Halfway, somewhere.

February 16th, 2009 Personal, Projects, RandomTags: Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Glenn Reynolds, Ice skating, Mental health, Toronto

Halfway, somewhere. The internet and it’s effect on my attention spans & workload.

Overload, is what it comes down to. I’m writing this as I glance down at a book open in front of me: “An army of Davids”, by Glenn Reynolds. Great book — I’m partway through the third chapter and really loving it. Next to that book are two others (God’s Secretaries: the making of the king James bible and God&Empire, if you were so curious to know) while splashed out on my computer screen are 27 different firefox tabs. In the midst a few of them I’m partway through some writings, readings and viewings. In particular I’m halfway through two videos I’m watching while reading a couple of betanews & mental floss articles, auditing my phone bill and my recent paypal transactions.

So, here I am. Writing something different for a change – I contemplated completing any of the above and just decided to say forget it. I wouldn’t complete any specific task without moving on to the next without feeling as if I hadn’t gotten anywhere. And the truth is, I didn’t. See the truth is for the past year or so I’ve been dealing with what I call ‘internet overload’, an extremely (un)rare form of attention deficit disorder. I can’t stay on task and haven’t been able to since business began picking up – my full-time job (Fused Network, which I do love dearly) scaled from sixty to a hundred to twelve hundred clients in a short period of time. Since then, the barrage of emails, phone calls and tasks have left me inundated. The daily deluge, I like to call it – is actually relatively easy to escape. Often I simply ‘turn off’ and disappear for a few hours to the confines of a coffee shop, book or ice skating.

I have learned to cope with it in my own interesting ways. This past fall I took a train ride from Toronto to Vancouver, escaping my reality for a total of three days (And taking in mesmerizing sights) while my awesome-worker-bees took the brunt of most phone calls and emails. Just a few weeks ago I drove from Toronto to California and back. Three weeks in total.

And I’m here again, cleaving to my workload like some high strung sailor in the middle of a hurricane. The ship isn’t going down by any definition but learning to cope is a task. I’ve dug around the internet and tried to remedy the situation by reading (half, I never could complete any) of a million articles on defining tasks & completing them, organizing and structuring life and about halfway through every article I’d take three phone calls, make lunch, do laundry & acquire a company. And then I’d forget about the article only to return to it sometime next week disinterested or far too busy for it.

My task list does dwindle though – during the past week I’ve completed roughly 4 items on my list of 30, got 2/3rds of the way through about five books (Two on PHP & BASH programming and the three aforementioned ones). I cope.

Coping
I often find ‘escaping’ simply the easiest way to cope. While I’m away out of the office I do often at the very least structure my thoughts, compile more thorough & feasible todo lists and make arrangements. It isn’t as though I’m that much of a mess when it comes to things to do — there’s simply far too many of them and far too little of me.

I’ve had a call out for additional positions that we’re attempting to fill at Fused Network, in particular the ‘personal assistant’ one but to this day out of 197+ resume applications I have only had time to audit two of them. Laundry, dishes, and over 110+ support tickets a day, of course, took precedent.

I’m busy planning my next attempt at an escape, admittedly though I don’t get far. I always have my 3g card and blackberry attached at my hip: readily available in the instant that I’m required to be available. This next one will either be to the Philippines (Blackberry rentals aren’t cheap there), Vancouver or maybe another stint in California. I’d like to go some place ’seemingly’ less busy on the outside versus another few days in Chicago where things feel rushed.

I have no doubt that somewhere out there I can find a pill to suddenly generate copious amounts of attention to provide to a single topic or task; But I (for some odd reason) prefer my quickpaced life – I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I wouldn’t mind a nicer view or some sunshine at the moment but having 4,000 tasks keeps me busy, something I’ve always loved.

I need somewhere slow, where I can work fast.

Battle of the theme

January 29th, 2009 Open Source, ProjectsTags: minimalism, wordpress themes

I’m what would easily be considered a “perfectionist”, or damned near close to it. After several months of digging through countless top wordpress theme sites, hundreds of “43 wordpress themes you’ve never seen” (That I had, admittedly, seen many times before) and more wordpress theme rating sites than I’d have ever hoped to have traversed in a lifetime — I’ve found a few usable “minimalist” wordpress themes.

Since this post is extraordinarily large you’ll need to read more to get the full story.
Read more »

e107 Plugins Launched!

May 28th, 2007 Projects

After several solid weeks of effort from Bugrain & a few beta testers e107 plugins is launched!

The site intends on being the greatest resource for e107 plugins & news. Featuring excellent tools for both plugin hunters & developers.

A few of the key features are:

• Easy to use ’search’ function based on plugin tags
• ‘New releases’ section to find the latest releases
• Thorough rating system to help you find quality plugins
• Search system will support by author, plugin name and tags added by the community

Features for plugin authors:

• Versioning system available to allow ease of upgrading
• Prompt, easy to use upload system
• System available to announce new plugins and releases

The new site is now launched & available so you can check it out here.
While there aren’t many plugins there yet please continue checking back as many will be getting added daily.

Weeklong Wednesdays

May 17th, 2007 Faith, Projects

Well it’s been almost a week since I’ve really sat down and had time to blog. Things have been busier than
normal despite not much going on!

My father plopped an interesting opportunity (previously discussed but something we’ve never followed through on) in my lap today. He has an offer on the table to sail from Florida to Panama on behalf of someone else. The ship we’d be taking is stunning & I wouldn’t mind spending a few weeks on it. I’ve discussed the arrangements with a few people who would temporarily take over my daily activities while I’m gone. It may just happen!

In other news I’m afraid I didn’t get the Tucows position. The excuse reasoning behind it was that I would be ‘overqualified’ for the position. The explanation did make sense in that I would probably be looking for alternative hats to wear within the company in short order. Previously they endured a few issues with people leaving the allotted position too quick leaving them empty-handed again and starting from square one. The company definitely had an interesting allure to it though. It’s one place I’ll regret not being able to partake in. But such is life, onwards.

At the same time I do have several interesting openings available to me at the moment. Mostly all telecommuting on behalf of web hosting providers; Nothing that really peaks my interest all that much. Sadly the industry has lost an awful lot of it’s shimmer that it once had prior to the last slumbering beast I worked for.

Perhaps the time off & lengthy sail will jumpstart my enthusiasm about it again. The web hosting industry is one of the few untapped markets yet. Despite there being a million competitors no one company has a massive grasp on it like the software & IT industries. There’s still an unexplored horizon awaiting.

As for my projects we currently have quite a few going very well. Hostjury is doing simply amazing as always and never seems to stop. The content on it is about to endure a massive overhaul which should increase the organic traffic quite a bit.

We have several others in development like Lamaku, a new ‘blogging’ network that has yet to exit the starting gates. I foresee a slow but decent growth with it. The blog market has slowed a bit in recent months but with the foreign markets relatively untapped we should be able to arrange ourselves in a proper niche to expand fairly quickly once organized.

On a completely unrelated project I recently picked up TO Today for a relatively minimal amount. Myself & about 15 other bloggers are going to be taking the local blogging ‘news’ market by storm. TO Today will have a good mix of the tastes, sights & sounds of Toronto. The site has yet to launch but I don’t think it’ll be more than a week before it crashes through the starting gates.

Look for more soon.. specifically with Fused Network ;) Time to takeover Toronto in respect to the web hosting industry. The site is currently undergoing a massive overhaul that should assist us in increasing our clientbase in short order.

Attached is a ‘preview’ (10% complete) of our new design.
Have a great evening folks & God bless.

Nerd by day, domain speculator by night!

May 14th, 2007 Projects

I’ve always been a domain whore. Everyone I know knows it. I’ve amassed a collection nearly ~200 large and it continues to grow daily.
It’s a nasty addiction to have with it’s price as well. ~200 a year x 6 is a month of rent!

Certainly not that bad as I have been selling off a few here and there. My most recent sale was Linksprout, I was sad to part with it but the ~500 dollar price tag really helped me get by those sad times. It was a project that was partly developed for this blog actually to ‘plop down’ links that I didn’t have space to put here.

I come across an awful lot of great links everyday that I just can’t put here. Linksprout filled that void!

At any rate I’ve recently picked up ‘totoday.com’ (TO Today) which I intend on setting up an online Toronto ‘news & classifieds’ site. I don’t think it’ll ever compete with 24 hours or the Metro but I’ll try to give them a run for their money :)