I really needed a vacation. Like really, really needed a major one. The past couple years I hadn’t really been able to step away from work for a week and it’s not been optimal for my health or productivity. I had a good work/life balance until last year when I began to change up the sorts of services I offer and a bunch of major changes and tragedies happened.

A few major things happened last year. I got rid of the office space for my company and our salesman Tristan passed away in an accident. I couldn’t really focus behind a computer screen as well as I had prior, so I took up part time taxi driving to meet new people, make some extra cash, and clear my head. We stopped pushing into as many different businesses as we had been in before and worked to service our referral and word of mouth clients.

Four years ago I did a pretty epic month long road trip to Newfoundland and since then...

In the past couple months a router has become a favorite on Amazon and deal aggregator sites as a low-cost workhorse router. The router in question is the Asus T-Mobile Personal CellSpot Wi-Fi Cellspot Router (TM-AC1900). As of the time of this writing, these are selling for $60, sometimes lower.

What were these routers for

I like T-Mobile quite a bit. Unfortunately their network wasn’t always so decent. One of T-Mo’s former drawbacks was that their network lacked low-band spectrum until 2016. The effect of lacking low-band spectrum is that their network had difficulty penetrating the walls in people’s houses: Especially if they were located in a rural setting with towers further apart. They had to fix the gap of making calls work at home, while indoors.

Building new towers closer is a bitch due to zoning, getting fiber and power run, and overcoming old people’s complaints of...

Today I was called a wastrel. Didn’t appreciate that.

One of the more difficult things I find is organizing my thoughts onto a single cohesive topic or post. Things come in flashes and cognitively it’s incredibly difficult for me to convey a full post on topic. I carried a phone with a physical keyboard to catch those times when it occurred.

I feel like today’s technology has changed things; the mind and how it works. Constant stream of stimuli, data… knowledge and nothing. A culture of consumption, devices are not being used for creation by the masses. The aristocratic few control production. Channels (and when I mean channels, I mean social media, the media, the spigot) get controlled by algorithms built by the largest accumulation of wealth the world has ever amassed.

Point being, humans are not meant to be hooked into this stream as they are. The brain’s structures adapt...

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor or a medical practitioner. Do not take my advice and experiences as one size fits all. Though unlikely, I am not responsible if you try any of this and get sick or die as a result. I recommend dialogue and coordination with a professional medical practitioner.

Sat on this post for a long enough time. I have some strong positions on diet protocol. Anyone who knows me, knows it’s a little peculiar how I eat. This is a result of a lot of research, along with personal trial and error over the course of the past 7+ years. Fortunately, the present is kind to alternative lifestyles and it’s not too awkward to make unusual requests at restaurants and such. I will format this post to provide a background and then my approach to different topics.

Background

Some details about me. When I was little, I was fairly skinny up until early grade school. After this point...

It’s become about daily now that I get people on the street asking me about bitcoin, or telling me how they just bought in. I’m frankly kind of annoyed with the coin lately, so I wanted to write down some of my thoughts. Before reading, get this through your head: Don’t invest money you can’t afford to lose.

Some background on me. I bought my first bitcoin at $2/coin, back in April of 2010. I think it was 15BTC for $30. There used to be a seller called Coinpal and you could just send PayPal. Services like that are long gone now due to PayPal’s ease of abuse. It was curiosity back then, I bought it to use it not to speculate. Nobody but a few visionaries thought in our community of a few hundred people that things would catch like they have. It’s been almost 8 years now and in the past few weeks I can truly sense the death of the original chain. I have been there for the crashes...

Chances are that if you run into me and ask how I’m doing I’ll respond with “I’m keeping busy”. This is usually accurate. Lately I’ve been setting up in cafes while I work. I have rented a new place for myself outside of town, though I do miss it sometimes. Andrew had been working remotely on design work. I think that will wind down.

Speaking of design work: I am not a designer. I just happen to own a company that historically marketed itself as a design company at some points in time. I primarily research and find solutions for a diverse number of clients involving such things as: finding someone to support a legacy UNIX application, building a cost-saving SMS marketing application, data forensics, attack mitigation, technical ghostwriting, and systems maintenance. I typically won’t say no to a job if it’s profitable and I know I can find the solution. However, I do say no a good...

It comes with many things. I’m not even going to put an image on this because of it. I’ll be honest though, it’s tough to keep most habits going. This includes writing regular blog posts. Part of why I do it here is so that I can build the habit for the company blog. Maybe I shouldn’t publish all of the entries. This post is company related and reflects my personal opinions and experiences with content marketing and blogging. Please don’t be offended if you find this concerns you.

Purpose

“Let’s build a thing.” Ok, why? Is it a hobby? Will it help your business or is it a business? Or maybe you built it to try to be cool. There needs to be a purpose to doing things. Even if it is just to pass the time.

I’ve worked with quite a few content properties now, as well as traditional service-oriented small businesses and very few update their sites regularly and/or effectively. I don’t...

“It’s better to keep moving”

I closed the company’s office HQ at the end of last month. I’ve been mobile since then and plan to continue until at least January. It’s an odd feeling, but I can’t say I haven’t been here before. I spent years as an independent contractor doing odd jobs before I fell into working at the startup that would be the predecessor to this one.

There was no party to celebrate, no blowout like the last company’s closure, and I really won’t miss the office itself but I feel it was pivotal for me and the company. You can’t fully understand the experience unless you lived through it.

It was time. Growth stalled in 2015 and while we recovered momentum in 2016, too much had changed. I take the majority of the responsibility for my lack of leadership at the time while I was out founding a second company. To make things work I had to focus on cutting overhead and...

Hello hello. Once again I picked a new blog software. Went with Svbtle this time for a few reasons.

Goals for me to have in a software/platform:

• It must be simple. No distractions. Period.
• It must use Markdown for portability and ease of writing.
• It must format well across devices and load fast.
• If it’s not hosted by me, it must be hosted by a company not selling my information or that of my vistors.

Previously, I wrote all my posts in Markdown using the very awesome Focuswriter software or Noted on my Blackberry Passport. This made it so I had to publish it later on using another software. Early on it was Dropplets, but it wasn’t until this year that they started to update the project again. I found it to be a great concept, in practice it was a little buggy. I selected Anchor as the replacement but found it to be too heavy for my usage.

Ultimately, I thought Medium would be a...