i noticed that the goals that were easy to accomplish were goals that I have already seen someone ELSE accomplish… and because of this visually imagining ME accomplishing the goals isn’t much of a stretch.  It’s almost like i’m remembering when “I” had accomplished it.  Also, memories are much easier to visualize than fantasies.

Sure these are memories of seeing someone else accomplish the goals, but the part of my mind that puts up the “what-if” barricades — that part of my mind doesn’t know the difference between me actually doing it in the past and me twisting a memory around a little so i remember it AS IF I had accomplished it myself.  My brain knows it’s not mine, but my brain doesn’t care. it figures “close enough”. all mental barriers are gone and it’s GAME ON.   It’s a very simple yet powerful technique I have used to overcome all kinds of mental obstacles.

Not convinced? try it.  lets say your goal is to buy a supercar.  you can try your best to picture what it’d be like to own and drive one. try it now.  imagine it with vivid detail… take a few minutes and try it now..

ok, now go find a supercar whether it’s in a showroom or on a sales lot or if you have to track down an owner and say you want to disprove a theory about visualisation (explain the theory). assuming you get a chance to see one up close. touch it. smell it. sit in it. ride in it. maybe even drive it.  AFTER you have experienced it a bit, now imagine owning your own…. much clearer picture, eh?

yup. memories beat visualisations every time.

next time you get an obstacle that seems too big to surmount, ask yourself if you can increase the vividness of the pictures in your mind and see if that helps.

good luck.

oh yeah, it’s a work in progress. I’m adding to it as I go. if yo have suggestions, please fire away.

1. the README file the is created when you run the Rails <appname> command was probably the most useful resource I found.
2. there is a few ruby and ROR cheat sheets. here are some I found:
   1. Ruby on rails naming conventions ror_naming.pdf
   2. http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html
3. podcasts
4. screencasts like ones at railscast.com
5. youtube. there’s a lot of idiots on youtube, but if you look a little there’s also lots of decent video tutorials on there.
6. books.  here’s some:
   1. Ruby for dummies
   2. bla
   3. bla
   4. bla
   5. head first ruby

also, i checked out a bunch of editors out there to use on Linux. without getting into the reasons, the ones i thought were the best for me was:

1. Aptana / RadRails / Eclipse (with Radrails plugin)  -  these are robust but a little bit of a learning curve if you are not already familiar with ROR
2. Gedit (kinda useless without tons of plugins, but once you add tons of plugins to it, it’s a pretty decent editor.)
3. Ultraedit (if you run windows).  it’s a pain to get running in Linux under wine, so i don’t use it.  this is one of only a handful of commercial editors i think are worth their salt.  too bad it runs poorly under wine in Linux.

some i didn’t try yet that look like they might be worth looking at:

1. geany
2. cream
3. kdevelop?
4. notepad++ under wine (i have not tried it for ruby, but i like it for other scripts in when working in windows) Be sure to check out the plugins to make it more robust.

If you plan on making Ruby development your main income, and you need a new laptop or desktop, and you can afford it, you should seriously consider getting a Mac for the TextMate editor.  (personally i think Mac’s are overhyped, but from what hear, the TextMate editor is far better than any other ruby editor out there.)

also note that although this is a windows program, it runs fine in linux under wine. (at least it did for me)

Passwordfox can be downloaded from nirsoft.  If you need instructions on how to use it, please ask, however you probably won’t need any help.

If you don’t know where your firefox profile folder is, this is a useful page to help you find it:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox#Finding_the_profile_folder

-tj

if anyone wants a “study buddy” to learn ruby on rails with, give me a shout.  tools like voip, screen sharing, git, etc. should make collaboration a snap.

I’m in Saskatchewan, Caanda.  We’re on CST time here (UTC-6hrs), though I’m a bit of a night owl.  I prefer to use Linux/RadRails, though I could use Windows if needed.  sorry, but I do not currently have any Mac machines.  I’d really like to give RadRails a serious try though.

any takers?  leave an email if you’re interested.

-tj

You know how you can “save” your game before fighting an adversary, then if you got killed you just restored the saved game and tried again as if you had never gotten killed in the first place?

Well you can do that with the entire windows operating system, and on a reasonable budget.  Often for free.  How?  Well, there’s a few ways you could do it:

• Installing your windows operating system in a virtual machine instead of installing it on your hardware and saving/restoring the machine as needed:
  • running a virtual machine technology such as VMWare, virtualbox, or Parallels and installing the windows OS in that.
• Backing up and restoring the operating system partition (C: usually) as needed. software that can do this includes:
  • commercial software like Acronis or free software like EASEUS Todo Backup or similar software. I beleive this software can back up the windows OS while windows is running, though I don’t recommend it.
  • booting into a Linux LiveCD (like SystemRescueCD) and backing it up with partimage or similar software.
• running a “bare-metal” virtual machine host, such as Citrix ZenServer.  this is not as hard as it looks, but is better suited for businesses that have several servers to pool their resources together.  There is some really wickedly cool things that ZenServer can do, like creating operating system installations from templates.

If there is enough interest I can elaborate more on the above technologies, as I have used most of them extensively.  I’ll see if anyone is interested enough.

My favourite technique is to install any windows operating system inside a Sun’s VirtualBox virtual machine, and run it within Linux.  This way you get the stability of Linux and the ability to easily save and restore your windows operating system when you need windows.  You might be surprised how advanced and user friendly Linux is.  It’s changed a lot over the last several years. When you want to run Windows as if it was not running within a virtual Machine, simmply hit a couple keys and bam, you’re running it full screen oblivious to the fact that it is even running on top of Linux in the first place.

If you have other ideas or comments fire away!

-tj

Then I was talking with my sister who needed a website.  She was confused on how to go about getting one.  She wanted something fairly simple, but the web site design companies were quoting her prices around a couple thousand bucks or more.  Which is a little steep for a lot of small businesses.
Well, I have done web design and web programming, and I’d love to design a site for her, but I have also done it for others and have seen the issues first hand – issues like not knowing what the customer wants – and the customer doesn’t want to spend the time to communicate effectively what they want.

They figure they are paying YOU to figure out the details.

so you try. and you are off the mark, so they don’t like some of it.

and you change it. and you are still off the mark.

and you change it some more. and you are still off the mark.

eventually you are both frustrated.  They just want the website done, and you just want to get the ordeal over with.  I had not done website development for others for a while because of these frustrations.

I mean I  wanted to help her but I didn’t think it would work very well.

Then I remembered Weebly and thought maybe it would be ‘enough’ for her needs.  I showed it to her, creating her ‘prototype’ site with her on the phone while screen sharing so she could see how easy it was.

If you can run your usual office programs you can make a weebly site.

She was delighted.  Not only was it ‘enough’ – it far exceeded what she needed, even in the free version.  FREE??   WTF?  if you have not checked out Weebly you should at least check it out.  I think eventually she’ll go with the “pro” version which has some advantages. and it’s only about 50 bucks per YEAR! not bad!   That’s pretty affordable hosting – even for the pro version.

anyway. I think most small business’s needs would be met on Weebly.  maybe I’ll make some JavaScript cut and paste add-ins for Weebly, since JavaScript is really what I enjoy the most to work with….

-tj