I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking lately, and reading, and certainly a lot of “doing”. I haven’t been spending much time writing, however. My thoughts flit incessantly from one item to the next, in a manner that would give me whiplash were I to try to watch them all whiz by. work-personal-life-guilt-pleasure-should-could-whatever — these thoughts often take over my mind.

The self, however, is not composed solely of thoughts, but is expressed by taking action and doing the things it most wants to do. For me, there are a breathtaking number of things I want to do. There are so many that I tend to pick up things to do at a much higher pace than I can actually process and do them well. This problem of overcommitment has plagued me my entire life.

When I meditate and settle my thoughts, I often come back to “What’s most important?” For me, “most important” cannot be defined simply as “things I am good at.” There are far too many things that I’m decent at, or “good enough” at, that were I to attempt to do something in every realm where I am “good enough”, that I would spend my entire life doing mediocre tasks and being bored by them. Thus, I had to take a step back even farther, and define what is most important to me, not simply to everyone else in the room at the time when I am making a decision.

In other words, I must simplify my life, and whittle down what I do to the things that I am absolutely the most passionate about, or else I risk being stuck in mediocrity and futile labor and being unable to pull myself out of that quagmire.

The purpose of this blog, in part, is to attempt to define who I am in a series of posts, each outlining a tiny part of my personal character. Grief, sorrow, and forgiveness have been a big part of this blog, but so have joy, excitement, and acknowledgment of those who have been there for me, and the answers I have sought.

That brought up another train of thought, and one which I’ve been very attached to lately, but which has also (sadly) been the one that has been preventing me from writing for the past 6 weeks. You see, instead of writing to ask something, I started reading, meditating, and thinking to answer the questions I had — and I had many. For a while, I had to take a hiatus and stop writing in order to listen, to form opinions based on the writings and teachings of others who seek enlightenment of the Self and Whole.

I’m back, and ready to share what I’ve learned so far.

First, I defined what was most important to me (personally.) These things included writing, the Internet, reading (books as well as blogs, and newspapers), finding patterns, and solving problems. I also enjoy being in charge and being my own boss…I’d find it difficult to work for anyone else. But most importantly, overall, I found I enjoy helping other people. Thus the crux of my current predicament — I love helping people and solving problems, but the quality of the problems I volunteered to solve was low (web development, for instance.)

I turned my attention to a slightly different focus. Knowing, then, what my motivations were and what was most important to me, what did I want to do? I know that one of my large purposes in this life is to help other people eliminate fear and overcome obstacles…to obtain goals previously thought of as impossible, and to influence people to change in a positive manner and thus leave a lasting impact on the world. Instead of a series of small, relatively unimportant tasks, then, I needed to focus my objectives and only say “yes” to those things that aligned properly with my Big Goals.

I started to clear things out in my head. I realized what my unimportant tasks were. A lot of volunteer work that I had previously performed needed to be completed and then filed away. A lot of previous things that I had said “Yes” to needed to be turned into a “No” or “Not any more” due to my changing life circumstances. I don’t doubt that this left a few hurt feelings, but I did apologize and made what was the most important step — the realization that I can never again say “yes” to these sorts of things, that if the request for help does not completely align with my Big Goals, that I have a duty to myself (and to the world at large) to say “No, I’m sorry.”

And life goes on… either the task gets done by someone capable, or it does not get done. In neither case, though, does it rest on my shoulders.

This may sound facetious to some of you. “How can you turn away people who ask for your help — especially if your skills align with their needs?” And the answer is simple — my life involves a call to action to help millions of other people. I can’t spend time doing web design or volunteer work for a small group if I could instead be turning my focus to things that help thousands or millions of others. If that still sounds bad to you, I recommend that you set bigger goals. There’s no reason you, too, can’t go out there and help millions of other people. But to do it, your life must be keenly focused so that every resource you have is turned toward that goal. Your most valuable resource becomes your time — so much so that you’ll need to hire layers of other people just to help you out. If you succeed, your success will be breathtaking. And if you fail… is there really such a thing as failure if you set out with a goal to help millions of other people, and only succeed in helping hundreds or thousands of others instead? Really? Here’s the worst that could happen — you only improve 1 person’s life. Your own. If you’ve put happiness in your own life, you haven’t failed.

So…now what? I have a couple more volunteer projects that I need to stop. I have a series of blog entries I need to write. But most importantly, what I must find is time. From having someone clean my house to having a personal assistant who can help me/Simpli do the tasks I don’t have time to do (such as filing papers), I must clear out my time so that I have time to do what matters most to me. Once those repetitive, menial tasks start disappearing from my horizon, I can start achieving bigger goals. As I do this, I expect to write more (after all, that was one of my Big Goals for 2007 — “blog more often.”) I expect to work less. And I expect that I will feel happier and more fulfilled, because instead of energy-draining labor, I will be spending time living my dreams and fulfilling my passions.

If this sounds too frou-frou to you, just wait…you’re going to see it unfold week by week in my life, and be able to change decisions about what you want to do with your life. Hopefully, this setting and meeting of Big Goals will encourage you to set bigger goals and be more motivated to live your dreams. That is, after all, why I am here.

This is a blog entry I’ve needed to write for a long time.

I generally try to avoid writing blog entries when I’m emotional. This time, I am emotional. In fact, the emotions started out as me being really upset at someone I’m close to not acknowledging me (or even acknowledging my existence.) Normally, when this happens, I go into this spiraling depression. I’m proud to say this time that’s not the case. In my anger and frustration, I (finally!) realized who I really am and what I want out of life.

As to FG (update: FG is part of his initials, in case you’re wondering why I call him that) Seth told me you’re still reading this blog. I hope you’re reading this entry. I have something to tell you, and I’m doing it via way of this blog because it’s important for me to put this out in the world. I’m ready to tell you that I’ve forgiven myself.

You see, a long time ago I really hurt FG — who loved me more than anyone ever has before. I did a bunch of shitty things because I was angry at how the world had treated me, and I was a kid who had not ever been acknowledged by my parents (or acknowledged in that awful “constructive criticism” way that was what my mom thought was love). I was so upset and so miserable from how I had been treated that I thought the only way to handle things was to treat everyone else like crap, too. And boy, FG, I did a number on you. I fucked you over big time.

It took me years to figure out who I really was. Now I know who I am, and I can tell what’s different. What’s different is that when shitty things happen in my life, I don’t feel a black hole in my heart any more. When I’m not acknowledged in the way I want to be, I don’t get destructive and lash out. I don’t feel this huge emptiness in my heart. Instead — and this is totally weird and not what I expected — I am initially angry, and then I feel a strong love. I feel love for those who acknowledge me and those who are there for me, and I can actually thank them. I pull them in for hugs and kisses and reassurance, and I know they are there for me.

Similarly, I hope to be the best friend for them and there for them when they are in need. I find myself listening a lot more. I find people GET IT. They are drawn to me because they know they can tell me things and I’ll listen, and offer advice perhaps, but mostly it is just that people are comfortable with me. Our clients tell me Simpli is a hugely different company than any other hosting company out there. On the phone with a client the other day, the client remarked “You know, Simpli sticks out like a sore thumb in this industry. We stick with you because of you. I have been in the business many years and I used to buy only on tech specs. Now I realize the importance of building relationships. That’s why I chose Simpli.”

In other words, I’ve moved my heart out into the open. I acknowledge that this has its risks. This blog and anything else I post can be used by those who are negative to construe me, or my company, as something negative because I put myself out there and make myself a target. But I take that risk because I realize the huge, HUGE importance of letting people know that there are real people out there is so much bigger than the potshots people take. I used to take potshots when my anger got the best of me. I used to snarl at people who were so nice. I made “nice” mean “fake” in my mind because I couldn’t understand how people could be nice without wanting something or having ulterior motives.

I’ve totally changed that perception inside myself. I’ve found that you create your world. If you want to create a world where most people are nice, and those who aren’t can be safely ignored, you can do that. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve ripped down my company and totally rebuilt it in the past 6 months. New routers, new switches, all new employees, new client portal, new IP addresses, new bandwidth providers. This absolutely parallels the evolution of my heart and my own personal journey to find myself. I’ve found that I define myself by how I help other people. Helping other people is my “heart goal” — that overriding value, above everything else, that makes me tick. What upsets me so greatly is lack of acknowledgment. I want to be acknowledged for what I’ve done in this life, both personally and professionally. I know I’m destined to make a huge mark on this world, and I’m not afraid of that destiny like I used to be. I just want to make sure those around me see it in me and really get it. It’s a tall order for someone to really get how much I want to change the world…not just change those around me, but to actually go out and help millions of people…personally.

It is these “down” moments I have, precipitated by those around me who can’t see that shining flame in my heart, where I find that my heart grows ever stronger, and my goals ever larger. It is incredibly frustrating to me that I can’t seem to find a partner who really “gets it”… but then again, my goals probably would overwhelm most people. *smiles*

Anyway, FG, since this post is for you, here’s what I want you to know. I know who I am now. My heart is filled with love and I love even in dark moments. You can look into my eyes now and see that I am that person you saw a glimpse of so long ago, and now I’m an amazingly strong version of that person. You know that I’m sorry for what I did, but what’s just as important is that you needed to see that I really have become what you saw — that what you saw in my heart was real. You also needed to know that the scared/angry part of my persona was gone.

It’s gone.

A long time ago, I described myself as having a 70/30 split between a vulnerable “inner side” of my personality and a hard outer shell. Those two sides have merged to form something unique. I’m still strong and aggressive. I have to be to accomplish all that I want. But even the strong and aggressive part is guided by an equally strong heart and desire to improve the lives of everyone I meet in this world. When things are going well, I am strong in ensuring that I am constantly moving forward, and when things aren’t going so well, I am strong in figuring out what went wrong and where I want to go next…guided by my heart goal of helping others, at all times.

I had to forgive myself for all of that crap I did in order to get to this point. I did, and while I’m still not proud of the things I did in my past, I know that my future is unmistakably bright. As long as I remember the love in my heart and continue to be guided by that, there is no limit to the things I can accomplish.

I wrote the other night, “Whatever it is you want out of your life, find it and commit to it and bring love and joy and passion to it…and be happy in those moments.” That is the way I live my life now. I know what I want, I’m committed to achieving it, and I’m not scared any more. FG, I think that’s what you saw in me so long ago. Now everyone else can see it too. 🙂

I had been waxing my legs for a couple of years, but I have a few problems with waxing. The main problems are:

1) Waxing is painful.
2) Waxing is expensive.
3) Waxing takes a lot of time (about 45 minutes per treatment.)
4) I was left with sticky wax on my legs and some irritation after waxing.

At $55 per waxing treatment, 4-6 times per year, for the rest of my life, waxing wasn’t a pleasant alternative. Neither, however, was shaving. Shaving was also time-consuming and, worse, was causing irritation and ingrown hairs — to the point that I couldn’t shave very often. Plus, shaving is just annoying. I also have a “treasure trail” of hair on my stomach below my belly button that I’ve always hated, and neither shaving nor waxing ever got rid of that to my satisfaction.

There was a small forest growing on my legs, so I needed to do something in order to feel comfortable wearing shorts. The answer came when I found out my chiropractor’s wife, Kathy, does hair removal treatments. Since my chiropractor (his name is Todd Bragg, and if you’re in or around San Jose, look him up) is awesome and I trust him, I decided to give the laser hair removal a shot.

My first appointment with Kathy was last week. She explained that I needed to shave before doing a laser hair removal treatment and did a couple of “test spots” on my stomach. I was surprised by how little it hurt. The laser hair removal practitioners usually describe it as a flash of white light followed by a zap/sting that’s approximately equivalent to being flipped with a rubber band. I wasn’t bothered by it much at all, however. It mostly felt hot.

Treatments are done approximately every 6 weeks since hair grows in cycles. Each treatment for legs+stomach runs $204 if I pay in cash or $215 to pay by credit card. Kathy said that it would take approximately 6-10 treatments to be completely done, but once the treatments are done, you don’t have to shave or wax for at least 20 years (during mid-life most people have a second hair growth phase which will require a few more treatments to completely laser away.) While $1200+ may sound expensive, consider that I was spending $55 per leg wax treatment at least 4 times per year. It doesn’t take very long to make that back up. Furthermore, it’s not the money I’m most concerned about, but my time. Life is short and I don’t want to deal with waxing, shaving, and ingrown hairs. One of my goals in life is to focus my time carefully so that I never spend time doing things I don’t want to do (more on that in a later blog entry.) Suffice it to say that the time and money saved by doing laser hair removal now will pay out many times over in my life.

Since the test treatment went so well, I decided to get both of my legs done (I’m doing the bottom half of each leg only) as well as my “treasure trail.” My first treatment was today and overall, it went really well! It took about an hour start to finish, with 40 minutes of actual treatment. Basically, the practitioner puts a small device over the area that is getting hair removed. The device does about 1″x2.5″ every time. You see a light flash (she asks you to keep your eyes closed) and then feel a heat flash. I noticed that my left leg tended to feel more “sharp” tingles and my right leg seemed to feel more “burn” sorts of feelings. Either way, it’s relatively painless and not nearly at the level of waxing. The most sensitive area was the back of my knees, which felt like someone jabbed me pretty hard with a fingernail. (I have lots of experience with this since I have two cats with claws. Cat scratches are way more painful than anything I experienced today.) Most of the time my legs just felt hot for a few seconds, and that was it.

I tuned out of most of it, put some chill music on my iPod, and listened to my own breathing, and by the end of the treatment I was mostly asleep and relaxed. The key for me was listening to my breathing…that way I didn’t anticipate anything and force my legs into a reflexive recoil. I had to really mentally focus for a while to get my thoughts onto my breathing and not onto “I wonder if this next one will be painful?” I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t very painful. Listening to my breathing and keeping my thoughts on the breathing and the beat of the music enabled me to completely tune out of what was going on.

My next appointment is in 6 weeks. I meant to take a picture of my legs today so I could showcase this on Flickr, but I forgot. Hopefully I’ll remember to take one next time so I can further track my progress. I should be able to see a noticeable difference even 6 weeks from now. We’ll see! 🙂

Recently Robert Scoble was complaining about how hard it was to add all of his Twitter followers as friends automatically. I figured it should be pretty easy to script. Well, it should be, but Twitter makes it unnecessarily complicated.

First, the Twitter API is marginally useful, but doesn’t let you actually do much besides passively read and post updates. I used the followers list XML and created a PHP script that snarfed the XML and put it in an associative array. My intent was to create a new followers page where you could check a box next to each follower (with a handy “Select All” button as well) and one-click to add those followers as friends.

Unfortunately, Twitter does not expose the login portion of the API, and just going to http://twitter.com/friendships/create/[follower ID number] without first going to the friend’s page redirects you back to your Twitter home page — even when you’re already logged in to Twitter! This is really broken — the Twitter API should let you work with their URLs.

Since Twitter’s API is completely useless for adding friends, and their interface doesn’t seem to allow for going directly to a URL to add a friend, I am stuck. However, I am happy to release the PHP code I wrote so that others can play around with Twitter’s API.

I grabbed the XML parser from a page on php.net — this is actually very useful to parse ANY XML document into a multi-dimensional associative array in PHP. My source code works. Right now it takes your username and password, sends that to Twitter, gets a list of your followers and displays them in a table, along with the correct link to add that friend (which, of course, doesn’t work because Twitter won’t accept it.)

It is my hope that Twitter will make their URLs and API much more useful in the future so that this sort of thing becomes easy. My script goes a long way toward making that possible on the client side, at least.

My source code
The XML parser I used

See the script in action! (Enter your Twitter username and password to get a list of your followers.)

This script is free to use, borrow, tweak, and hopefully will spur the Twitter developers into action and make them realize the importance of creating a better API.

An interesting synchronicity occurred today.

Let me preface this by saying that I read a lot of blogs. I spend hours a week reading blogs, and I consider most of them part of my work time. Blogs help me know what the trends are. Blogs help me know what our customers want (I read several of our customers’ blogs.) And most importantly, the really good blogs out there fairly often provide insights that I just wouldn’t have had otherwise.

This is pretty much what happened a few days ago when I read Tantek’s blog about human interface design. Basically, he stated that one of the reasons Twitter is so popular is that it only has one text field where you can enter anything you want and it’ll get broadcast to your friends. I am also powerfully drawn to the simplicity of Twitter (btw, I’m ericabiz on Twitter and you can click there to add me and follow me around.) The reason why people who are into Twitter are Twittering tens or hundreds of times more often than they blog is because blogging, for most, is a large effort: Log into your blog software, then click the create post link, then type a subject, pick categories (I hate categories) and then blog, proofread, blog, proofread, blog, proofread, and finally post. Then you have to watch for spam on your blog and make sure your friends’ comments aren’t getting marked as spam. Frankly, this is a large effort to go through even though companies like WordPress try to make it a lot easier. That means that most of the people who blog on a regular basis actually enjoy writing and find it rewarding enough to jump through the hurdles…like me. There are, however, hundreds of things I just don’t have time to blog about, or I can’t make long enough to fit into a blog post…so I Twitter them instead. This is a powerful recognition.

Jeff Lindsay, one of our customers and also a friend of mine, has also been blogging some really good stuff lately. In particular, I’m thinking of his recent post regarding open source web services. Jeff thinks virtualization is the future of web hosting, and mentions so in that post. I happen to agree, but in a long term, meta way, not in an immediately practical “I can host my web server on a cluster and it’ll be faster and cheaper than hosting it on a dedicated server today” way. (We’ve run the benchmarks, and with today’s technology virtualization is both more expensive and slower than dedicated servers. That’s not to say that won’t change in the future, however.)

Jeff also brings up utility computing, which is the trend that’s worried me most about hosting. Amazon has introduced their EC2 computing service, which allows you to buy all the gigabytes and megabits you want on an as-needed basis. That means Amazon and other large companies are gearing up to turn web hosting into a utility that you turn on and pay for as you use, much like electricity or water. This is good in some respects because the centralization of these services is lowering the barrier to create and distribute web services. But these services are also evangelizing that web hosting is about bits, bytes, and cost per unit. I feel strongly that the removal of people from any industry leads it down a path that we as a society don’t want to go down — that the more we dehumanize services, the more that we forget that we are, indeed, creating and distributing these services for other human beings. The more we make any industry all about costs, prices, and numbers, the more we lose focus on moving society to a better place together as a whole and helping other people, and that’s why I fight the trend toward making web hosting into a numbers game.

That’s getting pretty tangential, so I’ll get back to my point. The third fortuitous thing that happened was that I again picked up and began reading The Science of Getting Rich today. This book is highly recommended if you are interested in being rich by delivering value to others instead of by taking away or competing with others. It showcases a step-by-step method to having everything you ever could wish for in your life without feeling “guilty” that you have money and others don’t…and it shows you how to make others rich as well, so they don’t have to feel guilty or bad either.

Relevant quote from the book: “The normal desire for increased wealth is not an evil or reprehensible thing; it is simply the desire for more abundant life — it is aspiration.” Powerful stuff, and if you resonate with that sentence, I urge you to go buy the book and read the rest of it.

I had three things in my mind at that point: Tantek’s blog, and with it a realization that I needed to change Simpli’s website to make it much easier for those who need web hosting to order from us; Jeff’s blog, and a general agreement with his assessment of the future, but also a dissatisfaction of the hosting industry being turned into a numbers game of “who can deliver me the most gigabytes and megabits for my money?”; and The Science of Getting Rich, which (among many other things) states: “In so far as your business consists of dealing with other people, the key-thought of all your efforts must be to convey to their minds the impression of increase.”

That sentence hit me like a lightning bolt and shifted my perspective dramatically. It hit me so hard that I had to put down the book and start sketching out a new website for Simpli. What does everybody want? To be more successful! Why do they want to change hosting providers, or to start a new business which will need a hosting provider? To be more successful; to make more money; to serve their customers better! Then why is every hosting provider talking about gigabytes and megabits?! Why does our website say “100% uptime” on the front page? That’s a great thing, but it doesn’t convey to our customers what they really need!

So, do you know what our new website is going to say? Right on the front page, it’s going to say “We help your business grow and succeed.” And we’re no longer going to have categories like “Dedicated servers” and “Colocation” (although we’ll have links to those so people who are looking for something specific can find it quickly.) No, instead we’re going to organize it by business category: “Startup”, “Growth Mode”, and “Advanced.” And we’re going to offer an hour of consulting, either in person or on the phone/Skype, before you buy a hosting package from us, to make sure you’re getting the right hosting package that can scale with you as your website skyrockets to popularity.

Why? Because that’s what you want. You want to run a more successful business. You want to leverage the Web and email to make you more money and to make your customers happy by delivering them more value. And we want to help you do that. No more gigabytes and megabits on our front page. No more competing on price. We’re here to deliver you more value than any other hosting company out there, and we’re here to turn the slow slide of the web hosting industry into a numbers game on its head.

The new website will be up by April 1, 2007. I’m ready to make Simpli living, breathing proof that the world, and particularly the computer industry, is built on human interaction — on serving people — and not on numbers. In other words, I’m changing the world. Again.