Month: July 2010

Friends of the netherweb,

I’m looking for tried-and-true processes for enabling a new potential tech vendor access to my website without providing access at the web server level.

In the past, whenever getting first acquainted with a potential vendor, the need always arises for the potential vendor to actually look at the website before committing to a price or workload schedule. Also, a vendor is interested in seeing the site to ensure that they are familiar with the current systems and that their skill set is capable of executing the work.

Historically, I’ve given the vendor ‘root command’ access to the webserver. Once they’ve gone in and grabbed what they needed I’ve changed the primary password. Finally, when the vendor and I agree on terms and I feel comfortable with that particular vendor, I give them the new password. This is kind of silly on multiple levels.

Thus, I’m looking for process suggestions for how to get the website, in its entirety, to a potential vendor’s possession without opening up the full mothership treasure chest at the webserver host level.

Gracias Muchas.

So it turns out that the worst environmental disaster in US history — the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent spill — may be, in part, due to Microsoft Windows systems crashing. Now, I’m not going to straight-up blame Windows for this. Traditionally, BSODs (Blue Screens Of Death) are caused by malfunctioning drivers more than a malfunctioning operating system. But at the same time, to learn that the entire fleet routinely disables these Windows systems due to false-positive alerts and crashes is very, very concerning. Since when is Windows the preferred platform for mission-critical, life-saving, and possibly avoiding-the-extermination-of-all-humanity purposes?

Maybe I’m just being hyperbolic here, but give that massive methane explosions have repeatedly killed almost all life on earth before, just because it’s a 1-in-55-million chance I wish the engineers writing the software for the failsafe alarms had done a more thorough job.

Humanity killed by bad programming practices.

That would be a bad day.

Recently, a friend approached me with a short question that has a much longer answer.

“Do you think it’s really worth it to upgrade to the i3 Core processor?”

The computing industry has really stabilized over the past 5-6 years. We (collectively, humanity-wide) have bumped up against some really hard-limits in computing recently with heat management and silicon manufacturing techniques, resulting in the push to parallelize processing more: more cores, lower clock speeds, bigger caches, extracting more per clock cycle with less waste, reducing heat output and power requirements, etc. It’s been a boon for data centers, as the average cost of running these things has actually flattened out. Power requirements, while not going down, are not going up exponentially just like CPU speeds were for a while. And the power cost per GHz of CPU speed, and per GB of storage, is of course going down as we squeeze more performance per kilowatt-hour out of the systems.

So really, over the past four years, that has been the #1 improvement in CPU tech: extracting more performance for the same amount of power. Not extracting more performance as an absolute measure. Also there’s been a push to integrate Graphics Processing Units into the CPU core to enhance performance. As a result, it’s brought 3D gaming capabilities into the mainstream of computing, with lots of applications in real life that most of us rarely explored before. In addition, virtualization of operating systems has taken off like never before, as we can stuff more and more CPUs into the same form factor with similar power requirements. Even desktop users are very commonly virtualizing entire operating systems on their laptops these days. I know I do; I’m running a Solaris VM and a Linux VM on my Windows laptop at this very moment.

For the home user, though, if faster integrated graphics and extracting more work per clock cycle with better battery life tickles your fancy, then yes, an upgrade to a Core i3 (mobile), Core i5 (Desktop Mainstream), or Core i7 (high-end computing) processor is on your radar. Also, niche markets like audio-visual recording and real-time processing can take advantage of this sort of parallelized-power, if you will, driving innovation in the computing industry today. If power consumption isn’t much of a concern and you prefer discrete graphics, or if you aren’t running applications that can take advantage of symmetric multi-processing, then the i3 may not be worth the upgrade for you.

Keep smiling!

–Matt B.

Chanced across an article guaranteed to create some controversy: Women who are carrying more body fat have worse memory than those who carry less.

I received an invitation today (July 12, 2010) from Web Hosting Hub to try out their hosting service and compare it to my current web hosting provider (who shall remain nameless). There are a number of key features that I look for. Note that this list is from memory, and I didn’t check their list of features before writing it.

My Non-Negotiable Requirements:

• Very reasonable monthly rates (less than $10 per month, or $120 per year)
• Effectively unlimited bandwidth. I use a LOT of bandwidth every month between my MP3s and video files, upward of several dozen gigabytes a day. I used to bump up against bandwidth limits all the time with one former provider. I’m not hosting pornography or objectionable content, just LOTS of files and backups of configurations and files that I’ve archived but might need again.
• Effectively unlimited storage. With the 20GB or so of data on my site, I’ll want to know I never run out of room to store things now and in the future.
• Responsive 24/7 technical support via chat, email, and phone. When my site is down, or if I run into an issue, I want to know my webhosting company is aware of it pronto!
• MySQL support. I want this either on the server I’m using, or else hosted on a high-speed network.
• *nix-based hosting. My stuff works best on Linux or UNIX… not on Microsoft Windows.
• Shell access. This is critical for me. I don’t want just plain-old FTP… I want an actual shell, where I can chown/chmod files in my hosting directory, run scripts, and be able to manipulate files without having to download and upload them constantly. Cron alone won’t do; I’ve been a UNIX admin for fifteen years and want my shell!
• Support for Drupal, which requires the normal LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.
• Satisfaction guarantee. I want to know I can easily get my money back if it doesn’t work out for some reason.

As you can see, I’m quite a picky user. I know my tools, I know what works best for me with my experience and mastery of the technology. And I know if a vendor is trying to shine me on. To help me in this comparison, WebHostingHub.com provides a handy table to compare their features against their competitors.

What Do You Want?

Now, obviously I know exactly what I want out of a hosting provider. If you’re new at this game, though, WHH provides a number of guides to help you make your decision:

How to choose a webhosting provider is an overview of things those of us in the industry a long time know to look for. Company longevity, space and bandwidth, customer service, and reliability are all really important to look at. If you’ve outgrown your Blogger account or want more flexibility, configurability, and tools for your web site, you should read this to help you figure out what you’re looking for. Of course, WHH scores high on the marks in its own evaluation, but it’s still a good read.

Is Dedicated Hosting The Solution For You? is useful to help you evalute if you really need all the power dedicated hosting provides. Because dedicated hosting is so resource-inefficient, it’s much more expensive than shared hosting, but offers you almost unlimited configurability. I’ve been down that route before, and while it’s nice having the power at your fingertips, even for me — a bona-fide power-user — it was more than what I needed and I eventually went to a shared-hosting provider principally due to the price of dedicated hosting.

Should You Consider Windows Web Hosting? covers that age-old question: Linux or Windows? This is a No-B.S. evaluation of the benefits and risks of both. It all boils down to your application, as usual, and despite Web Hosting Hub being a mostly Linux shop, they give Windows a fair shake here.

Let’s dive in!

Now to figure out whether they’re going to meet my needs as outlined above, and have reasonable prices, to boot. I stepped through their signup pages. Right on the front page, I found they hit some of my non-negotiable requirements:

• UNLIMITED Disk Space & Bandwidth — a good sign!
• UNLIMITED Websites — Well, kind of expected in this day and age, but positive.
• FREE Domain Name — Cool, that was a feature of my current hosting provider that I’d forgotten about. I don’t need it right now — I already have a domain I want to put on this, waywardsun.org — but good to know.
• 24/7 U.S. Technical Support — OK, another “yay” point. Like most Americans, I want my tech support to be competent in English.
• Control Panel — OK, cool if you’re not me, gets a big “whatever”, but hopefully it has some good tools.
• FREE premium Web Builder — Meh.
• 90-Day FULL Money Back Guarantee — I might be taking advantage of that just for the purpose of this review!

I clicked through to the “See All Features” link. And there it was: Drupal support, Blogging Tools, PHP5, Python, Perl, cron jobs… OK. This looks like a pretty standard UNIX hosting place now. Good, good sign. I kept going, though I didn’t see “shell access” anywhere on the list.

Well, my usual next step is “Is there a coupon?” I know, that probably sounds weird, but one of the first things I look for is some sort of discount available for the first time period after signup. With my current provider, it was the first year for $20, subsequent years for $120 per year. Which is about what I expect. How does WebHostingHub stack up? Well, after some Googling for “WebHostingHub coupons”, I found several affiliate deals that purpoted to offer a discount, but in fact were trying to redirect your search to competing service providers. Unable to find any further discounts, I decided to choose the standard $4.95 a month deal using their regular signup.

I found an error that caused me some concern at the first signup page, though. There was a grammatical error. It reads “All account include a FREE domain registration or transfer!” As you probably know, “accounts” should be plural. This is a fairly common mistake among non-native writers, though. It got me thinking: where is this place hosted? The first thing I checked was the IP address: 173.205.127.11. Running this through ARIN, the American Registry of Internet Numbers, I found they were a US-hosted company working under the InMotion Hosting netblock. OK, so they are in the US and it looks legit, based in Wyoming.

Color By Numbers

One thing I like to do is look up the Netcraft stats on various providers to figure out what they’re running. Here’s Netcraft’s page on WHH.

Here’s what their page looked like back in 2002, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

What does this tell me? First, that they’ve been around for at least eight years doing the same business: providing low-cost shared hosting.

Chatting Up The Sales Guy

I paged one of their sales engineers from their web site on chat to see how well that worked. Within just a few seconds after submitting the form with my question, a chat box popped up, and I had a sales engineer on the line ready to answer my questions.

Matthew P. Barnson: I’m evaluating your service and have some questions: Do you offer ssh shell access to accounts? What operating systems do you use? Do you offer any month-to-month plans, or only yearly plans?

You are now speaking with Brian of Sales.

Brian: Hello Matthew.

Matthew P. Barnson: Hi, Brian. Nice to meet you!

Brian: We do not offer SSH as our account is shared hosting.

Brian: s

Brian: We bill in 12, 24, and 36 month increments. 12 months is $83.40 at a $6.95 per month price point, 24 months is $142.80 at a $5.95 per month price point and 36 months is $172.80 at a $4.95 per month price point.

Matthew P. Barnson: And what operating system are you running under the hood on the shared accounts?

Brian: We run CentOS a Red Hat Enterprise on our servers.

Matthew P. Barnson: Thanks, Brian. You’ve been very helpful. I appreciate you taking a few minutes to answer my questions. Have a good night!

Brian: My pleasure.

When you are ready to get signed up it is much faster to order over the phone with us as all online orders are held up to 30 minutes for verification and also we do call to confirm any order received through our website prior to activating the account. Please feel free to give me a call at 1-877-595-4482, or 757-416-6627 for international customers then option 9, then extension 878. We can have you setup in 5 minutes and I can also address anymore questions you may have. Or if easier you can contact me through chat by simply putting my name into the question line of the chat.

Now, it’s important to be aware of the rates. You get the special introductory rate only for your initial signup. This is pretty typical of the webhosting industry, but it’s worth your time to check out the terms of service.

The Devil Is In The Details

Web Hosting Hub’s terms of service are pretty standard. No pr0n, no spam, shared hosting means be a good citizen and not hogging the CPU or memory. I found nothing out of the ordinary. But it’s really important that you be fully aware of what it is you’re buying, and what a “FULL Money-Back Guarantee” actually means:

1. You agree to subscribe annually for $107.40 per year after the expiration of your initial promotional term. That puts them right at pretty much the exact same price as my current webhosting provider. Credit where credit is due: the company is very up-front about this recurring cost, and they encourage you to sign up for three years so that your price is locked-in at a very low rate for that term.
2. There are a number of services to which the 90-day money back guarantee does not apply. I understand why this is, but if you’re a newbie it’s really important to be aware of it. This includes SSL certificates, Free Domain Names ($11.95 per name), Dedicated IP address fees, and a few more things. If you sign up for the extras on your account, you’re going to be docked for those if you cancel before 90 days.
3. You’ll get a pro-rated refund of your remaining hosting fees if you cancel after the ninety days. If you were scared of the three-year commitment to lock your price in at $4.95 a month, don’t be. The refund policy is right in the Terms of Service in black-and-white. A pro-rated refund is a sign of a top-notch webhosting company that isn’t afraid of the competition.
4. If you sign up online, they are going to call you to confirm you are who you say you are before they allow you to sign up. In my opinion, this is a positive thing: it’s a sign of a reputable business wanting to make sure they are doing business with a real, live person on the other end.

CONCLUSION

If you’re looking for a web hosting provider with very decent fees, a solid Internet connection , unlimited transfers, and a plethora of tools to help you set up your site for a minimal time investment, WebHostingHub.com may be the exact match you’re looking for. They’re very competitive with other services, and offer a discount on 3-year paid-in-advance service that’s really hard to beat. They are also clearly offering an ethical service, are based in the USA, and don’t appear to have any hidden terms to surprise you.

On the other hand, if you already have a web provider with many of these features who meets or beats the price — or if you are a hard-core geek like me who feels he absolutely needs shell access with any hosting provider — you may want to look elsewhere. In the end, the lack of shell access was the deal-killer for me… but if you don’t even know what a shell is, or if you can live without one, WebHostingHub is definitely worth checking out.

You know, I realized that, after over a decade of operation, I have never really written an “About Me” page on my web site. No time like the present!

I was born in 1973 in the state of West Virginia, United States of America, as “Matthew Patrick Murphy”. At the tender age of three months, my mother left her alcoholic, abusive husband and moved the family to Washington, D.C., then to Alabama for the next several years. After meeting and marrying Bill Barnson while he attended the USA Air Command and Staff College — who later adopted me, thus I became Matthew Patrick Barnson — we all moved back to Washington, D.C. for my new Dad to work at Andrews Air Force Base. We built a house in a swamp on the shores of Piscataway Creek, near the Potomac River, a few miles from Fort Washington. I used to bicycle to Old Fort Washington and loved exploring the fort and the cannons there.

This is where I get my Military and Aviation interest. I love airplanes and things that go “BOOM”!

A few years after moving to southern Maryland, a couple of our neighbors were gunned down in a love triangle murder. That was kind of the last straw for my family, so we up and moved to a better neighborhood sixty miles north in Montgomery County, to a suburb of a suburb called “North Potomac”. Really, it was South Gaithersburg, but who’s counting? Anyway, the cost of the home was high, we were pretty house-poor, and I spent much of my teenage years living in the unfinished basement of our home, enjoying the cool during the summer months but hating the leaky walls during the winter.

Thus some of my Home Improvement and Lifestyle focus. I never want to live that way again.

Around the age of twelve, I discovered the world of FIDONet and LINDA, a local bulletin-board system, on my mother’s “Phillips Portable PC”. I eagerly exchanged messages far and wide under the pseudonym of “Haarough Drochenbalm”, pretending that I was over eighteen and that my nickname was “Harry”. Truth is, if I would have had my way back then, I’d have renamed myself to Harry. I loved the interaction. For a nerdy kid who really got stressed out socializing with others, the tiny green screen and modem was a solace where I was accepted for who I pretended to be, rather than the chubby pre-teen I was.

Thus my interest in Technology, Computer Networking, and primitive “blogging”.

As a teenager, I learned that I needed some sort of “in” to have some hope of getting a girlfriend.

Some guys played sports. I got winded walking from the refrigerator to the couch. Not going to happen.

Some guys were into Drama. After the first proposition from a gay guy, I decided I was only going to do that drama casually. I mean, I have no problem with gays. In fact, I’d have no problem being gay myself if it wasn’t for the fact that guys don’t turn me on and girls do. Sorry, fellas, you don’t know what you’re missing, and you’re never going to. But it seemed at the time that being gay was a prerequisite to being a good actor — or maybe the other way around — so I demurred.

Other guys played musical instruments. After watching Kenny Kramp and Marco Lorenzana play a duet on the piano in eighth grade when the band teacher was out of the room, while all the girls clustered around them, and all the guys huddled around in the back of the room staring enviously, I was hooked. I practiced piano for eight hours a day that summer, and kept up a rigorous practice schedule into my late teenage years. I was in several bands, starting with “Wayward Sun” in Jon Brusco’s garage during the summer of 1984. The very first song we wrote was “Fred The Cat”, a duet for poorly-played electric guitar and bass. The other choice for the band’s name was “Satin Knights”. Garage bands rule and still are the cutting edge of both lameness and innovation.

I still play occasionally, and have produced a number of singles and albums over the years, with a video game soundtrack thrown in for good measure.

Thus my interest in Music.

I decided as an adult that I needed to get in shape. I detail that saga elsewhere. If you want to change your shape to something more appealing, lift heavy weights at least once a week, eat plenty of protein — at least one gram per your lean body weight in pounds per day — in whatever form you prefer, carefully track your calories, and reduce either your fats or carbohydrates or both until you are achieving the weight reduction you want. Adjust from there to suit your body composition tastes. Every successful diet plan that retains muscle mass follows that pattern in one form or another.

Thus my interest in Health & Fitness.

My mother decided to cuckold her husband Bill and eventually forced him out of the house in order to marry one of her affair partners. I never got over this betrayal, not just of the man she married and taught me to love, but of her children and everything she claimed to stand for. I despised the man she married, even while being force to get along with him for nineteen years. As a result of this experience, I made it my life’s mission to be the best husband and father that I can be, and try to have and model healthier grown-up relationships than my parents did.

I am devoted to my wife and children. I feel that a healthy, successful marriage is my most important life’s work. My children will value my ongoing marriage to their Mom more than anything else I can give them, so when the time comes to choose anything else vs. my wife & children, they will win. Every. Single. Time.

Thus my interest in Relationships and Marriage.

Since the age of twenty-nine I’ve felt strongly part of my personal mission in life is to find out the truth and be open about it wherever and whenever I can. I abandoned the faith of my childhood — Mormonism — to follow the road less traveled. I currently consider myself a secular humanist — “little H” — but am open to whatever moniker you like that recognizes that I’m not your typical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant blogger (WASP). I’m your typical White Anglo-Saxon ATHEIST Blogger Itinerant, so if you want to refer to my faith, call me a piece of WASABI. Or anything but late for dinner.

Thus my interest in philosophy & religion.

Lately I’ve become interested in making money from web development technology. I’m really adept at this tech stuff and have worked with web technology on the server-side for a living for the past fifteen years. I’d like to try my hand at making money directly rather than just earning a paycheck from an employer who earns lots of money from my efforts.

Thus my interest in finance and entrepeneurship.

Oh, and finally, a lot of people have tried to tell me I need to focus my blog more on one specific topic in order for it to be successful. Sorry, I’m a Renaissance Man. I don’t believe in doing one thing well, or even being a Jack-Of-All-Trades and doing a mediocre job at everything. I believe in doing everything I put my mind to as well as I possibly can, and if that doesn’t fit with some advertiser or blogger’s view of the Way Things Ought To Be, then they can screw off.

DISCLAIMER

Oh, yeah. We need a DISCLAIMER here. You see, starting in July of 2010, I became interested in finding out how much people would pay me for my loquacity. So from time to time, you’ll find a PAID BLOG ENTRY. Now, the intelligent reader will see through these entries as the paid-shill advertisements they are. They will be few and far between — unless they actually make gonzo amounts of money, in which case they’ll be every single workday! — and you’ll see clear links back to this page in the text of the page. In fact, I may even anchor-link this part of the text so it takes you right here to this very paragraph.

You’re also going to find lots of instructions on how to do questionable things here. Look, you’re probably pretty smart and you can figure out that I’m not responsible for your choice to hack your boss’s email system, buy a product from a questionable manufacturer with ties to organized crime in Nigeria, or blow yourself up with a bomb made out of Diet Coke and Mentos. If you act on ANYTHING in this blog, please research it thoroughly before doing so, and recognize that it’s not my fault if you screw up your own life. It’s all you, bud. In fact, the one constant in all of your failures in life is YOURSELF. Think about it.

Recently, I’ve been conducting a great deal of research on blogging. Trying to understand what currently drives the blogosphere. After a great deal of “research” — said research being mostly “reading random links from bloggers who stay current” — I’ve come to the conclusion that, by and large, most bloggers are still doing what they’ve always done. Journaling their personal life, sometimes with hope of compensation, but more often than not simply so they have a place to express themselves, and more importantly, receive feedback that they are normal.

This morning I chanced across Pretty in Pink. I surfed through a number of recent posts to find something that interested me. Her blog details the usual day-to-day events and goings-on in her life, liberally mixed with product reviews and the paid endorsements and advertising links that are so common today. While perusing her recent entries, though, I happened across Pink’s recent post on post on Domestic Violence that stood out to me. Excerpt:

I began to think if being a battered wife is also normal? is it? does that mean once you commit your self to the man legally, it also gives him the right to punch you as often as he likes, does that mean too that once your married it also follows of submitting your human rights to the one person you think who loves you completely. If that is the case, then eventually married life will turn out to be hell and i pity those women who becomes helpless because of the bind between them.

This struck a chord within me. My mother lived in an abusive relationship with her husband for a number of years before leaving him when I was still an infant. It’s appalling to me how common domestic abuse is. And worst of all, how commonly the victims accept such abuse as a normal part of life, rather than being the aberration and correctable behavior that it is.

A number of months ago, as many regular readers know, I had some personal crises in my life that led me to deeply investigate what it really is that drives the connection between a husband and wife in a marriage. I found the works of Dr. Willard Harley, and reading his books and articles really turned my attitude around on marriage. Dr. Harley isolates the cause of abuse:

Abusive behavior usually begins when a couple tries to resolve a conflict the wrong way. Instead of finding a solution that meets the conditions of the Policy of Joint Agreement (never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse), an effort is made by one spouse to force a solution on the other. Resistance to the proposal is matched by increasing force until the spouse browbeats the other into submission. Every fight is an example of abuse because it uses the tactic of emotional or physical force to resolve a conflict instead of respect and thoughtfulness.

There appears to be, in my opinion, a clear link between emotional abuse, physical abuse, and alcohol. Now, many people enjoy a beer now and then. But when the alcohol use slides into alcohol abuse, inhibitions are reduced. The natural instinct to attempt to force your way with others rears its ugly head under the influence of alcohol:

My Policy of Joint Agreement helps create a rule that identifies a drinking problem for what it really is. The policy says, Never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse. That means if you are not enthusiastic about your spouse drinking alcoholic beverage, he should not drink even a teaspoon of it. If your spouse feels that you are being unreasonable, that he really doesn’t have a problem with alcohol, and then he goes ahead and drinks anyway, he is announcing that alcohol is more important to him than your feelings. He is willing to see you suffer, just so he can have a taste of liquor. If that’s the case, he is either incredibly thoughtless or addicted to alcohol, or both…

Is enduring physical and emotional abuse supposed to make us happy? I always thought it made us unhappy…if either spouse tries to sacrifice their own feelings so that the other spouse gets his or her way, the marriage is sure to suffer. Without mutually thoughtful decisions, marriage is usually a nightmare.

I have witnessed many recoveries from alcohol addiction, where the wife thought that once her husband stopped drinking, their marital problems would be over. But it wasn’t just alcohol that ruined their marriage — it was the way they made decisions, the use of alcohol being only one example. They needed to come to grips with alcohol addiction, but even more importantly, they needed to create a thoughtful way to make all decisions, not just the ones having to do with alcohol.

Thanks, Katy, for reminding me of what’s really important in my marriage: the feelings of my wife must always be paramount in my mind. Abuse, however, cannot and should not be tolerated or enabled in any way. This is surely something that has shaped me as an adult: I cannot, and will not, ever let myself become the abusive drunkard my father was.

“Whatever hatred saves the number.”

This nonsense sentence has a meaning behind it. As many of you have probably guessed, I’m working on posting more content to my web site. Part of my reason for this, at heart, is an experiment with this hypothesis:

A reasonably-intelligent person can make enough money from blogging to support a somewhat-expensive hobby, and possibly much more.

My expensive hobby is radio-controlled aircraft. I totally have self-interest at stake here. Monetizing my blog combines two things I love: writing and getting paid! One of the things I want to explore — and long-time Barnsonians, I apologize in advance for how crass this is going to sound — is paid reviews. Have someone send me a product, do a review of it, and get paid per word.

But see, what the advertisers don’t know is that I don’t gloss over JACK. I tell it like it is. I don’t care if the product was free or not. If it sucks, I’ll say so. If it’s great, I may just fall in love with it and overlook its faults.

So here goes. I’m signing up on a bunch of review sites with a cost of $0.01 per word. We’ll see if anything comes of this. The phrase quoted at the top of this entry was, in fact, a requirement to sign up at one of said review sites. Wonder what other hoops I’ll have to jump through?

UPDATE: Wow. Fun.

So, OK, I spent a lot of time signing up at the various sites that do these kinds of campaigns. In most cases, they need to “personally review” your site to determine a few things:

1. Has your blog existed for more than just a few months? This seems to be really important. If it’s a brand-new blog, you’re probably automatically rejected. 2. Have you posted more than a handful of times? Based on the nearly 2,000 articles here posted over a seven-year period, I think I qualify, but you never know. 3. Is your blog your own and not some kind of community network? Now, here, I worry a little bit. There are a few higher-privilege members of barnson.org that are allowed to post here, too. I don’t know if it will rule me out — most haven’t posted in a very long time — but the possibility exists. 4. Do you have a high PageRank on Google? I don’t know how high mine is. I really have never cared. I probably should pay closer attention; apparently, PageRank is important to marketers to determine if your blog is worth investing in. 5. Is most of your posting unpaid? Given that I’ve never been paid one thin dime for posting over 1800 blogs here, I think I qualify, but it’s still another interesting requirement. You can’t just post a bunch of reviews. You have to have a bunch of other original content, too.

Now, other than this, the ad networks seem to vary. Some want long product reviews, others want short blurbs as part of campaigns. Some want you to tag your posts as “sponsored”, others want you to astroturf with aplomb. Interesting game. I feel slightly scummy for playing it!

When I was a kid, I often heard my parents tell me to think positive. It was a kind of declaration, much like “clean your room”: easy to say, harder to do. I remember thinking to myself, “Really? I don’t think I can change how I feel about this.”

And you know what? It’s true. I can’t change how I feel.

I can only change how I act. I’ll explain.

Encounter With A Stranger

Today, I took a break over lunch to go fly my model aircraft. It’s a fun pastime, and even though lunch tends to go a little long when I do so, none of my co-workers or boss has ever complained as long as I get my work done on time. I saw a few familiar faces — the community of modelers isn’t very large, after all — and then one new one. I flew my helicopter a couple of times, watched one of the familiar faces fly his helicopter, then sauntered over under the shade awning to chat until my lunch break was over.

Well, I got in a discussion with the new face. Let’s call him “Red”. Red was prepping a gorgeously-detailed, 30%-scale Sopwith Pup to fly. We talked about the plane, about some of his trials keeping the plane looking nice despite the toxic gasoline exhaust, and smoke systems. While discussing smoke systems, he mentioned he no longer had the cash to buy much of anything. The conversation drifted to what he was doing flying in the middle of the day on a Friday.

Turns out he’s unemployed as a civil engineer. And he’s been unemployed for the better part of a year. The housing bust, of course, has really had an impact on this industry. I immediately empathized. There was a time I’d gone through seven employers in as many years and experienced long droughts of unemployment in between. This made me grateful for my current job; despite the lack of growth of substantial raises, it’s been stable for the past six years. Anyway, Red’s wife has been picking up the slack, but his unemployment runs out in a few more months, and he’s not certain what he’s going to do. I learned a few salient facts about him during this conversation:

1. He believed himself to be in very high demand two years ago.
2. He has interviewed nine times for a job this past year. In several cases, they had narrowed the field, but typically down to as many at 10 applicants for the position. He believes they are discriminating based on his age.
3. He’s mad as hell about the lack of employment. He’d love to move somewhere with a better construction market, but doesn’t believe his wife would tolerate such a move.
4. When he learned that my employer has been having trouble filling an IT position in Salt Lake, he quickly listed his qualifications for IT — typical word processing, AutoCAD, and basic networking skills — but was utterly clueless what I was talking about when I described the open position. Nevertheless, he gave it the old college try and gamely explained how he was the guy to fill this position.

A few things stood out to me from this conversation, chief of which was that Red really let his unhappiness bleed into his conversation with a relative stranger. Here we are, both of us experiencing a recreational activity we enjoy, and he’s grousing to me about his situation. I analyzed the facts.

1. He was in high demand when the market for construction-related jobs had a very high demand. In the current housing slump, he’s wasted a year trying to get a job doing what he’s trained to do, unsuccessfully. What has he been doing with his time? This doesn’t speak well of his motivation. If I spent more than 3 months unemployed, you bet I’d find a job that paid better than my unemployment benefits just to tide myself over.
2. He thinks interviewing nine times is some kind of Herculean feat. The reality is, if you’re working your contacts like you should, you should be doing nine interviews a month at the very least. This tells me that he doesn’t know how to manage his time effectively while he’s unemployed. Age doesn’t matter to me, but motivation does; if you’re content to rest on your laurels and aren’t interested in tackling new problems, I’m not that interested in helping you.
3. If Red is letting his anger so clearly take control of an almost cost-free conversation with a stranger, how much is his anger bleeding into his personal and professional lives? I understand the desire to vent. I really do. But venting toward anyone who might be in a position to give you a job is a really, really bad idea. Angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, selfish demands, and annoying habits will turn anybody off toward being around you. Despite his obvious modeling talent, within moments I was wishing I hadn’t engaged him in conversation due to this overwhelming negativity.
4. When you’re out of your depth on a technical topic, making stuff up to try to sell your abilities is also a huge turn-off. It makes me wonder what else you might make up down the road. Such bravado comes off as desperate, not competent.

Negative Encounters Affect You Negatively

Obviously Red is competent at his chosen profession, but what turned me off was his consistently negative attitude. I’ve heard the phrase “the power of positive thinking” my whole life, but I’ve learned something as an adult.

It’s not thinking positive that gives you the power.

It’s acting positive that gives you the power.

I’ll illustrate a few “don’ts” using Red’s position. I totally understand the depth of bitterness and humiliation that extended unemployment brings. But following a few simple action rules could have made me much more interested in helping him, rather than finding an excuse to get away from him.

• Never demand that people see things your way or try to educate them if they disagree. Instead, see how your demands can be turned into thoughtful requests that honor the time of the person with whom you are speaking.
• Never make a disrespectful judgment in order to get your way. You may think you’re just “telling it like it is”, but insulting all your prospective employers with allegations of discrimination isn’t likely to win you many friends… and in a job market as small as the one in Utah, most people in an industry know many others in similar positions and word gets around about disgruntled employees.
• Never resort to an angry outburst to try to get your way. It’s abusive and makes people dislike you.
• Dishonesty is never positive. If you’re out of your depth, own that fact. I’d rather know that you know that you don’t know something than try to make something up and look foolish.

Practice Positivity

Now a few things to practice:

• Open each conversation with a new person with a smile, a handshake, and a polite inquiry about them.
• Focus on the positive things in your life when talking with others. Help them feel good about what you are doing and what you want to do.
• Ignore your failures in the conversation. If you must discuss them, talk about what you learned from the experience… not how unfair things are.
• Ask positive questions. Almost everybody loves to talk about themselves. If you keep the conversation focused on what you can do about a situation, rather than what’s gone wrong, you’ll find a lot of progress.
• If you must discuss the negative things in life, talk to your dog. He’ll look on empathetically and appreciate you scratching his ears while you make those odd grunting and growling sounds. Or keep a journal to vent. Don’t vent at other people, particularly not at people who you have any reason to believe might be in a position to help you in the future.

If you’d like more tips on how to ensure that you treat every contact with someone as a potential for a rewarding relationship in the future, I cannot recommend more highly the book by the Arbinger Institute, “Leadership and Self-Deception“. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it’s basically a fictionalized account of how acting in new ways can radically and permanently improve your life. It’s difficult to describe, but reading it and practicing the concepts — all of which are presented in an entirely non-denominational way, with only the briefest advertisement for the Institute’s corporate services — changed my life for the better, and I know it can change yours.

Summary

To summarize, treat each person you meet with respect for their potential, and if you must discuss others, do so with respect for them and an assumption of positive intentions. Avoid the conversation-wrecking behaviors of demands, disrespect, anger, and dishonesty. Focus on asking plenty of positive and uplifting questions; if both of you engage in this behavior, you’ll find you both have plenty of time to talk about yourself.

You can’t control your feelings.

You can control your actions.

Act positive, and the world will treat you in a much more positive way!

Getting out of deep debt isn’t easy. It’s a process that takes time, diligence, and attention to detail. You can do it by yourself, or you can find a lot of people willing to do it for you… for a fee. I’m going to talk about building a successful strategy for your own debt relief, and then touch on available options for those who can’t – or won’t – do it by themselves. I plan to talk about some tools I’ve used to help with this in the past, and some simple strategies to help you achieve your financial goals without additional loans, grants, or commercial debt consolidation program.

Paying off debts – particularly if you need help paying off payday loans and other high-interest loans – requires a strategy. The very first step, before you start shopping around for debt consolidation, is to know EXACTLY where your money is going and where it’s coming from so you have an accurate picture of your financial situation.

Step 1: Figure Out Where You Stand Today

If you’re married or cohabiting, that means the much-dreaded budget meeting. Grab a copy of your bank statement. Write down your income and how much you can expect each month. Then write down all your expenses, down to the last penny, that you incur each month. Even if you got into debt due to irresponsible spending, document it here so that you know the truth. If you don’t know what you’ve spent your money on, take your best guess. You’ll revise it over the weeks, months, and years it will take to get out of debt, and eventually you’ll have a very accurate picture of where your money is going.

It’s always better to know the truth. Even if the truth is painful to bear! If your spouse has a lot of unexplained expenses, prepare yourself for the worst.

Step 2: Learn How To Manage Your Finances

Now, I’m not LDS, but the LDS church publishes a free pamphlet called “One for the Money: Guide to Family Finances” that is really useful to get you started in your road to financial freedom. The pamphlet outlines a strategy for paying off your debts that is guaranteed to work if you follow it – no pun intended – religiously. The pamphlet is available as a downloadable PDF file, and if you’re reading this, you certainly have a web browser that will do the trick! I think the only negative aspect of the pamphlet is its intense focus on religious values to motivate you to budget your money. But the positive aspect is that it outlines a successful strategy toward eliminating debt: pay the minimums on everything except for your one highest-interest loan. Once that is paid off, then apply that entire amount to your next-highest-interest loan. My wife and I have applied this strategy for the past decade, and have successfully paid off everything except for our home mortgages on two properties.

It works. Use it, if you can. I can testify to its usefulness, and our lack of significant debt besides our houses is a key to our ongoing financial success.

Step 3: Use The Right Tool For The Job

If the above pamphlet doesn’t quite do the trick for you – if you’d like a system to get out of debt fast – then I recommend YNAB, or “You Need A Budget”. The basic rules of YNAB will give you a successful strategy to live within your means… and the price for the tracking software is extremely reasonable (less than $50). I’ve used his spreadsheet-based product before, and within a few weeks of using it you’ll see exactly where your money is going and where you need to reduce spending to get your credit card usage under control. YNAB lives by the Four Rules:

Rule 1: Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck. Live only on the income you earned LAST MONTH, with this month’s income in the bank.

Rule 2: Give Every Dollar A Job. Plan exactly where each dollar will be spent. If you think you “never know”, that’s part of your problem!

Rule 3: Save for a Rainy Day. Even the tightest budget can find some room to put away a few dollars to cover those unexpected – yet common – big expenses.

Rule 4: Roll with the Punches. You’re never going to be perfect with your budget. Keep adjusting over time to try to meet your goals, but don’t expect perfection!

I have no doubt that everybody can find a way to live within their budget. It may require adjustments to your living conditions, but making and following a budget is vitally important if you don’t want to go bankrupt! You don’t have to live paycheck-to-paycheck anymore once you start following some simple budgeting principles.

But what if your credit truly is out of control? What if you’re so deep in debt that, after doing the budget, you have no money left to live on after paying your obligations each month?

Step 4: Credit Counseling and Preparing for Bankruptcy

There is help available, and you should really avoid ads for out-of-state debt consolidation programs. Debt consolidation can be a nightmare if done wrong! The Federal Government of the US offers a list of state-by-state approved credit counseling agencies. These organizations will often negotiate with your creditors to reduce your payments or forgive certain debts so that you have enough to live on. If you think you might need to file bankruptcy, these organizations are a required stop before you’re allowed to do so. The fly-by-night Internet ad you found won’t do the trick… you’re going to HAVE to see one of these agencies. But realize, there are important costs:

1. Paying less per month means you’re going to pay more – a LOT more – in interest over time.

2. It’s going to show up in your credit report. Agencies that claim that there will be no hit on your credit report are usually relying on fraud – like a false Social Security number – to achieve their ends. Expect a HUGE hit and an inability to obtain credit from now on. If your budget is so bad that you’re considering credit counseling rather than the free or low-cost alternatives above, you may not care at this point, but it’s important to expect it.

3. There’s usually a substantial fee for the services of the credit counseling service. If they offer free credit counseling, they are usually making their money on the back-end: taking a fee from your payments before handing them over to your creditors.

4. Beware of “balloon” offers. They’ll suck you in with a very low payment, but at the end of a certain number of years – typically five to ten – you have a very large payment that you need to pay off, and a need to obtain new credit to finance it if you don’t have the cash to pay it off. With the hit on your credit history outlined in #2 above, you have a good chance of being denied a reasonable loan!

5. Beware of “variable rate” offers. They’ll offer you a very low rate at first to suck you in, but as payments expand over time often these very low-cost loans turn into an unimaginable nightmare to pay off.

You Can Do It!

Look, I think you have the skill set to do this yourself. Grab a copy of YNAB, grab that pamphlet for how to manager your money that the LDS church publishes, and figure out your strategy. You can do it! Credit Counseling – and “debt consolidation”, as bad of an idea as it is – is really your last stop before declaring bankruptcy. If you’re overwhelmed by medical bills, you can make a good case for declaring bankruptcy on that basis. But avoid those two options unless you really, truly have no other choice.