I’m a bad Blog host. I show up, rant for days, and then disappear into the fray. I’m working on that – the last few weeks I’ve been keeping a lot to myself.

About a year ago someone said, “I don’t think people follow your blog as closely as you think they do.” It halted me in my tracks. I write for me, to be sure, but suddenly, I didn’t have a voice; in my mind, I didn’t have anything to say that people would want to read.

So, I retreated – I stopped working for myself and lost that feeling that I was the Captain, the guy who took charge and led the way. And for eight months, I had some really good times and some really bad times. I was doing good work, but I wasn’t making a difference and my confidence wasn’t coming back.

There’s a scene – and this will seem silly to you non-Trekkies out there – in Star Trek: Generations where Captain Kirk and Captain Picard meet. I’ve included it below; it’s something I think about every day.

Show transcript

I eventually realized that I don’t work well while standing in someone else’s shadow. My confidence wouldn’t come back because I’d done good work – I had to get my hands dirty and make things happen for myself. I decided that I’d quit that job on Xmas day – and did.

The last two months have been intensely introspective. I started to rebuild my confidence and sense of leadership, and started looking toward the future. I became The Geek Superhero – and did everything I could to live up to that title. I re-built my business; started right. Fixing a lot of the mistakes I made along the way last time. Built up a client base to provide a tight, but livable income.

A lot of the projects I put on hold for the last year are on my mind along with some new ones. The Digital Gunslingers. PodCamp Fort Collins 2. CareerCamp. Psychotic Resumes… TEDxFoCo.

I can’t do it alone, but I’m confident that I can lead the way. It’s time to make a difference – and I’ll stand with you if you feel the same way.

(Header photo: Untitled by tnarik)

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.

I wanted to tell you, I’m still here. I’ve had one of those “Ah-Ha” moments where I feel like if I don’t put this stuff in the right context, I’m helping aid your transformation into cogs. I want to do this right, I want to help you; not hurt you. Not all jobs are created equal. My goal is to help you find the (unfortunately rare) job that will appreciate you for who you are.

I’m also going to shift my… erm… radical business ideas to a different blog so that I can return the focus of this one to job searching.

Stay tuned. A new look and new content is on its way.

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!

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Show Notes

This week’s show featured an interview with Katie – the Director of Business Development and Marketing for Koda.us – a social media job search site.  Koda’s focus is right in line with the millennial mindset for job searching – a focus on the career rather than the job.  Brilliant!  And that’s why Koda.us is this week’s Monday Millennial pick!

Links Mentioned

Koda.us

Next Week

Blake Sunshine from BlakeSunshine.com – the Perennial Millennial.

Join the show:
Email – PsychoticResumes@gmail.com
Voicemail – (858) 5-WTF-FTW (858-598-3389)
Web – www.PsychoticResumes.com

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.