I am not a person that likes routine.

In fact, I have been known to say that I hate it. I don’t like the idea of being predictable. If flows counter-intuitive to the way that I see myself. Even though I am always looking for ways to improve myself, building a new routine is not something I place on my list.

Then by happenstance I heard it phrased a different way.

Develop a rhythm for your life

Rhythm is something I can understand. It doesn’t feel predictable like routine, instead it feels more like comfort. That I can do. And that has been my attempt over the past week. I can’t say for sure that it is going well. My plans always seem to get dashed. But I can say that the concept of building and sticking to a rhythm to my life is soothing( I know….I couldn’t think of a better word that actually expresses how I feel).

I am not the only one who feels this way, check out this...

I didn’t know much about this group until recently. In fact, I had only heard about them once before, as they were recommended to me by a mentor in Denver. “I think they have one in Houston, you should look into that…”, she told me a least a couple years ago. As usual, she was right.

I was lucky to have stumbled upon them at the Startup Career Fair. Since I started my freelancing career, this has been a great source of knowledge and networking rolled up in a bundle of learning experiences. Now I am going to be an organizer for the group.

I am looking forward to where this is headed. This may be a train that takes me from freelancer to full blown entrepreneur (in time of course).

I recently stayed in a hotel. For me, this means that I get to watch the cable tv that I normally never see (unless this is already available to me on apps via my apple TV), Thanks to my TV binge I found a new show to obesses over called Naked and Afraid.

What I love about this show is that it is about survival. Two strangers get dropped off in a hostile place, and have to survive with no food, water, or clothes. Intense is not enough to describe it. I could go on about some of the crazy and amazing things I have seen on this show, but what I find so interesting about this show is what it can teach you about life,

Lesson 1

No matter how much you prepare, nothing can really prepare you for the real thing

The people who come on this show are not ametures. They are extreme atheletes, primitave skills experts, blacksmiths, ex-military, herbalists, survialists. They are in many ways more...

Over the last few months I have learned a lot, grow a lot, then had my mac destroyed and rebuilt while losing my hard drive.

Now that I am in the recovery phase of that chapter of my life, I am ready to start taking on new things. It just so happens that as I was scrolling through The Great Discontent, a site I just discovered, I saw this….

and I immediately signed up.

The next words echoing insider my head were,

“I should do 100 Days of Code and Design”

I am still not quite sure what I am going to do…but it will be something like working on projects every day for 100 days and seeing what I can create by the end of it. Maybe this is what happens when you spend your saturday at a JavaScript conference?

Either way, it is my chance to actually start doing, the whole live life as an artist thing while I continue on my path to being a better developer. It sounds so romantic inside...

Otherwise known as….how I spent my Saturday, and the most re-tweeting I have done in one day….ever(hence the hastag).

This was a JavaScript conference in Houston. It was awesome for so many reasons. But, the one that stuck out to me the most was the focus on learning to understand and relate to others. I have listened to many talks on YouTube discussing elements of code, how to improve as a developer, how to incorporate new tricks in your developer toolkit, etc…

These have all been influential, but not nearly as inspiring as some that I heard on Saturday.

Since I was volunteering, most of the talks I heard were through a speaker in the front while we helped check in attendees. I was surprised to hear words like, art being used to describe becoming a better developer. It caught my hear because I am constantly trying to find ways to be an artist and a scientist. I was surprised to...

In the few months since I have completed The Iron Yard and started freelancing, I have become keenly aware of time.

Time has been my friend, and my enemy. I learned so much in such a short amount of time. I have grown so much in such a short amount of time. And now I have become quite protective of that time.

When I was working, corporate style, time was something that I never had enough of. Now I see that so much of it was just wasted. Wasted commuting to work, wasted in meetings that would inevitably end with the request for a future meeting. There was also a lot of time waste at work. In many cases, I could have done my job in less than half the week. But I had to show up everyday in order to be seen as a good employee. There are many things wrong with this picture.

Now I am learning about new ways to think of my time. It is important, as a freelancer, that I put my time into...

I haven’t had the chance to write in a while because my computer has been gone. I didn’t lose it, It didn’t go on strike, it was destroyed by water (like the great flood).

I spent a week in turmoil hoping that somehow Apple would save my hard drive since I was not sure that everything had been backed up. When I finally got a look at my remodeled computer at the genius bar, it was my worst fear realized—-everything had been erased. And I did not have a backup.

I was reminded of a Sex and the City Episode where something similar happens to Carrie’s mac. She is lamenting about having lost everything she ever wrote (I feel ya there).

Carrie: “Miranda I’m freaking out. What if everything I have ever written is gone?”
Miranda: “When was the last time you backed up?”
Carrie: “You know….no one talks about backing up. You’ve never used that expression with me before…ever! But,

I hate to admit this, but I watched a lifetime movie today.

To my credit, I watched it on youtube. Surprisingly, this movie really affected me. There is a part where the main character, Ally, talks about the prejudiced against fat people. She says,

“The reason why people are so bias is because you won’t wake up and suddenly be another gender, race or sexual orientation. But anyone can become fat. And that is what we are all afraid of”.

To make matters worse, I watched it after a horrendous bike ride. I thought that I could just have a nice bike ride through my neighborhood. I haven’t done that in forever. What ended up happening was me almost hyperventilating while I tried to make my way back home.

That was tragic, and eye opening.

Then I watch a movie about how hard it is to be fat. And now….I am on a mission. Its not just about not being fat, its more about not wanting to be...

This post is a part of blog series on my 2015 tech, anthro, and business reading list

“In spite of her depression, Mirabelle likes to think of herself as humorous. She can, when the occasion calls, become a wise cracker and buoyant party girl…The trust is that these episodes of gaiety merely raise her to normal, but for Mirabelle the feeling is so exceptional that she believes herself to be standing out..”
–Shopgirl

This novel is a quite one that tugs at your internal dialogue. Mirabelle, the shopgirl of the title is an artist, with an MFA that is working at the glove counter in Neimans…“selling things that nobody buys anymore”. Her life is safe and in many ways solitary. Even her trysts with Jeremy, an awkward and inappropriate lover in so many ways, barely blip on her radar.

Then she meets Ray.

He is older, he is wealthy, and infatuated with Mirabelle. But like many people, Ray...

I have been busy for the last week trying to get my mailers to work correctly on Heroku. Even though you would think that this would be easy, for some reason I had the hardest time finding the correct information.

In order to get it right, I had to phone a friend….literally. I had intended for this to be a step by step guide for future reference, but instead I am just gonna drop the code(a.k.a. mic).

Boom!

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'address_for_host.herokuapp.com'
        Rails.application.routes.default_url_options[:host] = 'address_for_host.herokuapp.com'
          config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
          config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
          config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false
          config.action_mailer.default :charset => "utf-8"
          config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
              :port =>