Experiencing a hurricane has been on my todo list for a long time. Hurricane Earl passed over Puerto Rico yesterday. We didn’t get the worst of it, but enough so that I can say I’ve been in one.

I enjoy weather, but power outages and Internet outages I can do without. I’m making this blog post from my phone at the moment because my ISP is still down. I have a 3G wifi hub that I bought last week, but it isn’t supposed to be delivered until tomorrow.

I’ve decided to change the format of this blog to be more personal.  I need an outlet to share my interest in various things and this is the place to do it.  I am going to be starting a business / web development / entrepreneur blog at another location.  I’ll have more details on that later.

Things I’ll probably be blogging here about:

• Family Life (I’m married and we are expecting).
• Airports & Rail Systems.  I’ve become really into those over the years.
• Various personal coding projects.
• Travel
• Opinions
• Yep, pretty much what you would expect from a personal blog.

It’ll be a grab bag blog, but all relevant to my interests.  This site has been a personal blog many times over the years and I think I still have a few backups of old blog posts so I might import them if I think they are worth making available.

Since my last post I’ve started a big lifestyle change by eating healthier and exercising frequently.  In addition to that I’ve stopped drinking coffee.  Giving up coffee wasn’t too bad.  I went from having 3+ cups a day to 0.  I only had maybe 2 hours of headaches the day I went cold turkey and that was it.  As a result I’m waking up in the morning much earlier and feeling a lot more refreshed.  I used to wake as a zombie just waiting for the first cup of Joe.  I feel like these changes have had a nice effect on my productivity.  The cleaner the fuel the better the performance.

I’ve also started working with Codeigniter recently.  I have to say that so far I’m really loving it.  I was looking for a PHP MVC framework to learn and I decided to go with Codeigniter over CakePHP just because I’ve heard a lot of good things about it and I think I’d prefer a framework that didn’t’ require me to use the command line.  I’m comfortable with the command line, but needing to use it for PHP development just sounds like fail.  I’ve had people tell me that Codeigniter isn’t true MVC, but whatever.  Just like anything else there are fan boys and haters.

I have kind of a fun site / project I’m developing with Codeigniter that I’ll announce with the time comes.

I’ve been so busy as of late, but I’m determined to start blogging regularly again.  I have a number of exciting projects I’m working on and I’m excited about the future.  I’m going to be hiring a part time employee as well as a virtual assistant to help me out.

I’ve known about the Thesis theme for WordPress awhile now, but never gave it a try.  It was hard for me to make the leap because I have been developing WordPress templates for years.  I always thought Thesis was for someone who wanted to do a custom WordPress theme, but didn’t know how to make one.  After playing with it for a few hours I have to say I’m pretty impressed with it.

What I like about it is that the code is pretty solid, and there is a lot of customization options.  I’ll be using this in the future with any client’s that have WordPress installs and want a custom design, but want to be able to change things on their own.

When I get some time I’m going to attempt to do a custom design using Thesis to see what the results are like.  I have a feeling the more custom CSS code I do the less the customization options will work.  I’ll see what happens and do another blog post about it.

I’m a Donald Trump fan and thought I’d share this video. I notice a lot of people criticizing his advice, especially when it comes to getting revenge or getting even with someone who attacks you. Watch this and comment to let me know what you think.

If you like this you should listen to the Think Big And Kick Ass audio book. You can download that here: http://bit.ly/cww4EZ

I think everyone just had their expectations set really high.  The Internet was buzzing about the new upcoming Apple “tablet” and people were dreaming up all kinds of ideas of what the features could be.  The one feature that I was guessing was an eBook reader and for books to become available for purchase in iTunes.  With Apple making a tablet device it would only make sense that they would go after the Kindle… and they are.

Anyone who purchased a Kindle is probably secretly regretting it now.  The Kindle DX is around the same price as the lowest priced iPad.  Color screen, more features… just better.  I think the Kindle already looks like some sort of portable device we would have seen in the late 90s.  It doesn’t look modern at all.  It isn’t appealing for a lot of types of books and magazines, but the iPad is.

If you were thinking about getting a Kindle I would suggest waiting and getting the iPad.  I don’t see any reason to pick up an iPad if you already have an iPhone or an iPod Touch.  I expect Apple to eventually release the iBook reader app on the iPhone and iPod touch as well.

It’ll come down to how well the iBook store does and how much developers embrace this device.

Short URL services seem to be popping up everyday.  This week we all got that news that Facbeook and Google are both launching short url services as well.  My question is what happens if and when some of them start to go away?  They are ment to be disposable urls that are only temporary, but people are using them in ways where they’ll always be around.  I even saw some TinyURLs in a book I was reading recently.

Lets say TinyURL can no longer afford to stay open.  Obviously the domain wouldn’t just go away and expire, someone would either buy the site or the domain.  The same could be said about all the other short url services.  We could end up with urls that don’t resolve to anything.  URLs that redirect to something malicious instead of the intended site.  Hell, someone could even set something up where you have to pay 50 cents to view the URL.

My advice is to never use a short URL service for anything that isn’t just temporary.  I know it should go without saying, but from what I’ve been seeing people are treating them like they actually own the url that is generated when in reality they don’t.  The book I was reading was using TinyURL when the pages they were linking to were on the book’s official site.  That just seems like a dumb move.

I had been having a lot of problems with Skype for awhile now.  Some days it’d work fine and some days not.  Most chat messages I’d send would show “Pending” as their status and people who would IM me would see the same pending message.  Calls wouldn’t connect most of the time  and when they actually did connect it would cause all those pending chat message to finally be sent.  As you probably know, Skype customer service is pretty much non-existent.  Lots of people report the pending problem on their forums and if you type Pending Skype on Twitter’s search you’ll see lots of other people with the problem everyday.

I seemed to have fixed the problem, at least for me.  I have a Belkin N Wireless Router and what I’ve found to be the solution is to log into the admin for the router and find the setting for “802.11e/WMM QoS” and switch it to Off.

Decided to put this out there just in case someone else is looking for a solution.  If you try this and it works for you please leave a comment letting me know.

Just wanted to put this information out there since I couldn’t find much while sitting through one of their presentations.   If you’re ever invited to attend a National Healthstyles Foundation presentation, but they don’t tell you what its about, its so they can try to sell you things.  The one I attended they were selling some cookware sets, pots and pans, etc.  The nature of their business is referral services.  What they do is get targeted lists of possible customers from bridal shops mostly.  The bridal shops probably sell them a list of customers that purchased from them in exchange for giving you a discount on a dress or something.  The reason its targeted is because they know that newlyweds often need a pots and pans set.

The whole thing seems legit, but I just know that if people like me knew what it was all about before hand they wouldn’t have attended.  Unless you’re in the market for new pots and pans then don’t go.  They say you’ll get a prize if you go and you do.  You get some free hotel stay in Mexico, but you have to actually pay to fly there yourself.  If you purchase the pots and pans you get like a week long cruise to the Bahamas.  Even with that you still have to mail in some form along with like $14 (for processing) and wait to receive your vouchers and information for the cruise.

I can’t promise my information is accurate, but at least now there is some information out there as to what you can expect.