I Do What I Want – Be Yourself, Be You
Be Yourself - Pierce Fire Trucks Are Amazing
I have been thinking at length if there is one thing that I would like the world to know or learn from me and my blog. There is a lot of philosophical topics that I would like to get out or show myself as an example of but when I boil them all down to their basic parts they almost become a cliche “I Do What I Want”, “Be Yourself” and “Be You”.
I Do What I Want – Be Yourself, Be You is not a negative statement but rather a rule to just listen to your heart and your desires. Doing is a conscience decision based on your own self motivation. I Do What I Want – So I Like What I Do is a simple solution for happiness. There is also a flip side to this thinking and that is personal accountability. For example say I were to do something terrible bad and the effects of which put me into a place that was uncomfortable for me. Doing what I want obviously put me there and I have only myself to blame. On a lesser scale lets say that I have not done anything too terrible but instead I love to eat ice cream all day and watch cartoons. If that is all that I do for 10 years time and I wake up one day and say “Wow how did I get here?” It is my own fault because I made a poor decision based not on what I really desired but on what I wanted at the time. The key to all this is to only want good things and to avoid making poor want based decisions that could put you in places that steal your happiness. I believe that everyone can have the desires of their hearts and that the universe acts in such a way that you can have almost all of them. So how you find out what you really really want?
Be Yourself, Be You are phrases that have told to us over and over again but society often sets up trip hazards that keep us from getting there. Sure some things are impossible, I could never grow up to be a firetruck, America does not have a king, and I probably will never get effected by gamma rays that will turn me into Mr. Fantastic regardless of how much I may have wanted those things to happen at some point of my growing up. Be Yourself is a two sided element as well. The one side is that you know yourself best so why not let that side come out and shine like the sun in the sky everyday. That you have a talent that is unique as you are somewhere within your being so dig deep and find it and show it off. Some people may even have 2 or 3 talents in them. Finding , unlocking and developing this talent is key in being able to Be Yourself. It will show you a new range of desires and while you develop these talents you will notice that you are also “Doing What You Want” and before long you may even start to see that you are getting your personal desires met. The flip side on this is that sometimes we get confused between the internal us and the external us in both defining who we are and our desires which in turn seduces and warps I Do What I Want into I Get What I Want. This causes a paradigm shift which can lead to internal unhappiness because now we are not chasing our own talents based on our wants but rather chasing the material things above our self.
Be You, simply put stay grounded in yourself and your talents always remember that you are the captain of your ship. Go after your personal development, make it what you want, develop it in only a way that you can. Be You because that is who you are so stand up for it and don’t let anyone or anything steal that from you.
Shopp for WordPress
teamartini - Joomla!
Some of you that know me may think that after reading this post that I have lost my mind. That jace_martin is an advocate of Joomla! and Joomla! is the only answer for every web problem. This maybe true, I do know Joomla! and I have always thought of WordPress to be too light and fluffy for my tastes. That deep down I have always needed to get into the code and work out the bugs and make things work. I have advocated Joomla! for a long time as a product that can level the playing field on the web between the big dogs and the start-ups. It is a product that really can have a limitless boundary for your web ideas if you do it right. However, I have noticed that over the last few months just how simply awesome WordPress is when it comes to ranking in the seo. I currently have Joomla! set up with e-commerce at teamartini.com. The shipping and payment modules have been taken offline because there was an update to an api that I just never got around to fixing because I am a fairly busy person and it is a pita to fix. Don’t get me wrong Joomla! fans out there, it is a great tool that I have loved using but the reality is that I have a small business and I feel that Joomla! is like using wrecking ball to drive a nail when it comes to the small shop owner. I don’t mind being a one man wolfpack when it comes to development but I have come to the conclusion that I enjoy having things that work right out of the box. I do not mind paying a little bit of cash to get them to work correctly so that I can get to doing the fun things that I like doing and avoid having to do things that I do not want to do.It makes sense, the web is changing rapidly and I cannot keep up with the bleeding edge on every element of it. Why not buy a product that has a team dedicated to making sure that I can stay in the game without me having to work too hard at it? In sports it would be illegal to buy and use such a product but in technology and web development there are no such rules.
So I have been out and about looking into other e-commerce solutions. I am currently looking into getting Shopp for WordPress. They have a nice test drive demo on their website at https://shopplugin.net/ in which you can even log into their admin section and take a look at how things work. This answered many of the questions that I had about making a switch. Now there are a few things that I could do in Joomla! that I cannot do in shopp and WP. It is a short list and I will not get into all that because they are not critically important to my needs. The bright side to all this is that shopp is working on a beta for version 1.2 that from the build notes looks like it will be a competitive advantage against all other shopping carts I have looked into. (ever).
Oh and the critical information is that shopp cost $55 for 1 site basic package. For most of us we would like to have some sort of transaction processing so that module will be an extra $25 and then the shipping module is another $25. Bringing the total to $105 for the basic 1 site package. Maybe that is a little steep for some people but a weekend of my time is worth more than $105 to me and there is no recurring cost associated to it. From the thread on their announcement article shopp 1.2 will be a free upgrade for existing members so no reason to hold back for beta release.
Except there is one for me. =) I have to check with Therese before I make the change because I am not the sole proprietor when it comes to the small family business. That and well it is always a good thing to check with the wife before making a spending purchase or a fundamental change in business. Either way I will get an update out about all this at a later time.
TastesLikeTrash.com
snapshot from the tastes like trash website
I think that I may have stumbled onto something or rather fell into it. A few months ago Therese was complaining that there were only crappy movies on netflix streaming. I did not agree with her on this. In fact I told her that she was just too narrow minded in her tastes and that she needed to widen her range of what is acceptable entertainment. This conversation kicked off a challenge in our household in which I got to inform my wife about all the really crappy movies out there that I rather enjoy. She has now been introduced to mst3k, rifftrax and cheesyfilms…which in theory backfired on me because none of which has supported my side of the argument. It was about at this time that I had an epiphany that I love trash media. That through my film studies in school I had made a conscience decision to accept all media without regard for quality or content. I also got to thinking that I can not be the the only person under the sun that has developed a taste for trash. Tastesliketrash.com was created out of this.
Like almost always my wife won the in-house debate about trash media and streaming. Fortunately for me it is not just an attribute of Nettflix streaming but also Amazon and do not even get me started on Hulu; trash is just the condition of streaming media for now. We could all speculate as to reasons for this…or we could just all learn to enjoy the trash for now because it does not appear that bad movies will be going away anytime soon. I mean heck even Birdemic is getting a sequel. The cost to make a movie is down and there are a lot of amateur filmmakers out there with power to launch their creations on the web. We have cellphones that shoot video in 3d and nothing screams B-movie like 3d.
Anyway if you like to talk about bad movies like Bridemic, Bronx Warriors, Zardoz, Thankskilling and the like, then join the fun and check out tastesliketrash.com
“Arnold: They’re eating her… and then they’re going to eat me…” (one of the most epic lines in “Troll 2″)
ThereseMartin.net
Therese's Blog
Earlier in the week Therese asked if I would update her theme for her website so being the good hubby that I am, I agreed. So after a couple tries I have come up with this for her new blog theme. Yes as it says “She has been slacking” at her blog. My guess is that she is still trying to get 1 million gold in world of warcraft or is hooked on rated battle grounds or something. Anyway, I am off to work one last website for the weekend. I have been working on overhauling the teamartini.com website. But I will have more about that in another post.
Creative time and inspiration.
Good Stuff
There are a lot of creative people out there and I think that we all have our own creative rituals to get the brain matter going, for example if I am working on the web then I usually have my headphones clamped over my ears with a handful of music artists playing. With this said, I have to send a shot out to Santi White (Santigold) for having music that keeps my brain matter flowing with creativity. It is rare for me to find a music artist that I can put every single track they touch in the mixer with random and repeat on and listen to it all day long. Santigold is one of the few artists that I count on. I am glad to see that Santi was on the latest Beasty Boys album and it also appears that Vans is working with some promotions for her too (custom SG vans = cool). This music is incredible.
I wonder what other people do as rituals to get in their own happy creative and productive mood on?
Check out Santigold on YouTube then get some tunes on Amazon.