I am a big wimp!  I do not run or jog when it is cold outside.  I just don't do it.

I'll hike or go sledding or skiing, but running just isn't what I do when its below about 55 degrees.  Actually, any colder than 65 degrees more than a few days in a row and I probably won't run then either.

So after sitting out most of the winter in the freezing area of North Carolina where I live these days (grew up in Illinois), I'm finally getting back to running as of today.

Yesterday, we hit Sports Authority and I bought the ugliest shoes I could find.  There seems to be direct correlation between ugly shoes and comfortable, light running shoes these days.

Of course I went through about 8 pairs of shoes to find the size for the brand that would fit this season and then find a pair that felt right.

I thought these shoes looked kind of cool actually (below) but they felt like I had just tied rocks to my feet.

Of course after buying the shoes, that pretty much means that you have to go running, so that is what I did.  Even took the kids running with me, which was a good excuse to run slowly since my middle daughter is only 5.

Now the next thing that I need to do is get to Wal-Mart, a place I hate about as much as the cold.  I obviously need a new razor.  My old one died a couple weeks back, and its time to replace it.

My old razor pretty much sucked since the day I received it as a gift and I've been longing for the day when it would bite the beard dust ever since.

This week I am wrapping up what has been a pretty good week all in all.  I almost think I can see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Early in the month, one of my largest customers was continuing to go through a financial melt down.  That led to a great deal of phone and email work on my part trying to get things patched up and on an even keel.  The customer is still 50/50, but as a result I have brought in a new customer, and almost landed a second that together will do a lot more business than the previous customer.

I had worked with my previous customer for months trying to help them recover (while payments to your truly stacked up and still have not been paid). 

Ultimately, I had to say 'enough is enough.'

Meanwhile, I was working on a Joomla implementation for a client in January about the time Joomla 1.5 came out.  We made the decision to go with the new version and that has proven to be a serious pain in the kiester.  Its not well documented yet and for the lack of a better word, it seems to be buggy.  Its possible that its not 'buggy' and just extremely poorly documented, but whatever the answer is there it is definitely a royal pain! 

My solution, work on some other work while the Joomla community figures it out! 

I contribute to a large variety of online communities, but I do not have time to figure this one out right now, so I'll let everyone else that does do the heavy lifting and I'll come back in later.  That's one of the benefits of open source.

This weekend, I'm looking to get caught up on my back log of articles.  I have about 8 inches of research to convert into some very serious articles (for lots of reason these will be important).  I'm hoping to halve the stack this weekend, and maybe spend a little time on the side doing some graphic design on a logo for one of the new customers, while they get their ducks in a row with their IT team in India that will be handing over the keys to the car to me when I upgrade their site next week.

Last night I jumped into the weekend by doing some major SEO updates 9 of my WordPress sites.  There was a lot of uploading and configuring going on and while that was happening (lots of mundane steps), I played Texas Hold 'em on line and made out pretty good until about 4 am, when I was up by $15k and lost about $10k. 

This actually marks a weakness in hold em that I am trying to train out of my system.  I need to be able to do 2 things:

1. When playing in a tournament and I hit fatigue, I need to discipline myself to play very tight.  I can play tight when I'm not tired, but when I get a little tired and I'm not self aware of the fact yet, I slip up.
2. When I am not playing in a tournament and just playing and I hit fatigue, I need to pack up my chips and stop for the night!

Possible Next Things

I've got a bunch of possible things cooking the next couple of weeks.  I need to get back to Atlanta to do a few things on my house, so I can list and offer up some Georgia land for sale.  Every time I think of that, I think of Bill Clinton saying and if you believe that, I have some land for sale.  That's about the time I remember his Whitewater scandal.

I may fly to Vegas tomorrow for one day at Affiliate Summit West also.  Still debating that one, it would be 48 hours of non-stop stuff with no sleep except on the plain.

Then there is SXSW.  I was planning to go but my non-paying customer cut a hole in my budget along with a backlog of work too!

So I guess we'll see where it all shakes out. . . Maybe I'll be traveling a lot!

Last night around 11:30 pm, after the kids and my wife had gone to bed, my work week started.  That has been a common kick off time for me for quite a few years. 

When I worked for the US Postal Service years back, I used to work 2nd and 3rd shit.  Back then, that was about the time I had lunch.

Later, when I went to work in corporate finance, that was the time of night when I would do heavy lifting in the form of complicated database analysis and project management.

Since I became a consultant, started my own company and then entered into the world of online publishing and blogging, it has now become the time of the evening when I kick off the articles for the week.

The great thing about starting work at this time is that you are usually relaxed after having a day or two off on the weekend.  Your mind is clear and it is easier to creatively attack problems and apply good solutions.

Last night, I put together a couple great solutions on several of my websites that instantly helped me start earning more money on those sites.  The 'more money' was the reason why I did it, but the creative solution was the thing that was the most fulfilling.

There's something about applying my mind, focusing it through the magnifying glasses of my eyes, and coming up with something that I have never conceived of before.  I personally feel that its rather difficult to come up with a completely original thought, but the more I work in and with technology, the more I think that it is possible.

So you my faithful reader, you my friend that have managed to read this far, I'd like to hear from you.  How often, if ever do you work on Sunday evenings?

Is it more fun to work on a Sunday evening as compared to say a Friday Afternoon, or a Tuesday morning?

How does it work for you?

Is there a specific day or time of the week, when you like to work the most? 

Sorry that last question sounds kind of flaky.  :)

For a couple months, I have had a goofy adsense problem here that has been making the site look less than smart. I do apologize, but I just figured out what was causing the problem.

I had FeedFlare activated in Feedburner (for those of you that have no clue what I'm talking about already, just scroll to the next article comfortable knowing that there will be fewer obtrusive ads on the site).

Somehow Feedburner, which was recently purchased by Google last fall, has managed to link adsense to feedflare and so Adsense ads were showing up twice on my blog.  In one section I could control what people saw in the form of ads, and in the other, I had no control at all.

It made it look like there were 2 ad sections running back to back and that meant at least a half page of extra scrolling for my readers. 

That type of exercise isn't good for your heart even

So anyway, I fixed it up, I haven't figured out how to completely remove it as that could also accidentally remove things like the email this button and some other useful tools on the site.  Google is bound and determined to get their pennies out of my site, but I guess in this case I won't complain too much as they gave me the site for free in the first place and they split the pennies with me too. 

Gee whiz, thanks Google, I need more pennies, that will fill up a jar nicely

I love this one, even though I can't look at the picture for very long.  I received this great viral email tonight.

Some people ask me, "what is a viral email?"

Answer:  Its basically something short of spam that gets sent all over the internet via email to everyone and their brother.  Often it is sent more than once, every 3-5 years even.

The Setup

Washington DC women were recently polled and asked if they would sleep with Bill Clinton.

Approximately 84% of women responded (with a margin of error of 3%) that

They would not sleep with Bill Clinton "Again"

I wonder why that is?

I was never a fan of the former President.  In fact bringing him back to Washington strikes me as something slightly worse and short of using a reverse colon cleanser on our nations capital.  I am positive that the area dry cleaners will be happy to see him return, while the NYC dry cleaners will morn the day he leaves Harlem.

I guess its a good thing that the former President does not reside in a Sharia law state or else they would probably stone him before sun down. . .

That said, these new Bin Laden Burkas are getting a little more sexy.

Batter Up, Its Bill Clinton batting .459 against blue material.  Burtha Bin Laden winds up for the pitch, he hits, he shoots (sports metaphors get twisted) he scores, she's a legend and Osama Bin Laden Cuts his own throat.

For a couple years now I've been doing some writing and sharing some experiences with stand up comics over at ComedySoapBox.  One of the most popular comics on Comedy Soap Box is making a break for something bigger and will be appearing on Season Six of Last Comic Standing.

His name is Adam Sank and fortunately he's wearing a shirt more often these days in his act.  Adam is a gay comedian and that factors into some of the perspective of his act like water fills up a damn.

If you catch the show, show him some love and support!

I wanted to see if I could remove the imagery of the movie Reservoir Dogs from the Song Stuck in the Middle with You. I liked the movie a great deal, and the song fits perfectly in the movie. I just wanted to see if I could deconstruct it a bit and build it back together into something else.

So I started with the music video from the band Steal Wheelers that actually made the song in 1972, the year that I was born actually.

I was originally inspired to try and make some statement about the role of social media in medicine inspired by an utter over at Utterz called Healthcare and Social Media It's Coming Soon.

So I went about trying to come up with a video response for this Utterz comment. I was thinking to myself, that I could just envision what would happen in hospitals and doctors offices when people started wearing video cameras that record everything all the time (they exist, cost $200 and record 4 hours at a time).

So any way as I was getting into the lyrics of the song, it kept moving further and further away from the topic of medicine and its evolution and seemed to go towards politics and the evolution of politics in the US. We are probably actually stagnant in the US with a bit of devolution in politics.

I originally intended to put about 10 images into the video, trying to make a video response statement to Healthcare & Social Media its coming soon, but then the images in number grew and I had about 50 by the end of it.

I liked the end result, although there are a couple images in there of people in hospital waiting rooms in the modern day, in foreign countries and from 100 years ago, that probably don't fit as well with the evolved theme.

The Steps to Creating a Mashup Video

So I had never put together a real mashup before. I'd taken video from cameras and put together the video with pictures and even put music or a sound track together. But it was typically something of a random slide show.

Downloading a video from YouTube and mashing it into something new was completely foreign to me.

Funny enough I had most of the software I needed as I had written a review and made a clickable mindmap of the software a couple months back, intending to do this then, but running out of time. The problem was that when I installed the software, it went on some obscure directory of my hard drive, and I couldn't find it again. So I had to go back to my own article and find the software all over again, and try out the ones that I liked until I could download the video, convert the video from .flv to avi and separate the audio from the video, pushing the audio into MP3.

I used AVS Video Converter, which I had previously picked up because it also converts DVDs or mini-dvds (from my camcorder) into digital content that I can edit on my computer. (AVI, MP4, MPEG, MOV, WMV and more). I grabbed the program which does come with a free trial -wrote about that here.

The article with the clickable mindmap has a number of YouTube video download programs on it. The tool for a PC that I found the most useful was VideoGet.

I tried TubeSucker, but it kept dropping the right audio track.

Now when I mixed it all together, I used MovieMaker (free Windows program that comes with XP and Vista). Its easy and free, but a good bit limited on the surface because they keep it easy. I'm actually preparing to upgrade to new software, just hadn't gotten around to ordering with an educational discount yet.

My wife is a teacher and I have kids in school so I qualify for lots of educational discounts!

I ran into an issue with MovieMaker. I had imported the video in originally in a windows media file format. This enabled me to mix everything in MovieMaker, but prevented me from burning it to a file so that I could publish it online.

AHHHHHHHH! 2 hours of work and I was stuck with a file I couldn't use.

So I spent about 2 hours trying to fix the file, but that just locked MovieMaker up until it crashed. Ultimately, I had to remake the whole thing from scratch. I knew the final format, so did this and got the video produced in about an hour.

I published it first on Utterz and then on Revver where I can earn a little money whenever someone is interested in clicking on ads from the video. Mainly though I like the final quality of videos on Revver, it seems less grainy than YouTube videos.

The only thing I wish I had done differently is the placement of the image of Sgt Osvaldo Ortiz. It was important for the song to be placed where it was, but the way Revver works, that was the image that shows up when the player is showing but not playing. It makes the video look a little more somber than really is.

OK, now the fun is over for the weekend, and I need to get back to work with my ghost writing gig focusing on mortgage lenders and home loans.