A few posts ago I mentioned how I’ve been getting into 4chan lately (for better or worse), and a thread sparked something in me. Someone posted (stupidly) how much money is in their wallet, and a thousand posts later, the thread is littered with 10-20 people posting cash laid out across their desk. Where they get said cash isn’t of interest to me but the simple fact that they have it is what inspires me.

Is it odd that I don’t necessarily worry how they made the money? I think I have the sources and ability to make it, but the desire and energy put forth is what I need to work on.

If you hadn’t noticed, I’m not too concerned with social habits of not talking about money. It’s in nearly every part of one’s day and it should be talked about. The post is more of a thought provoking message than a well constructed post - a collection of thoughts to get them out of my head and be able to come back to them later (most of my posts are like that).

I’m considering using my skills as a spidering/scraping expert to take it into more of a maintstream approach and offer my skills to my scripting company, Blast Scripts.

BlastScripts has been an inside company from the get go of DevBlast, my umbrella company. BlastScripts will eventually be a script depot for me to upload programs and other libraries of PHP code and others to purchase and/or download them for free, keep track of updates, etc.

Anyway, back to the idea of consultation of scraping. I’ve always been an avid scraper. There is nothing that I enjoy more than scraping a site of it’s contents. The process is always different, entertaining, and enjoyable. There is always something new around the corner to work against. The regular expressions that I have to come up with off the top of my head prove to work flawlessly (most of the time) and that is a reward in my thinking.

The only thing holding me back from providing such a service is the legality of such a service. Is it legal to provide a program that completely defaces a website and steals most/all of their content? Is content something that is copyright in general? I have no qualms with providing my clients with the ability toscrape any given site, but whether or not scraping is prohibited is beyond my stretch of legal knowhow.

I’ve got several sites already live and public, more so than I have before and it feels great. I have several venues to exploit and it’s my job to figure out a way to interlink them and profit even further.

I recently purchased a few books on C#, C++ and C# with .Net to build windows applications, something that I’ve always wanted to pursue but never put forth the effort/energy to learn. The possibilities are endless with the knowledge that I could obtain with the books that I’ve purchased, and I’ve got to keep that in the back of my mind when I come along the normal speed bumps that come in the road to knowledge.

Other than that, I’m going to continue pushing content sites  as that seems to be my skillset in this point of the game. Simply pushing large amounts of content will eventually work, won’t it? I’m hoping so.

I’m always happy to get client work, at least when I’m in need of money. However, naturally when I make money, I have an immediate need of said earned cash and it just ruins the good energy of making money.

I hate that everything in my life is about numbers and the bottom line, but when things get tough, that’s how I do it I guess. At least I worry about my future instead of my peers, those who work at remedial jobs and earn $350 a week doing nothing productive. At least I can know enough about myself that I can go out and make a living off the things that I’ve learned on my own (without schooling) and keep on the grind until I’m comfortable again. And, in that, I feel very safe about my well being. Now, if I were put into a situation where others relied on my ability to provide for them, I’m not sure if I could rely on that (at a security sake), which is why I’m trying to build up my assets and plan for the overall future.

I’ve got to keep pushing and pushing. With enough force, everything breaks. This drought will subside and I’ll be back in business.  Thankfully I’ve got a thousand ideas to pursue and all of them lead to my ability to take over each entire niche with my skills and background.

The skills that me and my friends have - you can’t teach that in school or a university - and that is something that I hold very important to me.

I spent about 30 minutes tonight filling out an application to YComb’s Summer 2008 Startup challenge. I don’t really care to discuss what I submitted as my project for their approval, but I think I wrote a fairly convincing set of ideas and my distaste for the lack of quality in today’s web offerings.

I doubt it’ll result to anything but I’m glad to have written something heartfelt and know that I really feel strongly towards making the online real estate (read: web space) better for the future.

Here are a few things that are new in my life that I can’t seem to shake (whether I want to or not) that seem to make my day just that more enjoyable…

Google Reader

I used to have a distaste for Google Reader because it seems so complex for what it’s used for - until I saw a short 15 minute presentation in one of my business classes on a guy’s usage of the site. The ability to quickly organize your feeds into several categories, quickly read each article, flag for later reading, and then never see the feed entry again (at first glance) are a few of the great things that I’ve come to love. With my current (read: old) homepage, Google IG, I look at the same headlines all day when I load up a new browser, go to check email, etc. I’m still trying to figure out what I can change my homepage to but still have quick access to Gmail. I’m not sure if I like having a Gmail bookmark in the top of the browser because it takes at least 5-7 seconds to load Gmail - just enough time to piss me off when nothing is in the inbox. Perhaps I can keep my phone nearby so I can hear the mail alert sound as a notification of new email. Who knows, we’ll see what finally comes as a result to changing over to Google Reader.

4chan

Easily the bottom of the barrel in regards to maturity and clean humor, but perhaps enjoying the site and interacting with other Anonymous people is exactly what I need to lighten up my mood when I can’t seem to grasp onto a project to work on for a while.  I could easily waste hours every night browsing, posting, photoshoping, laughing, etc., and have in recent time, but sometimes I’ve got to hunker down and just get my work done.

Business as usual

I’m starting to get back into the swing of doing client-based development work. My side projects, ownership of certain websites, etc. seems to take an unacceptable amount of time to come to fruition, so I need to pick up the slack and become more of an active job seeker than I have in recent time. I’m still trying to decide if selling off my biggest revenue generator was a stupid idea or smart in the long term decision. In an entrepreneurship sense I’m sure in a few years the latter will result as the winner (experience wins over safety any day), but struggling with everyday financial entities is certainly the most frustrating aspect of the life that I choose to lead. When I step outside of my head for a while and watch other business students ask inane questions regarding things that I personally think are a waste of time such as an internship with any company. When I say I step outside of my head, I mean that I question myself if what I’m doing and the way I think is the best course of action I should be taking on at this point of the game. Am I missing out on opportunities that could prove valuable in the future? Perhaps I should think over my actions, or inactions, more before they become out of reach.

Dealing with life

In the past few months it seems to be one failure after another in my life, whether it be in business, dating, experiences, etc. I’m starting to learn to keep my head up and perservere through any obstacle that is thrown at me. Yes, I go ballistic and worry over something that seems life threatening, but it seems that when I take control of the situation and mold it with my hands in the shape that I want it to be in, that is when I succeed in any problem. Obviously I don’t have that luxury in every corner of life, but when I have the option I seem to find myself taking that route more and more frequently. I’m learning to tell myself, when dealing with a problem in my life, “Okay, I don’t like this. What am I going to do/change to get what I want?” I think of this phrase when I feel down about something in my life that I wish I could take hold of and change into something better. I’ve only been doing this for a short time, so we’ll see where this takes me.

Knowledge, balance, and time

I’ve started to accept that I need to continue my persuit of knowledge, in more ways than just a professional education. A day or two ago I bought a Visual C# .Net book to get me started in programming Windows software (something I’ve always wanted to do but seemed too complicated). I think I’m going to take the route that I took when I learned HTML, and then PHP: start from page one, start reading, and control myself from diving in immediately into writing software. When I dive in immediately I’m fine for a few pages and something trips me up and makes me feel as if the next part or two are out of my league, thus kicking me out of the desire for learning something new. When I keep myself away from diving in too early, I start to understand the structure more and figure out where exactly things are going and not over extend myself into territory rich in uneasiness.

Balance is something that needs to be monitored on a daily basis. You have to pump yourself into not just work or not just play, but in all other aspects of life as well. Sometimes I find myself doing nothing but reading websites with my work open in the background, waiting for something to be completed. I then lie to myself and say that I’ve been working all day and somehow feel better about my day because of it. This might be why I moved myself to Google Reader instead of Google IG: so I can set my news and information aside and focus on one thing at a time. Quitting work for me is hard when I do this route of management because there is always something that needs fixing, needs additions, etc. It’s hard to find a stopping place in software development because you might forget what you were thinking of adding later or you might have forgotten to remind yourself to fix an obscure part of your code and it goes unfixed. However, when I do manage to quit laboring away, I am starting to feel the eagerness of doing something more enjoyable, whether it be browsing 4chan or just getting away from the computer for a while (working out, etc). I have to think of it as a reward to myself for being productive. It sounds obvious, but when you surround yourself with the ability to work, play, and relax, all in one place, it’s extremely hard to seperate the three. Perhaps that is why I find myself moving my desk around once a month so I can keep achieving a fresh backdrop to my screen.

I strive for not sounding so cliche when writing entries like this, but time management is extremely important to my life; whether or not I actually abide by it is a completely different story. I’ve only got such a limited amount of time during the day that I can utilize to make it more beneficial than simply throwing it away, so management should be a key component to my daily list of events.  On the other hand, there is more to time in my life than just the business aspect and respective usage of it… Getting over things from my past seems to work best when I throw an excessive amount of time between it. I eventually stop thinking about what happened and simply move on to different things. I focus my energy on more productive matters; even if it seems to lead to nowhere, at least I’m not devoting myself to something that is undeserving of my attention. I’m sure I sound like I’ve got a specific event in the past that I think about, as anyone does, but that’s neither here nor there. All I want to say is that time does heal and makes you a stronger person.

Even if everything in my life seems to have gone to complete shit, I still push myself to persevere and come out bigger and better. Perhaps that is the entrepreneurship that is inside me and, from what information I’ve gathered, has come from my grandfather as well. From what I’ve been told about him, I’m very proud to be a part of his legacy and hope to continue down the path he led, no matter what obstacles are in the road. Had he still been alive today, I’m sure he would be thinking the same thing.