Category Archives: Thoughts

Confidence and Skill: Tip Toe Past your Boundaries

The best way to grow is to keep your confidence level slightly above your skill level.

Why do I say this? Because it pushes you past your boundaries without breaking them. As a technician, manager or even business owner, if you remain within the comforts of what you know how to do, you stay there.

I am not saying if you are a IT geek, go get a job as a cook, no. I mean, as the IT person who is used to a certain way of programming, or language…step out of those bounds and start working at something you have never encountered or been asked to do. Make small projects for yourself that test your limits, slightly. Try writing in a language you never had before, and let Google be your guide! Search! Learn! Solve!

Doing this keeps you on your toes and forces you to figure out a new way to do things. The only thing that comes out of this is growth, as long as it is done slightly. No sense trying to do something that completely forces you to reinvent your own wheels! You want to grow, not break yourself down.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team takes a similar approach, he has a “30 day” program where you tell yourself you are going to do something for 30 days, and do it no matter what. This is an excellent program however my approach is somewhat different…take what you are good at and modify it so its a bit more difficult, not comfortable. When that becomes easy, move onto something new.

Don’t get caught in a rut doing the same thing day in and day out. The more you can do, the more valuable you are, and the easier it will be to overcome opportunities in the future.

Scams, Marketing Masters, Gurus, Self Help, Make Money Online Eating Chips and Soda on Your Couch – See! I can Stuff Keywords too!!!

So I was researching this guy XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX, looking for negative reviews to show this lady who asked me about him that hes just another Marketing “Guru” with nothing new to say. Surprisingly I cant find anything negative on Google after searching 40 pages, nothing that didn’t have huge retort to it. What was amazing is how bloated the internet was with keywords stuffed SEO Copy with the word “XXXXX XXXXX Scam” that was in fact explaining how it wasn’t a scam. This was crazy! I was shocked and appalled. Whatever little content and advice based on his system I found, was irrelevant, outdated, or already known by myself and I assume the large majority of internet markers.

So what did I do? I went to bing.com and typed in “XXXXXX XXXXX Scam”, and found negative reviews from page 1 on!!!

What the hell Google?

Spellcheck on Tests in Oregon and Thoughts on Effect of Technology in Daily Life

This was a comment in response to a Gizmodo Post:

Depresing Newz: Spelcheking During Exams Now OoKay Wit Oragan Schols

Not sure if they have allowed me to comment there yet, they say you have to audition but I do not see anywhere to audition! Oh well, hopefully it will be up there sometime.

If they teach spelling before a test then it doesn’t really matter if they can use spellcheck on the test, it just gives kids a greater of getting that important and state required “A” to pass their class.

Using spellcheck allows the school system to pass along the majority of kids who don’t really care about their education.

Cyberelitism and Social Networking Success

This was in response to an blog entitled: How building your online social network may affect your offline social life, which was based on an article study about Cyberoptimism and Cyberpessimism.

As with anything else in “business” or “life”, it all comes down to strategy. Offline or online, building relationships one “friend” at a time or one “business card” at a time is really much the same thing. It all depends on what you are going to do with the relationships you maintain. It matters not if you are a Cyberoptimist, or cyberpessimist, either way, you are social or you are not, being social is knowing how to take the next step beyond small talk and introduction (aka. friending).

Ask anyone, having too many friends offline is time consuming, they demand your time, your attention and your loyalty. The difference is that online friends demand less of this attention and you can have more of them. The quality is not there, but because we are finite beings with finite time and requiring immense amounts of it for real business, those that aren’t part of your “life” or “business” strategy will always come last, offline or online.

At The Office at 12 AM, Thinking About ReLiC

So its 12 AM, and I am at the office waiting on the AT&T guy to fix the phones. The office is an hour and a half away from home. Sigh. There is some funny business going on across from the office. 4 cars are parked next to the train tracks…weird. People are getting out in the dark and talking to each other. We turned the lights off. Hmm…

Valuable programming time is being lost, so I decided to blog on one of the Agent Computers. The boss (one of them) is here with me, just hanging out. Bored.

Thinking of all the things that have happened the past few weeks leaves me feeling amazed. I have learned so much about programming in PHP, running mySQL queries, writing wordpress plugins, etc. I love being in this type of environment where I am free to develop my own abilities (with the help of Google of course). And the scary thing is others are starting to notice these abilities.