Since I’ve started working at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and getting steady paychecks, I’ve 6 month bad credit loans and become conscious of my cash flow. I want to be more financially responsible and grow my wealth. So I went to the Barnes and Noble bookstore and browsed through aisles. Found this bestseller and bought it. Man, I really learned a lot from this book—-common sense, advice, and wisdom make up the most part of this book. The book explains that being rich and being wealthy are not the same thing. It’s “Income vs. Consumption.” You may be earning more than 100k (only 5% of all Americans earn more than 100k) but you spend on a lot of things (consumption), such as 60 inch tv, fancy house, 2 or 3 different luxury cars, pool, and so on. These prevents you from becoming wealthy. You may look “rich” to your peers but inside, you’re really not.

The book has a formula of how wealthy you should be. (I left my book at home so I’ll look up the formula again) The big key to become wealthy is to “live below your means”. That means don’t overspend your income earning and try to have the widest margin between spending and saving as much as you can. The less you spend, the more you can save. Then your money begin to accumulate and build wealth. That’s all there is to it. But we are in the capitalism world and we’re surrounded by marketing—billboards, tv commercials, even competition with your peers who just bought a brand-new car or a big screen tv.

It also talks about Offense and Defense. We have to defend ourselves from those marketing pitfalls. Offense is accumulating wealth while defending against spending on items. I learned more about taxes and why people are always trying to avoid paying taxes. I realize that the government really takes a big chunk of your money (approx. every 30 cents of a dollar goes to the government), so the best you can do is to minimize your income taxes.

To do that, start investing in tax-deferred accounts such as 401k, TSP (Thrift Savings Plan for those who work for the Federal), IRA (Individual Retirement Account). Your paychecks will be deducted first before tax is charged. I plan to invest in these accounts as soon as I build up my savings account first (for emergency).

Finally, if you’re 25 years old or less, like I am, USE YOUR AGE AS YOUR ADVANTAGE because the younger you are, the more you are able to accumulate your wealth over time. So that’s what I’m gonna do. Start investing early and live below my means. That’d be a struggle for sure and takes some time to become used to it. My goal to be financially independent before I become 50. :-)

You know the famous logo of Fedex, right? The first three letters are in blue/purple, the last two orangish. You’ve probably seen it a countless times but do you know that there is something more to the logo? Look at the logo again and more carefully. See anything? No? Look at the empty space between E and X. You’ll start to see the shape—yes, that’s right, an arrow. I discovered this by stumbling on one of the billion web pages and this blog talks about the man who designed the logo for Fedex. This logo has become one of the most recognizable logos in the world, along with Mcdonalds, Nike, Adidas, IBM,, etc. The logo was conceived when the founder of Fedex wants something strong that can be seen from five blocks.

When I see the Fedex logo again, I’ll always look at the arrow, not the words.

Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

*wheezing* I’m a regular visitor to one of my favorite websites, Gimzodo.com, and it tracks any latest gadget and is updated daily (it’s a blog website). It keeps me abreast of new technology stuffs that are coming out everyday. If you own a xbox, you’re in a luck. Xbox is arguably the easiest system console to mod. Why is that? Because it’s based on a PC system. People are able to crack the xbox open and simply flash the BIOS. Bingo, you have an modded xbox that can play any kind of vidoes, MP3s, and can be a server to store files. I installed a 160 gb hd drive into my modded xbox. Now, this link, http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~ranma1/mac_install.html, you CAN install a fully operating system, Mac OSX, onto an modded xbox! I’ve decided that this will be a project and I will attempt to install Mac OS on my xbox. Can’t wait!

My own long-awaited website has finally come into existence. Today’s the first day I uploaded my website. Pretty soon, my website will be viewed to millions around the world (yeah right). I’ve been delaying and procrastinating to get this done and uploaded onto the Web. It’s not 100% completely finished and probably will never be. Rome wasn’t built in one day so it’ll take time to populate this website to make your visit more worthwhile.

Anyhow, one of my goals for this website is to experiment some ideas that I think will be proven useful and one day, thousands of people will be using my idea! (yeah, right too). Another reason is to use this to communicate with colleagues, friends and my family. So far, this has three pages—home, portfolio, and blog—and in the near future, I’ll add more pages like photo journal, weather, news, etc. I guess that’s all for now and I’ll post more in the future. Catch ya around.

All morning I’ve been working on php to retrieve the latest post from the blog.html to the front page since I don’t want to put all entries on my front page. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I mean, I have an idea of how to do it but wasn’t able to figure out the codes right till I found this page that was really helpful. I want to give credits to the man who shared the codes, http://www.fluidthoughts.com/howto/php/content_syndication/. I was about half way in the codes and this page basically answered my other half problem, which was to capture the line number and keep going till the last line number that you want to parse.

Now, it’s working beautifully but one more thing remains to be solved, which is to tell the cpu to select the latest post in the archives folder. Right now, the filename is hard-coded. Hope it wouldn’t take as long as this one.

As I push my website closer to a “final production” version (meaning ready for public viewing), I have an idea that I want to add weather information to my website. You may ask why do I even want to bother putting weather info if there’s tons of sites that have it, such as The Weather Channel, Accuweather or rather, find it out in the newspapers? You do have a point but do you really want to type zip code or city and state everyday in the input box to get the weather forecasts you want?

Now, you’re thinking “Well, I use cookies to remember my preferences.” Only if you don’t mind sharing your personal information to the websites and besides, do you really want to see those ridiculous ads that appear next to your weather news everyday? I don’t think so too. That’s why I want to put weather forecasts on my website without even bothering with flashing ads or typing the zipcode. The place to do that is to firstly download a file from this weather service website, www.xoapweather.com and then configure the code to get your weather info. I’m doing that now and I’ll post again once I get it working and explain how. :-)

This morning, I decided to add a calendar to the front page, and found a popular script made by Dale Ray of www.corantodemo.net. The script can be found there and download for free. Pretty easy to follow and very editable. Then I customized the size, look, and font of the calendar. It looks pretty nice and simple. Later, I’ll try to see if I could link the dates to archives. Now, I’m going to really have to complete my website and set up a photo journal, so I could make better use of my brand-new sony camera that I was lucky enough to exchange it for my old sony camera under warranty at Best Buy. Then I’ll probably fiddle with the overall look of my website till I am satisfied, which probably is never. From time to time, I’ll add some more features to make it a bit more advanced than just a simple blog setup.

I’m back at work after a pretty nice weekend. I can see why they call it Blue Monday because it sucks to be here! Few workers are here, due to AWS (Alternate Work Schedule) that allows them to take one extra day off if they work nine hours shift in the two weeks period. I’m supposed to be working on Excel VB project, adding more features to the programming. But I need to see how it works first, so I’ll ask a co-worker first. I guess I’ll prolong it till afternoon.

Remember when I said I decided to use Blogger instead of Movable? Well, I learned a few more things about Blogger. It’s like once you set it up and get it running, you’re on your own. If you want to have an add-on, you’ll have to find around in the Internet for a script. Blogger doesn’t provide one for you. Movable already has a nice calendar script that comes with the installation. Also, it gives you more control over your blog, like you can look at the database and you log in from your own server, instead of Blogger’s server. Now, I’m trying to find a calendar script for Blogger and configure it myself. I’ll still keep Movable as it is still a nice blog tool.

Now I realize Blogger doesn’t have Calendar module add-on, so I’m looking for the codes in the internet. MovableType already has one and I’m thinking about copying some codes from there to here since the entire blog is on the same server and I know Movable Type sends variables to the cgi-bin, then get echoed back in html format. Will that work? hmm…

In this past week, I’ve been working on my new website that would include a blog. At first, I decided to use movable type as I heard a lot of things about them and a lot of people seem to be using movable type too. I had a bit of trouble installing everything but managed to get it to work.

My first impression was that I thought it was well-constructed and nicely designed. Then I added a navigation bar, which required many edits. Everything seems to work well except for one thing. While it gives you a sense of “software enterprise”, where you could see everything, it is not a quick edit blog. For me, I’m very fussy on tiny things and if I see something out of place, I quickly edit it, then re-post to see the changes. Movable Type is not designed for something like this and it’s more of a group blog with multiple users or someone who doesn’t have a remote access to Unix server. Which was why I decided to look elsewhere to see other options and the first thing came to my mind is Blogger, now owned by Google. I should say that I might be biased because I’m a fan of Google and has an email address with them. Also, I was aware that Google has redesigned the whole blog and I must say that they have taken it to the new level. Everything was installed in less than 5 minutes and only took me a few minutes to customize my own template and I can quickly edit it. If you have an access to Unix command on the server, then you can very quickly edit pages such as style sheet and see the changes very fast. That’s what I like.

So, after this post, I’ll migrate everything to Blogger but will still keep movable if I happen to need their services. I’m going to create a photo journal, my daily blog in home and tech blog in portfolio.

—tranmission ends—–

I’ve just basically copied this from the homepage and created another blog for tech talks, like site changes and explain some of the tips I found on the Internet. Most likely, I will rabble about my frustrations while designing this website. After I get everything set, I’ll add some of my programming work that I have acquired in my classes at RIT, my alma mater. This will be also where people can look at my resume, my skills, ideas, all related to my work. I will also add links to useful tutorials, good tech info, etc. In the homepage, it’d be more of a journal and what did I do during the day and my training workout. Next, I will set up photo journal so I could make a good use of my brand-new sony camera 5.5 megapixels. Well, I hope I explain the differences between these pages clearly.

—transmission ends—

Another repost from Movable Type

Like I said in my previous post, I’ll be back. Not much work has been done as I’ve been thinking about what I should put on this page, with layouts. I’m thinking of putting the search box at the top right under the navigation bar but I’m not sure what else I should put up there. Using movabletype is pretty cool, can be complicated at first but now I’m getting the hang of it.

I think I see some bugs and probably will upgrade to its latest version, like deleting entries wouldn’t work and I have to go directly to the database and manually delete unwanted entries. Also, I wonder if there is a way to edit this index page on the fly inside the server rather than having to go the templates menu and edit within the browser. I also want to add RSS feed news somewhere here, maybe on the side or under this body. The real reason why I decided to do this is to keep my skills intact and I’ve never had a complete website before; only half-completed or or a mock project for my courses at RIT. Alright, I’ll work on this page a bit after I submit this. G’day.

This is the repost of my post in Movable Type blog.

Dang, it really does take a lot of time to edit this whole thing to a desired perfection. I finally got the navigation part to work properly and style sheet to cooperate with the web browser. There are still many things I’d like to add. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in one day. I plan to work on this website daily and when it’s almost ready, I’ll send this to the domain page, which is www.ke5ter.com. Now I’m gonna have to stop working on this and start catch up on some real work before the end of the day. I’ll be back.