The American Dream is belief in the freedom that allows all citizens and residents of the United States to pursue their goals in life through hard work. Today, it often refers to one’s material prosperity, which is dependent upon one’s abilities and work ethic, and not on a rigid class structure.

Although the phrase’s meaning has evolved over the course of American history, for some people, it is the opportunity to achieve greater material prosperity than was possible in their countries of origin. For others it is the opportunity for their children to grow up and receive an education and its consequent career opportunities. It is the opportunity to make individual choices without the restrictions of class, caste, religion, race, or ethnic group.

To me, this is not a dream.  Perhaps if you come from another country where you have been previously oppressed, the life I live would seem like paradise.  Perhaps, I am just a spoiled brat who can’t accept that the life he has is actually quite good.  No matter how you want to label me, I think the American Dream sucks, and I think it is an illusion.

So what is the modern american dream?  I would summarize it as saying:

To live in America, in a nice housing development, with two kids, a dog, a cat, and a heaping mound of debt.  To work at a job you barely enjoy, to make money, so that you can spend it on shit you don’t need.  Hope that you can afford to put your kids through college so they can live the same life you did.  Retire, and actually start to enjoy your life, once you’re almost 70 fucking years old.  Then die in a retirement home because your selfish kids didn’t want to deal with you.

I am just a ray of sunshine aren’t I?  But seriously, boiled down, this is the modern American Dream.  This is what the lucky members of our society are living.  Not to discount the fact that in reality, I know I have it pretty damn good.  It’s just that, living life should be what you want it to be, it should be enjoyable.  That’s the point, right?

This is where I am.  Should be enjoyable.  Without sounding too emo and suicidal about the whole thing, I can make an analogy.  If you are reading a book, and you don’t like it, do you continue reading it?  If you are playing a game, and it’s not fun, do you continue playing it?  If you are with a girl, and you are unhappy, do you stay with her?  The answer to all of the above questions is clearly, no.  So then, how come if you are living a life you hate, it is unacceptable to simply quit life?  Suicide is obviously a bad idea, it is the most selfish act one can commit.  I am not suggesting anyone do it, nor would I ever do it.  I am simply posing the question - Why is it so unacceptable?

How can I find Joy in my life?

Yup.

Education and Employment

For most people, from the time you are born, you are being sculpted.  Sculpted into what you will become someday.  From the time you are about 3 years old, barely even self-aware yet, you being the process of formal education.  Saving pre-school and kindergarten, you spend about 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, at school.  From the time you are about 6 years old, to the time you are 18 years old, you are being taught.  Trained.  Shown the things you need to know to be a successful adult.  After you are 18, many people volunteer for more education, with the expectation that the more educated you are, and the more pieces of paper you have, the more successful you will be.  Success?  A topic for an article in itself, the concept of success has become very warped.

From a very early age we are given the idea that we need an education to work towards a goal, that goal being, a good job.  So at 18, we either go to college for several more years, or we jump right into the workforce.  Those that go to college, after those years spent learning even more, we jump right into the workforce.

Why?  To make money.  If anyone even tries to suggest that they want/get a job for any other reason, then to make money, they are a liar.  So basically, we spend the first couple decades of our lives being groomed into a money making tool, so that we can provide income to ourselves, and our family, under the pretense that having that money will provide us the things we want, and need, to be happy.

The system has been designed in such a way that one cannot survive without money, and that one cannot obtain money, without a job to provide income.  Clearly these jobs can vary greatly on the scale of how much they suck, but even the best jobs, still suck.  Even pro athletes, and movie stars, I am sure, would much rather spend their time in leisure, or with their families, then being grossly overpaid to do things that to us, seem fun.

The purpose of your life

So then, if it can be argued that the purpose of your life in this day and age, is essentially a linear progression of:  Birth, Infancy, School, More School, Work, Retirement, Death.  What would you say the progression should be if you had to choose what you did?  If you did not need money to survive, if someone else provided everything you needed to you, what would you do?

Since the dawn of time, man has sought purpose.  No other organism on this planet has such a superficial life with such superficial purpose.  We are given roughly 75 years of life on this planet, to do with it what we choose.  Nature’s only concern is that we reproduce.  In days of early man, time was spent raising a family, making babies, and hunting food.  Later, we decided to make tools to aid us in this effort, even later, someone devised the idea that one could make a tool for someone else, and sell it, for a fee.  And even later, our entire life on this planet became being spent devising ways to make our lives easier, and, finding ways to profit from those ideas such that our own lives can be even more comfortable as we reap the benefits of our ideas.

Fast forward to modern times.  A system of currency has been developed, companies that provide such goods that our lives are more comfortable proudly provide us with all the things we need to live a happy, comfortable, fulfilling life.  Problem is, we need to be able to give these companies something in exchange for their goods.  Since we cant trade skins anymore, we trade labor.

You work for me helping to create these items of value, I will give you tokens for your efforts.  You give me those tokens back, I will give you the items you desire.  And thus, the cycle starts.  The purpose of our lives has become a constant uphill battle of obtaining the objects of our desire, and working hard to earn the tokens we need to pay for them.

When we age too much to be viable labor anymore, we retire, and enjoy the last few years of our life, doing what it is we wanted to be doing the entire time.  Nothing.  Shortly after which, we die.

The machine

As outlined above, there is a machine at work here.  A system of goods, services, and currency.  Companies exist to create the things we enjoy.  Other companies exist to provide those companies with the resources they need to create the things we enjoy, and even more companies exist to provide the services, logistics, and resources to all those companies, all so, you guessed it, we can have the things we enjoy.

So, we work at one of these companies, to make money, so that we can spend our money by giving back to the exact people who are paying us.

All this so that, when we are not at work, we have our television to watch, we have our video games to play, and our pre-packaged food to eat.  We have our care to drive, and electricity.  We have central air conditioning, and heat.  We have a comfy mattress to sleep on, and a toothbrush to keep our teeth nice and white.  We work so hard so that when we are not at work, our life is, what we think it should be.

If these companies did not exist, and no one created these luxuries we enjoy so much.  If the objects in our homes, and the video games we want do play did not exist, nor the tv shows or movies, nor the luxury car, or boats, nor the fishing rods and cameras, what would we want?

It is indeed a machine.  One enormous machine creating the very reasons we tire of work, creating the reasons we would rather stay home to enjoy these items we work so hard for.  And as such, in order to obtain these items, and maintain a standard of living, we go out each day, and contribute work into this machine.  We are the fuel for which the system burns to churn out the very objects we crave.  We resent the fact that we must spend so much of our life doing things we do not want to do, just so that when we get home, we can do the things we want to do.

What it boils down to…

As I am sure you already know, we must work.  We, the masses, must have a job to collect our dollars, to buy the things from the companies we work for.  All so that for about 4 hours a day, we can truly relax and enjoy our lives, all to go to sleep, wake up, and do it all over again.

The activities we enjoy the most get relinquished to being mere “hobbies”, and we spend but a fraction of our time actually doing the things we love.  But, such is life in this world.  In a system designed so that all of us humans are merely a means to an end.

Reproducing and raising families has become secondary to work.  People cannot afford to have children either due to time, or money constraints.  Some people choose to have children when they cannot afford to, and live a live of near poverty, others, decide to never have children because they are too selfish to share their income and wealth with someone else.  Then there are the minority of people who have kids, and can easily afford to raise those children properly…properly meaning, providing them with objects they want, providing them with a good education, and steering them in the direction their parents went in, to become another cog.

I know this seems like a gloomy outlook, but in my opinion, it is the truth.  Fact is, this is how it is, and how it must be.  I just wish I could find a job, a purpose, in life, which I actually enjoyed to some extent and did not dread waking up each day.  A job where I could create, a job where I was not subject to the whims and bias of other people, a job where I had the freedom to work as much or as little as I wanted to on any given day.

I guess I should launch a website and cover it with advertising.

For those of you who don’t know, Thunderbird is the Mozilla equivalent of something similar to Microsoft Outlook Express, which is an email client.  It is essentially the firefox for email.  I particularly like it, and if you are currently using Outlook Express, give it a shot.  If you are using lots of features inside the real version of Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird is probably not for you.

The Symptom  

You open Thunderbird, most likely after an update, and all your settings, contacts, and email is gone.

If you use Thunderbird, but this has not happened to you, skip down to the end under Voila!

The Solution

Most likely, what has happened is, Thunderbird went ahead and created a new default profile for you, ignoring the original one, setting you back to the defaults.  Not to worry though, there is a solution.

Step 1

First, see if you have any other profiles on the system.  If you are the only user of Thunderbird, and the computer most likely you will not.

1. Click: Start -> Run
2. Type: thunderbird.exe -P
3. Click “Ok”

You will be presented with a window that looks like this:

Profile Manager

If all you see in the above window is one profile, and it is named “default”, then this solution will help you.S Simply click exit and move onto the next step.  If you see multiple profiles, try loading each one to see if any of them contain your information.

Step 2

1. Click: Start -> Run
2. Type: %APPDATA%
3. Click: “Ok”

A Windows Explorer (NOT Internet Explorer), window should pop up.  At this point, find a folder called “Thunderbird” and double-click it.  Then, find a folder called “Profiles” and double click that also.

Inside you should see at least one, two if this how-to will solve your problem, folder.  The folder names will be something similar to “g4g1da13.default”, the characters before “.default” will be random.

If you see two folders with “.default” at the end, right click on each one and select “Properties”.  Make a note of the size of each one.  One of the folders there will be significantly larger than the other.  Write the name of this folder down.

Close Windows Explorer.

Step 3

Follow the steps in Step 1 again to open the profile manager, this time, we are going to create a new profile.  Click “Create Profile” and follow the wizard.  When prompted to name the profile, you can name it anything you want, just don’t call it default.  I will name mine “Bryan”.

Create a new profile.

In this window, the most important step occurs.  Click on “Choose Folder” as seen in the window above, and browse to the folder we wrote down earlier.  If the dialogue does not put you in the right place you might need to browse to it.

It should be located in: “C:\Documents and Settings\YOU\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\”

Select the folder name you wrote down earlier, click “Ok”, and finish the wizard.

Optional: Select the old default profile, and delete it.

In the profile manager, you should be able to select the profile we just created, and click “Start Thunderbird”.

There is a chance you will get an error saying “The profile is in use, unable to start Thunderbird”, or something very similar.  If you get this message, simply reboot your machine, and start Thunderbird after it comes back up.

Voila!

If you were seeing the same symptoms as explained in this post, and you followed this step-by-step guide, you should now be back up and running in thunderbird with all of your old data in tact!  

Since we created you a new profile, which is not named “default” anymore, you should never see this problem happen again!

If you are a Thunderbird user, and this has not happened to you yet, it is a known issue, and it could happen to you at any time as long as you are using a profile named “default”.  If you want to prevent it from ever occurring, open the profile manager as outlined in Step 1, created a new profile and point it to the current default profile folder as outlined in Step 3, and give the new profile a unique name, then delete the old default profile.  This should prevent you from ever having this issue.

If you have any questions, or this guide does not work for you, please feel free to comment!

Pro - fes - sion - al :

1) adjective - following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain.

2) noun - a person who is expert at his or her work.

The problem with words like this, in the English language, is that they have two radically different definitions which people interchange so that it suits them.  Taking the first definition above, I would be able to call myself a professional web developer/designer, a professional backup and disaster recovery administrator, a professional mechanic, and a professional computer repair man.  I do not, however, declare myself an expert in any of those things.

Where does the line get drawn?  I feel so many people claim they are a professional at something because they have made a job out of it, yet, they use the word professional is such a context that it makes it sound as if they are an expert, for their own gain.  There are many people who take pictures for money at their friends garage band’s shows at the local bar, who claim to be professional photographers.  Many people who have been paid $200 to play at the same bar, who call themselves professional musicians, people who have put together a catchy hip-hop beat on their home pc who call themselves professional producers, and many people who won a few bucks at a local game tournament who call themselves professional gamers.  The only thing these people have in common is, they made a few dollars doing something, so they use the word professional to make it sound as if they are an expert at doing such a thing.

I think a distinction needs to be made, in a few ways.  First of all, being a professional does not automatically mean you an expert, or even good at, what it is you are a professional at.  It simply means you make money doing it.  Also, making money doing something, does not mean you exhibit any professionalism.

Food for thought:

Michael Phelps - Not a professional swimmer, clearly, the best swimmer in the world.

Not a professional.

Stephen Baldwin - Professional Actor, clearly, the worst actor in the world.

Professional.

All things not being created equal, professional does not always mean good, and does not always mean expert.  However, when someone claims to be a professional, they usually convey it sound as if they are.  This article was prompted by a friend of mine who showed me this survey, which asks people to declare what type of photographer they are.

If you read down the list, you will see a common trend.  Some of the better photographers who post a response modestly claim to either be an amateur, or worse.  While most of the teenagers, ranging from 13-17 years old, claim to be professional or semi-pro, because they take shots of their friends band, or try to sell their pictures online on some stock photo website.  Clearly, they just love the word “pro”.  In the world of photography, if you have some sort of crazy expensive Nikon digital SLR, you must obviously be pro.  Especially if you don’t even know how to use the majority of the features the camera has.

So, it seems the best definition for professional these days is: Something you make money doing, but aren’t necessarily good at. What about professionalism then?  Do professionals always exhibit professionalism, is the showing of professionalism only limited to people who claim to be professional?

To me, professionalism is very difficult to describe in words, but easy to exhibit through actions.  I feel that there are many people who exhibit the absolute best traits of professionalism and are not even professionals, and that the vast majority of professionals do not exhibit any professionalism whatsoever.  Professionalism is an attitude, it is a certain modesty and open-mindedness which allows you to take the suggestions and input of others, and use that to better do whatever it is you do.  It is the mindset which allows you to constantly strive to be better.

In today’s world, people are so obsessed with titles and powerful words they can use to make themselves appear to be something of importance.  Most self-proclaimed professionals are too obsessed with themselves and the idea that they are some sort of authority on a subject to have the professionalism to actually become better at what it is they do.

Actions speak louder than words, and describing yourself as a professional, but acting like an amateur, makes you an amateur in my eyes.

I should preface this by saying that my ultimate goal is to work for myself, and successfully run a business, preferably some sort of website that people enjoy using.  Short of attaining that lofty dream, however, I feel my conventional career path has been a successful one.  My goals in career development are independent of my overall life dreams and goals, which I work on in parallel, using my free time.

Developing a Career

Know what you are good at, and do it.

Everyone has some sort of dream job.  For me it was a toss up between working for a race team designing and programming engine control units, or running a successful web based business.  However, I also realized that both of the above career choices were long shots.  So, I took something I knew I was good at already, something I knew I wouldn’t hate doing, and went down that path.  For me that thing was computer hardware.  I knew that I could have a successful career working with computers, with relative ease, and I could use that career path as a slingshot to working on my other goals in parallel.

I know this is going to sound awful, but in most cases the best choice is to not follow your dreams.  Obviously some people have followed their dreams and been quite successful.  No one becomes a rock star or a pro athlete by not trying.  Thing is, if you aren’t blessed with natural talent, and you find yourself struggling with your dreams, you need to realize that it’s best to do something else, at some point.  Often times what you are actually good at, is not the same as what you would love to do.

Go to college.

This is just some advice from someone who has “been there, done that”.  Again, there are plenty of people who are highly successful who never went to college, but if you plan to develop a career in any sort of corporate sector, the ceiling for you without a college degree, is low.  I, personally, went to school for computer engineering.  I would not deny for even a moment that I do not, and have not, used a single thing I was taught at college in my career.  However, I had a job paying over $70,000 a year from the moment I graduated college.  It opens a lot of doors.  It is really just an expensive piece of paper at the end of the day, but it is also a very valuable piece of paper.  Graduating college with a serious degree program not only shows potential employers that you are smart, but it also shows that you are dedicated and able to finish things that you start.

Never stop learning.

If your company offers any sort of college tuition programs, make use of them.  I am personally currently pursuing a Masters in Business Administration and my company is picking up the tab.  It is a lot of work, but if you turn down a free graduate degree, then something is seriously wrong with you.

Get training, and certifications.  From my perspective, certifications are almost useless, and stand for nothing.  From a hiring managers perspective though, they are very valuable.  I have several certifications which cost my roughly $100 each to obtain, and I was able to pass the tests with little to no preparation.  If you have knowledge on a subject, back it up with a certification.  It really helps.

Training helps you stay up to date on the latest technologies you are working with.  Most companies will reimburse you for any training you wish to receive.  If you don’t wish to get training on a particular technology then get other types of training such as project management training or corporate development training.  This is all managerial ammunition.

Challenge yourself.
If you have a job which outlines certain responsibilities, and you do them, you will likely never get fired.  But you will also likely never get promoted.  In my own career I have often used my free time to read about other subjects I have had interest in, or gotten trained on technologies I thought it might be useful to have the knowledge of.

As a result, I have been able to expand my horizons quit a bit.  I started my career as a backup and recovery analyst and I have since made moves, and gotten promotions into areas which interest me much more, such as SAN and Storage.  I have greater respect and responsibility around the office now then I had ever had in the past.

Be outspoken, be replaceable.

Always speak your mind, but also be careful with your words, and pick your battles.  It is very important to make yourself heard, especially when you are going to be the one who is ultimately responsible for dealing with the decisions which are made all around you.  Do not bend over to management will every time, challenge them.  Expressing yourself not only exhibits your passion for what you do, but also your knowledge of your area of expertise.

Do not hold information so close to you that you are not replaceable.  Many people hold their responsibilities close to their chests so that they cannot be fired, but, if you can’t be fired then you also probably can’t be promoted.  Document what you do so that it is easy to transition someone else into your role.  It will make things a lot easier when it comes time for that big promotion.  Holding things close not only makes it more difficult for your coworkers, but it also makes it hard for management to ever consider moving you out of your current position.

Managing Change

Embrace Change.
Change happens, always.  There are people who fear it, and try to prevent it, and people who embrace it and use it to their advantage.  You should always be one to embrace it.  If your company is making moves to move to technologies which you don’t understand, learn them, and be one of the people who helps make it happen.  If you get a new manager who tries to shake things up a little bit, accept it and do your best to make a good impression with them.

For me, one of my close co-workers recently left the company, and also left a very big hole with very big shoes to fill.  I stepped up and offered to fill them.  It was the best thing I ever did in my career.  It opened up a whole new set of doors for me.

Change often means more work, especially in the short time.  It also usually means more stress, on you and your family.  More often then not though, the work pays off.

Recognize when to quit.
All change is not good.  Sometimes you have to know when to recognize bad change, and make drastic and scary decisions around that change.  Big company mergers, layoffs, recession.  All very scary.  In my career I was part of one very sloppy takeover, and a huge mess resulted.  I started looking for a new job.

Luckily for me, I found a new job very quickly, which I enjoy much more then the old one.  I turned negative change into positive change.

In conclusion

To wrap it up, the synopsis is:  Do what you know, never stop learning, and don’t fear change.  If you follow those simple guidelines you should have a comfortable and successful career.  I am only 26 years old right now and I feel like I have a very bright future.  My rules don’t apply to everyone but for me, they haven’t let me down yet.

He must be doing design work.

Most people who design sites, who are not professionals, design it to look nice in whatever browser they are using at the time, with whatever settings they have turned on or off, at the time (see MySpace).  This is a perfect example of the old saying ignorance is bliss.  If I could develop websites all day to work on a Mac running Safari, design would be so much fun.  This is the case for many professionals, at least those designing applications for in-house use, who only need their designs to work in whatever browser their company has deemed the standard.  Most of us, though, are not so lucky.  Us being the people, professional and amateur, who develop public facing websites where there is no remote way to predict what your audience will be using to view your website with.  Us being those who are anal enough to care about how our website looks in almost every possible scenario.

What are these scenarios one must consider, well, here is how I usually think about it:

Will my site still look/work okay if…

• The user is using a non-mainstream browser (there are dozens)
  • I try my best to consider all the ones I can.
• The user is using Internet Explorer older than version 7.0
  • Usually relatively easy to contend with, avoid translucent png’s, deal with odd css bugs.
• The user has images turned off
  • Use CSS text replacement techniques, this can degrade easily.
• The user has style sheets turned off
  • Make use of conventional html tags as much as possible.
• The user has Javascript turned off
  • Do not rely on Javascript to do anything your page cannot live without having.
• The user has a very large/small screen resolution.
  • Optimize your site for the lowest popular resolution, screw everyone else.
• The user is browsing from a cell phone or mobile device
  • Use a mobile stylesheet.
• The user wants to print something on my site
  • Use a print stylesheet.
• The user is on an operating system with different base fonts
  • Carefully choose your fonts and do your best to optimize their precedence.
• The user has their screen color settings low
  • You can try to use web-safe color codes, I don’t.
• The user has their font size increased/decreased in their browser
  • Try using EM based layouts instead of Pixel based, I don’t.
• The user is on a slow connection
  • Try to keep your images, css, and javascript files as small as you can.
• The user does not have something installed
  • Such as Flash, Java, Shockwave, etc.
• A billion people hit it all at once because I’m just that popular.
  • Minimize database hits, cache, have a good server.

As you can see, if you want your site to work well, across the board, it is no easy feat.  In fact, it is very difficult.  What you usually wind up with at the end, feels like some sort of hack.  In the case of the new design I am working on, I made a couple of fundamental choices which have made the design incredibly more difficult to implement.  Although, they shouldn’t be, as they were quite simple choices.  Nothing too fancy:  A fixed position footer, and the use of one translucent png image.  Neither of these features are supported by any means in Internet Explorer 6 or below, without hacks.

Javascript in itself, is very nice.  I can write snippets of code to do very nice things with it, if the user has Javascript turned off, it appears as if those features never existed.  This is perfect.  The problem arises, for me, when your page relies on Javascript to even work at all.  This is the case of my new site when being viewed in Internet Explorer 6.  Javascript needs to constantly put the footer in the correct place, and it needs to make IE display translucent PNG’s correctly.  I don’t like this.  I had two conversations earlier with two different web design professionals on this exact topic, and I got two very different answers.  To paraphrase:

Designer 1: Javascript is there as a tool for you to use to accomplish what you need to accomplish.  Why should it be considered a hack?  If your site works, it works.

Designer 2: I find it is best to not fight the web.  If you find yourself coming up with all sorts of tricks to make your site behave the way you want, it is usually best to just change it around a bit to make it work the way the web wants it to work.

I agree with both of these points.  I have not yet decided which of the two I will listen to though, when it comes to my own design.  I realize that the amount of people who will come to my site in IE6 with a screen resolution of 1024×768, and Javascript turned off, is a very, very, small number.  For some reason though, I still feel compelled to support it.  Perhaps I should just let go and stop supporting IE6.  That decision would be much easier if the last 3 corporations I worked at did not use Windows 2000 with IE6 as their default setups, thus making me realize that the user base of this highly outdated browser might still be much larger then it should be.

So what am I left with?  A design which mostly works due to a system of hacks which I am quite uncomfortable with.  It is as if the internets does not want you to be creative, because if you try to be, you will be punished by having to spend countless hours working on one tiny detail of your site.  Which you can only hope will pay off when that one person who stumbles across your site on a 15 year old computer can actually enjoy reading it.  The best part is, you are so good at what you do, that person wont even appreciate the hard work you did, because they have no concept of just how much work it took to make your site simply work as they expected it to under their very specific set of circumstances.

Users do not appreciate the amount of work it takes to make something work, the simply love to bitch about it when it doesn’t.  I should just develop for the web on a highly standardized, proprietary, platform like Flash or Java.  At least you know what your end result will look like, every time.

I am very anal when it comes to staying organized.  I obsess over very small things and I am constantly making to-do lists, or managing things on a calendar.  I offload as many standard things I would otherwise have to remember, such as bill due dates, onto a calendar system.  I find my day to day life is much more enjoyable when I can put my faith into other systems for remembering when things are due.  If you can trust your calendar to remind you when a bill is due, that leaves your brain open to focus on other, more important things.

My biggest issue with staying organized has always been related to the world of computers, however.  As much as they help, they tend to make an obsessive person such as myself want to have access to everything from everywhere, since something like a calendar is only useful when you have access to it.  I am going to try to describe my digital world, and how I have it set up to keep me organized.  My system has many flaws but it might be able to help others in similar situations as myself overcome their daily mess.  I would love to see some comments and suggestions though, in case anyone has a better way to do the things I attempt to do.

My digital world consists of 3 facets, Work, Home, and On-the-go.

Work:

Work Issued Laptop
Work Issued Blackberry
Access to work, from home.

Organizing my world of work is easy.  I have a laptop and a blackberry both of which tie into each other seamlessly.  All of my unix accounts and home directories are synchronized and shared.  I have access to my work calendar and emails from anywhere thanks to my blackberry and I can log into my work VPN from anywhere I can get internet access.

Home and Mobile:

I make no effort to integrate my work world into my home world, since there is no real need to.  The blackberry pretty much takes care of having everything I need for work at home and on the go.

So lets take work out of the mix and focus on at home and on the go; this is where things get complicated.

Currently my girlfriend and I have between us:

• 3 Desktop Computers
• 2 Laptops
• 2 iPhones
• 2 Web Servers
• 1 Digital Camera
• 1 Collection of Photos
• 1 Collection of MP3s

Most of this, of course, is mine, but we try to keep everything centralized and in-sync.  We both want access to all of the music, photos, and calendars.

On a regular basis I use my Windows Vista x64 desktop and my Macbook Pro.  Both my girlfriends PC and Laptop are Windows XP Pro.  The 3rd Desktop PC is a Dell e521 running Leopard which I simply use to experiment with.

I have several things which I need to remain consistent:

• Bookmarks
• Calendars
• Contacts
• Email
• Instant Messaging
• Music
• Notes and Lists
• Photos

Bookmarks used to be really easy.  Using Firefox across all of my systems, Google Browser Sync made having all of the same web bookmarks everywhere, very easy, even on my work PC.  Now that it is not supported on Firefox 3, I have switched to Safari full time on my mac and I use Del.icio.us to organize my bookmarks.  It takes a bit more discipline to use, but it gets the job done.  I know there are other options for syncing bookmarks but I actually have grown quite fond of del.icio.us.

Calendars is a bit tricky, but we have a setup which works quite well.  My girlfriend and I both have google accounts and use google calendar.  We both create calendars and privately share them across to each other using full access so we can both essentially manage one calendar which we both share but each maintain our own separate accounts with google.  If you share a calendar with full access, and both maintain the same list of calendars you are basically both looking at, and have full access to, the same exact calendar.  On my end, I sync my google calendar with iCal by simply subscribing with one-way access to it.  I do not usually update my calendar very often, but she does.  She uses Microsoft Outlook.  After much searching and trial and error I greatly recommend using gSyncit for 2-way access to your google calendars within outlook.  It is the best solution I was able to find.  Using this solution she can manage our calendars from the web, outlook, or her iphone.  I can then use iCal, the Web, or my iPhone to view the calendars.  Giving us both access to all of our bills and appointments across all of our devices.

Contacts I am still working on getting a firm grip on this.  Having an up to date list of addresses for all of your friends is still unfortunately a highly manual process.  I simply try to keep my macs address book up to date as best I can.  FacebookSync is a neat little took to help you do some of the work.  Apple address book can also sync with google contacts, but this provided me with highly undesirable results.  Basically google contacts keeps a list of every email address you use, and when you sync your address book to that you get a ton of garbage.  I sync my contacts with my iPhone which keeps things pretty normalized.

Email is helped through the graces of webmail and IMAP as I have many email accounts.  My domain email addresses recently switched from self hosted email, which I got sick of taking care of, to google apps for domains.  So basically I have a couple gmail accounts all cross-pollenating to each other, and my domain emails are also essentially on gmail as well.  Whenever I check email on any device which is not my home computer I use webmail or IMAP.  On my phone I use IMAP, at work I use webmail, and when I get home each day I clear out the inboxes using Thunderbird to pull everything down on POP.  This allows me access to all of my email from everywhere while still having a long-lasting record of it kept on my home PC which has every email I have received for the past 10 years on it.

Instant Messaging is pretty much a no brainer.  Across all of my accounts I use Digsby on my windows platforms, and Adium on my Macs.  This makes everything stay consistent buddy list wise and keeps all my accounts manageable under one client.  I really don’t understand how anyone can communicate using multiple IM services and individual clients for each one.

Music is done very manually.  I maintain my entire 60GB music collection on my PC.  This is where I sync my iPhone for music.  All of my other devices such as my Xbox, Playstation, Laptops, and Girlfriends computers access my collection using my home network.  I also regularly back up this data to my linux server just in case I have a hard drive issue.

Notes and Lists are managed by a fantastic program not many people know about:  Google notebook.  They are basically like portable post-it notes which I use religiously.

Photos are sort of a pain having only one digital camera.  I maintain all the photos on my primary PC, and we do a similar thing as is done with the music.  The problem is making sure that all the photos we take wind up on my PC first.  If we are out and about and need to clear off the memory card and plug the phone into one of our laptops we need to be conscious of getting those photos onto my PC later.  It also prevents me from really being able to use things like iPhoto since it takes control of how your collection is organized.  Having my main photo repository on my laptop, via iPhoto, does not promote me having good access to the photos on my Windows based machines.  I have been making more of an effort to use Flickr in an attempt to centralize my access to photos a bit, but I am weary of putting ALL of my photos online.  Since I have my own server I attempted to use Gallery for a bit, but I didn’t like the feel of it.  My Facebook profile is linked to flickr so I don’t have to worry about posting photos for my friends to see in 15 different places.  I also sync selected galleries to my iPhone using my PC.

So as you can see I go to great lengths to remain organized in my life, and being a regular user of several different computers definitely complicates this matter.  The main two pain points are the photos and music collections.  I wish there was a better way to maintain these in a manner which is not only accessible from anywhere, but also easy to keep in sync with various devices.

The iPhone does have one major shortcoming which I would like to mention here as well.  It is a sync only device, and on top of that, it can only sync with one other device.  This means that for me, I have to choose what items sync to which computer, and stick with it.  You cannot manually copy music, photos, or anything directly on or off of it.  I have my contacts, email, and calendars set to sync with my Mac, and my photos and music set to sync with my PC.  Ideally, if I could sync my phone with both my PC and laptop it would bridge the gap and allow me access to everything, on both.  Instead it leaves me slightly more fragmented.  I cannot sync my contacts to my laptop and PC, which means my PC loses access to my contacts, and I cannot sync my music and photos with my mac, which means I must manually copy that stuff to my mac from my PC.

In closing, I feel the internet has come a long way as far as helping us stay organized goes, but I also think there is still a major convergence issue.  Even with all of the above efforts to keep my life as organized as I can, it still feels like everything is scattered about.  I think the future is bright, but we aren’t quite there yet.  If you have any tips for me, they would be very welcomed!

Me taking one of my famous naps.

Over the years, my schedule has varied quite a lot, there have been many variables at play all the time, yet my desire to nap never waivers.  Perhaps I should be the subject of sleep study, I don’t know.  My day to day schedule in the past 5 years has gone from 21 credit college course schedules, to 9-5 work schedules, sometimes I work out 5 days a week, sometimes I don’t work out at all.  What I have always done, is nap.

My usual day usually goes something like this:  Wake up around 8:30 or something relatively close to it, get dressed, go to work.  During my day at work I am totally awake and alert, even having only gotten an average of 6 hours of sleep the night before.  I drink some coffee in the morning and after lunch, not so much to combat sleepiness, but more because I simply love coffee.  I leave work around 4:30 and get in the door from work at around 4:45.  I change into something a bit more casual, and lay down on the couch for a quick nap.  If I get home late, I will skip my nap as I know it will interfere with my night time sleeping schedule.  I usually sleep about an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less.  Then, I get up and do whatever it is I have to do, or want to do with the rest of my day, and I get to bed some time around 1am.  I have always been a night person, whether it be to watch movies, play games, or just sit up.  I have no idea what it is but going to bed before midnight is simply not an option for me unless I am simply exhausted.

While my nap is an integral part of my day, as I said earlier, it is not normally a requirement due to tiredness.  It is usually a combination of slight boredom, and a simple enjoyment of naps.  I have to say that laying on the couch after a long day of work and snoozing for a little while to wake up totally refreshed an hour later is one of the most enjoyable things in life.  Its the small things.  Oh, and my nap must be on a couch.  I have no idea why, but if its not on my couch, it just isn’t the same.

My writing this is prompted by grief I receive from everyone around me about my desire to nap, and the recent evidence I found that I might not be so abnormal.  It make me go digging around for more information on the subject.

Many people feel a mid-afternoon slump in mood and alertness, especially after a poor night of sleep. Many believe that this slump is caused by eating a heavy lunch. However, in reality, this occurs because we were meant to have a mid-afternoon nap.

Several lines of evidence, including the universal tendency of toddlers and the elderly to nap in the afternoon and the afternoon nap of siesta cultures, have led sleep researchers to the same conclusion: nature intended that we take a nap in the middle of the day. This biological readiness to fall asleep in the mid-afternoon coincides with a slight drop in body temperature and occurs regardless of whether we eat lunch. It is present even in good sleepers who are well rested. Sleep researchers have also discovered that the afternoon dip in mood and alertness is associated with poorer performance, particularly after a night of sleep loss, and a simultaneous increase in sleepiness-related accidents. In fact, deaths from all causes show a secondary peak in the afternoon after a nocturnal peak, presumably from sleepiness-related accidents

(source)

A quick google search reveals many articles written about the benefits of naps, and on the contrary, a search about why naps are bad returns many less results.  In fact, if you search for things that are bad about naps you’ll find most of the returned results are articles about how naps are good, and not bad, the word bad simply comes up in the context like “Myth: Naps are bad for you”.

I should also point out that some of the greatest minds in history were some of the most legendary nap takers.

Thomas Edison napped in lieu of sleeping at night.  He believed that sleeping was a waste of time, “a deplorable regression to the primitive state of a caveman.” but he napped frequently and for long periods.

Albert Einstein felt that his daily naps ‘refreshed the mind’ and made him more creative.

Winston Churchill scheduled his cabinet meetings around his daily catnaps.

Salvador Dali napped in his armchair, holding a spoon over a metal pan on the floor below.  When Dali hit REM Sleep and lost muscle tonus, the spoon would fall from his grim, band the metal pan and awaken him.

(source)

So this goes out to you, my friends, family, and most importantly my girlfriend.  Next time you see me napping, just think of all the great things it will help me do, and how it truly is a healthy part of every mans day!

Office Berzerker

I can understand the cubicle monkey mentality, and I have seen some examples of really poor cubicle layout which makes it seem like you are working in a sweat shop, I think a lot of these setups are found in companies which are not technology focused.  Possibly you will find the typical tiny shared cubicle layout where everyone is almost elbow to elbow in companies focused on customer support, telemarketing, or some sort of sales; however it seems the people who are most commonly labelled as cubicle jockeys are people in tech careers such as myself.  For exaple, I can see how the below image would simply suck.  If I had to guess though, this layout is some sort of sales force or low-paying telemarketing job.

Cubicle Farm

The other end of things, where us uber high-end tech folks live for 8 hours a day is more like my cubicle.  My day is spent in a cube which is about 8′x8′, I have a nice L-shaped desk, two sets of cabinets, two sets of drawers, my own closet, a nice private doorway, 7′ high walls, and room for a couple of extra chairs in the back.  I have my own phone, with my own phone number, I have two 20″ LCD monitors, and I am rarely bothered.  To be quite honest, my cubicle is quite a pleasant place to work.  It’s not an office, but its definitely the next best thing.  I even have nice little personal items scattered about and my own white-board.  Across from me is a window with a nice view of some trees, and less then 100 feet from me is a nice outdoor patio with picnic tables.  Is this that uncommon?  Am I just incredibly lucky?

I tend to doubt it.  I work at a 100 year old company who is highly tech-centric yet very old-school at the same time.  If you look at the layouts of some of the newest most up-to-date tech companies you will find their office layouts to be even more comfortable.  Even members of my family think of me as some keyboard mashing, vampiric cubicle dweller who is treated like Milton from office space.  How can we break this stigma?  Do I have to get a job at google, who has one of the most highly regarded office environments in order for people to believe that I am not just another Dilbert depicted cube dweller?

I really hate the way people in IT get labelled by the rest of the world.  All of the folks who work in other industries think of us as having the super easy sit on your ass all day jobs that everyone dreams of.  We get made fun of for sitting like cattle in large grids of cubicles with the only light our skin is exposed to being the beautiful hum the fluorescents above our heads.  Since when is being smart, and using a computer a bad thing?

I don’t know about the rest of you fellow IT people out there but I for one don’t spend my entire day mashing away at a keyboard, my PC is simply the tool I must use to accomplish my job, and my cubicle is quite honestly a very comfortable and private place to get that work done.

Next time you want to make fun of one of your IT friends for their mindless lazy cubicle job, maybe ask for a tour of their office, or see if you can come to work with them one day.  I think most people would rather keep their construction or waitressing job after spending a day in my shoes.

Let me first preface this by giving a bit of my background and a little information about why you should listen to me.  Firstly, since you are reading this, you obviously assert that my opinion on almost everything is vastly superior to anyone else’s, I mean, I have a blog;  How can what I say not be right?  On a more serious note though, I have been a windows user since the days of Windows 3.0.  I was probably 12 years old at the time, but I still used it.  I have also used almost every iteration of Windows since then.  In case you don’t know all of the desktop flavors of windows, I will list the versions I have used here.

• Windows 3.0
• Windows 3.1
• Windows 95
• Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
• Windows 98
• Windows 98 SE
• Windows 2000
• Windows Millenium
• Windows XP
• Windows 2003 (Server)
• Windows Vista Ultimate, 64-Bit Edition

On top of this it should also be noted that I have also used many other desktop operating systems.  This article is not simply me comparing Vista to other versions of Windows.  Prior to Windows I believe the first OS I ever laid my hands on was MS-DOS 5.0.  I have also used about 10 different Linux distributions and about 5 different window managers on Linux.  I also use AIX on a daily basis, and I am actually writing this very article from a Mac.  So, I am not biased towards windows, in fact, I wish the games I like to play would run natively on other operating systems so I would not be forced to use Windows.  The reason I am listing out my desktop computer experience is to give you a little insight as to the types of Operating Systems I have used, and to give you a little perspective on my basis for comparison.

So, why does Vista not suck?  Well, I will spare you the technical jargon and just give you my impressions as a user, I am going to try to place myself in the mindset of an average Windows user and how you can expect to benefit from using Vista over XP.  I will also highlight a few of the negatives you can expect to find in the OS.

The first thing you must ask yourself when considering a switch to Vista is “Why am I going to make this switch?”  I would be hard pressed to recommend that anyone using a computer that is 2 or more years old, for basic tasks such as web browsing, email, instant messaging, or other relatively simple things spend the time and money to upgrade.  However, I find that a growing trend online is that people with brand new computers either downgrade back to XP, or choose XP to be installed from the factory over Vista.  If you are one of these people, I suggest you also look at the above question I just posed.  Why are you making the switch back?

Here is how I made my decision:  Being an IT person, it is in my nature to always want the latest and greatest version of any piece of software I use on a regular basis.  My Mac has Leopard 10.5.3, my Desktop has Vista, my server has CentOS 5, my TSM Servers run TSM 5.5.  I wanted Vista because it was new, and I wanted to experience using it for myself.  I wanted to see what was new, and familiarize myself with the OS since it is something I need to do in my line of work.  As soon as Vista went RTM, I had a copy installed.  My history with Vista is a bit shaky at the beginning.  I was definitely part of the Vista Sucks bandwagon.  My initial impressions were that it was a slower, prettier version of XP.

So why the change of heart?  Let me summarize the last year in the life of my desktop PC’s.  Prior to Vista coming out I built myself a brand new top of line computer, and put a fresh copy of Windows XP on it.  All was well, since Windows XP is probably the best Operating system Microsoft has ever put out.  At the time I was a very hardcore gamer, so when Vista was in beta, I didn’t care to bother much with it.  At some point the gaming toned down a lot for me, so I took the plunge and wiped my hard drive and put a fresh copy of Vista on it.  No dual boot, no spare PC.  I just dove right in.  Months later, my girlfriend wanted Vista on her PC.  I obliged.  We both were sufficiently enjoying our experiences with the OS.

At some point a few months ago, we started playing some game in which she was experiencing poor performance.  Mind you, her PC was a couple of year old Dell which was never even meant to game on.  Instead of taking the correct approach and upgrading her PC, we decided to downgrade her back to XP since you are said to expect around 10% performance gains in 3D games on XP versus Vista.  Since we were downgrading, I decided to downgrade my PC also. This was basically a test to see if on the latest and greatest hardware, you could expect a significant performance gain on XP.  I would say that neither of us found the performance gains to be worth the trouble, and we were both in regret about the downgrade.  She is still in the closet about it though since she doesn’t want to feel like she wasted my time switching OS’s back and fourth.  We eventually discovered that her Wireless network card is what was causing her random performance issues, not Vista.

That being said.  We recently upgraded our PC’s a little bit.  Through creative swapping of hardware, I was able to build 4 usable PC’s out of a combination of new and old parts I had lying around, sell two of them, and in the process upgrade our two desktops for a relatively low cost.  Since we were doing all this work, and my new system is running over 4GB of ram, I decided to take the time to put Vista back on my system.  This point here finally brings me to why I think Vista doesn’t suck.

64-Bit Vista works, and it works well. Not only that but it can address 4GB of ram!  Why not just use XP 64 you say?  Because the driver support for it is worse then Vista 64, and the kernel is based on the Windows 2003 kernel, which I am not interested in using on my home PC.  It should be noted that every single processor to come out of Intel or AMD for about the last 3 years is a 64 bit processor.  So, while you might not benefit from it in any noticeable manner, why not use a 64-bit operating system?  RAM is cheap, eventually almost everyone will have more then 3GB of RAM in their PC’s and none of them will have a way to utilize it if they are still using XP 32.  Software will catch up with the 64 bit trend eventually.  Might as well be ready to accommodate.  A lot of people suggest you will have a driver nightmare on a 64-bit os, but I have not yet come across a single device which I use that did not have functioning drivers for Vista 64.  This includes a 5 year old printer, a webcam, gamepads, digital cameras, mp3 players, etc, etc.  If you can’t find a driver for some device you have chances are it’s and old piece of crap made by some company who is slacking to support drivers for it.  In which case, get a new one!

It’s pretty, seriously. The operating system is very pretty.  After switching from XP to Vista, then back to XP, I really missed the glossy pretty touches on the OS.  Everyone says things like “Oh its just trying to be like a Mac”, well I think that’s crap.  There is nothing revolutionary in a point and click os’s gui these days, they are bound to have similarities.  I use OS X and Vista on a daily basis, and I quite honestly find very few things about either one which I feel was blatantly copied.  They both have their fine points.  There are some odd things in the gui however where you can get glimpses of UI elements which appear to linger from the days of windows 95, like the fonts control panel.  Aside from that, the UI is very polished and highly usable.

Vista Fonts

You can turn User Account Control Off! The main thing I see people bitch about when it comes to Vista is UAC.  Well here’s some news folks, you can turn it off.  Yes, out of the box Vista prompts you to click to approve things left and right, for security.  Yes its annoying.  So do this.  Start > Control Panel > Users and Accounts > Disable UAC.  Done.  Now shut up.  Personally, if I installed Vista on my dad’s PC, Id leave it on.  UAC is not a bad thing really.

It hasn’t crashed, at all. In all my days of using XP I got accustomed to the monthly BSOD.  In my year of using Vista, it hasn’t crashed.  Not one time.  How’s that for stable?  The UI might not be super snappy, but at least its stable as hell.  The new kernel is stable, and it works very well.  It is plenty fast.

It doesn’t impact game performance as badly as people say it does. In fact, if you are playing anything thats really new, and uses DirectX 10, it probably helps performance.  That and the fact that Windows XP does not, and never will support DirectX 10 aside from using a handful of hacks.  I have played several games on XP and Vista.  Here is my conclusion.  If you are on older hardware which can barely play the game at all, a lighter OS (Windows XP) will help you play that game.  If you have a new computer with sufficiently powerful hardware to play the game you want to play, Vista might lower your FPS rate by 5-10.  To me going from 100 to 90 fps is tolerable.  If you are trying to play Crysis on old hardware, Vista is not going to help matters.  Then again, who wants to play Crysis on DirectX 9.

The embedded software is pretty nice. Microsoft put in a few more embedded apps, at least in the Ultimate edition which are quite nice.  The picture library is almost as nice as iPhoto.  Microsoft Mail almost makes me want to stop using Thunderbird.  There is also a really nice set of performance monitoring tools.  Power management actually works really well too.  Windows XP’s suspend feature almost never worked right for me.  My computer would suspend and either take 5 minutes to come back on, or just never come back on.  In Vista after an hour my PC quietly goes to sleep and comes back on as quickly as if it was just playing a screensaver.  When both of my PC’s were on Vista using the Balance power settings, I actually noticed my electric bill go down by a couple dollars.

So in conclusion, I like Vista.  I actually like it a lot.  It took me a while to warm up to, in fact it took me switching back to XP after 6 months on Vista to really appreciate the OS, but I do now officially give it my vote.  I think resisting the upgrade and staying on XP, or purchasing a new PC with XP pre-installed is probably just in the way of progress.  Like it or not Vista is the next OS Microsoft has given us.  It is not in any way similar to the disaster Millennium was.  Chances are XP will be out of support by MS before Windows 7 comes out.  Chances are you will see Vista installed on your work computer, and chances are if you read enough Digg, you will automatically hate it.  I suggest you go into the OS with an open mind, take the time to set it up the way you want, and decide for yourself.  There are far too many people complaining about it with nothing but silly complaints which are easy to overcome.

Not for lack of trying thats for sure.

For the past seven or eight years, I have tried time and time again to fulfill my life goal: Becoming so successful on the internet that I can quit my day job. This might sound unrealistic, but is it? How hard can it be to make enough to earn a living online? I’m not trying to become a millionaire, just maybe $80,000 would suffice.

So why can’t I do it?

I think I know. Long-term motivation. Let me go through a list of projects I have attempted and why they failed:

• WerkkreW Productions
  This was the original reason I bought werkkrew.com. It was a joint venture to support and promote local music. Essentially we were a miniature record label/record promotion company started when we were all about 16 years old. This company lasted about 4 years actually but it never did anything except cost money. I believe the reason it failed was twofold. One, it is suprisingly hard to get garage bands to actually motivate to do anything. Despite constant pushing, promoting, going to shows, etc, etc, the bands never really seemed to be willing to put the amount of time into it we were. Two, shortly after we came out with this site and idea, things like MySpace Music came out, which essentially blew us out of the water.
• The WerkkreW Society
  This was essentially a vanilla web forum which we installed just so that werkkrew.com wouldn’t be an empty page. Well done message forums can actually be a great way to get successful online given a large enough user base, we just were never able to capture that audience. After about a year we peaked out at about 1000 users, with maybe 50 active users. It was fun at its peak and pretty rewarding to watch a site grow but as it slowly died, it was painful. Why did it fail? I think mostly because there was no direction behind the forum. There is really no place on the internet for yet another general purpose moderator-less message board. The most successful forums on the web usually cater to very specific audiences with a specific overall topic. We didn’t. This was the allure to the smaller userbase we did have but also the ultimate downfall of the site.
• WerkkreW News
  This was an idea spawned off the ever successful slashdot where we attempted to correct a lot of the issues we had with that site and namely, its moderator/comment system. We got about 50% done this project when Digg came out and just basically decided to give up.
• WerkkreW Design
  This was a moderately successful venture, but didn’t really fit the category I ultimately want. I basically paid my way through college through this business and its moderate success but ultimately closed it down due to simply being unhappy doing web design for other people. It became increasingly frustrating to design sites for people who are not web savvy at all.
• WerkkreW Webhosting
  Similar to the above, this was far too customer service intensive to be a part-time venture. We peaked with the number of customers we needed to simply break even on our costs and after getting tired of supporting retarded requests and support tickets, we decided to retire the business and retain the server for our own purposes.
• Mine for a Minute
  This idea never really got off the ground, I felt it was good but I never had the support of any of my close colleagues and after the release of StumbleUpon I decided it wasn’t worth really doing.

So, aside from the above, there were probably at least 10 other ideas which came and went as more motivated individuals beat us to the punch. I just cant seem to come up with the one idea I need to make all of my dreams come true.

To better describe my dream job, maybe typing it out will actually help ME better understand it.

Essentially I want to create a useful, user-driven community that people ENJOY using.  I want a site that will hopefully become a staple to internet lovers everywhere.  Ideas as lofty and successful as Digg and Youtube are examples, but smaller implementations such as large message forums, the ever popular ytmnd.com, or anything else people enjoy using would be amazing.  I wan’t something fulfilling that I am passionate about and all around proud of.  I don’t want to sell anything, I don’t want to slap up any old site that can drive traffic in like a madhouse.  I don’t want to domain squat or trick people into clicking on things.  I want to create.  I want to make something genuinely useful and enjoyable to even just a large handful of people.

I want to feel proud of what I create.

It pains me to have the skills, talent, and resources I need to accomplish my life goals, but never seeming to be able to get there. I think I need to take a course in time management, but in reality, when I am motivated I work very hard on what it is I am trying to accomplish.

The right idea, the right friends, and the fiery passion behind my idea is all I really need.

Anyone else feel this way, if so, contact me, maybe we can brainstorm.