Todd's Blog

Hi, I told you I was going to re-post some of the "good" articles from my old blog. This one was originally posted on Valentine's day, and was fairly well received. If you didn't read it yet, hope you find it helpful ... I usually get most of my marriage and relationship advice from my friend Lin’s blog. But, seeing as how it’s Valentine’s day and all, I thought I might share a few little nuggets that I’ve picked up over the years. I’m not on my first marriage. Ana and I had both done this previously. To be honest, I’m not sure whether that makes me less, or more, qualified to offer advice on making it work. I hate to say that my first marriage was just a “test” or a “learning experience”, but I can say unequivocally that I get along so well with Ana to some extent because of the lessons I learned when I was in my 20s. :-) I’ll start out with the most important one first … Banish the phrase “how it should be” from your vocabulary. Your marriage (and really life in

This is one of the last pictures I took before we left Hawaii: I mainly wanted to post this picture up here so that I have a something pretty to look at while I build a few required pages on this new blog. But also, when I previous posted this picture on my old site, Sire from the Wassup blog had asked that maybe I could post something about how I made this image. Well, since this blog does have "tips" in it's name ... Here's a little secret for you. Good photography is not only about having a nice expensive camera (which I do), or having a good eye; what most people don't realize is that a lot of the magic is actually in the post processing. Here's the image above as it looked straight from the camera: It's not bad, the colors are okay, but it's definitely nothing to write home about. Unfortunately, at the time I processed this image, I didn't really plan to be doing "tutorials", so I didn't save a PSD with all the layers. In th

My Success with Todd blog is officially D.E.D ... dead. I killed it. This is a lesson I should have already known, but some old dogs never learn new tricks. A person who only knows just enough coding to be dangerous, really shouldn't be playing around with php code that he doesn't really understand. Whatever I did, it messed up not only the code, but the database ... to the point where I was getting "not enough memory" errors. That scared me enough to just suspend the domain, and set this blog up instead. (I don't want to lose my whole reseller account). Anyhow, the news isn't all bad. I do have back-ups of many of my favorite posts from the past 2 years. That being said, rather than just restore the database, or the xml file to this domain, I think I'm going to use this an opportunity to actually do my blog "right". Make sure I have, and keep, valid code. And re-write my posts with better titles, and content. Over the coming weeks/months

So what exactly does it mean to be "rich"? Is it a specific level of income per month, or per year? Is it when your net worth (assets minus obligations) reaches a certain pre-defined threshold? Is it a "lifestyle", that may or may not have anything to do with how much money you actually have? To be honest, I really don't know exactly how to pin down a really good definition of rich. One thing's for sure though, it sure does seem like most of us spend an inordinate amount of time and energy obsessing over the idea of BEing rich some day. Here's something to chew on ... What if we are already rich , but don't even realize it? What if being rich, while still involving money, has nothing to do with exactly how much you actually make? Here's my definition: You are Rich when you have Freedom From Money . Think about that for a second ... It could be argued that the financial crisis our country is currently undergoing was caused by people with a lo

Whew, it's been a busy week ... We've been unpacking boxes for the past 3 days. But it's all good, last week I got a nice surprise. We'd been looking at a few houses out the local community surrounding Ft. Hood, and even saw a few that we might like to rent. Well, the military has a rule that you're supposed to check in with the housing office before you sign a lease. So, like the good Airman that I am, I stopped by. To make a long story short, instead of giving me information about leasing in the community, they offered us a 5 bedroom house on post. We took it. So for now, our new "home town" is the Comanche II housing area on the western side of Fort Hood. It's a big house, probably more room than we actually need. There is a park/playground almost right outside the gate of our backyard, as Jasmine (6 y/o) is pretty happy. And both the elementary and middle schools are within walking distance ... although at .7 of a mile, Johnathan might argu

... at least that's how the song goes. We've been here in Texas for almost 4 days now ... and we're already on our second hotel room. I won't go into too much detail here, but basically don't always believe those reviews you read in the google local search results. The room was "ok" ... but not exactly quality ... and when several people who are from a place tell you it's probably not safe to go out after dark in that neighborhood, probably a clue that you need to find a new place to lay your head. The good news is, the hotel we are in now is about 200% nicer. And once the weather warms up a bit, there's a pool out back to help relieve the kids boredom a little. We've done a little bit of house hunting, but can't really do any walk-throughs until tomorrow. We found a couple that we like ... so far this one: Diana Loop is on the top of our list. We also made a new purchase. Picked up a TomTom XL GPS. This is a WAY COOL new toy. An

It's been a good start to the week out there in the blogosphere. I just wanted to take a quick opportunity to share some of the best of what I've been reading ... First, Jack Humphrey just released the newly updated Authority Black Book 2008 . I read the first version of this book back when I was just getting started with Blogger. At the time, I really didn't understand about half of what I was reading. But, the parts I did understand set the foundation for where I am today with my blogs ... and through the course of several additional readings, I eventually figured out most of the rest of it. This new updated version contains all the great lessons of the original, and expands on them. If you're all interested in Web 2.0 and/or Social Networking , Authority Black Book 2008 is a must read. The second nice surprise so far this week was today's release of Build a Niche Store V3.0. I've been using BANS on a couple of my domains for about a month and