Self-Employment Satisfying and Frustrating
Having one vehicle while running a mobile PC repair company can be very frustrating. Here I am sitting outside my customer’s house waiting for my wife to pick me up. She was waiting outside for me, but I told her to go ahead and run her Target errand while I work. I didn’t expect to be so efficient as to repair two computers within one hour. I need a Prius. They get great gas mileage and would be perfect for what I do.
Of course, my primary frustration with self employment is the inconsistency of the work flow. I want a consistent paycheck with all he benefits of being my own boss. To achieve this you have to have great marketing. I hate marketing. I feel so lost in the realm of real business management.
Perhaps I am just ADD. I get distracted so easily. If I could make money just doing the things I enjoy most without having to do the other thing… Ah, pie in the sky.
iPad FTW!
I have to admit that I thought the hype was a bit much for the iPad, but nonetheless I was very excited about it. Perhaps I am becoming an Apple acolyte. LOL
That being said, now that I have one in my possession, I absolutely love my 64 GB iPad!
Embarrassing Moments
This morning I started working with Pro Presenter 3 at my church. We attend Calvary Temple in Concord, CA. We also enjoy a rather large attendance. Fortunately this happened during first service, which has the smallest attendance.
Anyway, the mouse batteries were dying. We didn’t realize this part until third service. When I clicked on the video that plays the church news during announcements, the mouse skipped to the live button! All of a sudden the iMac’s webcam activated, and a live picture of a closeup of my face and bald head beamed over the projector!
In a moment of panic, we quickly reclivkes the news. Fortunately the pastors saw the humor of the situation.
I was informed that was a first in this church! Leave it to me to be in the right place at the right time under the right circumstances! We have since disabled the live feature of the program and changed the mouse batteries.
When they say laughter is good for the soul, remember that it’s ok to be the occasional butt of a joke or the focus of a funny but embarrassing incident. Just go with it, and rwmember… Those too will pass!
Smarty Template & Math
Well, today I actually learned something in web design for the first time in years. That’s amazing to me, because it has felt like web technology hasn’t progressed a great deal or perhaps I just haven’t had the opportunity to do anything complex in a long time. I find if hard to get motivated to work on my own websites.
I guess my passion has been online video since my kids were born. I have learned a lot about Final Cut Express, Final Cut Studio, Flash Video, Quicktime formats and more! I must say I still love my Mac Pro. I guess I am fully converted to the Mac from Windows. I find so many things are just easier and stabler in OS X Leopard.
My wife and I were comparing identical workflows today. She was working in Windows XP. She absolutely hates Vista! Anyway we learned that working with websites in Safari on a Mac is far faster than Internet Explorer.
Anyway, I digress. My purpose in blogging tonight was to share what I learned today. I am still rarely new to the Smarty template emgine / language, though I did get some experience working with it last year when I designed an e-commerce site for a customer of mine that sells party supplies. We utilized x-cart for his website, and I just customized some pre-existing templates.
Today, I wanted to achievesomething involving math functions. You click on a category and it dynamically pulls the sub-category list for that parent category. It creates a table and sets a variable to 1. Then it displays the image and sub-category name in a table cell. It uses the {foreach} function for each sub-category and increments the variable by 1 for each cell. Once it has created 5 cells, it then closes that line and creates a new table row. I was having problems figuring out how to increment the variable. When I finally figured it out, it was obvious. The wrong code was:
{assign var= “col” value=$col+}
This actually kept adding the string “+1″ to the end of the variable! I’d end up with an output of “1+1+1+1+1″ and longer! It began to get frustrating. However, I knew it was just a syntax problem. The correct code is:
{math assign “col” equation = $col+1}
That was simple enough, and It was the breakthrough that I needed! I’m getting quite close to finishing this project, and I am happy to be learning and facing challenges again!
Well, it’s time to bring this never-ending blog to a close. I do believe this is the most I have ever typed on my iPhone at any given time – ever! My arms and fingers are actually hurting now. And yes, 100% of this blog was written in bed, lights out, next to my wife… On an iPhone. /bow
Baby Videos and Google
I’ve been pushing out videos left and right lately. In fact, some of my favorite baby videos are ones that I’ve edited recently. I’ve had an influx of usable footage lately. Thanks to the speed and ease of use iMovie ’08, I have produced almost one per day.
The videos can be seen either at my Mobile Me Gallery at http://gallery.me.com/joelmbryant or my You Tube accout at http://www.YouTube.com/Entelzar.
I have been fairly disappointed with You Tube lately. I believe that the You Tube community has degraded since Google took over. They have been more concerned with network partners like NBC, ABC, and yes even Oprah that us little people mean nothing to them.
However, my biggest complaint is that it seems they have decided to re-encode our content with lower quality settings. Perhaps they are trying to make the videos better viewable on the Edge network, but I must say that would be a poor excuse for degraded quality. I think it was for more selfish reasons. If the re-encode our videos with lower settings, then the file sizes will be considerably smaller. That means less bandwidth is used by the viewers and Google makes more money by lowering their expenses. I guess I shouldn’t begrudge them that, but I do.
Well, my arm is getting quite tired. This iPhone only blog is turning out to be an interesting experiment. Goodnight everyone!
Setting up a Non Profit
A a except I am struggling to keep my eyes open tonight.
Just a bit of news. I am going to go next week and register Christnet Productions and Christnet Ministries with the county clerk’s office. We actually received a donation on our website today. It turned out to be one of Dale’s friends, but it was stii a nice surprise.
You can check out the website at http://www.christnetproductions.com.
It Gets Later and Later
It’s almost midnight, and I have to admit that I am more tired than I can remember in a long time. Back when Jen and I were going through our problems I experienced extreme emotional exhaustion the likes I had never experienced before, and I hope I never do again. Nonetheless, I have been burning the candle at both ends.
Today I only worked 7 hours, but I have been putting in 12 hour days in the hopes that I can get paid the last half of this job. I haven’t tallied all of my hours yet, but I am guessing that I’ve put a total of 30 hours in the last couple days. The upside of this is that I make noticable progress on a daily basis, and THAT is a huge moral booster. It’s good to feel like you are achieving something.
CommerceV3
I am writing this from my iPhone again thanks to the wordpress app. Once again it is 11:00 at night and I am lying in bed with my wife lightly snoring beside me, my cat bathing himself while pressing himself firmly against my leg, and my 11 month old daughter balled up in her crib a couple feet from the edge of our bed.
It’s hard to believe she will be one year old in three weeks. Jen says she can’t remember a time when we didn’t have children and I concur. I can, however, remember when we ha just Joel Jr., but only just barely.
The other thing I wanted to write about tonight is a website I am working on for a friend. I actually designed the site a couple years ago, but he never used the design. The database work was too daunting for him back then. Lately he has found himself in a conundrum over his database, order management software, and shopping cart. I convinced him to go with Commerce V3 because they offer great marketing tools and they work with his Stoneedge order management software. Check out my work at capsandvisors.commercev3.com. Please take a look at my work and let me know what you think.
My wife just turned over to face me and is bouncing the bed! That’s my cue to close this blog entry. It’s actually much longer than expected. Until next time, goodnight and God bless.
Hello WordPress & iPhone App
My first post here on WordPress is actually being typed from my iPhone, so I will keep this one brief!
I have been working on a site hosted by CommerceV3. They use the Smarty template structure just like X-Cart. However, it’s much more in depth. I am actually enjoying coding again!
Ok, I think it’s cool that WordPress created this iPhone app, but who really wants to type out a full blog on this small keyboard?! It tales forever when you want to type out URLs or any other HTML. Besides, it’s now after 1 AM! I need my beauty sleep when I have a 2 year old boy and an 11 month ole daughter who will wake up at 7 AM. Goodnight everybody, and welcome me to the WordPress community! 
