Quite literally, Christmas in July…

Now I enjoy Christmas, but this is an obvious example of how the season has turned into a shopping season and NOT a Christian holiday.

This was taken in Walgreens yesterday, July 6th. July!

How much time do you need to get your store ready for Christmas? We have five months at least before Christmas.

So, you now see my opinion on Christmas. It’s become too commercialized, un-Christianized, and too many people are wore out by the time Christmas comes because they’ve over shopped, over decorated, and not focused on what Christmas is all about.

It’s about family, it’s about love, and how Jesus lived to make those things important. He didn’t live so that we could shop. Yet we use that excuse.

Many things about network marketing scare people into not being successful with it, and becoming (as DK says it) the 3%ers… Meaning they fall out before they make any success because it looks too hard or like too much work. Or maybe they can’t stay focused (a lot of people’s problems, especially when they’re doing it part time at first). But a good mentor is usually pretty accessible, there’s a wealth of mentors looking to help you be successful because in the world of network marketing, your success is their success.

So here’s a video by a very popular marketer and author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad” Robert Kiyosaki, to tell a little more about this subject, and using his way of explaining the system.

According to a Google search on the definition of religion:

A religion is a set of beliefs and practices often organized around supernatural and moral claims, and often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law.

There are so many religions out there. The most obvious and widespread ones are Christian and pseudo-Christian, Judaism, and Islam. For thousands of years these “religions” haven’t co-existed very well. From the Crusades, to the war in Iraq.

But what is all the fuss about? Why are people so hooked on religion, religious icons, to the point where many of them become or seemingly become cults?

Maybe it’s because people can’t hold on to a real belief. They get swayed on emotions or what everyone else believes, and they never take the time to figure out what they really believe. They don’t read the religious texts of what they “believe.” And therefore, never really make that great of a “believer.”

Or maybe it’s because we need something iconic to hold on to. Maybe there’s this everlasting void in our bodies that desires something somewhat meaningful to fill it, whether we really believe it or not.

Because the majority of religious people don’t even really know what their beliefs are. They attend services, pay their dues, and never really know why other than it seems to fulfill some void in their lives.

Indeed, there is a void. Indeed, something about religion fills it.

But is it religion? Because if religion really filled it, there wouldn’t be anything occasional about attendance.

All their friends would do it.

Their lives would be sold-out to it.

They would think of it everyday.

Every hour.

Is Mac a religion???

Okay that last one’s a joke. But seriously, think about some of the things we idolize in life, things we treat the same way that others treat like their religion. Like hard-core Star Wars fans. Harry Potter fans. Sports fans.

In fact, many of these things take a larger presence in these people’s lives than their “religion.” So is it a religion. What is religion?

My focus for saying all the above is this: I don’t have a religion. I used to. I used to be a religious person, and I catch myself at times being swayed back into it.

The fact is, my beliefs would exist without a church. Without a preacher.

And they did in fact become my beliefs after I did much much reading, much research, trying this and trying that. Finding what really filled that void.

I don’t have a void anymore. It’s full with something that doesn’t want to go away when I get home after service. That I want to think about all during the week and during the day.

And when I’m reminded of how it’s affected my life and my plans and my attitude and my abilities and my family and everything, I cry. It’s powerful.

It’s not religion.

This video triggered this post. These people represent the miracles I feel in my life. And my friends and my family’s lives. It has truly touched me and done things with my life that I couldn’t do without. I wouldn’t believe the things and the way I do if it weren’t that I was 100% sure that this belief was what did it. What gave me the direction and put me where I am today.

I give it all the credit.

What I don’t like? All the religion that surrounds this topic. Religion causes wars, taxes, confusion, hypocrisy, and more. Our beliefs release us of these things, the same way Jesus released his followers of these things. He preached against these things, so why did we misconstrue it to make it a religion when it’s not???

What do you think?

Got to make business work, make business happen. I’m a doer. All I’ve ever concentrated on was the day job, being an internet sales manager for a dealership.

You have to believe in your self! Say this to yourself: self, I am number one. I can do whatever I put my mind to.

My business partners and I met and decided I’m going full-time managing our auto business. It’s a leap of faith. It’s business building full-time. To make it take off like a rocket. WE CAN DO IT!

I had a hard time getting me HTC Touch to use ActiveSync with bluetooth through my Toshiba laptop. I had tried before with no success. Well, tonight I found some really cool programs, and I was more determined than ever to get it working.

Toshiba (as many others) has their own Bluetooth tools (I think Compaq or Dell one uses them in their computers). So setting it up apparantly for some people has been quite a chore.
Well, I read through a LOT of blogs, and here’s the one that saved me. If you’re having problems with your HTC Touch and getting bluetooth activesync to work on your laptop computer, this article will get you going in the right direction:

Activesync via Toshiba bluetooth.

What tools did I find that were oh so tempting? That to come in the next blog post after I play with them some…

The following video is my first how-to video (for this site). This video will teach you (for free!) how to install the ever-popular WordPress blogging system on a Bluehost server account. The video covers WordPress 2.5.1 with Simple Scripts through the Bluehost CPanel.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Don’t know about Bluehost? You get UNLIMITED domains, UNLIMITED storage and bandwidth, for only $6.95/mo! I use this and I have a ton of sites running on the server, so the unlimited domains works great for me. Sign up NOW!

Revised and Widgetized

The WordPress template this site uses is called TM3. Of course, I take any template I use and customize it, but this one I didn’t customize the look so much as the usability of it.

The problems with TM3 that I discovered were:

• it didn’t have widget ability
• some things in the stylesheet were misspelled, disabling some design features
• the top logo was hidden
• other small design corrections needed

So I took the theme, added widget-ability to both sidebars, corrected the CSS typos, and added the ability of a logo on the top. And, presto! Download my design enhancements below, give kudos in the comments if you appreciate the theme enhancements.

tm3-02 revised

I’m taking a fresh start for this website. My personal freelancing has taken me in all kinds of directions, and the old Drupal site wasn’t keeping up. I understand that a lot of big names use Drupal, and it is a very nice CMS. But I’m not a big name. I needed something simple and a little more graceful.

So here it is, the new site runs on Wordpress, something I’ve used for a lot of the sites I’ve built lately and it’s proven very graceful, robust, and far easier to upgrade.

Speaking of upgrade, now if I can only figure out how to properly migrate my Drupal 4.7 blog information over to the new Wordpress install, I’d be all set! Supposedly it was simple. Supposedly someone had a plugin. But nothing.

Wordpress developers, you can import every OTHER blog system EXCEPT Drupal. Amazing.

After hours of messing with databases, I give up.

Until the rest of the old blog makes its way back over, enjoy the new site.