Playing With Theme Design
In case you happen to stop by the site tonight, you will probably see some goofyness with the site. I’m playing around with some new theme design options working in a completely different framework, so my apologies if things are a little broken.
Watching Kung Fu Hustle on the dock with the Kids
@brettbum
My cellphone camera doesn’t do justice to Red Sunrise
@brettbum
Beauty of a night for a run
@brettbum
Distractions, Stumbling Blocks, Obstacles, Time
Trying to get back into the swing of writing a bit more regularly, and in the original spirit of this blog, I’m just going to let my brain go and dump some of my thoughts. I apologize in advance (actually afterwards because I’m writing this sentence after I wrote what follows), well, apologize in general for the complete lack of organization of thought below.
Its Sunday and I have just about recovered from a week that was a bit distracting. I’m in the middle of a challenge where I’m attempting to recreate an existing website for a client entirely within wordpress 3.01 and Pods CMS(which was going great and then I hit a brick wall). I like the Pods system quite a bit, love its potential, but the site itself and the tutorials/examples seem to be missing quite a bit. It seems like one of those deals where the developers keep building and improving it but never quite get around to explaining how to use their masterpiece, even though they seem to respond well in a quirky chat program.
I suspect they wouldn’t have to spend as much time chatting, if they or someone else took some time to explain how to use the thing. In short they need an evangelist/mentor type.
Last weekend, my primary laptop started acting up. Based on a myriad of details, I suspected that I needed to reimage the machine to clean it up or else face the possibility that the mother board may be dying on the machine.
Ugly no matter what, a pain in the butt, time consuming and possibly expensive.
The machine has been on borrow time for almost a month, but due to financial issues last year (which are now mostly solved) I didn’t make the move to replace it yet.
So around mid week, I attempted to prepare to reimage the machine, using a borrowed laptop to hold my current image temporarily, I proceeded to take the machine back to a factory state, then upgrade it to Windows 7. That took about 4 days, when it should have taken 1-2, but tech happened. ATT Uverse went down when some gas pipe layers wiped out the new fiber optics in the neighborhood. I had several other stupid issues of that nature as well.
Long story short, despite hoping to avoid it, I lost about a week of work on this challenge and I still don’t have my old broken laptop working again (ergo it runs, just don’t have all my tools on it yet).
All of that took place while I was trying to finalize a different client’s website. One of the stumbling blocks on that finalization is that the client states that one of the fonts and font colors of text on the pages is incorrect. I used the fonts they told me to use, so I asked, OK, what’s the font and color supposed to be?
Its been almost a week and they haven’t said what that should be. If its wrong, tell me where its wrong and I’ll fix it. Its a simple setting switch. Not sure where communication is breaking down on this issue.
[deep breath]
I did take time out for a stress break yesterday. My wife talked me into a trail run at the US white water center in charlotte. That was a lot of fun. During this whole week, I’ve been trapped in front of laptops trying to get mine migrated/upgraded/repaired, and my running almost came to a stand still, which isn’t great for peace of mind and overall well being.
But yesterday the run helped, and then we went next door at the last minute to a neighbors party. So I got to celebrate with some carbon life forms and get my head out of a stupid display for a while.
In the meantime, I’ve been listening to the Pillars of the Earth audio book from Ken Follet. We’ve been watching the show itself on Starz and I’m pretty hooked. Its not as riveting as Deadwood or as titillating as True Blood, but I do like it. nice change of pace.
Anyway, my challenge deadline is coming up this Wednesday. I have no working laptop yet. I have no working solution for Pods CMS yet. I don’t even really have anytime yet, so it looks like I’m probably going to lose $1k in revenue. 
The $1k isn’t going to make or break me, but I hate to miss an opportunity. More importantly, I really hate getting bogged down with tech issues in hardware and stuck on learning a new system because there are no resources for teaching that new system.
Oh, well, there’s only so much I can do.
In the meantime, Becky and I are going to see Tears for Fears at the Fillmore on Friday. Been a long time since we had a date/concert so I’m looking forward to that.
ATT UVerse Online Tech Support SUCKS!
Just need to take a moment to vent my frustration with ATT Uverse. In particular, its online tech support and on the side its internet service.
- ATT Uverse online technical support sucks – it literally routes you to att wireless tech support which as you might guess, can do NOTHING to help you with a att Uverse problem
- Att Uverse internet is slow/down more than its up. Cable and phone service is normally reliable although as I write this, our entire service has been down for 4 hours and counting. I also have a time warner cable account just for internet, and I use it 90% of the time because it is far more reliable than ATT Uverse internet. Speeds are about the same, I would have considered consolidating entirely into ATT Uverse, but I can’t trust it.
One of the extra sucky things about ATT uverse is that when its down, out, whatever, you have no phone, no internet, no tv, you can’t even watch shows recorded on your att uverse DVR!
Winning Despite Failure – Thanks Jim Kukral for the Timely Perspective
Yesterday, I found myself sitting in bankruptcy court, definitely, a first for me. Long story short, business has been good, but my personal finances went into a tail spin when Wells Fargo foreclosed on my home in the middle of an Obama plan refinance. BoA didn’t help the situation eith
er by jacking my interest rates up to 30% even though I hadn’t ever missed any payments at the time.
So after months of work reorganizing my personal finances, things came to a head when my wife and I went to court and asked for a discharge of debt, aka we went bankrupt filing chapter 7.
Not happy about it, but as I was thumbing through the book, Internet Marketing from the Real Experts by Shawn Collins and Missy Ward of Affiliate Summit fame, I came upon the 3 minute lesson from Jim Kukral, whom I’ve had the good fortune to have known for a few years now.
The chapter was his famous ‘Are you a Loser or a Failure?’ topic.
Now, I have been lucky enough to here Jim speak more than a half dozen times. In fact, one winter, I heard him give his presentation ‘Are you a loser or a Failure’ three or four times in a week. It’s a good presentation, but by about the 2nd or 3rd time, well, I had heard that one before. Lesson learned, internalized, filed away, and appreciated.
Context is Everything
Then yesterday while I’m sitting in bankruptcy court with dozens of other people in the same situation, I came across this familiar topic again.
Well, even though I could just about give this speech myself from memory, it sank in on a new level.
The general point of the topic is that Losers give up and quit and people that are failures, learn from their mistakes and try again.
That pretty much sums me up. The downward spiral of my personal finances can be traced back to my corporate accounting days when I made $100k per year. Salary was great, but to support that salary and stay on the fast track, I had to relocate every couple years. That led me to rack up a lot of debt, which I could maintain when I was making $100k, but then the Chinese Mafia got involved (literally).
One day I found my division at Motorola transferred and sold to the Chinese Mafia. That’s not the type of thing they tell you during the HR employee transition meeting unfortunately. They just give you the name of the most visible corporate shell owned by the mafia, aka your new bosses.
So to keep my long story short, once I found out who I was working for, I turned those assholes in to the Feds as fast as I could, lost my corporate accounting job, but saved my life and the lives of my family. Who needs a $100k per year salary when you are dead or ‘disappeared’?
For the next 5 years, I worked to build my own business, and looking back, I have done pretty damned good. I just didn’t grow it to the point where I was profiting $100k a year, this that and another thing, and before you know it, I’m seeking bankruptcy protection and REALLY starting over.
But not starting over completely. Because I’ve got 5 years of lessons learned, a growing business built on my reputation and results (but not physical assets hence the chptr 7).
I wasn’t feeling down or negative yesterday, the low point of this whole mess was last March when I learned that I had been foreclosed on 
without any written notification. That blindsided action was depressing a bit, but there’s only so much you can do in that situation.
But it was definitely a boost to internalize Jim’s message again yesterday, especially in the middle of a week, when I’m working like crazy on projects for my clients. The future looks very good, business is looking good, I’m not only working from a clean slate financially, but I’m working from a clean slate with a lot of great experience.
Icing on the Cake
Now today, the day after bankruptcy, Amazon just delivered Jim’s new book “Attention This Book will Make you Money – How to Use Attention Getting online marketing to increase your revenue”
I’m expecting big things out of the future.
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