Day 8 : Just Crush It

I’m going to start off by saying, if you have not read the book Crush It ( #crushit ) by Gary Vaunerchuk Read It, and if you have not heard of it you now have! I started reading it today and had a hard time putting it down. It’s a very inspirational book about how to follow your passion, how to cash in on doing it, and well how to crush it. If you’ve never seen the term, enthusiasm and believing in what you are saying is infectious, in action then you’ll get one of the best examples I have ever seen while reading this. The book helps you to learn how to take something you are truly %100 passionate about and turn it into your brand using social media, and ultimately cashing in in it. Many people may look at this pessimistically but really he states that you better be willing to work hard and put a lot of sweat into it so it’s by no means a get rich quick scheme, or even a get rich scheme at all. In fact the main purpose of building a brand for yourself is not to make money, the thought is if you are building a brand based off something you are truly passionate about people will listen and the more eyes that are on you the more possibility for revenue streams. After all as Gary says money goes to where the eyes are. He also shows a bunch of real world examples from online pseudo celebrities to real celebrities who have built up a brand and cashed in.

This brings me to my inspiration of the day. Sarah and I have been toying with the idea of going into business together in the future for quite some time now. We were thinking of combining my web and design knowledge with her Interior Design knowledge to offer new or growing business full branding and office planing services. We both want to make a difference in the world so we expanded on that to be business that wanted to go green or businesses at the community level. We are both very passionate about green issues, I mostly interested in new green technologies and the politics of it all, and her sustainable design and adaptive re-use. So I got to thinking that if we really want to start a business eventually that it would be stupid not to leverage the knowledge I am learning about social media and start now to build a brand.

My thought is that if we start now to build a brand for us based around these things that we are very passionate about then when it comes time to form a business down the road we will be seen as experts, already have contacts, and be the go to people for knowledge in these areas. So the plan over the next few weeks is to plan out our brand, how we want to start it, and where we may see it going. Right now we are thinking of starting with a blog where we would both research and talk about the areas that we are interested in on the blog so we can build a brand together but also separate. We would also do some collaborative posts. As stated I’m really interested in green technology and the possibilities it holds for helping the human race so although I’m not an expert I will start to research that and talk about it. Sarah is interested in helping people through sustainable building and adaptive re-use and again not an expert but very interested and wants to learn. The blog will follow us through our learning of these areas but also at the same time start to establish us as experts in the field so that eventually we can start a consulting company helping businesses or individuals become more green and to help them promote that. We hope to bring a younger fresher spin to this area one that most people can relate to so that we can get more people on board and following us.

I’ll keep you updated on this as we go ahead with planing and let us know what you think.

Day 7 : Mondays Suck

Mondays are going to suck for the next little bit. I have classes from 2pm till 10pm, so before 2pm is often spent getting other things done before school. So many Mondays until the end of the semester are not going to be very creative posts because I may just not have the time. Today after I got back from school I spent I while setting up a printer that I found in the garbage area in my building. It’s a great business grade laser printer, which yes works and although it says the toner is low still prints just fine for the time being, crazy the things you can find in the garbage. Anyways so I set that up, cleaned it up, hooked it to the home network, and configured it on my desktop and Sarah’s laptop. After that I had to get some stuff together for class tomorrow – a resume draft and 15 pieces to be considered for my portfolio. After all that I looked at the clock and it was already after 12 so I came to the conclusion that I just don’t have the time or the energy to do something creative.

So I have to decided instead to switch gears to the other purpose of this blog which is to write about something I have learned or find interesting. For one of my classes we have to pick a topic each (some larger topics are two person groups) pertaining to web development and different API’s, and write a report on them and do a presentation. Jordan and I chose to research Cake PHP. Cake PHP is a framework for rapidly building websites and web applications using PHP. For those of you who are unaware of what a framework is, it’s basically a bunch of pre-built code which has all the most common functions you will need to use already written. This enables you to hook into this code and access it as you need for your site or application. This significantly reduces the amount of code you need to write while developing.

Now Jordan and I are just starting to scratch the surface of Cake PHP but already we can see the immense power of this framework. Primarily what we learned today was how easy it becomes while talking to a database. Once you have a database set up and you connect it to Cake PHP, Cake can do a lot of stuff behind the scenes based on the data-types and structure you have chosen. For example when creating a form with Cake you simply call the function cake uses for making form inputs and where in the database it is going to go and Cake will figure out what type of input you will need for that data-type and create all the mark up for you. So what would of taken you many lines of code can be done in one very short line. Also all the code that deals with database queries is also all handled by Cake, so this means all you need to do is call the Cake function for what you need done and pass it what you want to get, insert, modify, etc. and Cake does the rest!

As I said we are only starting to figure out the full power of Cake PHP but with today’s brief introduction we are starting to see the possibilities. With Cake your main worry is your database and the style of your site, the development is made so much easier simply by customizing Cake to what you need for your site or application and let it do all the back end workings.

Well I do want to leave you with something to look at so here is another picture from last nights experiments.

Somerset at Night

Day 6 : Ottawa by Night

Today I decided to use the view from my balcony to do something I have been wanting to do for a while. Ever since I moved into this apartment I have known that I want to take night shots of downtown since I am on the 15th floor of a building near Bayview facing east towards downtown. I grabbed my tripod and started playing around with the settings to see what worked best. I found that working with a 30 second exposure and varying aperture settings worked best for what I wanted to achieve.

Downtown Ottawa Skyline at Night

I took a bunch of photos and there was a few that made the short list for making it into this post but I just really liked the composition and the look of this one. I had a lot of fun on this one cause I’m a big fan of night photography and I really started to figure out how to get the proper settings. I love the colors that come through with night time photography, from all the city lights. I like the times you get cars going by and you get the streak from their lights in the photo.

Night time photography is something I want to explore furthure in future blog posts, and I look forward to the multitude of opportunities to get nice shots at winterlude when it opens. Please leave any comments or feed back.

Day 5 : Who Said Dogs are Man’s Best Friend

I’m going to keep this short since it is late and I’m tired and have been drinking. I unfortunately left the blog till last minute but I’m actually happy with today’s post mostly because of the subject matter. Needing something to put up I decided to grab my camera and shoot my best friend.

Spike

I took a bunch of photos of him and this was probably my favorite. I am far from a photographer so a lot of the technical stuff may be off but I know enough to get a decent shot in low light. I liked the composition of this one and how it caught him in a more regal look. Ok to be honest I like most any picture with him in it but it was fun to shoot him and I would like to give it another try when I have more time to put some good effort into it.

Day 4 : Banner For my Love

Wow, so today sucked cause apparently when I got home from school I was in a shit mood and didn’t want to do anything. After while of trying to get inspired I decided that I had been in front of a computer WAY to long so I decided I would go and do something else that I love very much. I decided that I would hit up one of the outdoor rinks, do some skating , and play some hockey. What a great Idea I thought as I threw on a sweat shirt and and my Ottawa Senators Jersey. This will get me outside and doing something I love to do, take my mind of my shitty mood and maybe get inspired by being out and active. Thanks to the mild weather today how ever the rink was closed, and you can only imagine what that did to my mood.

I brooded the entire way home dreading heading back inside to sit in front of my computer to be angry and even less productive than usual. I even decided to take the stairs I wanted to postpone it so much – it’s worth noting I live on the 15th floor of my building. I talked to my girlfriend Sarah briefly on the phone letting her know I was angry and had no idea what to do for my blog so we decided to maybe tag team something when she got home since she is doing a similar challenge and blog.

So she got home and we tried to work on something but I was not in the mood to think of anything and wasn’t really into what she came up with (I know my own fault). After a while and getting even more frustrated I decided I would whip up a banner for her blog site since I want to skin it some time when I get the time so it matches her web page.

sdeesign banner

Anyways I like the way the typography came out but find the banner lacks any sort of interest, but considering I don’t have the rest of the page to work with and am just using the color scheme and design from her site as a guide I guess it’s the most I can do. I’m happy to be able to do something towards her site but honestly I’m just happy day four is over cause I’m having problems thinking of anything interesting and I get very frustrated and angry when this happens. Hopefully day five will be better and I can go back to being happy with my blog entries.

Day 3 : Loving Photoshop as a Medium

I apologize for yet another zombie picture I’m just having so much fun with photoshop and I have a lot of zombie stuff to keep me inspired and to give me reference. With that said I do have some other ideas that I may try out for any future photoshop art.

Rotting

As usual I would appreciate any feed back, interesting links, or inspiration.

Day 2: Horror Show!

Today I honestly thought I was going to do something web related or educational, in fact I was sure I was going to try to recreate this really cool 3d effect using only CSS and HTML that I found here. Although it is something that I really do want to try to recreate some time, it’s not something I can tackle in one day right now – between my skill level and school work. So I started to check around Smashing for some more ideas and reading some blogs. I was really drained from a bad sleep (I never sleep well) and school today which means I find it really hard to read and get inspired.

I was really starting to get mad when I looked at my tablet and realized I had not used the pen for a long time. So I fired up photoshop and started playing around. I’m not the greatest at just pulling something out of my head and drawing it so I just began making lines and shapes. I absolutely fell in love with the line work I could get out of my experiments but really annoyed that I could not come up with anything to draw. That’s when it hit me and I thought of the perfect subject matter for this style of drawing. I love zombies, anyone who knows me knows this and I have plenty of resource material and inspiration lying around (ok maybe not as much as I would like but enough). So I grab one of my books, opened it up, and used it to get my brain started and my hand moving.

Zombie Eating

I had a lot of fun with this one especially since I have little to no experience drawing and painting in photoshop. I look forward to trying this out many times in the future and I may even do a series of posts of zombies to help get some experience. I hope I can expand my skills in this area because I really did enjoy it, and it’s been a long time since I have used any of my artistic skills and it was starting to get to me. Please let me know what you think, any criticism would also be beneficial so I know what areas I need to improve in and how I can better my skills in this medium.

Day 1: Getting Started

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

First off I would encourage new people to this blog to check out the My 365 Day Challenge page to get the explanation of what I’m doing here.

Ok so I feel like a may be cheating a little today but I am feeling a little overwhelmed so I will take this in small steps. Today has been a day of checking for blogs I may be interested in, mainly web design, web development, and green issues. I have begun subscribing to them so that I can check them out regularly, and I’m a little intimidated cause that’s going to be A LOT of reading for someone who is used to just putting things off and NOT going out of my way to keep up to date with things.

Several things have become apparent very quick, first being I got some catching up to do so that will be my work for today and tomorrow, so hopefully tomorrow will be a better post. The second thing I figured out is that I really need to get better at reading faster. At the moment I do enjoy reading but I’ve never been strong at it and I’m not very fast it which is one of the reasons I always put it off. Lastly I’ve noticed that I’m going to need a lot more focus, I find myself bouncing around from article to article to doing something else and never actually finishing anything. This is the first thing I’m hoping to kick with this challenge since it is probably the worst trait I have in my opinion. I have in the past been diagnosed with ADHD and although I feel it has been over diagnosed over the years I do feel that concentration, or lack there of will be my toughest road block to get around.

So my next step is to get up-to-date on what I’ve been missing and trying to come up with a plan of where to go next. If anyone has any suggestions of blogs to take a look at, interesting designs I may like for inspiration, or just any comments or encouragement that would be greatly appreciated. Hope to get at least a few people following!

- Thomas Martineau