Lets actually answer the question of how much is a million dollars? If you take a look at a single US $1 bill, it weighs roughly 1 gram. So a million $1 bills is somewhere in the neighborhood of one million grams, one thousand kilograms, or one metric ton (1.1 US tons). For those who don’t care about weight however, it’s about one million double cheeseburgers, one hundred thousand movie tickets, thirty-three thousand blu-rays, twenty thousand video games, and about ten Chevrolet Corvette ZR1’s.

So, it’s a good chunk of change am I correct? Of course, you’d all love to see multiple millions of dollars in your bank accounts, but the question of the day is just about one million, just one small million dollars. What would you do with it if you acquired it tomorrow?  The following is what my fellow Twitter and Pownce friends had to say:

acey612 @oubipaws probably the normal American dream stuff. Buy a house, and a nice car, pay off debt. However, I would keep working.

P0tat0head @oubipaws pay off my mortgage and buy another place

brundage @oubipaws Tomorrow never comes.

DrifterMama @oubipaws buy off bills buy a house oh and a vacation

joecwik @oubipaws Pay off my house and my parents house, then move.

MichaelYurechko @oubipaws Not invest it.

Alan Houser - Bury it in a can for safe keeping.

Guillermo Esteves - Get the fuck out of Venezuela. I wouldn’t even pack.

Shane Glass - Pay off debt and invest some, stash the rest. Oh yeah. A new house, too. Definitely a new house. And a new suit or two. And a surround sound system. And a new(er) car.  I think that’d be it.

Ben Burris - Pay off all my debt and save the rest for whatever is to come.

Jonathan Youngblood - venture capital!  oh yeah and buy a new laptop because some goatfuckers stole mine from my friend’s car. oh and probably a d90…and some mics…maybe some new drums. oh fuck yeah, i need a new guitar, too.

Small Rant!?

Before I continue, I need to rant for a second. Part of the reason for this post is due to some of the unfriendly emails I’ve received over the past 24 hours regarding turning a profit turning a time where others are in pain.  Before I say another word, I’m just simply going to need to come off as a dick for a second, and say “kiss my ass.”

Before I end up getting more emails and comments calling me out, let me explain something very simple and maybe you’ll understand.  Anything I do in life is not something than any of you couldn’t be doing, and more than likely, it’s something most all of you are already doing.  So when emailing me about how you are in pain currently over the economic situation, then to you, I say I’m sorry, but more than likely it is your fault.  Go get a better job, spend less money, cut up a couple credit cards, downgrade your car, etc.   It’s not my fault in the slightest, so please don’t try to play it off as such.

So What About Me?

Now with all of the above said, I enjoy trying to get more money because I see it as a personal challenge, not because I think I deserve millions of dollars or even want millions of dollars.  It is simply because it’s a challenge and if you know me very well, I don’t like things to be really easy and prefer to do something thats going to require a little more out of me.  I want to get out there, kill it, open a business, and make something better out of myself just simply so that I can say I did it!

So what would I buy?  How would I spend $1,000,000 if I acquired it tomorrow?  Would I help others or just help myself?  Let’s find out….

1.  Aston Martin DBS - This my friends is the definition of my guilty pleasure over anything else in this world.  If you had to ask me right now what is the one thing I want to have before I die, I’m going to tell you without any hesitation that it’s an Aston Martin.  To quote Aston Martin themselves, their cars provide power, beauty and soul and I personally just can’t find those traits in any other car brand.  (Total Cost:  $250,000)

2.  House - Yup, thats right, this is a second priorty in my life as I honestly don’t mind renting a house, but I would also love to own one at the same time.  Not just any house though, I want a roughly 1,500 sq ft home in the mountains of Colorado.  The reason for this is that I want to be able to sit outside on the porch, easily be able to go snowboard, let Megabyte play in the snow, and just relax in the cold seeing as how I hate warm weather.  (Total Cost:  $250,000)

3.  Investment - Investments are a must have to secure your financial future, so $100,000 would be spread across long term stocks, hedge funds (if stock market is down), mutual funds (if the stock market is up), and the remaineder in a high interest savings account.  Simple enough right?

So I managed to spend $600,000 on myself to secure my future and fill my dreams, but I have no intentions of ever giving up working as I honestly enjoy it.  But what about the rest of the money?  Easy Solution!  It would be given to my parents to take care of any debts they might have, get them a new house, and to pay for my little sister to go to college (their websites are under construction by the way).  Should their be any money left over after those items are taken care of, it would go to several charities that need it much more than me.

So in reality, I don’t want to be rich, I simply want the american dream where my house and car are completely paid off and my financial future is secure.  Could you really ask for anything else?

What about you though?  What would you do with one million dollars?

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“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience.”

Seeing as how yesterday (Monday, September 29th, 2008) was the largest single-day drop in history for the DOW, it might be time to start looking into what you are going to do with your investments.

There is this giant “bailout plan” going on right now and a lot of people are getting quite scared, but how are you feeling? Is it hurting your wallet? Did you empty out your 401K and investments? Are you prepared for the worse?  Most importantly, do you know how to turn a bad situation into a good situation?

What Twitter Folks Have To Say?

Phatlip12 said…

It’s kind of hard to tell at this point though I think we have some ROUGH times ahead of us.

Chrispund said…

right now I was tempted to withdrawl all my money from my Wachovia account and switch banks

but with it being a direct buyout it should be a seemless transaction. definitely a good time to buy wachovia stock though

im also hoping all this mess will help bring the housing market prices down in my area. young people can’t afford to buy at all

bowillis said…

young investors need to keep doing what they do. Older investors well they should be worried. Not enough time to catch back up.

What Should You Expect?

If the stock market collapses and no bailout plan is put into effect, it’s not going to be a pretty picture, but I think most of you can already see that.  For those who don’t quite have a grasp on reality, take a look at the following problems that could be caused:

1. A depressions that could be equal to or worse that the Great Depression.
2. Bank collapses in multitudes
3. Continued Unemployment and greater numbers of foreclosed homes.
4. Lastly, a worldwide economic collapse.

Buy, Buy, Buy! (Research, Research, Research)

By definition, I’m a geek, and by no means a financial expert, but I’m a hobbyist stock trader and I spend a great deal of time researching the market to see if and when a profit can be made.  Simple enough right?

With that said, what I don’t currently understand is the fact that day traders (and hobbyists) buy overpriced stocks everyday and are wasting money “because the market is up” as this is the normal.  No questions are asked as long as GOOG is going to go from $450 at opening bell to $475 by end of day.

Buyers never set themselves up with entry and exit points to maximize profits as they are afraid the market is going to go down very quickly and never rise back up.

The problem with that is now the stock market is down, and some are even predicting the DOW to go down to around 8,000 points or lower.  It’s by no means a great time to try and get a loan,  but why not buy stocks?  They are completely undervalued and you can sit on them while they rise back up -  Everyone runs from the stock market when it’s down, but it seems as if it’s the perfect time to buy, buy, buy!

Who Am I Researching?

After all of that is said and done, It’s up to you as an individual to decide on a entry price for a stock, to decide which stocks are best for you, and to decide when and how much to invest.  Right now, I’m simply taking my time and researching ten stocks (in no certain order) to see if they can help benefit me:

1.  Capital One - (Stock Symbol:  COF)

2.  Research In Motion (RIM) - (Stock Symbol:  RIMM)

3.  Amazon - (Stock Symbol: AMZN)

4.  Electronic Arts - (Stock Symbol:  ERTS)

5.  Google - (Stock Symbol:  GOOG)

6.  Starbucks - (Stock Symbol:  SBUX)

7.  Citigroup - (Stock Symbol: C)

8.  JPMorgan Chase - (Stock Symbol:  JPM)

9.  Bank of America - (Stock Symbol:  BAC)

10.  Goldman Sachs - (Stock Symbol: GS)

Wait… something is missing?

No, Apple (AAPL) is not missing, it was purposely left out of the list as there is no sure fire guarantee at the moment for making a profit.  The definition of a conservative investment is where everything can go wrong and you still won’t lose money. Apple isn’t yet priced that conservatively.

I would want to see them have a miss, and the stock get hammered, with the price going down to a conservative multiple of recession earnings. Then you can buy because short of another depression, the stock can’t really lose in the long-run.

In all honestly and to make it short….”fanboyism” isn’t justification for investing in a company.

10 Things You Can Expect From The Economy: [Via Consumerist]

1. A much less leveraged economy — Cash will be the thing to have.

2. More modest rewards — Less risk-taking means slower growth, slower appreciation of property value, etc.

3. A feast for bottom fishers — If you’ve got patience and cash, there will be a feast for you amongst the wreckage.

4. Fewer financial firms — Big banks are swallowing the smaller ones.

5. More government oversight of financial markets. — They’re gonna be watching.

6. But a revival of private financial firms — Kiplinger’s doesn’t think that investment banks are gone for good.

7. Simpler forms of securitizing debt — Nor do they think that the secondary mortgage market is gone for good. They say it will be back, but it won’t be as ‘exotic’

8. Greater scrutiny of executive compensation — Shareholders are annoyed. Very annoyed.

9. Higher taxes and/or a bigger federal deficit — Someone has to pay to run the bilge pump.

10. Higher long-term interest rates — You saw that one coming, didn’t you?

Parting Words…

In the end, the only THING that is going to be making guaranteed revenue from this horrible time is the media, and it’s best for you as always to spend time researching anything you do and not simply follow your gut.  ”5 o’clock is just swell” doesn’t sell advertisements, just try to avoid trusting media and only trusting yourself for a while.

Side Note: The only plus from this entire situation is that it looks as if the American public might actually get to see some truth come out about McCain.   It seems as his ratings are taking a huge hit by the bailout being denied yesterday and looks like it’s just helping get more voters over for Obama.

There is not a whole lot of advice out there right now that is going to help you calm down or realize that you’ll make it through all of this fine, but for today, I leave you with some tips I found over at Get Rich Slowly:

• Don’t panic.
• Tune out the media.
• Remember your goals.
• Focus on the fundamentals.
• Know your risk tolerance.
• Educate yourself.

If you’ve got any advice, stock tips, or recommended links, post them in the comments, if not, go signup for Scottrade (no aff) and kill it!

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.

Often times the problem comes down to the fact that you might not know or just might not understand the steps to get started, but pleading ignorance is no longer an excuse as you need to learn to kill it. The following is an outline of the basics I’ve learned for opening a business…

Getting Started

Every business, whether large or small, must start from somewhere and work their way up to the top. You’ve got to research information on choosing the business entity of your company (example: LLC, S-Corp, Partnership), develop a strong and effective business plan to help attract capital as well as display long term growth, and learn to protect yourself legally. Sounds quite daunting at first doesn’t it?

The decision to open a business for yourself is not something that should be taken lightly, but instead should be something you’ve heavily invested your time into and done a good amount of up front work to create a higher chance of success.

Make The $$$ Hustler

No matter what anyone ever tells you, money is what makes businesses go round, and you’ve got to try and get into orbit with all of the big boys. Just remember that when choosing an idea for your first (or only) business, do something you love, and then create a revenue stream from there.

Infusing capital into your business, filling out necessary paperwork to sell stock, and trying to obtain venture capital is all part of life as the ship’s captain. On top of this you’re going to need to find forms and strategies for keeping your financial books, including accounting methods, cash flow comparisons, and methods for finding balances and budgets.

Oh yeah, don’t forget that tax laws are an absolute bitch! These can really affect your business and you need to learn the basics including business deductions and IRS filings. Just remember, if you fail to do the things the law requires you, it’ll come back to haunt you and thats something you simply want to avoid at all costs.

Employees!

As your business grows, you’re not going to be able to maintain the business all by your lonesome and eventually you’re going to need to hire someone on board. The purpose of this is to help to allow yourself the time to help grow the business, but it allows some others to relieve some stress and still help you obtain your goals.

You’re going to need advice and tools for hiring employees, such as employment agreements, employee applications, and the questions to ask (or not to ask) during an interview. On top of this, you’re going to need to learn how to retain your new hires and motivate them to help build your company to the next level. What about benefits? Incentive plans? Stock options?

Now, what about those who don’t deserve their benefits and perks anymore and need to be fired. Do you know how to let them go? You’ve got to learn the strategies to avoid situations where an employee needs to be fired, but you’ve also got to learn how to properly handle the situation when the day comes (and it will come) when someone does need to be let go.

Lastly, in some cases you don’t need a full time employee, how do you go about hiring a independent contractor or consultant? What forms do you need for backing up the non employee status of these workers for the IRS?

Cover Your Own Ass (WYOA)

When you’re running a business, you’re bound to run into problems and bad stuff can be around every corner that could just eat into your profits. Are you prepared if you land in court or in jail? Are you prepared to loose several thousands dollars in court fees because you missed something simple?

There are just some legal issues you need to be aware of as a business owner such as how to protect your patents, trademarks, and other intellectual properties (IP), which can all be the blood running through the veins of your company. Protect your business at all costs! Not only do you have to worry about yourself, you’ve got to worry about your employees, their families, your investors, etc.

Market, Market, Market!

As I’ve said to many people before, you can never market your business or product to much! If you feel like you are marketing it to much and no one is interested, your obviously going after the wrong target audience.

But when it comes to a business, you’ve got to know the legal ways to market your business, how to pay for advertising, and how to publicize effectively. Do you buy press releases? Obtain a billboard? Where is your audience? How much is all going to cost?

As an example of genius (and simple) marketing, I was watching one of the news stations the other day when I saw a new company making high heels for babies. It’s an interesting idea, and a lot of woman out there would buy it for their babies, but how do you get the word out there about the idea? SIMPLE!

They sent several free pairs to the celebrities to wear during a couple award shows (I believe the Emmy’s was one of them) and now from what I’ve read, the shows are selling like hot cakes. Genius! You eat a little bit of profit to send them something for free, but you know there is going to be a massive return on investment (ROI) and thus justifying this plan.

Can you say the same about the billboard you just bought in the middle of nowhere? What about the $400 classified you bought in the local paper or YellowPages? Research and plan your target, then attack with full force!

Where To Go From Here?

So as I said in the beginning of this post, it’s a daunting task to open your own business and it can be quite risky if you’re not willing to put in a large amount of effort and time.

Should any of the above try to push you away from opening your own business though? Absolutely not! If everything in life was easy, everyone would be a millionaire, and we wouldn’t be having a 700 billion dollar bailout for our economy right now.

Just take the above, and do the same thing I’m doing, read anything and everything you can possibly get your hands on, and go from there! I’m no expert, but I’m putting in the time to make it work for all parties involved, and if I can do it, anyone can. Expect several posts over the next several months regarding running a small business and how to get it off the ground initially.

As a final note, if you’ve got a successful business and you have suggestions for the beginners, I’d love to hear them in the comments or even in the form of a guest post. Also, if you’re just opening a business, then please let me know and I’ll give you some free advertising to help you get off the ground.

Before I leave you for the day though, I would like to simply share the following tips which were sent to me by a good friend who has worked for several Fortune 500 companies and has opened three successful businesses of his own:

1. Don’t make unrealistic assumptions
2. Don’t underestimate the difficulty in opening a small business
3. Know Your Competitors. Know Your Market.
4. Customer Relations and Branding are key to success.
5. Don’t say that you’ll be bigger than Microsoft in 12 months.

Take Care Everyone,
-Nicholas

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.

As I was finishing the video, my mind was completely blown and I realized I’ve simply been overlooking the obvious - pleasures don’t come without working for them. Nothing is going to come to those who don’t chase after it and truly want it as it’s just not easy.

For me, in the past three years, I’ve managed to create several products and make some decent money them, but never did I truly enjoy working on them or think they would be a success. This honestly caused the projects to never get off the ground, be done half-assed, or even completely fail in some cases. This is absolutely not a good example of branding yourself or your company now is it?

My theory is that you need to think of the future just as the past with the lights on, and remember you still have the ability to change and correct the direction of your future. Remember this is a one shot type of deal where at the end of your life, that is all you’ve got and there is no chance for a do over. Are you prepared to be remembered as you are currently?

In my opinion, before you can really get started on a path to becoming a true success and finding happiness, you’ve got to define it all to yourself. By that I mean that you need to tell yourself what it is exactly that makes you happy and how you want to be remembered when the time comes. You want to be remembered as that guy who started [insert some future idea], then do it! “Smurf it up!”

Ultimately, at the end of the day, did you truly kill it or did you allow someone to steal your thunder because of some TV show, videogame, or other crap stole all of your time? To quote Gary, “Stop fucking watching Lost!”

As said above, set the scene in your mind as to what you love and convince yourself you can be successful, then prove to those around you that you really were capable. If you believe in something yourself, not only are you more likely to succeed, but those around around you will be able to sense your confidence and help.

Next, the biggest issue I personally have had to overcome though, especially over the past year or so with going back to a nine to five job, is that “I don’t have the time.” MAKE THE TIME! As said in the video, go to work everyday to support yourself and family, then come home, do the family thing, and bust your ass from 7pm - 2am (or whatever) to hustle and make your mark on the world.

Get out there, tell the world who you are, and let them know what it is that you can do to help them. Help create an image for yourself, create a community around your branding, and don’t let go of something so valuable. Once you’ve got one product out of the gate, that same community can help you create the next product and continue the revenue stream.

As another personal point of view, the other issue I’ve had in my life or I’ve heard from many other people is that it’s not easy to get the word out about your product and get a return investment quickly. Are you frickin’ serious? (yes, I’m directing that question at myself as well)

This is something Caesi and I were having a conversation about just this past week and it’s quite honestly amazing how word of mouth has evolved over just the past several years. Think back to the point in time where if you had an “revolutionary idea”, all you could do was maybe buy an expensive press release or tell your friends. Well how many people are going to find out about something just from you telling your friends? Maybe 100 or so if your lucky?

Currently, with your Twitter, Pownce, Myspace, etc accounts, look at the number of friends you currently have and how many people read what you write or say. You’ve instantly got access to thousands, scratch that, millions of people who can read what you write and can check it out. Did it suddenly become easy to market your brand? Did it suddenly become easy to reach people within a couple minutes time? It’s at your fingertips now just waiting for you to take advantage.

As an example, Kevin Rose made Digg a success because of the network of people he knew from TechTV/G4 and instantly everyone knew about the site - gasp - YOU CAN DO THIS TOO! Get your product/brand built, and get online and market it to anyone and everyone who will listen. If they won’t listen, give them a reason to listen. Network with people in your niche! It doesn’t get in more simple than that and if you’re not prepared to invest your time (not money), then you’re not cut out for running a business.

Concerning the money, let me get this straight, you want to open a website and tomorrow you want to be a millionaire who instantly flipped their website? Do you enter the stock market with $1000 and expect to wake up tomorrow with a million dollar return? NO!

Your need a business plan, whether for a blog or a company, on how to create revenue throughout the entire process, but also don’t create something just with the intent to flip it. If this is the case, then more than likely, you simply aren’t doing something because you love it, but instead for the cash return. Money is wonderful, but you should be doing something because you love and are capable of being able to live, eat, and breath your brand.

But back to the issue, you need a plan and you must have patience. Without both of those, you’re honestly doomed to failure and I know this from personal experience. Understand that if you want to build something, you need to be happy with working on it 24/7/365 without becoming an overnight success. On top of that, don’t let the bad days overcome the good days and cause you to be unsatisfied with an otherwise satisfying product.

Take what people say, listen to them, respond and interact with them, and at the end of the day, that’s more profit than you can ever make from flipping a site thanks to the community and the brand you’ve just developed which can’t be replaced by dollars.

So for me, I’m starting over tomorrow with the idea that I’m simply going to kill it from now on to become a better person and to create a successful brand. But what about you, what did you take away from the video?

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Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why.  Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don’t know why.

Before I even really get started with explaining this framework or why it’s become my new best friend, I’ve got to make a very up front and honest statement.  I ABSOLUTELY LOVE RAPID DEVELOPMENT! If something can be done in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes, then I’m all over it like a fat kid at a bakery.  How does CakePHP help though?

CakePHP (Cake for short) is a PHP framework, but not a set of libraries, though it does contains dozens of functions and methods that simplify web development much like libraries do. With that said, Cake waits on you to bake up some tasty goodness and extend its objects while adding your own customized resources and scripts.

With Cake, long gone are the days of individually scripting each and every function of each and every one of your websites. Instead, us code monkeys are able to use a bundled package of scripts, libraries, and conventions that are designed specifically for web development.  Make’s life easy right?

So in short - Frameworks make is so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you start a new project.  You’ve got a base to build upon, and it’s now up to you to decide how you want to build your project out.  Thus saving you time, money, and in some cases, it even helps you not loose all of your sanity chasing bugs!  Now, no one wants bugs in a cake do they? 

How Do You Get Started?

With Ruby on Rails, and this is going to be blunt, it’s an absolute bitch to get a server up and running efficiently for any sort of project in a short amount of time.  You have the ability to build out an application very quickly, but the time you made up from not writing something from scratch is now wasted on getting the server configured to actually serve the website to the public.  That is your goal right, to make the site public and build a community?

Now, with Cake though, it’s as easy as pie (no pun intended) and it’s PHP so you’ve always got tons of developers around the community to help you out if you get stuck.  Also, you’re already familiar with a LAMP server setup right?  If not, I’m sure you’ve got shared/dedicated hosting somewhere and it supports PHP.  So here comes the hard part though… Download CakePHP… and upload it to your server!

This is what your basic cake install looks like after uploading to your server:

.htaccess
app/
cake/
docs/
index.php
vendors/

The “app” folder is where almost everything happens in your Cake application.  It contains all of the controllers, models, views, layouts, and pretty much all other Javascript, CSS, Flash, images, etc files.  To make life even easier, if you take a peak inside the “app” folder, you’ll notice that everything remains organized into several subfolders to make your life easy.

The “cake” folder contains everything that helps to allow Cake to bake up sweet, sweet applications.  Inside you’ll find all of Cake’s libraries and scripts which basically means you’ll find a bunch of PHP files that contain all of the classes necessary for Cake to run.  It’s my understanding that as new releases of Cake come out, you can simply replace this folder without ever having to mess with your application outside of some possible tweaks in your code.

The “docs” folder should be pretty self explanatory, but just in case it’s not, the folder is filled to the brim with lovely documentation and change logs.  If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the documentation folder, you can always checkout The Cookbook (free).

Although I haven’t messed with it yet, it is my understanding that the “vendors” folder is to contain all non-Cake php script you intend on using on your applications.  This is a non public folder and should be used for pretty much only external PHP classes.  (if wrong, please comment and I’ll update this post)

Now, you have some basic understanding of the environment you’re going to be working inside of, but let’s not open up the software in your browser quite yet unless you want to see some errors.  Instead, let’s take care of the following first:

1.  Setting Up Permissions:

Although this might not be a requirement on your server, it’s better to have it fixed before Cake starts complaining somewhere down the road.  You’re going to want to give read, write, and execute permissions to the users as well as read and execute permissions to the group.  Simply put the following into your command line:

chmod -R 0755 /path/to/cakephp/folder

Now, there is a folder inside of the “app” folder labeled “tmp.”  By default, it’s permissions are set to 0777, but it is possible for to change to the server’s default permissions.  Just run the following command from your command line to change the “tmp” permission and it’s enclosed folders:

chmod -R 0777 tmp/

2.  Changing Your Security.salt Value:

Whenever a session is initialized, the server groups a set of requests together using a session ID, a database, or a cookie file (making me hungry - Cookie, Pie, Cake….).  Whatever the method your application is using, the idea behind the session is that the server can maintain a pseudo-connection with the user.  A good example is whenever you’ve logged into your favorite social network or web mail service and the site knows whether or not you are actually logged into the service.   Sounds really complicated right?

CakePHP makes this extremely easy, but you need to make sure your session string is secure.  You really wouldn’t want any users to mess around with session handling in effort to break down your application now would you?  To prevent this from happening (or to try and prevent this from happening), take a look at the “app/config/core.php” file and locate a line that looks similar to the following:

Configure::write('Security.salt', 'a1s2d3f4g5h6j7k8l90i');

You’re going to want to change the second section of that line (a1s2d3f4g5h6j7k8l90i) to something unique so that Cake has a good definition for creating hashes and other session variables.  You just need to fill that line with any alphanumeric string which should be roughly forty characters.  Once that’s done, just save the file and you’re good to go!

3.  Peanut Butter Database Time:

Before you can store or retrieve any data in a database, you’re going to need to tell Cake how to connect to your local MySQL database.  To do this, you’re going to need to take the “/app/config/database.php.default” file and rename it to “database.php.”  Once this is complete, you’re going to want to open the file with your favorite text editor and edit the file with your configurations as shown below:

var $default = array(
'driver' => 'mysql',
'persistent' => false,
'host' => 'localhost',
'port'=>'',
'login' => 'root',
'password' => 'root',
'database' => 'cake',
'schema'=>'',
'prefix' => '',
'encoding'=>''
);

4.  Time To Open The Oven:

So you are finally starting to feel like a chef and you want to open the oven to cooking correct?  Well in the past five or so minutes, you’ve managed to install CakePHP, configure the basics, and get ready to be on your way to create the worlds greatest cake - How does it feel?

If everything has gone according to plan, then you should be able to visit your initial CakePHP installation by opening the URL in the browser (ex:  http://localhost/cake_php/).  What you see should look something like the following:

Should you not be seeing something similar, then please post up your errors in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do to help you out in getting your installation up and running.

Error / Side Note: Simply unpacking the file seems to work fine under a MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment, but upon testing inside of an actual LAMP environment, the styling was messed up upon the initial loading.   The quick fix was to add the following to your virtual host setup for your domain:

<Directory /path/to/cake>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Do keep in mind, this needs to be going directly to the “cake” directory and not to the uploaded directory.  What this means is that if you uploaded files to /websites/cakeupload/, then you need to point to the cake folder inside of the cake upload at /websites/cakeupload/cake.

Also, I had to setup my DocumentRoot as the following as well:

DocumentRoot "/websites/cakeupload/app/webroot"

Summary:
Installing a new Cake application is a very simple process and requires very little configuration to get up and running quickly. If you follow the steps above, you’re initial setup should be good to go and you’ll be ready to start building applications in no time! Like I said though, if you run into any problems, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to help you out!

Over the next week, we’ll be building a wonderful little fun application with CakePHP.  Keep checking back for updates! 

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So it’s been a long year, but it’s been a year that has gone by very quickly, and it’s now at that point where I’m looking back at what has been accomplished and what will be changing over the following month(s). As far as this post though, it’s the official announcement of where I’m going and whats to become of this geek.

This Blog?

I’ve owned this website since back in 2004 if memory serves me correctly tonight, and in that time, it’s undergone many changes in regards to looks & feel, content, user base, etc. Always getting bored or chasing the almighty dollar, it’s never stayed the same for to long and this has bothered me for quite a while.

As I said in my first post back, it’s time for a change and luckily that time is now. No longer putting the focus on making a profit, but instead focusing on building a community, I feel that I can enjoy this website and not feel pressured to use it. Didn’t feel like blogging today? No problem! Traffic down today? No Problem!

100,000 unique visitors a day or 1 unique visitor a day, it doesn’t really make a difference any longer - if I can help just one person, whether it’s via free advertising, a linux tutorial, or just something I’ve said at some point, then I’ve successfully put my website to a purpose and thus making it all worth while.

Understanding your community, spending time networking, as well as learning and evolving as a group - that’s what I see as the underlying purpose of a website. Is there anything wrong with being John Chow? Not at all and I applaud him for his success, but it’s not for everyone, and if you choose to do something different, then you shouldn’t be looked down upon because of it.

In short, community first, profit second.

What can YOU, the reader, expect though in regards to a reason to come back to the site? The linux tutorials are going to continue to grow in volume, new wordpress themes, video blogging will become a normal occurrence, search engine optimization guides will be published, and it’ll just be a fun site. Don’t expect another John Chow rip-off, but instead, just my Outboard Brain.

You’re Moving To Texas?! WTF?!

Yup, that’s correct, and for those of you who follow my twitter or talk to me in person, you’ve been informed over the past couple of days that I will be moving to College Station, Texas next month. Why you ask? An offer was placed onto the table that I simply could not refuse as it’s a big step for me and will help build out my resume even more for the future.

In short, instead of working for one newspaper as I currently have been doing for about the past year and a half, I will now be working with a small team to help build out websites for several newspapers as well as helping to create innovative and profitable ideas in the industry. Having missed the “team environment” from working for the Department of Defense, I’m highly looking forward to the change and I’m honestly looking forward to new challenges.

Part of me will really miss Myrtle Beach and the people I’ve met here over the past several years, but it’s not as if I’ll never talk to these folks again. It’s just like when moving from Maryland to South Carolina, it’s an adventure, and you always get to meet new people and experience new things. Life is fun and yet life is short, so there is no point in sitting still in one place forever and never growing as a person.

So to Texas, I saw “Hello, World,” and I shall see you soon! You can go ahead and expect plenty of video blogging and pictures during the last two weeks of October while I’m traveling between South Carolina and Texas.

So no company then right? Noiseable is bye-bye right?

As things come about in life and decisions are made, plans change, and this is just part of moving forward with your life and part of evolution. Nothing ever stays the same, nor do things always work out the way you planned them, but this doesn’t many that a bump in the road is a death to an idea.

Noiseable is not going anywhere, just changing business plans in a new direction. Simple enough right? The initial goal was to create a umbrella company to own & operate all of our projects as well as “chase” after web design clients in Myrtle Beach, SC. The end result was suppose to be opening our own office in the end of 2009, and thus leaving my current employer, but this is no longer something I see myself doing.

Instead I would rather move to Texas, grow with my current employer, and use Noiseable simply as an umbrella company to operate all of my personal projects and domains. What projects you ask? Funny you should ask because they are going to slowly start trickling out over the next couple of months. Some are very niche targeted, and some others are very open to anyone.

Just keep in mind, community over profits. That’s my (our) goal with every project that’s developed and marketed to all of you guys out there in the internet world. If you have a project by the way, and you need some free exposure, just contact me and I’ll hook you up with some free advertising. (Speaking of free advertising, if you’re ever in Myrtle Beach, SC, make sure you check out my buddies website for some places to check out in the area. The Hot Spot MB)

Is that all you’ve got?!

Yuppers, thats all I’ve got. New job promotion, new blog, new company, and a new beginning - sounds like a pretty good plan to me, but now I’ve got a question for YOU. What is going on in your lives? What excites you the most for the remainder of the year? New Job? Newly Married? Children? Same old, Same old?

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.

“Your potential is unlimited.  Aspire to a high place.  Believe in your abilities, in your tastes, in your own judgement.  Image and perceive that which you wish to be.  Back your image with enthusiasm and courage.  Feel the reality of your “new” self; live in the expectancy of greater things and your subconscious will actualize them.”  -Brian Adams

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been looking for the right time to retweak my blog, my online presence, my offline presence, and truly work on becoming something other than just another name - well guess what - that time is now!

An online (and offline) presence often times feels like you’re forced into a certain image just because [insert name here] is your idol, but luckily, imitation doesn’t create success (more on this another day).  Taking many chances, learning from the best around the world, being able to stand up for yourself, and have a good time, all until you die because it’s a beautiful ride is success.

With that said, from now on…. this blog is my beautiful ride…  and all I have to say for now is “Hello, World!”

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.

Having been a Time Warner customer for several months now and honestly not having any problems whatsoever with my high speed internet or my digital cable, I wasn’t expecting any issues when moving into the new house. However, I couldn’t be any more wrong if I tried.

In this week, I’ve had everything scheduled out so that it was easy to get everything accomplished in a short matter of time without any real conflicts or problems to arise. With that, my brand spanking new Mitsubishi 1080P 57″ DLP TV (which is awesome by the way) was set to be delivered today (Friday) along with my entire living room suite. This meant the logical idea was to try and get Time Warner Cable to come reconnect my cable modem and digital cable box on Friday as well.

So I called Time Warner Cable on Wednesday (Jan 2, 2008) and it just so happened that their earliest appointment would be on the same day my items were being delivered (Jan 4, 2008). This would be an all day appointment and I would need to be around the house from 8am - 8pm just in case the technician shows up at any time. This all day appointment either required for an entire day off from work or a change in schedule; so I chose to work a night shift and spend the entire day at home just so I would not miss the technician. No money lost, just time spent at home unpacking some final items.

I arrive back home around 8:45am and was honestly expecting the technician to show up sometime in the morning as that’s usually when they come take care of me in the past. So when 11:30am came around, I had a couple things out of the house to take care of if possible, so I called Time Warner Cable (866-892-7201) to get a status update.

The gentleman I spoke with after sitting on hold for almost thirty minutes told me that he could not give me an update and that I should stick around the house until 8pm if I did not want the technician to skip over us. His only other recommendation was to put a sign on the door saying “Will Be Back In 5 Minutes,” but he could give no promises that the technician would wait around (within reason and completely understandable).

So I chose not to leave the house and just wait it out knowing that what didn’t get done today could always be done tomorrow and that the cable needed to be hooked by up for business and entertainment purposes.

At 2:46PM, a local technician in the Myrtle Beach, SC area named Donald left me a voice mail stating that he was trying to get a hold of me and “we would reschedule for a day better for me.” I had left my iPhone upstairs to run downstairs for a few minutes to prepare for the TV and furniture to be delivered, but I did call back Donald at 2:53pm.

We made it clear to Donald that we would be around the house for the rest of the day and even made it very clear as to where the house was located. Better yet, to show that he knew where the house was, he even stated the name of the apartment complex on the same road as the neighborhood I live in…but this is after telling me has tried calling me multiple times and left several voice mail’s during the day.

Already irritated for being called a liar when I stated that there were no missed calls or voicemail’s from him, he stated he would see me later in the day and would get the services all setup and configured.

Come 6:30pm, I’ve still not heard anything from Time Warner Cable, Donald, or anyone else and I’m starting to get worried that this is not going to be taken care of before the 8:00pm deadline. So we call up the customer support phone line, sit on hold for 35 minutes, and then get to speak to a woman who yet again is swearing I’m a liar.

Donald put in a report canceling the service order due to lack of response to multiple voicemail’s, phone calls, and overall attempts to get in touch with me. The woman on the other end of the phone (whom stupidly I forgot to write down a name for) bluntly stated that the technician would not lie about something such as this and there was nothing they could do except reschedule the appointment, but she would try contacting dispatch for “shits and giggles.”

She was going to contact dispatch, and if we heard back from her or anyone else, it meant that it wasn’t successful and that they would need to reschedule. 7:17pm rolls around and we get a phone call stating that we would have another All Day Appointment on Tuesday (Jan 8th, 2008).

Upon getting off the phone with her, I call Time Warner Cable back again in hopes of speaking to a manager as I’m highly irritated for wasting an entire day sitting at home for no purpose and then getting put off until Tuesday?! After sitting on hold for another little bit, I get to speak to a friendly gentleman named Quinton who stated “no managers were currently on duty.”

Quinton did supposedly send an email out to the dispatch manager as well as the local manager, a woman named Cindy, and said I would receive a phone call to get this matter taken care of as soon as possible. It’s now 10:00pm, no phone call has been received and I’m getting more and more upset as the night goes on since this is just putting a lot of things on hold.

I’ve got to go pick up my new puppy tomorrow afternoon, but you can be sure I’ll be at the Time Warner Cable office speaking with a manager as well as getting his supervisors contact information so that I can file a complaint

In short, Time Warner Cable Customer Service - YOU SUCK!

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.

(In Alphabetical Order w/ Author’s Notes)

Askimet -Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template.

All In One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress Blog.

Comment Relish - Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘thank you’ relishing type message to users when they first comment on your weblog.

Do Follow - Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments.

FeedSmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.

FlickRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site.

Google Sitemap Generator - This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

iPhone / Mobile Admin - A plugin and theme for WordPress that automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch.

iPhone / Mobile Theme - Gives a mobile-friendly admin UI to browsers by user agent, using a plugin architecture. Includes support for iPhone/iPod-Touch.

Optimal Title - Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.

Recent Posts - Displays a list of the most recent posts.

RSS Footer - Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.

Show Top Commentators - Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one)

Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Wordpress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

WP-Cache - Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system

Wordpress Contact Form - WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+. The plugin was originally developed by Ryan Duff but has been modified by Doug Karr to require a challenge question and response to fight spam as well as some other features.

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.

Side Note: Highly recommend you check out YouTorrent, it’s a compilation of searches across all of the torrent search engines.

For those of you that match the above description, you also more than likely do not like having your torrents downloading constantly on your desktop/laptop and you’d love a way to simplify this method correct? The solution is an php application for your LAMP stack that will handle all of your torrents for you!

It’s actually quite simple, you install the application and from anywhere in the world (as long as your server stays connected to the internet) you can access your items in queue, add more torrents to queue, and check your status of torrents all via a nice web interface. INSTALL TIME!!!!

Acquire Install File and Prepare For Installation:

#wget http://www.torrentflux.com/torrentflux_2.3.tar.gz
#tar -xvzf torrentflux_2.3.tar.gz
#sudo mkdir /var/www/torrents/
#cd torrentflux_2.3/html/
#cp -r * /var/www/torrents/

Preparing MySQL Database:

#mysqladmin -u root -p create torrentflux
#cd sql/
#mysql -u root -p torrentflux < mysql_torrentflux.sql

Open Configuration File:

#sudo nano -w /var/www/torrents/config.php

Change Configuration File For Database:

$cfg["db_user"] = “root”; // username for your MySQL database
$cfg["db_pass"] = “password”; // password for database

Give Proper Permissions

#sudo chmod 777 /var/www/torrents/downloads/

The Outboard Brain of A Geek - Visit the author for more great content.