Here’s how the old one looked:

The old one was super-wide… 1200px wide. This one is under 1000px and uses the space more efficiently, I feel. Much less clutter.

Update to the page content is coming soon, but you can look forward to (at least) weekly blog posts on:

• Freelancing and Employment
• Community and Fort Collins
• My Projects and Events
• Digital Gunslinging, Marketing, and Business
• Sci-Fi and Star Trek

We made a quick stop-over in Vail, where everyone we met had a French accent and visited a “please rape me now”-style bathroom, down the stairs in a concrete bunker.

Refreshed and ready to go, we jumped back on the highway and headed toward Grand Junction, Colorado where my Great Grandma Bailey was celebrating her 85th birthday (as it turns out, she’s the same age as Warner Brothers – and questioned why they haven’t sent her a present yet).  We all sang Happy Birthday to her and had a good time hobknobbing for some birthday cake and ice cream.

Jumping back on the road from Grand Junction to Salt Lake City, we hit up Wendy’s and totally forgot to grab gas (though, we TOTALLY rocked the tweet exiting town).

The road between Grand Junction and Salt Lake was foggy – but in Utah, there’s all sorts of amazing signage.  We stayed with Deb, who lives with the Minority Leader of the Utah Senate – David.  Deb and David are kick-ass hosts – David makes a killer coffee and Deb makes amazing, custom greeting cards.

Deb shared an amazing diner with us, the Blue Plate, where we were served by Ruby.  The owner, Von, shared the story of the diner and we’ll post that video later.  It’s been the best first restaurant experience we’ve ever had.

We stopped in at Signed and Numbered, run by Leia and opened up 5 days ago.  She’s the first person who knew about the Spiral Jetty – which is where we’re headed today before heading to Portland!

Blue Beanie Day is a day in support of web standards.  In other words – good websites done right; I’m all about that.  I photoshopped my beanie on, since I don’t have one.

When you say the word “Podcast” people lock up.  They think it’s too hard, their voice isn’t nice enough, or they don’t have enough to say.

No more.

Every two weeks, I’m going to teach you how to make a podcast – YOUR podcast.  Daryle of the Northern Colorado Blogger MeetUp and I have teamed up to bring you this one-of-a-kind class on creating your very own podcast.

Every two weeks, we’ll pick a topic submitted by the class and create a real, 5 minute podcast – absolutely free.

The first class is October 5 – sign up today!

After I take a moment to remember the people, I usually come to the same conclusion: the greatest destructive force in our lives is the drive for affluence. What some will do to save $1 is unthinkable – what some will do to gain $1 is often worse.

Sitting in a cubicle, day after day, the value of that dollar starts to decline, doesn’t it?  But all the stuff we’ve created and tricked ourselves into thinking we need – a brand new, more expensive car, endless shelves of DVDs collecting dust, fancier couches, fancier furniture, more square footage to put all the junk we’re accumulating.

Even though we loathe the 9+ hours we’re away from our families, without access to natural light, a window, or even taking lunch breaks, we persist at sitting there.

Being self-employed, I value my own time.  I know if I don’t pull in enough, the roof over my head will disappear.  In order to keep that from happening, I have to inflict monetary damage on someone else: monetary damage that, if they had my skills, they’d never have to pay.  The urge is always there, human nature, I guess, to offer one more service, one more thing I can charge for that they might get value out of.

In a way, I’m every bit the “capitalist” bad guy that I detest.  But then I remember that I’m usually doing business with friends – and if they’re not friends yet, they soon will be.  I don’t do business with bad people – I’m very blessed to have so many wonderful business friends.  I can’t justify doing unnecessary damage.  That’s not how I do business.

Business is inherently evil, cutthroat, and populated by the vile, disgusting mirrors of decent, hard-working people.  That’s just the nature of the game.  The value of the $1.  By extension, entrepreneurship introduces you to the lowest fucking depths of the human psyche – ones so dark you can’t imagine them – because it’s not “the man” or a corporation bending you over, it’s another person.

I don’t play by those rules.  It’s why I offer $1 classes while others charge ridiculous sums of money to share the same ideas.  It’s why I do business with people like Ron and Ava and Viveka and Tracy and Laurie, who believe the same things I do.  It’s why I take on just as much pro-bono work as I do paid.  It’s why I don’t overcharge my friends with recommendations for unnecessary services or by padding my hours.  Google might have said it first, but Do No Evil is my mantra, too – and I’m getting better at it every day.

If I could do it all for free, I would, because I’m damn good at it and I love the work.  Sometimes I’m metaphorically punched in the face for this view.  If you can’t take a little bloody nose once in a while, you ought to turn right around and head for the cubes.

Mark my words – I’m going to change the game.

10 GB is not enough free space to do anything with, and that’s all I had left on my MacBook Pro’s stock 160 GB 5400 RPM hd.

I’d heard that it’s not that hard to upgrade stuff in a Mac, it just takes patience or money.  That’s all well and good, if you have the money to replace it if you break something – or a decent backup computer.  Although I have 3 other computers in the house – one other Mac included in the count, I don’t have a computer to replace this one if I happened to kill my MacBook Pro during the upgrade process.  Any mistake spelled doom for my entrepreneurial career.

This was no ordinary hard-drive swap.  It was a bomb defusal.

To get Apple to replace the harddrive would cost labor ($60 – Apple, $60 – MicroCenter, $160 – The Mac Shack) plus the cost of the harddrive (between $69-150).  Because decent laptop harddrives are so expensive on their own – and if it were any other computer, I’d have no problem doing it myself, it wasn’t really an option for me to spend money on labor.

Warranty be damned; I was doing it myself.

Running to MicroCenter, I picked up a USB enclosure, a computer screwdriver, and a 320GB 7200 RPM western digital harddrive to upgrade with – total cost: $100.  I did end up missing one necessary tool – a spudger.  Think… one end of tweezers, but not metal.  I ended up using the tweezers I had, which worked just fine with a light touch.

I grabbed my trusty HP Mini, saddled up with ifixit.com‘s MacBook Pro harddrive replacement guide, and read up while I placed the new harddrive into the USB enclosure and “restored” (cloned) my 160 GB harddrive to my 320 GB harddrive.  Using Apple’s Disk Utility eliminated the need for a third drive while transferring data only once: from original to copy.

Once the transfer finished, I was well-read… and loathing Apple for their innovative, yet fucking hideous internals.  Honestly – who GLUES the harddrive ribbon cable down!? And not just that – who fucking glues the sleep light and IR sensor fucking ribbons to the fucking harddrive!?  WTF am I supposed to do with that, Apple???

Once I recovered from the shock of just how many screws it would take to get at the harddrive (19), how many ribbon cables I would have to un-stick (2), and how much of an idiot I was for even considering this stupid mission, I started in.

The first thing they have you do is remove the battery and remove the ram shield – which was good, because I didn’t know what configuration the memory was in on this computer (turns out – two 1GB chips – this will be my next upgrade).  Once those things were off, you remove a few supporting screws and quite a few body casing screws.

Then the fun begins.

I have to take my huge-ass fingers and “slide” them underneath the top paneling.  Yeah fuckin’ right.  Worse – I have no earthly fucking idea what’s underneath besides what the pictures tell me.  I manage to get the back lifted about 3/4″.  The sides are more stubborn, but I work my way down and they slowly come up as well.  Now the front… that’s a different story.

Keep in mind, I’ve been using this computer for several hours daily – for the last two years.  These panels have supported the weight of my forearms for all that time – and also collected all the gunk and grime that two and a half years bring about.  The front of the top panel is fucking glued down – and Apple wasn’t to blame, this time.

I finally managed – with two very loud, very frightening pops, to free the top paneling from the body of the laptop after about 10 minutes of struggling with pressure and leverage and de-gunking as I went along.  There’s ribbon cable that connects the top panel to the rest of the laptop, though – and thank God I didn’t yank hard enough to pop anything unfortunate out.  I chose to leave that particular ribbon cable attached, despite the instructions telling me otherwise.

Anchoring the top of the laptop casing against my forearm, I maneuvered the tweezers underneath the glued ribbon cable – millimeter by millimeter, until they came free – all 4″ of ‘em.

Finally, I was able to get at the hard-drive.  It had only taken 30 minutes and 11 different sets of screws to loosen.  I quickly swapped the old harddrive out for the new one, placing the old one back into the enclosure should disaster somehow strike at the last minute.

I slowly put things back into place, retracing my steps the whole way through – and only one screw gave me any sort of trouble.  I’m not sure why, but I somehow managed to thread it wrong and it sticks out just the tiniest bit, no matter how hard I try to correct it, I can’t get it right.  Oh well – it’s covered by my SPECK case, so I know it won’t be a problem.

Wrapping up, I covered the ram back up, put the battery back in, and turned on the laptop.

It doesn’t boot any faster (I will need a ram upgrade for that, I think), but it sure as hell has more space AND the apps seem to load faster once the whole startup sequence is done.

I did notice one problem – the battery was listed at 55% power and would suddenly drop to 0% and the computer would go to sleep with no warning (the first time it did this, the battery showed 3 green lights).  I reset the SMC, checked the power again, and the battery was down to one.  Something I did must have discharged the battery quicker than normal (“normal” here is a relative term – the battery is two years old and doing what most batteries that old do – die quickly), and I think changing the RPM of the harddrives requires the computer to do a different calculation for remaining power.  Resetting the SMC should have corrected for this.

At the moment, I’m writing this just after having recharged the battery to full.  It tells me there’s 1hr remaining, so we’ll see if it suddenly drops out.

All in all, the whole experience was nerve-wracking.  The bomb, knock on wood, hasn’t blown up in my face yet – I was exceedingly careful as I did the upgrade, and all the functions attached to those ribbon cables (IR, sleep light, ambient light sensor, speakers, trackpad, keyboard, and everything else, are working just fine.

I’ve got to run a few more tests, but if everything comes out okay, I’m going to declare victory on this one.  Not only did I learn something cool, but I also gained the confidence that I can make a tough decision with a high-amount of risk without blinking.

And that’s a lesson worth saving $60+ for!

Last night saw some pretty intense lightning storms over Fort Collins.  I ran out once to grab my Flip and stayed inside with the lights turned off the rest of the night!  This was probably the best video I got of all the lightning, it was near constant… with only one really, really close hit.

I know that I can be passionate about programming (judging by the stack of books I have in my possession). I probably just haven’t found the right fit for me in that world yet and the improved skills could come in handy if I can find an entry-level/intermediate-level programming job.

I have an interview tomorrow for a web/e-marketing specialist position that I’m VERY excited for!

On the agenda today: post my resume to a few of the Andrew Hudson job listings, Monster, and Craigslist.  After that: I’m going to finish writing my Twitter eBook and focus on Head First C#.

If I finish with that, Head First Ajax.  Once I’m done with those, I’ll jump in on Pro Silverlight and Head First JavaScript.

In between, I’m going to record “No, Really…” – a fake news podcast and see if I can get the old Two Chicks and Nick recordings turned into podcasts.  Gotta make my added value apparent!

I will really miss the great people.

I will not miss the near constant, nagging anxiety of having just wrapped up a session of pair programming only to break something again, thinking: “Oh, holy hell, why the hell isn’t this working???  My ass is gonna get fired…”

While I enjoyed my time there, I found that I was often frustrated by the work (and myself)… the nature of their development process demanded results a LOT faster than I could port them out while 1) learning a new language/methodology and 2) struggling under the stress of having to be “billable”.  I couldn’t spend much time at work learning – I had to be producing something.

This works great if you have the ninja programming chops to back it up, but I don’t have ninja level programming skills yet – I have hot dog vendor programming skills.  You know, like Jack Black in Kung Fu Panda?  He was a noodle vendor before he became the kung-fu master.  With enough time, hot dog vendors can become ninjas, but in the mean time, they still get thrashed by ‘em (most often when they run out of hot dogs).

I tended to spin my wheels a lot.  I just couldn’t learn the things they wanted me to learn as quickly as they needed them and at the level of expertise they needed.  I feel like it was a personal failure, even though I know there’s not much I could have done differently.  It was a very frustrating, very humbling experience for me.

I’ve made it my personal goal to never show that level of ineptitude again.  In terms of programming, I think I chose the wrong career path… which is why I’m angling away from straight web development jobs in my job search.  I’m heading towards Marketing and Web Marketing in general.  It’s the thing that I live, breathe, and eat when I’m not at work – I have penchant for it.  Not only that, but out of all my classes, I enjoyed the Customer Relationship Management and other Marketing courses the best.  I might not be a ninja marketer yet, but at the very least I’m an apprentice in the dojo.

I’m confident I’ll be able to find a job by the end of the week.  That’s not to say I’m not scared shitless.  I am.  I just had an emergency open appendectomy – and the bills from that are not going away any time soon – not to mention rent, a car, and other pseudo-necessities when you want to avoid living in your parent’s basement… or on the street.

I’m trying not to think about that.  I know I’ve got a lot to offer any potential company… and I hope to bring some near-ninja skills to my next opportunity.

Speaking of which, if you know of any good opportunities in web marketing or web production, please do let me know.  Here are my resumes:

Click here to download my Web Developer resume in PDF format.

Click here to download my Web Marketing resume in PDF format.

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed Skittles briefly changed their homepage to show the stream from Twitter of #Skittles.  Any time someone mentioned Skittles, a new message would appear on their homepage and push the older messages down.  What ended up happening is a lot of sexual innuendo and posturing from snarky idiots.  I guess that’s why you could say I wasn’t surprised when I found this in Walgreens: Sweethearts Twilight candy hearts.

Lower Left text: “Secret Scent, Rub to Reveal…”.  Lower Right text: “The Forbidden Fruit Tastes The Sweetest”.

Apparently the candies also Sparkle and feature such messages as “Bite Me”, “Lamb”, “Secret”, “With You” and “Live 4 Ever”.

The weirdest part?  What the hell month are we in???  It’s freakin’ MAY.  MAAAAAY.

I’ll let you know if they’re also aphrodesiacs.  My guess?  They’ll make me bloodthirsty enough to play Halo again.