Interesting Notes of 2011:

Health

• Stopped drinking diet cokes, energy drinks, and most forms of caffeine the entire months of January, Feb.
• Stayed off diet coke until late April.
• I weighted around 228 lbs in January of last year, I maxed out at 234 lbs in February. I started the four hour body. By May I weighed 206 lbs. In June, I started getting stressed out and returned to my old habits. Dec 31 – I was back at a whopping 224 lbs. Oh well…

2012 Health Goals:

• 190 lbs via 4 Hour Body starting Jan 1, 2012.
• No Cokes / Energy Drinks.

Fun things to remember:

• My Cousin Katie got married, we went to Dallas TX for the wedding.
• Kentucky went to the Final Four.
• Suzanne’s Family Vacation to Myrtle Beach.
• St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series in dramatic fashion.
• Started playing golf again, took a few lessons, pure addict status now.

I’ll post more as I get around to it. I still have the incomplete 2010 post from last year that I never finished so I wanted to go ahead and publish this…

Happy New Years!

Things is Greeeeeaaaaaatt!

As a recent convert to mac-fanboyism, I have started downloading all of the ‘mac-crack’ applications everyone says you “must have” — C’mon, You know what I’m talking about:

• QuickSilver
• Transmit
• Coda
• Versions
• Coda
• … and Things

Things is a really sharp GTD tool inspired from the master of “Getting Things Done ™”, David Allen. As soon as my trial runs out, I’ll be swallowing my pride and paying for it. It’s created by Cultured Code and can be downloaded at their website.

Now, as amazing as I have made this product sound in the three long-run-on sentences I have typed about it — it’s not without its flaws! It’s a Mac only App, gasp! Sure, it’ll sync with your iPhone & iPad, but if you’ve got a Windows box on the desktop – uh, well – you are out of luck. I use my MacbookPro and iPhone exclusively for handling all of my personal “to-dos” so I am not really affected by this limiting lack-of-openness. Come at me, Bro!

that’s right, I totally just stole the graphic off their website — Whadda ya gonna do about it? Lazy but effective.

Things(tm) allows Due Dates, Notes, Search functionality, tagging, projects, “Areas of Responsibility”, Delegation, iCal sync, iPhone Sync, and “Quick Entry”. If you are confused about any of those terms, you probably don’t need to be using Task Management or GTD software!

Anyone else using this tool? Lemme hear your feedback!

Please note the exceptional use of sarcasm in the title of this blog post!

I’m not going to lie – I love it when facebook releases a huge change and the world freaks out. It always makes me realize I’m one step ahead of most people.

Like many, my initial reaction to the Facebook changes was unfavorable… a collective “WTF?” moment if you will. Have faith little ones! The reality and absolute truth that we must accept is that Facebook knows what they are doing. They hire smart people. Very smart people.

Craig, go on, explain!

Smart people don’t make arbitrary decisions – they make calculated, tested, and proven decisions. They produce positive results that meet the end goal and accept that some changes will not immediately be popular. I would almost personally guarantee that they have been A/B split-testing these changes over the last month! And they found a positive response, so they made the changes to the masses. In the short term, the masses will riot with a vengence. Then they will accept, finally becoming even more addicted.

What does facebook want? It wants users to live/breathe/eat/die its websites content. It wants to be the social engine of the Internet. They want you to log on, daily, multiple times a day. They want you using it on your computer, mobile phone, while your watching tv, and every time you sit on the pot. Every one of these horrid changes have been thoroughly tested to – in the long run – increase the quantity and quality of the experience. We we all embrace these changes, eventually.

Ok, I’m fine with that, but seriously, why won’t they add a dislike button? That’s what the users want! The dislike button has been buried because they have not found a way to implement it without alienating users and losing pageviews. It’s as simple as that. The enhanced experience does not net positive results to the goal of Facebook.

Everyone needs to chill out and accept the following: Facebook will be an always-evolving creature – fighting to stay relevant – just like all other websites past, present, and future.

Look at Digg, Slashdot, and MySpace. Slashdot never betrayed its users – but it simply failed to evolve. Better content sources became available. I am a nerdy person, but I cant tell you the last time I read slashdot. Digg refused to listen to users and implemented untested major flawed changes that drastically cut the traffic of the site. They “long term” alienated the reader while viable alternatives (read: reddit) took over a majority of the userbase in a few short months. Myspace couldn’t control the spam, they had a horrible interface, and failed to keep the core audiences attention. I can only imagine what those meetings must have been like – the arbitrary decisions being made on a whim – millions of users affected without one ounce of solid, documented results to show for it.

Finally, not a day goes by when someone doesn’t ask “What do you think about Google+?” — My absolute honest opinion is that its a flawed, hopeless, copy-cat idea that will fail. Its the Google Buzz of 2011. Google offered a few ‘great’ new features that Facebook didn’t have – and expected everyone to jump on this new, shiny, `clean interfaced` bandwagon. Bad idea, Google.

Three months after being accept into the beta, I log into Google+ just to see if people were still using it – I obviously have not been… hell, the only reason I clicked it was because of the nifty marketing arrow on the front page of the Google search page. Nope, nothing really going on there… a bunch of nerds circle jerking a site that fails to provide a better experience.

I can’t validate much of this – honestly – which is pretty sad considering i’ve written a short novel on the importance of empirical data. The reality is that I am not Facebook — nor will I ever be — and am too darn busy to go around and site a sources with statistics. I don’t care if my page views skyrocket! What a liberating feeling!

In conclusion though – I will say this – Deep down, deep in your tiny little heart, I think you know that I am right — And i’m fine with that, that’s all I really need! I <3 you.

Update: Remember when it used to be like this? Lol – so much better now…

I don’t say it enough — I am the most fortunate person in the world. I have such great friends and family! It’s important to recognize them.

My good friend and business partner sent me a real surprise this week. The fedex guy showed up with a box from Apple Computers. Yes, I am now rocking a Macbook Pro. It’s hard to believe that “I” would even consider switching – but I am just not a fan of Windows 7/ Vista. I’ve used it for three days and am completely in love with its simplicity. A few quick app additions (Quicksilver) and I pretty much have zero reason to ever use a PC again. IPhoto is awesome. Mail is awesome. The mousepad gestures — you guessed it — are awesome.

My other hero this week has been my wife. I have a very addictive personality – I am now back on the crackrock (aka “Golf”). I started playing again a few weeks ago after becoming incredibly stressed out. The weather was nice, so I went and hit some balls with my father-in-law. Its been absolute non-sense since.

I’m watching the golf channel almost exclusively, buying / selling / trading clubs on craigslist, watching youtube instruction videos, looking at country club memberships, taking a lesson, driving ranges, following PGA golfers on twitter … its border-line nuts. All and all though – my wife has been very supportive. I’ve had a lot of stress lately (not entirely work-related stress either) — so its been good to get out and do something outdoors, and she has been a real all-star about it.

Finally, I’ve dusted off the old bible and really started studying it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not ever really thrown the thing out the window — but after a few good christian podcasts, I have felt very “drawn” back to my roots. Life is short, we have to stay focused on what is really important.

All and all, thats all I really had to say… I’m looking forward to NFL, NCAA Football, baseball playoffs — it all starts soon! The neighborhood kids are back in school, and my grass is finally turning green again since it has cooled off a bit… Change is in the air at the Clayton household…

One lovely feature, though, is the ability to setup separate chroot environments.

Here is a basic example of some of the stuff I’ve been working on. We have a panel that our users log in and can use to manage their hosting account. That copy of apache is old and the php version is like, php4. I’ve forgotten how horrid it was to have OO code in php4 – so I am not going to update the panel in that. I also dont have time to do a major upgrade on all of our servers and update to the latest and greatest — what if it breaks something, right? So what to do?

Simple:


boxX # cd /
boxX# mkdir /lenny-chroot
boxX# debootstrap lenny ./lenny-chroot http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian
boxX# mount -o bind /sys /lenny-chroot/sys
boxX# mount -o bind /proc /lenny-chroot/proc
boxX# chroot /lenny-chroot


Blam! Its like I have a whole new env to build an apache server on. Basically you create a directory, use debootstrap to setup the environment (using the parameter lenny as the debian version you want; second parameter is the location to place the chroot). You use the two ‘mount’ commands to allow the chroot to use of the sys / proc of the true base env…

Before you get too crazy, I have a suggestion – update your ~/.bashrc file to change the prompt so you know your in the chroot.

nano ~/.bashrc

Just simply update the export PS1 line to include the name of the chroot – this is what I did for my test chroot.
export PS1='[lennychroot] - \h:\w\$ '

I learned this the hard way – I had exited the chroot but thought I was still in it and started changing conf files on my main env, not the chroot. Bad times! Anyways, now you can tell where you are (if you’re in a chroot) cause its labeled [lennychroot]…

A few quick commands (and yeah, I modified some conf files for ips, etc, but you can do that):

[lennychroot] - boxX:/# aptitude install apache2
[lennychroot] - boxX:/# /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
[lennychroot] - boxX:/# aptitude install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
[lennychroot] - boxX:/# aptitude install php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-ming php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-json
[lennychroot] - boxX:/# /etc/init.d/apache2 start


Wham-Bam! I got a fully functional apache server with the latest greatest versions of php to deploy code on. I set apache to run on a seperate IP address so I am able test without having to shutdown any of my other services. Once I get the panel closer to completion, I can start testing the migration of users on it (slowly) to make sure the new apache installs (they will be compiled – much faster / tighter) can handle the load of 100k user accounts on them.

Specials thanks to Tim Hart for posting a blog entry today an inspiring me to write this little ray of sunshine.

*update 1*: Oh yeah, if you want to get really snazzy — you can just rsync the ./lenny-chroot/ directory to other debian installs and your env works on them – so deploying an env across multiple machines becomes super easy.
*update 2*: I am using lenny in this example because thats what we are running – we are moving to squeeze when we migrate equipment… so forgive me for using old versions.

Wait, according to all the big-shot marketing firmsEMAIL MARKETING IS DEAD!

It’s amazing how many emails flood into my inbox daily, all trying to sell me something. Microcenter, Newegg, TigerDirect, Dish Network, Trailside RV Center (seriously).

For years, i laughed … and deleted.

I would never fall for that! Mentally, I sit around picturing these slightly delirious grandmothers clicking links in forged emails. All of them buying from imposter chinese hacker sites that steal their social security numbers and digitally rape their elderly souls — as the chinese use the data to create bank accounts, purchase questionable goods, and fill their shed-like communist homes with the finest capitalist products produced by Sony. That was a run on sentence — nevermind…

Anyways, Well, tonight, it happened. Lids.com is the official winner. At some point in life, I joined the lids.com passport club. You get discounts if you signup for this rewards program. It basically gives them the ability to spam your mailbox with offers — which they have done, over and over and over again.

But tonight, the urge to view and buy a new Kentucky 5/3 NewEra flatbill ballcap was too much. I bought a cap for 25 dollars! For those wondering, I did get 25% off!

1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.

2. Lack of impulse control. Habitual impulsiveness gets in the way of optimal performance. Some people do not bring their full intellectual resources to bear on a problem but go with the first solution that pops into their heads.

3. Lack of perserverance and perseveration. Some people give up too easily, while others are unable to stop even when the quest will clearly be fruitless.

4. Using the wrong abilities. People may not be using the right abilities for the tasks in which they are engaged.

5. Inability to translate thought into action. Some people seem buried in thought. They have good ideas but rarely seem able to do anything about them.

6. Lack of product orientation. Some people seem more concerned about the process than the result of activity.

7. Inability to complete tasks. For some people nothing ever draws to a close. Perhaps it’s fear of what they would do next or fear of becoming hopelessly enmeshed in detail.

8. Failure to initiate. Still others are unwilling or unable to initiate a project. It may be indecision or fear of commitment.

9. Fear of failure. People may not reach peak performance because they avoid the really important challenges in life.

10. Procrastination. Some people are unable to act without pressure. They may also look for little things to do in order to put off the big ones.

11. Misattribution of blame. Some people always blame themselves for even the slightest mishap. Some always blame others.

12. Excessive self-pity. Some people spend more time feeling sorry for themselves than expending the effort necessary to overcome the problem.

13. Excessive dependency. Some people expect others to do for them what they ought to be doing themselves.

14. Wallowing in personal difficulties. Some people let their personal difficulties interfere grossly with their work. During the course of life, one can expect some real joys and some real sorrows. Maintaining a proper perspective is often difficult.

15. Distractibility and lack of concentration. Even some very intelligent people have very short attention spans.

16. Spreading oneself too think or too thick. Undertaking too many activities may result in none being completed on time. Undertaking too few can also result in missed opportunities and reduced levels of accomplishment.

17. Inability to delay gratification. Some people reward themselves and are rewarded by others for finishing small tasks, while avoiding bigger tasks that would earn them larger rewards.

18. Inability to see the forest for the trees. Some people become obsessed with details and are either unwilling or unable to see or deal with the larger picture in the projects they undertake.

19. Lack of balance between critical, analytical thinking and creative, synthetic thinking. It is important for people to learn what kind of thinking is expected of them in each situation.

20. Too little or too much self-confidence. Lack of self-confidence can gnaw away at a person’s ability to get things done and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Conversely, individuals with too much self-confidence may not know when to admit they are wrong or in need of self-improvement.

• Have a time-consuming, 14 hr day, Project with ultra-tight deadlines at work,
• Buy a House,
• Move,
• Renovate Home,
• Try to blog daily,
• try to start working out,
• Unpack,
• have a pregnant wife

…all at the same time. No good. No good.

Have you ever heard of the Herman Miller Aeron Chair? Its one of the most comfortable, ergonomic chairs in existence. Guess what, I just bought one on Craigslist for next to nothing. Yes, Craigslist. It is in perfect shape and has all kinds of levers, knobs, and adjusters. Are you jealous? You shouldn’t be — I mean, I’m the one sitting here on the Internet _bragging_ about buying a stupid office chair like its a sacrificial rite of passage to nerddom. Dont get me wrong — it is … a rite of passage … but … how pathetic do you have to be to be bragging about a chair at 1:35am? … Sigh …

Oh well – I am enjoying it. I am NOT enjoying my wife being pissed that I bought it, but sometimes you gotta swing the ‘sac around and lay down who is boss (and / or buy her something nice for the baby … or a house … with new floors, carpets, counter tops, whisper-close toilet seats, and Behr Premium Plus Paint…) ((yes, cause normal paint isnt good enough to put on a friggin wall)) …

Before you ask, I am going to put up a blog post about whisper-close toilet seats. I know your dying to know about them…

Love,

You Friend Craig