Well, the easy answer here is you can’t.  Sorry, I know that is not the answer you are looking for, but I have a little help.  I have been a windows user my entire life.  I’ve had access to Macs, but never have used them regularly.    It’s time for a new laptop, and I’ve decided to make the plunge.

After carefully weighing all the options, I decided on the following minimum specifications:  15.4″ screen, 4GB RAM, 512MB on board video, 7200 RPM hard drive.  I set my overall budget for this computer at $2,400 to my door.

Unfortunately for me, Apple doesn’t carry the exact configuration I need in any of their “standard” packages in my price range.  Once you get up to the faster processors and $2500+ models, you can get close, but it looked initially that this was an impossible task.

I went to the local Best Buy, and they carried two models that were close.  The first, a $1,999 model had 215Mb video, 5400 RPM hard drive, and 2GB RAM.  I strongly considered this option, but the fact that the RAM was two 1GB sticks completely killed that consideration.  No way was I buying a brand new computer only to upgrade the RAM and throw away what was in it.

Their next option was a $2,499 model that fit my specs much closer but with sales tax was over $2,700.  I buy a lot at Best Buy and know some of the employees quite well.  I’m about as close to a VIP as you can get there, but they had no play on working with me on the price.  I thought about upping the budget, but decided to get online and see what I could find before caving in.

If you go to Apple.com you can do slight customizations to the available models and get one within my specs.  Unfortunately, Apple.com charges sales tax just like local stores.  That, plus the fact that my specs put the model at or over my budget makes this option a no-go as well.

I finally decided that the only way to get a deal on a large Apple purchase like this one was to find someone who had free shipping and no sales tax to my state.  This alone could save me up to $300 on this $2400 purchase, freeing up more money for a better computer.

After a lot of searching around, I came across the following model at ABT.com.

Apple MacBook Pro 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Silver Notebook Computer – Z0G0320/ 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor/ 320GB 7200-RPM Serial ATA Hard Drive/ 15.4″ LED-Backlit Glossy Widescreen Display/ Built-In iSight Camera/ Built-In AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi And Bluetooth/ NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT Graphics Processor/ Dual Display And Video Mirroring/ Multi-Touch Trackpad/ 85W MagSafe Power Adapter/ Mini DisplayPort/ Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard/ Silver Finish

ABT is having a sale through next week that includes free shipping, and being an online retailer they don’t charge tax to my state.  WIth my research, I’ve gotten a better overall computer than Best Buy was offering for about $400 less.

The downside is that I have to order it online and wait for it to get here.  But $400 extra in my pocket is worth the wait.  However, I’ll probably pay an extra $50 and have it sent next day shipping, because I’m not that patient.

I wrote a few days ago about the new Flip Mino HD camera that I got to do my daily video’ing.  I did my research, looked for the best deals, and made sure that was what I wanted before I purchased it.  I was ready, and decided to make the purchase.

Just my luck:  less than a week after buying the Mino HD, flip introduces a new Flip Ultra HD with a bigger LCD screen, twice as much storage, and rechargable AA batteries for about $40 less than I paid for my Mino.  To add salt to the wound, Best Buy (where I purchased my Mino) dropped the prices on the Mino HD I have by $30.

Luckily for me, it fell within my return window, I saved the box and everything (which I don’t always do), and I’m a “Silver” rewardzone member so I don’t have to pay restocking fees for open items.  I took the mino back and got a refund.  My local Best Buy is out of stock on the new Ultra HDs and they won’t have them in until next week, so I’m cameraless until then.  I will probably have the strangest things happen to me in the next few days (that I would like to video) just to further agitate me on the whole situation.

I don’t know who is handling the product lauches for Flip, but they could have done a much better job.  There was no announcement, no buildup, nothing.  Someone just went into best buy and bought one of the new Ultras and it was then all over the internet.  Late yesterday evening Flip finally made an official announcement after everyone already knew about the product launch.  If they had waited until Tuesday to announce, it would have been outside of my return window and I would have been furious.

Let me start off by saying that I have always believed in the value of education.  From the time I was young, a College degree was one of my most important goals.  I graduated Salutatorian from High School and worked hard on my way to a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science with a Concentration in Architecture from Auburn University.

When you first graduate, that education is everything.  You put that degree on your resume and you make sure everyone knows you have it.  As the years begin to pass by, that degree becomes less and less important and is replaced by the work and the relationships you have created.

I can’t tell you the last time I had a potential client ask for my education information.  I really don’t recall that ever happening.  If you can do the work, it doesn’t matter how you learned to do it.  Some of the most successful people in the world lack a college education.

Where that college education benefits you is getting you into doors you could not otherwise get into.  Jobs that you would never be considered for are now possible.   However, I often wonder which is better:  four years of real-world experience of a college education?

I feel that the real benefit of a college education is that it opens you to an environment of learning, hopefully gets you to think logically and rationally, and introduces you to subjects outside of your major to make sure you are a little more “well-rounded”.  Then again, I am surprised by most of the potential employees I interview in how they completely missed all these benefits of college.

In my opinion, if you don’t get the full experience, then you would be better off just getting a job.

I was in Talladega today and swung by the campgrounds out next to the track to meet up with someone.  For those who don’t know, yesterday was the big Nascar Race in Talladega and the place was experiencing a mass-exodus of campers when I arrived this morning.

After pulling into the campgrounds, I was amazed at the amount of junk people left behind.   You can easily overlook the amount of garbage your own family puts out, but you really get a new perspective when you see how much trash that many people can create in a couple of days.  Amazing.  We are such wasteful creatures.

It is almost enough to get me off my lazy ass to start recycling.  Almost…

Thanks to twitter user Kevin Jones for the blog topic.  Kevin is working to become a website designer, and is struggling with self confidence issues that often come when people are first tackling a new venture.  Once the excitement wears off, the energy drain begins and self-doubt can start to set in.  Fighting through this lack of motivation is this is the turning point for most people and is what separates the dreamers from the doers.

This principle applies to all aspects of life, and not just web design.  However, because many web design projects are individual instead of team oriented, it sure seems much more common to hit this “wall” in our industry.

Just as with learning something new, the same pitfalls apply to any projects that aren’t completed instantly.  You have a good idea, you immediately jump into it with both feet and you are as excited as you can be to get started.  Then, after spending twice as much time on it as you had hoped, you finally get half through.  You now start to second guess the original idea, struggle to get any productive work done and begin to “piddle” and work in circles.  After enough time doing this, you often begin to doubt your ability to complete the project.  Many will give up on their new venture and move on to something that excites them.

These are your dreamers.  They stay excited, as they are always working on something new.  However, they never really accomplish anything.  So if you want to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be, you need to figure out your own special way of channeling your confidence and pushing through the mundane and completing your work.

For me, I typically will walk away from the project for as much time as I need to recharge my enthusiasm for it.  This time often includes doing things completely unrelated to website development as I often get tired of it altogether instead of an individual project. I like old cars, so I’ll spend a weekend working on restoring my car or do something that is as manual as possible (no computers).  For you, it may be something else.

Those who lack confidence in themselves will have difficulty pushing through this barrier.  If you don’t believe you can do it, you can’t.  It is as simple as that.

Confidence in yourself and your abilities is something that must come from within.  You can often draw on external forces such as friends and family for confidence, but when the chips are on the table it is your belief alone that will decide your fate. So you must work on believing that you are capable.

With most people, the process of managing confidence is simple:  You gain confidence when you accomplish goals and you typically lose confidence when you fail to reach them.   If a project or task seems overwhelming, break it down into smaller goals.  For example, are you overwhelmed at trying to learn website design and development?  There is a lot to it (HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Flash, Actionscript, PHP, ASP, JSP, LINUX, etc…).  So break it down into a small goal:  learn how to mock a simple page up in HTML and CSS.  You can accomplish this inside of a day and you’ll have the knowledge and confidence to move to the next task.

I am lucky in the confidence department, I guess.  I have always felt that I can do anything, it’s just a function of time.  Given the right amount of time, I could build a perfect full-sized model of the Great Wall of China out of spitballs.

When starting in business, this was one of the most useful qualities that help me get off the ground.  Back in the “early” days, everything I did was new to me.  Every time I sold a project, I did so not knowing what was needed to do to make it happen.  My answer, when asked if I can do something has always been (and still is to this day):  Yes, of course.  It doesn’t matter what it is, I can do it.  Have I done it before?  Maybe, maybe not, but I can do it.

I actually sold my first website before I knew how to build a website.  It was a full-out e-commerce site with programming and bells and whistles and here I was a college student that had not even completed a basic HTML page.  I talked to the owners, explain to them what it would cost, and they went with it.  I learned on the job and am still at it today about 10 years later (and that original website is still a client).

If you are going to be successful at anything, confidence in yourself will play a part in it.  You have to examine your life, find your strengths, and draw the confidence needed to push through the difficult parts and continue to move toward your goals.  Changing goals will not help if the goals do not come with an increase in your confidence.  Don’t be a dreamer and quite wating time.  Get out there and get stuff done.

After finally deciding that the Canon XH A1 that I had sitting around was too cumbersome to use practically and way too overkill on the advanced functionality, I decided to put it on Ebay. After it sold, I chose to try and pick up the anti-XH A1 by going with some ultraportable, HD quality, and easy to operate (so my wife would quit fussing about not being able to use the camera).

So today, I went to the local Best Buy and picked up a Flip Mino HD.  It fit all my requirements and the price was right.  I haven’t had much time to use it, but the quality looks great for what this is.  It’s nothing compared to the canon, but there is no apples to apples comparison there.  The main drawback I have seen thus far is that it is really shakey when held in hand, but it is perfectly smooth on a tripod.

When I put this tiny camera on a full size tripod it seems to defeat the purpose of having a ultra-portable camera.  Maybe I can find time and creativity to post some videos.

I don’t use twitter to make myself popular.  It is not my goal to get as many people following me as possible and that is not something I spend time working on. As with most twitter followers, I typically follow people who post on topics I enjoy, link to news I want to read, or are otherwise interesting people.

Because I don’t do any Twitter self-promotion, most of the people who follow me are simply those using John Chow’s advice and follow as many people as possible in the hopes that everyone will follow them back.  However, if you do that make sure your previous tweets come off like you are a human and make them at least mildly interesting.  With most of these types of requests I get, when I check the profile I find that they either have less than two tweets, they are simply retweeting others tweets, or they are just tweeting news from some news sources and every tweet has a link in it (looks like some sort of autotweeter).

If you are a business and are tweeting, make sure I understand that.  If I expect an individual, I am anticipating some tweets about their life outside of work or at least a little more conversation with other tweeters.  If I don’t see this immediately, I quickly close the browser and do not follow back. If your account makes it clear this is a business (through the twitter name or profile or twitter design), I might actually do a little more investigation if all you are posting is news.

For example, the screen capture to the right is the latest person to follow me.  Pulling up their profile they have a grand total of 3 tweets, all of which are self-promotion of some project they are working on.  Had they put up a few useful blog posts, linked to them and tweeted like a normal human being, I might have followed them back.  I don’t want my timeline filled up with useless junk like what projects he is trying to build links to.

When trying to build followers, use common sense.  Look at your profile and ask yourself if you were in another’s shoes, would you follow you based solely on the information you have tweeted thus far?  In the case of SEOBuddy, definitely not.

I saw a tweet by Andrew Turner this morning that got me thinking about how hard it is to protect yourself when dealing with clients.  To really be safe, you must write an air tight contract to keep the client from shutting the project down, halting scope creep, and avoiding the other many possible pitfalls that comes with doing service oriented work. 

However, writing good contracts adds a lot of overhead to your business.  Often, this overhead is hard to recoupe on small to medium sized projects.  If done correctly, it often takes nearly as long to write a good proposal/contract as it does to actually do the work.  The problem is that you put out all of this work without really knowing for sure if you are going to get the project. 

With that in mind, it is really tempting to cut this time out on smaller projects by not properly writing up the work to be performed or not having a contract at all.  In my experience as a website developer, the smaller projects are usually the biggest headaches.  These are the projects that have tight margins and the ones you must define explicitly before starting to work. 

Balance, Young Daniel-Son
I try to strike a balance on my project proposals/contracts.  I have enough experience that I can typically tell when a client is going to be troublesome before I start a project.  When I sense this, I make sure I spend extra time nailing down exactly what they are requesting.  This almost always saves me multiples of that extra time later on when the projects starts to go south. 

However, on typical projects, I often don’t spend too much time on the contract.   I take my stock contract template, rewriting a little to suit the project, and send it out.  This, if I choose wisely, decreases my overhead and increases my profit margin. 

When do I get Paid?
When you enter into a contract with a client, you are taking a small risk that they are going to pay you when finished.  As a business owner, I don’t like risk.  So, on all of my projects I share the risk with the client.  On smaller projects, I ask for 1/2 of the contract amount up front, and 1/2 when it is completed.  With this arrangement, I run a risk of only getting paid 1/2 of the total amount, and the client shares in the risk that I will finish the work they have paid for. 

As an added bonus, I often find that this up front payment helps the client see the value in the project and it is often easier to get the information I need out of them to quickly finish the project versus clients who have no up-front investment. 

On larger projects, I will set milestones and have distributed payments when that milestone is met.  I used to break simple website designs up into three payments, 1/3 up front, 1/3 when the design was approved, and 1/3 upon completion.  The middle payment was contractual proof that the design was approved.  However, waiting on that payment just slowed down the entire process and made these contracts drag on for several weeks more than they otherwise would have.  Also, clients are visual.  When they see the design, they think the site is 90% done.  They have no clue that the design is on 10% of the project (on small websites) and that the next phase is 90% of the work.  This thought process combined with a “midpoint” milestone confused many customers and  they never understood why it took so long to complete that last phase. 

Dates
It is not a bad thing to set dates and goals for completion, and it is often required by the client.  However, never say a particular date like “april 12th”.  Always state something like “21 working days from notice to proceed”.  You never do know how long it is going to take to get an approved contract, and that week they thought about it might come back to haunt you when the date you put in ink comes around.   

You want to also put wording into your contract that lets them know that these dates are based on your assumption that all required materials will be provided by the client in a timely manner and that these dates are subject to change based on unavailability of materials and/or sickness. 

Get a signed contract, then work
It is so tempting to hop right into designing that new website project you just finished discussing with a client.  However, I can’t count the number of times that a client said “the check and contract are in the mail” only to never send them or back out at the last minute.  Make sure you have that signed contract in hand before you begin working.  Otherwise, you may be wasting your time. 

Don’t be afraid of the client, and communicate with them early
I see this a lot with freelancers, especially younger ones.  They are so intimidated by the client or afraid of losing the job that they will let the client run them over.  If you have a contract, and it clearly states what work you are to do, you have a right to ask for more money when the work exceeds that.  In most cases, the client expects it. 

In almost all cases I have seen, if you immediately explain to your client that what is being requested is outside of the contract and that it will costs $x more, they are fine with that.  Where inexperienced freelancers get in trouble is by waiting until all the work is done and then sending the customer that inflated bill for the extra work without having explained it to them before you completed it. 

If you allow a client to cross the line of what you are contractually obligated to do without enforcing your right to more compensation, they will almost always continue to push that line during the project and it will quickly get way out of hand, costing you tons of money. 

Sometimes it is better to walk away
In more cases than you realize, you can make more money by just turning down a job and moving on to something better.  If they don’t want to deal with a contract or pay anything up front, you are going to have nothing but trouble out of them and you may never see a dime for  your work.  In these cases, simply walk away. 

These were just some tips I had in mind and quickly jotted them down.  If you have any questions, please post in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. 

Well, let’s say my first dips into Magento commerce have come with mixed results.  I really like their interface right out of the box, and I like a lot of the options that they offer.  I truly believe that with a little more maturity this will be my shopping cart of choice.  However, I’m not sure I’m ready to move everything over this this just yet.

It takes some effort to get setup for the first time as it requires PHP 5 to be setup like it needs it.  In my case, a recompile of PHP and apache was necessary.  That’s no real problem if you host it yourself, but on a shared hosting environment you may find it difficult to get the necessary modules enabled.  So, be sure to check to see if your host is Magento-friendly before you dive in head first.

I tried the downloader install first, as it makes more sense to not download the entire cart, decompress it, and the upload it to my server.   However, something wasn’t right and after several tries it couldn’t install the cart (I have got this to work on my second install, but I still don’t know what the difference was for this first install.).  So, I downloaded everything, extracted it, and waited forever for it to upload (It’s not that big, but there are a lot of files).  Once uploaded, the install went fine.

After getting it to install I was excited.  I could finally play with it!  My first task was to try and wrap a custom design around the stock content area.  Wow, the templating system is a bit complex to wrap your head around initially.  After a couple of failed attempts at theming the site and a lot of googling for answers I finally figured out the basics of how it works.  I had to re-install the default template and erase my butchering of the site and start fresh, but my  third attempt was successful.  I could probably theme it about as fast as OSCommerce now that I know how it works.

On my second install, I was attempting to migrate an OSCommerce website that had about 3,000 products.  The latest Magento was 1.3.1, so Installed that and attempted to use the migration tool.  Unfortunately, the migration tool quit working when Magento was upgraded to 1.2 so that was a waste of time (spent about 5 hours trying to make it work).  I finally decided to just install 1.1.8, migrate OSCommerce, then upgrade.  I deleted the database, removed the uploaded cart, and am in the process of uploading 1.1.8.  Once it is finished, we will see if it works a little better when importing from OSC.

After spending a few days playing around with Magento Commerce, I really like it.  It was much more difficult to figure out how to create a theme than with just about any other cart I have used.  However, with this complexity comes flexibility.  You can easily do things in this cart and keep your upgradeability that are not possible in just about any other cart out there.

Thats really what I am looking for:  A cart that has the features I need without having to “hack” them in and lose the ability to easily upgrade the cart.  This cart seems to provide those thus far.

I spent a few hours completely screwing up the template and learning how to do it.  After re-installing the default template, I was able to get the basic design wrapped around the site in a few hours.

So far, so good with this new cart.