Entries from May 2007 ↓

When I was younger, I found myself thinking about this question quite often.  During that time approximately 5-10 years ago I’d have to say that the answer I always came up with was money.  Wow how my thoughts and priorities on that subject have changed over the past few years.  I think it all comes with growing up and the fact that I look at priorities in life and whats important to me drastically different than I used to.

Money is great and it does do alot for you,  but I wouldn’t trade where I’m at financially and personally in my life right for any amount of money.  Yes money still is a motivating factor for me, but I’ve got a great wife & dog, a job where I enjoy what I do each day, and great amount of friends and family.   So to answer my question, I think happiness is what motivates me at this point in my life.  Each one of the factors I listed above plays a key role in my happiness and how I motivate myself to approach life each day.  Ultimately when I look down the road  I’d like to be able to take care of my family and also be able to possibly help out those less fortunate than I’ve been in my life.

So what motivates you?

Well its been a long 3 years since my wife Amber started grad school, but last weekend she finally graduated.  She now has a Doctorate Degree in Physical Therapy from the University of Kansas Medical Center and has just started a new job here in the Kansas City area.  She only has one more hurdle to complete and that’s passing her state board exams in a couple months and I’m sure she will do great at that as well.

Anyways if you can’t already tell, I’m extremely proud of her and its definitely been a long stressful 3 years for the both of us, so this is definitely a huge accomplishment in my mind. We also had a lot of family and friends show up for the graduation celebration last weekend, so I would definitely like to say thanks to them as well because it meant a lot to both of us.   Once again, I would like to extend a congratulations to my wife Amber for the hard work and dedication she has put in over the last 3 years.

As most of you know I’ve been a big fan of Cutline created by Chris Pearson.  Well now that he sold the Cutline theme, he released a new theme in conjunction with Copyblogger.  So far from what I’ve read it basically resembles the old Copyblogger design and is fully customizable.  It even has a specialized theme package titled organic that makes use of the custom CSS stylesheets the same way the most recent version of Cutline did.

I was actually pretty excited when I read this today, because I’m just getting ready to redesign this site in the next few weeks.  I’ve pretty much used Cutline on everything up to this point and I’m going to go ahead and give the Copyblogger theme a try on my new design.   It looks like it has some awesome features and it should be fun to customize, so look out for a design that is totally different sometime in mid June.

In the meantime go check out the new Copyblogger Wordpress Theme and give it a try.

As I previously posted I was on vacation last week and it was definitely both long and relaxing. I guess that sounds kind of confusing, but I decided to do a write up of my entire vacation write here so I hope you enjoy.

Day 1 - Sunday May 13th
We had to catch a 7:25 flight out of Kansas City that morning and since we were both up late the night before I think I actually got about 1.5 hours of sleep before we had to get up. Once we got in to LAX we hopped on the shuttle to pick up our rental car from Budget. Now this is where I made the best investment on my entire vacation. Budget was offering Garmin GPS System to rent for $10.95 a day and I decided to do it as I really did not care to be lost in Los Angeles. I can tell you right now it was the best investment I made as I didn’t get lost once out there and I’m so impressed with them that I plan on getting a Garmin GPS System for myself down the road.

Once we got to the hotel in Irvine we were both pretty tired due to lack of sleep and the 2 hour time change, so we decided to lay down for awhile before dinner. We decided to try a restaurant called El Torito Grill for supper and it was some of the best Mexican food that I’ve had in a long time. After dinner we decided to check out South Coast Plaza for some shopping and of course my wife found another purse that she wanted.

Day 2 - Monday May 14 - Universal Studios Hollywood
On Monday we spent the day at Universal Studios Hollywood, it was quite a ways from our hotel but the Garmin GPS System got us there without any problems. This is the first time that either of us had been here and and we both really enjoyed it as we spent the entire day at the park, as it had a lot of great attractions and neat things to do and see. I posted some photos of some of my favorite parts of the park below.

Before you enter the park they have a city walk with some great shopping and food options.

Below is a photo of the set for the Waterworld show from the movie Waterworld. This was the best show at Universal studios and all of the actors did a fantastic show and the special effects were great as well.

The next photo of the cabin used from the John Candy movie The Great Outdoors was a highlight for me because I have been a big fan of this movie for a very long time.

If you want to see some more photos from my visit, I will post some more to my flickr gallery later in the week. Well that about wrapped up the day at Universal Studios Hollywood and the only thing I can recommend is if you go be sure to get there early because there is quite a bit of stuff to do and see in the park.

Continue reading →

I’m extremely excited because in the morning I’m flying to California to take a little vacation with my wife. We are heading to Los Angeles to just hang out and have a good time and celebrate our 3 year wedding anniversary on Tuesday. Next weekend she graduates with her Doctorate in Physical Therapy and as I’ve said before I’m extremely proud of her.

So I probably won’t post much over the next week, but I’m excited about some projects that I’m beginning to work on and I plan on really getting heavily in affiliate marketing once I get back from vacation and my new site design for this blog as the current one is really starting to get on my nerves.

As you may or may not know, I’m a big fan and an avid reader of SEOmoz. They consistently put out quality content on a daily basis and today they launched their annual Web 2.0 awards. Basically their entire team reviewed over 200 sites in 41 different categories and I can only imagine the time involved with that.

The one thing that I think is great about this is the vast amount of great sites I found here, that I didn’t even know existed. There are so many cool sites among their winners and I’ve listed 3 of my favorite ones so far.

• Cocktail Builder - Lets you know what kind of drinks you can make with the liquor you have around the house.
• Pandora - This is kind of cool music site, you choose what kind of music you like and let their player keep playing what you like to hear.
• Zillow - I really like this one since I’m currently in the process of looking for a house to buy. It basically gives you an idea of what the homes you are interested in should actually cost.

I haven’t had a chance to go through the entire list yet, but I highly encourage you to check them out. It was a great list and Jane Copeland from SEOmoz did a great job assembling it.

Since I’m 26 now and getting to be an old man, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my younger days lately. Now mainly what got me thinking about this is a site that came across the other day www.cpashare.com. The site is actually run by a 14 year old freshmen named Harrisson Gevirtz, who is becoming quite a successful affiliate marketer.

It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come considering at the age of 14 in 1995, I was flipping burgers at the local Dairy Queen for a whopping $4.75 an hour! The power of the web has opened so many doors for everyone of all ages and I think it has only just begun. Everyday there are more and more ways to make some good money online as long as you have the determination to reach your goals. I personally applaud anyone at any age that is using the power of the web to create a better life for themselves. It is true what they they say, “Work Smarter, Not Harder” when it comes to making money online. Now by no means is it easy, but it sure the hell is a lot better than a regular day to day job working for someone else.

I only wish this online revolution would have happened a little earlier in my life. If it would’ve it would have prevented countless nights I spent during my teenage years slaving over a hot grill.

I seem to always find myself browsing the web in search of great resources that offer tips to help me with my projects. Needless to say I’ve found alot of great information out there and I wanted to offer some valuable info and tips in return to help you build a better website.

1. Choosing a Color Scheme - This is a concept that I have always seemed to struggle with in the past. Now I feel as though I’m actually getting much better at being able to choose color schemes for my sites. One of the things that I think helped me out the most in this area was a site that I found called COLOURlovers a great site dedicated to numerous different color trends and palettes submitted by users. Be sure to check it out as it helped me tremendously.
2. Find Great Photos - More often then not I find myself looking for photos to use that don’t cost a ton of money. There are a ton of different photo sites out from a variety of different price ranges. Lately I’ve been using Fotolia and I really like it. Their prices range from $1 -$3 per photo depending on the license you choose and they definitely have a great selection of stuff.
3. Web Usability - I have to admit that web usability is something that I never paid close attention to until about 6 months ago.  Previously when designing I never really took into account what the overall user experience was like and I think this definitely had a negative impact on some of my designs. Well last fall I purchased Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and it totally changed the way I look at designing my sites now. I highly recommend this book and its definitely worth the money.

Hopefully those 3 tips will help those of you looking to enhance your design skills.  I plan on posting more tips like this in the future as well.

On a side note I’ve become quite bored with the design here and I hope to completely redesign it and have it up by sometime in mid June.  I think I can do alot better than what I currently have here so be on the look out for that.