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What do you plan on accomplishing this year.

Passion

Passion is a corner stone for a prosperous life. Passion for anything and everything you do. Seek out projects and get involved with them. Feel a personal connection to them. Build value in your life by surrounding yourself with things you care about. The world will look bland if you never look up.

Take on things you care about. It means nothing to fill your life with stepping stones. Don’t seek out a job only because it will lead to a “better one.” That can be a factor but not the factor. That better job may never come and you will settle with what you have.

We have a limited amount of time and there is no need to waste it. Seek out what you are passionate for and don’t be ashamed of it. If you like taking pictures, then take pictures. Don’t spend time thinking about how goofy you look or how bad your photos might be. If your friends and family are important to you, then spend more time with them.

Boredom

Every so often someone will tell me they are constantly bored. They sit around and complain about it and refuse to take a step in a different direction. This is shocking. There are so many opportunities and they can’t even find one that interests them. The problem may be linked to respect.

Respect

Respect your passion and the passion of others. One reason people don’t follow their passion is because they are too worried about what others think. This shouldn’t be an issue. Your passion is for you and no one else. Respect it and pursue it. Passion is solely for the one pursuing it. Don’t judge another’s passion. Let them seek it out and enjoy it.

I have a passion for technology, photography, numbers, writing, movies, and books. What are yours?

Then I advanced into middle school and high school.  Magically, mittens were cool.  It seemed like everyone had a pair of those knitted mittens.  They would wear them all the time: indoors, outdoors, summer, and winter.

In hindsight all this was pretty silly.  Hand garments aren’t a status symbol.  It is crazy how young people put a coolness factor on everything.  Mittens are more practical because they keep your fingers together to maintain warmth.  Gloves are practical because they allow you to use your fingers.  They both have their advantages but I wouldn’t consider either one dorky or cool.  People can and have devoted lifetimes to understanding these social trends.

In case you are wondering, I had planned this whole post to be about gloves and mittens.  That is dorky.

Photo by kathrynivy

The one year that comes to mind, Cartoon Network was previewing a number of shows that were being considered for full time. Among them were (if my memory serves) Power Puff Girls, Johnny Bravo, and Dexter’s Lab. Throughout the night you could call in and vote for the one that you thought was the best. I never called, mostly because I thought it was silly and didn’t make a difference. In hindsight I was most likely right.

That year as I sat and watched these shows I started to get a little down. You see, I didn’t have the knowledge I do now and had some interesting thoughts about the TV studios. In my mind there was a single man in the studio who had to put in the tape (this was back when my family owned a VCR) to start the next show. He would manually load all the shows and commercials and take all the calls. I started to feel bad for this person and wonder why I was so lucky. I imagined that he was sitting there in this dark room all sad that he had to do this while his family was having a party at home. I wondered what he did to pass the time. He must have already seen these new shows since he worked for Cartoon Network. I could only guess that he sat there staring into space with a bottle of juice. I really wished we could invent a robot to switch the tapes so he can go home with his family.

I now know that it is mostly automated and there is no one manually changing tapes in a VCR. There probably is someone who is working there during New Year’s Eve, but I don’t think it is anything like the scenario I imagined. Looking back, I find it interesting that I never felt this way on Christmas.

If I write purely for my readers, you will get half assed and mediocre articles.  There will be no emotion or personal interest driving the article.  Unless I am interested in it, I will see no point in writing it.  I may force one out just to get something up, but that doesn’t do anyone any good.

Writing for others also made it hard to find topics to cover.  There aren’t many topics that will be right for everyone and the result is no post at all or they are all over the place to try and cover the entire audiance. There is no formula to follow that will guarantee good results.

From here on out I will get back to my roots.  I started blogging for me.  I wrote articles so that others can see my interests and opinions.  I want to put my energy back into something that I care about and hopefully the result will be higher quality and more frequent articles.  The posts will be about whatever I choose and can be anywhere from two lines to a 1000 word essay.

If you find yourself in the same situation as me then start writting for yourself. Write articles you would want to see and that you want others to know about. Put your opinion in there and take ownership for every word you place on your site, even if you end up being completely wrong.  This is my site and I want to be proud of it.

I love the theme I have.  It does a great job and my eyes don’t bleed when I look at it, but it isn’t mine.  I didn’t create it and it doesn’t satisfy my wants.  The problem is that I lack the knowledge and creativity to build my own.

My personality drives me to learn new things and tackle new problems.  Some day I hope to learn enough to create something that will satisfy my wants.  As of right now I just have too much on my plate* and must settle with a simple blog post.

* If you don’t believe me, you can ask those who are: waiting for my photos, wanting to hang out, suggesting I work more, etc.

There is a limit to the conversion. There are only so many problems, or lemons, that one person can handle. After a certain point it just gets ridiculous. You can keep making delicious treats but lets face it, nobody would like an entire lemon flavored meal. I don’t want to sit down and eat some lemon cookies with my lemon pie and have lemonade while I prepare my lemon basted turkey.

So remember, when life gives you lemons create delicious food but fix the problem before you create a meal.

After my first visit to apple.com I got intrigued by the veil of mystery that surrounded the Mac. At the time I didn’t know anyone that owned one. This presented me with the opportunity to be the first to learn about the technology. I could safely fiddle to my hearts content without anyone telling me a better way to do things. It gave me a chance to take the longest way possible to arrive at the simplest solution and learn new things along the way.

I had plenty of friends that knew about Windows. I even had some that knew about Linux. Due to this fact, I would always be second best. I wouldn’t have the chance to learn as much. If they asked what I was working on it would eventually lead to just giving me the answer. As long as there were others that used these operating systems, I would always be second best in my mind.

With the Mac I had free rein to explore until I saw fit. I could come up with my own weird ways to do things without anyone telling me to do it differently. I developed my own opinions on software and created new habits.

Getting a Mac opened me up to exploring other technology. It was the gateway drug to my tech addiction. I got addicted to trying out different technologies and trying to learn as much as possible. I believe that my foray into the Mac world made me more comfortable learning new things.

I by no means hate Windows, contrary to what some of my friends think. I use Windows daily both at school and at work. Since getting a Mac, I have learned more about Windows. The Mac OS has taught me a ton about operating systems in general and I have taken that knowledge over to the Windows side.

My main point is that I didn’t start using a Mac for the debatable claims that people make (like lack of viruses, it just works, etc.) I started using a Mac to quench my geeky thirst for technology. I continue to use a Mac because this is where I have built my computing world. I have my own software setup that makes my life easier day in and day out. I have set up things to work best for my way of thinking and I continue to learn new things as I explore new problems. Sure my software may have capable counterparts on the Windows side, but why switch. I don’t believe that all Windows users should switch to a Mac for this very reason. Stick with what you know and what you like. I like using my Mac and I see the benefits of Windows as well.

Hopefully others can see that although I am a Mac fanboy 90% of the time, I still maintain a strong grasp on reality. My beginnings with the Mac weren’t the same typical arguments you hear again and again. Mine was much deeper and connected with a part of my life that defines me.

The constant fiddling is great most of the time.  That is until I have a lackluster yet important task to accomplish. I have no problem accomplishing the task and am perfectly capable, but my fiddling nature can quickly derail me. The other day I had to start writing a paper for one of my classes. It wasn’t a large and unbearable task, just less interesting than some other things. I had allocated more than enough time to accomplish the task and write an amazing paper. I had a full day of writing and then a couple of spare hours to revise. All was on track, until the curse.

I was knee deep in the research aspect of my assignment when I took a break for some food. I decided to take this extra time to check on my blog and maybe polish up some posts. Then it happened, my site was having problems. I logged into my blogs admin panel and tried to load up the main dashboard. It would start loading, then stop a quarter of the way. Worse than that, it would take down the rest of the site.  I would get error after error that the server wasn’t available.  If I waited a few minutes, I could regain access to other parts that weren’t the main dashboard (like plug-ins, posts, or comments.) If I went back to the dashboard, it all went down again.

As you can imagine, I just had to try and get this working again.  I couldn’t leave my precious blog struggling to stay alive.  The thing is, I am pretty new to hosting my own blog.  Up until a month ago I have used wordpress.com or Blogger.  So when things went bad, I wasn’t exactly sure how to fix it.  After messing around for awhile to make sure it was a consistent problem I contacted support.  Things got more difficult because they couldn’t recreate the problem.  It seemed really odd that it only happened when I went to one specific page.  After 12 hours, they had given up and told me that I needed to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server because I was using too much of my servers resources.  That is ridiculous considering I get 16 or 17 visitors on a good day.

Eventually I ended up reinstalling wordpress and restoring my database from an old backup.  The site worked fine for about 10 minutes and then the problems happened again.  Cutting to the end, I finally isolated the problem to my theme.  After disabling a feature of the theme, everything is working fine for the most part.

The point of this long drawn out story is that my fiddling can get the worst of me.  I did end up writing my paper, but that was after 8 hours were wasted trying to revive my blog.  The paper turned out to be great, but I had to make sacrifices.  I didn’t get as much sleep and I had to postpone other projects.  Overall it just wasn’t a good thing.  This is what I call the curse of the geek.  It is the ability to get distracted and derailed from more important tasks by something that requires fiddling and has to deal with technology.

Who do you think deserves to be recognized today? Leave a comment or even start your own blog.  There has never been a better time.

Thanks Annette.  You inspire me.