This was my FIRST trip!

You don’t have to go there to make it work. That’s one of the great things about the Philippines.

While I was there for 2.5 days I recorded quite a bit of video of my observations and experience.

I then sent all the (HD) video to one of my GUYS (whom I hired because he spoke english) and he edited it and put this video together (he really didn’t have other skills except english when I hired him 4 years ago…now he can do anything!).

16 minutes of learning, treachery, kidnapping, disaster, running out of gas, and just good fun!

If (WHEN!) you get a chance to go and meet your GUYS, please take it. You’ll have a blast, and your relationship with them will change for the better forever.

Since I was on a roll with my blog, I thought I’d also talk about the most recent technology that changed my life.

Night light…
Heated Seat…
Heated Water…
Pressure Control…
Heated Air (For after…)
Settings for Him, Settings for Her…

It’s Perfect!

We were playing Apples to Apples the other night and the green card “Perfect” came up. My wife, knowing my experience with my new toilet seat, put down the card “My Bathroom” and I instantly declared her the winner.

You can see more here:
Swash Intro
and
This one’s really funny (warning…you’ll see some bum’s)
I bought mine here (It’s significantly cheaper than anywhere else online).

Enjoy!

Fortunately, I had about 16 different backups of them…so it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

But, what if that just happened to you?

What if your hard drive failed?
What if Windows just went crazy and won’t boot?
What if your computer just failed and you can’t turn it on?
What if you got a virus that wiped out your data?

Would you lose all the digital pictures of your kids? Would you lose years of work? Home movies? Contacts? Excel Docs? Bookmarks? Emails?

My hard drive that just failed was less than 6 months old.

This was probably the 8th hard drive I’ve had fail in the past 8 years.

HARD DRIVES FAIL!!! It’s only a matter of time…PERIOD. Every hard drive WILL fail.

This post is about being prepared for that.

If you’re not making regular backups of your computer, you are literally playing Russian roulette.

So, let me tell you the things I do, the things you can do right now to take care of this so you can sleep better at night:

1. Use Mozy. It costs $5/month for unlimited automatic backups. You set it up initially (which, shouldn’t take you very long because it will automatically backup lots of documents for you) and then it goes to work. Every day it backs up the stuff that has changed on your computer since the last time it made a backup.
You MUST do off-site backups! Mozy accomplishes this for you automatically. You never have to think about it again.

2. Buy a 500GB external hard drive like this:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/857763
or even:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/856410
(**Note**: Both of those links go to fatwallet.com where people have found a great deal on something.)
Most large external hard drives will make automatic backups of your computer for you. They come with software for it.

Now, you have an automatic backup that happens every day that’s attached to your computer. If your computer fails, you can immediately restore your data.
If your house burns down, or floods, or your computer gets Kool-aid spilt on it, you also have a backup online that you can download (mozy).

Doing both of these things will take you less than 1 hour, and you will be protected against data loss.

3. Now, how about your website? Do you back that up too?

Oh, your hosting company makes backups for you?

WRONG!!!

Don’t ever trust your hosting company to make backups for you. They don’t do them as often as they say they do, their backups are rarely complete, and I’ve seen them screw up backups multiple times.

I use rsync to make backups of my web hosting accounts.

I use RIBS to manage what rsync does (rsync is an exceptionally complicated program. RIBS is a php script that will run rsync for you and gives you ton’s of options). This is something that would be a perfect task to give to one of the guys you hire in the Philippines to have them implement for you (or maybe someone on elance?).

I set up RIBS on a $6/month hosting account, and it backs up all my other hosting accounts. I set it up to back them up every 8 hours.

4. Do you backup your cell phone? Why not?
Look at this:
http://lifehacker.com/software/cell-phones/backup-your-cell-phone-data-with-bitpim-174785.php
Here’s how I do it on my blackberry. I use Funambol to sync my contacts to ScheduleWorld. I do this because it can happen over the air, so I don’t have to plug in my blackberry in order to back it up.

5. I use Flickr.com to do another backup of my digital pictures and videos. It’s $25/year for an unlimited account, it’s a great backup of my pictures and it puts my pictures online for easy sharing, and they have good tools for easy uploading.

There are 3 keys to remember in setting up these backups:
1. It has to be automated. If you have to do it yourself, it won’t get done.
2. It has to be reliable. Make sure you have multiple backups.
3. It has to be regular. Don’t make backups once a month. Imaging losing a whole month’s work.

Yet…the whole point of these things is that we’re going to put off doing them until the new year comes.

And, since you don’t start something on a Tuesday, this year we’re going to put off starting our new habits until Monday, January 7.

So, a month ago, you decided to procrastinate losing weight because there was something special about January 1 (well, now January 7 because that’s a monday).

And 2 weeks ago you decided that January 1 was a magical day when you would work on making money outside of your current job, or you would be more patient with your kids, or you would be a better person.

January 1 doesn’t have any magic. That’s why new years resolutions almost always fail.

Procrastination is bad. And generally that’s what a resolution is. It’s something we’ve procrastinated, and something we knew we were going to procrastinate until the new year.

What happens if you need to lose weight in July? You’re going to get fatter until January 1? That really stinks.

I don’t do new years resolutions because when I realize I need to change something in my life, I make a big effort to change it today.

If I need to lose weight (which has happened a few times), I stop drinking chocolate shakes at 9:30 at night today. If I need to stop spending so much time on email, I close my email browser today.

Of course, I always write these things down in my todo list and email them to myself.

Make your new years resolution for 2008 to not need to have any 2009 new years resolutions. Resolve to change your life “today”, every day this year. You’ll have a much more productive year if you do.

After reading David Allens “Getting Things Done” and having his system change my life I have stumbled upon/created a system for personal productivity that uses technology to make me more productive.

If you’re not paying the $20/month to be able to do email from your smartphone, I think you’re wasting the biggest productivity tool you have. I’ve always said that outside of being a phone, most pda/smartphones are just toys. They look cool and sound great, but in the end, they’re just eye candy. Toys to play games with in your down time and keep people’s contacts in.

Here’s my podcast of How To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Million Dollar Tool instead of just having a phone and a toy.

Or you can play it here:

The website I use and talk about in the audio is http://tracks.tra.in.
I also use Google calendar.

Here is the php script I use to email myself the todo’s.

Here’s a video of instructions:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=816501744180957431

[tags]gtd, getting things done, gtd online, blackberry, smartphone[/tags]

The archive button in gmail is great in that you don’t need to delete messages anymore. Instead of deleting, simply archive. 2.XX GB is a lot of space.

However, being able to save messages you don’t know how to categorize isn’t the best thing about the archive button.

The best thing about the archive button is how it changes the mental state of email users.

One of the biggest problems with email is having to decide what to do with each email. It’s so time consuming. It’s also a major brainpower consumer.

Not any more.

The archive button can be used to say:

Get this email out of my face, I don’t want to deal with it.

or

I don’t know what to do with this email, so just get it out of my inbox so I don’t have to think about it.

Mentally, it allows you to get your inbox back again.

It allows you to get rid of emails, without having to figure out if you should delete, respond, categorize, group, filter, …, …, an email.

It allows you to think about more important things than a stupid email that isn’t going to help you in life.

If you haven’t read Getting Things Done yet, you need to. It will change how you think about what you keep in your head.

Email is a major contributor to thought garbage (the dumb thoughts you keep around in your head, trying to remember stuff or thinking about unproductive things, things that aren’t going to help you in any way) and the archive button helps get rid of it.

I’m not sure google really realized how effective the archive button was going to be. For me, it’s so effective, that I’ve turned my inbox over to someone else to filter my mail before I see it. I can let someone else safely archive all the emails that they think I shouldn’t see.

If they get it right, great. I don’t have to see the emails I didn’t want to see.
If they get it wrong, ok, that’s fine. The emails are still there. I just have to look at “all mail”, or search for the important email (if it’s really important, it’l get through to you).

If you’re not using an archive button, you should be.

It’l free up your brainpower to think about more important things.

He talks about going on an information diet. Not reading the newspaper, watching the news, reading blogs, talking on the phone, going to meetings…

I decided a few months ago that I was going to do this. I wanted to JUST work on my business and on making money.

Not that I don’t think that being part of society and being informed is important, but for me, right now, getting my business running in an automated way is more important.

And I have succeeded at it.

It took a few months.

But, after a few months of hard work and separating myself from stuff that just distracts from what is really important, I have things running to the point that I can now concentrate on the stuff I want to concentrate on.

For the past 4 months I haven’t blogged. I haven’t read other people’s blogs. I haven’t worked on stuff that doesn’t make me money. I haven’t really gone to meetings. I stopped going to the UVEF luncheons that were fun, but a waste of 4 hours of a day.

I have participated in a weekly mastermind group with some brilliant internet minds and it has been worth every minute of it.

My point in writing this is that I think that sometimes we get too caught up in the popular things people do. The problem with this is that the reason they’re popular is because they’re easy. Easy things don’t often lead to the successes we want.

It’s also much easier to do good in this world when you have money and time to spend.

I hope to write some of the insights I’ve gained over the past months at some point. No guarantees. I’ve seen a lot of good…I’ve seen a lot of bad.

I’ve seen that if you really concentrate on the most important things to get done, you can make a lot of progress towards the things you want to get done.

Stop answering email as an excuse to why you aren’t successful!

Read Tim’s book.

When I saw it, I immediatly identified with it because I have seen the “law of attraction” in my life over and over again. If you seek out good people, good people will seek you. If you look for certain things in life, they’ll find you.

Since I haven’t blogged for a while, I thought this would be a reasonable way to get back into the swing of things. The secret dvd is worth watching. You can rent it at blockbuster.

While it alone won’t change your life, the principles they’re teaching are good. (There’s also a really good lesson to be learned from the whole movie)

[tags]the secret, the secret dvd[/tags]

6 inches!

IT’S SEPTEMBER 16!!!

Help me out a little!

After a little bit of moaning my wife asked me:

“Did you miox yet?”

Mioxing to us means mixing up a batch of extra strong water using my miox water filter and then drinking it immediatly. I love the miox filter because it will kill anything, supposedly including a lot of viruses.

Normally you’re supposed to mix the solution according to how much water you’re purifying and then you’re supposed to wait 15 minutes before drinking it. When I “miox” I mix the solution twice as strong as I’m supposed to and I drink it right away. The thought is that it will kill whatever is in my stomach that’s making me sick.

Sure, it probably also kills all the good bacteria in my stomach, but they’ll come back, and it’s worth it to me to try to kill whatever else is there.

So far it has worked two of the three times I’ve done it.

Today wasn’t one of them!

If you’re into emergency preparedness or anything of the sort, the miox water filter is a must have.