It’s funny how my first blog post of 2011 is December 20th 2011.  I always say I’ll start blogging again, but we’ll see.  I’m headed to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas next month and I’m going to be building a new man cave / office early next year.  Maybe I can blog about those things.

Yesterday I was thinking about the internet radio show / podcast that Richard Lech and I did while in college called Geek Love Radio.  I did a search on Google to see what was still around these days and ended up finding there is a new show with the same name.  The guy who started it didn’t notice there already was a show called Geek Love Radio until he had already started.   Traded some tweets with him and listened to the show.  Not bad, just really weird to hear them say the name of the show, but it’s not Richard or I.

I ended up having a hard drive crash that caused me to loose the majority of the Geek Love archive so we are piecing it all back together between the two of us.  Luckily Jason Scott over at textfiles.com archived the majority of the season one Geek Love Radio.  We had three seasons so there is a lot of work to do.  I know that between the two of us we probably do have almost every episode scattered around various hard drives and old CDRs and DVDRs.

I did manage to dig up one interview we did with a local tv station and put it on YouTube.

Still looking for other videos like Geek Love Radio on G4 / Tech TV’s show The Screen Savers.

Here is the new show that shares the name: http://misterwizard.podomatic.com/

My son Lucas was born on November 30th 2010.  Being a father is an awesome feeling and puts so much more passion and motivation into my life.

Here is my little future geek:

I like blogging, and have a number of blogs.  The problem is that I seem to always neglect my personal blog.  I guess I’m still just trying to figure out that format I want.  I guess it’ll just be a grab bag of info until I figure it out.

I have a number of things I’m doing on the side.

• Codeigniter development.  I hope to make some libraries and helpers available to the public soon.
• WordPress Themes.  I’ve gotten back into that again.  More into developing premium style themes.
• Stepping up my affiliate marketing.

I’m headed to Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas in January with Sheldon over at riscit.info.  I’m hustling hard to have a lot of my projects together before then.

I’m eventualy going to be dropping Thesis and going with my own custom theme for this blog.  Thesis is great for what it is, but I’m just too much of a DIY person.

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