I’m currently in one of my states that I don’t enjoy. I’m usually very happy and content. As long as progress is being made, I’m good. Occasionally though, I feel stupid. I feel that I’m not smart enough.

For most people, this probably doesn’t bother them. For me, it kind of stops me in my tracks. I feel that I should be doing better, that I’m not far enough. It feeds right into my insecurities. I start to wonder “What do I have to offer?” And in my worst moments, I answer with “Nothing.”

I’m always trying to learn, even if I don’t ever plan on using it. It’s my way of keeping this nagging doubt at bay. Lately though, I’ve hit a rut. I’ve been working, coming home, having dinner and going to bed just to repeat it the next day. The routine doesn’t bother me. I just need more substance. I need people I click with. I need to find something new. I need to find something to learn.

I know when all of this started too. I remember it vividly. I was young, in kindergarten. I was angry about something that I won’t go into. I made a mistake and was ridiculed relentlessly for it. From that day forward, I’ve always tried my hardest to never let that happen again.

I may not be able to recall everything immediately but I do remember 80% of everything I’ve learned. That sounds kind of low. But with everything I’ve done, that’s still a lot.

The only way out of this state of mind is for me to find something to learn. I’ll start that soon and everything will be better.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with this site. I’m thinking about changing that again. Things have really started looking up for me recently. I got a job doing what I enjoy. I moved out again. My confidence in myself is building again.

It’s time for a fresh start. I’m still looking for a better paying job but I won’t let that keep me from starting now. I want to start getting into shape. I vowed to lose 100 pounds this year. I don’t think I’ll be able to hit that mark but I’ll try pretty damn hard to get as close as I can. I’m going to get my first car soon. It will probably be junk but it will be mine.

I’m ready to get things going again. Things are falling into place and now I have the launch that I need to make things happen. Keep checking back for more stuff as I move forward. It will be nice having a place to document the things I’m going through.

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I was bullied as a child. I was, and still am, fat. I hate seeing people just give up because they think people hate them. I thought everyone hated me. Day in and day out, I was picked on. It started in elementary school and went on all the way through high school. Why didn’t I give up? I knew I was better than that. I took the pain and frustration and set out to make myself better than the people that were mean to me. One of the bullies I had ended up in prison. I run my own business, teach myself new skills almost daily and am happy with life in general. My current situation may be less than I want but at least I’m happy with myself and treat people kindly.

Since this is MY blog, I decided that I needed to make it more about me. I’ll continue writing the other types of things that are showcased here but I came to the realization that this was pretty impersonal for a personal blog. Stuff like the post about religion won’t be common but I figured that it would be nice to shed a little light on me personally. I always have stuff going through my head but never write about them. I’m going to start making that change now.

Religion is one of those hot button topics that usually ends up turning into a long heated discussion of who is right. That’s why I don’t talk about it with most people, people that can’t accept that I see things differently than they do. That number is surprisingly high. Lately though, I see a lot of people saying more and more increasingly insulting things, whether it’s intended or not, about other points of view. The point of this isn’t to call anyone out. It’s more of a way for me to share the way I see things.

Religion is a personal choice. You choose a religion that makes sense to you. Some people just choose to follow what they grew up with because it’s what they know. There’s nothing wrong with how or why you choose one over another. The problem, to me, is when you treat people differently because you find out they don’t believe in your version of holy text or deity. One of the major principles of many religions is to treat people in the way you want them to treat you. If you’re hostile toward them, they’ll more than likely be hostile toward you. If you treat them as you’d treat someone in your religion, they’ll treat you the same way.

I tend to keep my views to myself. I’m not even sure that my family knows what they are so I’ll give you a little look into my past. I grew up in a home that, when we actually went to church, was Baptist. I had a mother, a father, two brothers and a sister. I had the normal struggles of the middle child that was separated from his older sister and younger brother by three years each. I didn’t hate going to church until later in my life. Even though I was a child, I understood enough about our religion to know that something wasn’t quite right. I was surrounded by a lot of adultery and divorce. Things that were, at least I thought so at the time, looked down upon in the church. Shortly after this realization, we moved.

For reasons unknown, we stopped going to church after that. I was okay with that. I never really thought about religion for quite some time after that until my parents decided to get divorced. I’m not going to go into what happened with that because it doesn’t matter. It was sudden to me. I had trouble dealing with it. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. I remember, quite vividly, an attempt to help me understand that it wasn’t my fault. We went to some kind of child therapy place. The person leading the session went on and on about how it was my parents’ decision and that it didn’t change how they felt about us. There were some strong religious undertones to it and that’s fine because I’m sure it helps people. It didn’t help me though. Life went on. I grew to understand what was going on and moved on with my life.

My mom got remarried. They started going to church. It was a Baptist church. I didn’t really like going but I went because my mom asked me to go. It’s still that way today. It’s just not as frequent. As a child, I sat and watched what was going on. I listened to the people. I watched what they did. I saw a lot of the same things I saw at the first church I went to. I was still a kid so I just attributed it to something adults do. I continued to go for a few more years. I never really grew to care for it very much. I figured that I didn’t need a group of people to agree with me for me to have faith in something. Having someone telling me what I was able to read myself was too much like school.

When I graduated high school and went off to college, I was thrown into a new world. Before then, I’d never really been exposed to religions outside the realms of Christianity and Catholicism. It was definitely an eye-opening experience. I met Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, Wiccans and pretty much any other religions, or lack of religion, that you can think of. I would talk to them about their religions. I liked learning about them. I still do. I’ll even go as far as going to worship with people. I do have one rule though. I won’t take part in rituals that tie me directly to a religion. That means no communion, no baptism, no confession, anything like that. I respect their religions too much to make them waste their time on someone that isn’t a follower.

That pretty much covers everything up until the present. I have a very small group of people that I’m actually open with about my views. Each of them has a different view on it from everyone else. We can actually have discussions about it. Sometimes it gets heated but we always end up leaving the situation feeling pretty good.

Now comes the part of this post that makes me hesitate a little. There will be people that don’t understand so I’m going to explain as best as I can. When people ask me what my religion is, so I don’t have to explain to people that don’t care to listen, I say I’m an atheist. That’s only partially true. It’s true that I don’t hold belief in a religion that believes in a deity. I’m actually an agnostic atheist. I don’t believe in a deity but I don’t have a stance on whether one, or more, exists or not. Both of the words used to describe my views are tinted with a hue of misunderstanding by the religious community. While it’s true that some atheists and agnostics are, to put it bluntly, asshats, not all of us are. It works the same way with Christianity. Not all Christians, in any of the facets, are like the KKK. It’s a small group that overshadows the rest in some cases. It works the same way with us. I don’t dislike anyone because of their religion. I do, however, dislike people that use their religion as an excuse for treating people like garbage.

That’s the best I can explain it, I think. If you want to talk to me about anything in here, feel free to ask me about it. It can either be in the comments below or in another form that is more private. I enjoy talking about it as long as the person asking is actually listening and not just trying to make me change my mind. It hasn’t happened in the last 7 years. It isn’t going to happen now.

When we created Guild Press, I was a coder. It wasn’t all the new to me. I started learning HTML at 14 or 15. At 16, I stopped because there wasn’t really a need to learn more at the time because I didn’t know what I wanted to do as an adult.

Once I started college and had decided that I wanted to be a computer engineer, I started learning C, Java, Visual Basic and Assembly. I didn’t learn them because I wanted to. I had to. It was required and I hated it. I only did what was required. I didn’t make magic happen. I didn’t like doing it because I had to. I liked doing it when I was doing something I wanted to do. Making a program that can tell you how many donuts are left was stupid to me. They only had one application: homework.

Ray and I spent a lot of time talking about all this stuff we wanted to do. He’d already spent a lot of time working with web languages. At this point, HTML was all I knew and I hadn’t used it in quite a while. Once we decided we were going to make Guild Press a reality, I jumped into the world of web languages. I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning. I still don’t to this day but I’m miles ahead of where I started. I started giving myself crash courses in PHP and Javascript.

Shortly after we started, I noticed that everything looked very similar. The colors. The styles. The layouts. They were all the same. Neither of us was really that versed in CSS or working with graphics beyond some simple vector editing. Since Ray was already a much better coder than I was, I decided to take on the task of learning how to work with images.

I was terrible when I started. The most I’d ever done was a small competition for a logo when I was 15. Once I got into it, it got easier. I started using Illustrator and slowly started working my way into Photoshop. One of the great perks of being a student is getting the software at a huge discount. I’ve gotten a lot better since then and even started offering it as a freelance option at Orange Beast.

While working on the graphics side, I’d been asked to do some custom themes for WordPress. While still working on images, I had to start learning even more in-depth with the web languages. I started working with SQL, CSS and jQuery as well as working more in-depth with Javascript and PHP. I started out just modifying existing themes to suit what they wanted. For one project, for a photographer, I decided to start from a skeleton. No formatting. No design. Just the barebones. After the initial intimidation wore off and I got things to move into places that I wanted them, I got a lot more comfortable with them. So much so that it offer custom themes on Orange Beast too.

Once in a while, I take a step back and look at what I’ve accomplished and realize that as long as it’s something I want to do I can get pretty far. I still get that feeling of accomplishment when I hit a roadblock and find a way around it.

I can’t say which I would rather do. I love doing both. I like knowing I can manage to do both parts of a project and get it to look exactly how I want it to. I’ll stick to doing both for the moment. If someone comes up that will let me focus on one over the other and make enough money doing it, I might decide to switch.

I’m a tech guy. There’s no way around it. I work with computers and I love it. I enjoy fixing them. There’s a rush that you get when you finally fix an issue that’s been staring you in the face for hours. As much as I love it, I don’t want to do it everyday, all day. To me, once I make it my job, I’ll start to hate it.

I’ve never had a “real job”. I’m worked for money. I’ve made a living. For what I can do, a “real job” means sitting in a cubicle/office or standing behind a counter and writing invoices so I can later work on a machine that an over-emotional customer has brought in because they were playing around with things they shouldn’t have been. Doesn’t sound like fun, does it? Even though I love fixing computers, I don’t want to deal with that. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find a job that allows me to do that along with several other responsibilities so that I don’t hate it. That’s why I’ve done Internet radio, freelance tech support and now run a tech startup that caters to gaming news sites. I get to work on computers. I get to code. I get to do graphics. When I get tired of doing one of those jobs, I can focus on the other two.

We’ve recently written a service agreement so that we can take clients and actually start making money. While that wasn’t the goal, it’s a nice product of our work. There are days that I hate my job. I don’t always want to look at code, hardware or graphics. That’s a part of life. At least this way, those days are few and far in between. I love my job.

I’m doing something I like. Isn’t the the goal everyone has for their life? I may not be exactly where I’d like to be but I’m working on it. I’d eventually like to make enough money that I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’ll be able to pay my bills and buy food. Right now, that’s a struggle. I’m not too worried though. I knew that there would be a time in my life that this would happen. I’ve just taken the steps necessary to begin to turn it around.  I’m not typically a planner but I have a plan for my life. I know what I want and what I’m willing to do to get there. There’s really nothing else I can do. Once things start working out how I’d like them to, life will get much easier. The real test is in how long it takes me to get there.

As time goes on, I’ll start sharing that plan with you. Maybe it will be the motivation you need to start making a plan of your own. In the next few days, I’ll start sharing where I’m at in the process and show more as I start to progress toward my goal. I hope to be able to write about what it’s like to reach that goal some day.

Ray and I have a lot of Skype calls. We use it for podcasts and while we’re working. That means I have a call recorder installed that begins recording as soon as a call is answered. We always joke about recording our conversation, off Skype, and posting them as podcasts to get feedback from other people. Today, Ray decided he wanted to sing. lol Since every call I have gets recorded, I thought this was the perfect time to start doing that. This is the first episode. Many more will come. I warn you though. These are pure, unadulterated calls. The only editing done was removing silence and topics that we don’t want shared publicly. Enjoy.

I’m one of those people that has to do everything. I’m a horrible teacher. I don’t have the patience to explain things multiple times in multiple ways. I just don’t have it in me. When I have an idea from something visual, I HAVE to do it myself. That tends to be a problem. When it comes to being visually creative, my hand and head refuse to speak to each other. They’re having some kind of lover’s quarrel. I don’t know where the disruption comes from. I can see the design in my head. Somewhere between my neck and my hand, an epileptic on an acid trip jumps into the mix. I’m sure that someone born blind could draw better than I can. I might have to test that…

Anyway, I’ve had a lot of image ideas in my head. I’ve been trying to make the druggie in my arm go through rehab. It works sometimes. Other times, I think he’s sneaking hits in the bathroom when no one is looking. I can get it started, very roughly I might add. Somewhere along the line, the acid kicks in and I can’t, for the life of me, make the end product look like what I intended it to. I’ve been working really hard to get them to work together. I’m slowly, very slowly, getting better.

As I progress, and by that I mean force myself to make terrible attempts at good graphics, I’ll start posting them. I can admit, just as with coding, it’s a lot easier for me to take things that already exist and make them look/do what I want.

Here is the first image from my journey into bettering the relationship between my hand and my head.

As I look at my generation, I think “What is wrong with us?”. We play video games. We watch cartoons. We have, and I’m willing to admit it, very immature senses of humor. I’ve been putting more thought into it lately.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with us. We look at our grandparents and see very serious people that worked their entire lives away. We look at our parents and see something very similar. In some cases, families have fallen apart because of careers. They’re too serious. They work and work and work. For what? Stress and a paycheck? That doesn’t sound like the life I want. I’m 24. Why would I want to be that serious right now? I can do that when I’m 40 or 50.

If we really look back at our childhood, what did we really have? Some of us had it kind of easy. Happily married parents that gave us what we needed. Some of us had it a little rougher. Even if you forget how things were at home and focus on school, you’ll notice a trend that continues. Things our parents and grandparents didn’t start learning until high school were taught in middle school (junior high for some of you out there) or even elementary (grammar) school. I think I’m starting to see why as I look at each of the younger generations. We’re evolving. I’m not talking about the theory that opposes Creationism. I don’t plan on talking about those things on my blog at this point. I’m talking about the speed at which we learn. It’s increasing. I was doing math in middle school that my parents struggled with in high school and found it easy. I was reading at a much higher level than they did at my age. I wouldn’t say we’re smarter. I think we just learn faster. Computers are a great example. Kids in elementary school are learning how to do things that their grandparents can’t even figure out where to begin. Our world is a lot more fast paced. Things change so fast that we have to be ready to relearn it at any moment.

We’re growing up a lot faster. I was able to cook for myself when I was 11. Probably before that but that’s the earliest I can remember cooking without help. Our generation is changing things. I don’t want to say that the older generations are afraid of us but it’s evident that fear is a factor, for some of them, in the way they treat us. We get just as much done in a day, if not more, than they do. Why? We learn to do things faster. We learn to do things smarter. We can get just as much done with less work. If you’ve ever taking an electrical engineering course or read one of the textbooks, you’ll know exactly what I’m about to say. We find the route with the least amount of resistance. We try to be as efficient as we can be. Even while I’m writing this, I’m putting part of my focus on other things that need to be completed tomorrow. We work differently. That’s even visible in the way we dress. I’m a business owner. I don’t wear a suit or dress shoes. They aren’t comfortable. I know I’ll be sitting at a desk for hours. In some cases, it could be for more than 12 hours. Why would I want to be uncomfortable? We have an office that I work at sometimes. The most I do is put on a polo or a collared shirt over a t-shirt. I still wear jeans. I’ve been given weird looks because of it. That’s just how we’re starting to do things.

So back to the beginning of this whole post. Why do we play video games, watch cartoons and act immature? Why not? We hang onto the things that relax us. When I need to relax, I’ll turn on my Xbox or watch Family Guy and The Cleveland Show. Relaxing is supposed to be fun. Why take it seriously? Video games are actually better for me when I’m just taking a break. It keeps my brain working faster than a cartoon does. Once I turn off my Xbox and go back to work, I can pick up right where I left off without  wasting time getting my brain back up to speed.  I’m not saying there aren’t other things out there that can help but that’s what I do.  I’m sure many of you do other things to relax.

What’s so wrong with doing “childish” things like that? We’re made to feel like there is something wrong with it by some people, usually our parents. I don’t know why. If we can get everything done on time, what’s the issue? If you really want to see the shift in the business world, look at the tech companies. Facebook. Zappos. Roosterteeth. Bungie. Digg. The list goes on and on. People work in what they want because they can. Zappos even offers daily nap time for their employees. That’s awesome. If we take everything about our jobs so seriously, we’ll burn out and start to hate it. If we hate it, we’ll work just hard enough to get by. It’s a shame that it took our generation to really make that connection. I just hope it keeps going.

We don’t have to “grow up”. We just have to be mature enough to know when enough is enough and get our work done. Video games and cartoons don’t make you a child. We could be doing much worse things. Does several drinks after work sound familiar to some of you? If you want to call us children because of how we wind down or spend our down time, as Clark Gable put it, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”