This site will be going through some changes - You can see some of them on the side now. I have converted my blog over to wordpress as I figured that would be quicker than creating commentability in my current setup. Thus, we now have a new blog (although it should look virtually the same) and there will be a new RSS feed you will need to subscribe to. I first need to make sure it works... Edit: The new url for the feed is: http://cjhess.com/wordpress/feed/ Also, there are lots of benefits to switching...

So the other day I found an article online about gift cards. It was talking about how when you buy a gift card it is actually a loan. I had never thought of this before. The article went on to say that if a store goes bankrupt one of the things they do is stop accepting gift cards. I enjoyed the article and thought I would pass it on to my favorite personal finance site Get Rich Slowly. J.D. decided that he would post a short article on it this afternoon and I got...

Ok, I realize that I posted about this before, and that I was going to exercise and things, but I am starting to really feel a need to get into good shape. It is one thing when you walk up stairs and you are out of breath - not that it is ok, but it is easier to justify. It is quite another to realize how out of shape you are when you are just standing somewhere... My wife looked at me the other day and started laughing and I realized why, and changed the way I was...

I have learned over the last few days that when you are having trouble getting things done, the antidote is... you guessed it! ACTION! Just start doing things! Maybe you feel like you have too much to do (your todo list got too long?) Then Make a SHORT todo list - one with just a couple of things. And get in the mind set that you only need to do those things. Reward yourself if you get them done - then, if you feel like still doing things do another thing that wasn't on your short list....

Some days things just don't seem to go well. You finally get to working on something you have been putting off, and nothing seems to be working right. We have all had the experience of deleting the work we have just spend hours working on. Or maybe we didn't delete it, but our computer shut down on us. Have you ever had a day like that? So what can you do to get back on track? First of all, don't get upset - OK, maybe for a minute, but then let it go. ...

As I hoped, this week has already been more effective than the whole first part of February! While taking a break today I was pointed to this article by Chris Brogan. It is some great advice on cutting back on things that aren't as important. I've been thinking a lot about this the last couple of days and about where I'm going to have to make cuts to get everything done. I've heard it said that we almost always try to fill our day with at least one more thing than we think we can...

Alright, today was pretty good. I actually managed to get some things done. You know how did it? I knew today was a day off, and anything I got done was a bonus. So I just set out to get a couple of things done. I focused on getting them done, and now it means that tomorrow I don't have to spend time doing those things and I can work on things that aren't due tomorrow but are to be done for the next couple of days. Lets take it one day at a...

So, I'm not really sure how to get out of this rut. Maybe its a bit of "senioritis", or maybe I'm just not in the game, but it has been a rough couple of weeks. I'm still getting everything done, just not when, or how I would like to. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day... Maybe that will lift my spirits!    On an unrelated side note - if you have been reading my posts using an rss feed reader (or live bookmark) I have switched it up so that it only shows the last 10 posts, and it...

Ok, they are still a work in progress, but I wanted to give a basic description of what I have put together as my routines, and give a brief report on how it is working. (These ideas come as a compilation of ideas form others most of which I cannot take credit for.)    Mornings    The mornings are pretty simple. Wake up, exercise (which for now consists of sit-ups), Breakfast, Shower, Do some reading, And then comes the most important part - I create a todo list from my online "master list". This list contains all of my...

Being a dad is great! Jayden got his first tooth this weekend, and although it has been a rough couple of weeks, its nice to know why now. He is so cute, I will gladly take the bad with the good. Although he is in the other room right now crying with Kristine, there have been a few times in the last week that we have just played, and he has laughed, and just been so cute. I can't wait to see him grow up and I get so proud of him when he does even little...

Well this week has been a bit crazy, but there have been a few lessons that I learned that I would like to share.    1. Sometimes you need to take time for yourself. Some days you need to not try to see how much work you can get done. Sometimes it is just important to relax and take a day off. Read, watch some TV, or just spend some extra time with those you love. Enjoy your days, and if you are getting too caught up with life take a day, or part of a day,...

The morning routine worked great today! I got up, got out of my room, and got things done before I even met with my project group at 9. I had things done before 9:00 on a Saturday morning! Wow did that feel good. I AM tired now and its getting close to 10 so that's great! Just finishing a few things up and I'll head to bed! The system isn't perfect yet, but I'll report on progress and what is working in the next couple of days! Oh, by the way, I've been doing pretty...

I think I am only beginning to understand systems and how they can help in getting things done. I've tried lots of thing thus far in becoming organized and I've made some great improvements. I do however still feel that I am lacking immensely in where I could be. I have decided that I am going to try and develop systems for being organized. I have setup times that I am trying to go to bed and to get up, and I'm trying to be more organized on that front. My main problem right now...

Ok, well I had a fun experience today that is spawning this post. I'll start with the moral of the story so that you can all get the idea if you don't want to continue reading.        If you are going to keep a todo list, you need to actually use it.   Ok, now here is the story. We got new locks on our church building a few months back. At the same time I was given a spreadsheet that was to be used to keep track of which keys were given out,...

Well, I have a lesson to share with all of you. No matter what you are doing, there is something I learned today that I think anyone can benefit from, ALWAYS READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!!   I have always been real good at this rule. Since my wife and I got married a year and a half ago, we have put together a ton of things. Desks, cribs, bookshelves, tv stands... you get the picture. Well today we bought a highchair for Jayden. I expected it to come in parts but when we got the...

Well I'm attempting to get things going to make a bit of money on the side of my day job. I've created some scripts for other things and I decided - Hey, while I've already created this content I might as well make it useful for others! So I'm putting it up on Hess Web Services so that others can get to it. I also figure that I can put up a donation button if people like the scripts, and I could offer to help people customize them and get them setup for their own sites for...

Well today Leo Babauta at Zen Habits announced that he has quit his day job to be a full time blogger. I'm so jealous! Just a couple of months ago J.D. Roth at Get Rich slowly announced similar plans of slowing work until he quits completely. Although I don't think that I want to be a full time blogger, I don't want to work for someone else forever. As I'm graduating in April, I know that I probably can't really just start with my own stuff full-time, but I really really wish I could. ...

So I did something today that I don't often do. I watched hours of tv. It started this afternoon when I was holding Jayden. He didn't want to be put down so I put the tv on. Then I got into Psych, which was 2 episodes, and then 2 episodes of Monk. Both of those are an hour long. Then later tonight I sorta watched 2 half-hour episodes of scrubs, then Numbers, Monk, and Psych. That's 8 hours of tv in less than half a day... And that's not counting the shows...

I was watching the TV this afternoon, and I had this great idea - I should start a website for only positive news. I promptly pulled up my laptop and decided that I would see if positivenews.com was taken. Sure enough it was, and it forwarded me to http://www.positivenews.net. The site is visually in need of some work, but I decided that since Dave already has something going maybe it would just be better if I assisted with his efforts. I spent a few mins. doing some research for positive news. I found a...

Well I found something that I can't start doing at 11 at night... Looking at money stuff. I started looking at Mint.com and categorizing and labeling all of our spending from Christmas and our trip. We spent more than we should have, and its fun to see where it all went. Mint now has a "split" option which allows you to separate a charge or check into its parts so that if you bought groceries and clothes at walmart, you can specify how much was in each category so that your trends look correct. Its so...

Well, I've now made it through 2 days of school. I had my marketing class today, and I think I will like it. The teacher has done a lot of marketing consulting in industry, so she has a lot of experiences and excitement about it. I think I will actually enjoy most of my classes, although some more than others.   While trying to think about what to write about today, I asked Kristine what she thought. She gave me a bunch of ideas that ranged from how Jayden (our son) can roll over, but only from...

Well, School started up again today... I was all excited. It is my last semester, and I have a fairly light class load. Its one of those things you know... I'm very comfortable with school, its pretty easy to get by, but I'm ready to be done. I can't wait until April! Should I start a countdown? Maybe now is a little early.   On an unrelated note, I'm still keeping up with my goals. Got them all almost every day. Its been a week now so thats a good start!   One...

I have been thinking a lot about goals lately. I've set a bunch here at the beginning of the year, and I've been trying to work on them. I was in a group today discussing reasons people fail with achieving goals. One of the conclusions we came to was that although they feel the need to change, the don't have the motivation to do what it takes to make that change. One way we came up with increasing the desire to reach a goal is to have a reason for the goal. If a doctor came...

Well we finally made it home. The trip was great, but how nice it is to see your own apartment and lay down on your own bed! Today was one of the shorter drives we had (about 4 1/2 hours) from Idaho. It was one of the hardest too because we knew we were almost there. We got in, and we even started unpacking, but we decided, it is time for bed - unpacking can wait... Time to sleep in my own bed for the first time in 20 days! (link)

When you tell someone that you are a member of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", often times you get a puzzled look. But if you say you are a Mormon, people know what you are talking about. They may recognize the name and they probably have ideas as to what Mormons believe. In some cases, the ideas and thoughts that are had are not accurate or are just slightly confused. This short (10 min.) Video clip answers important questions/myths people often have heard about the Mormon Church. It is supplied by the Church...

Well we made it to Idaho - only 4 1/2 hours left of driving and we don't have to do that until Saturday. A day to relax and get some things done :) - or just relax... (link)

Editor's Note: This post was written yesterday, however we didn't have internet in the hotel. Also, we realized this morning that we didn't exercise yesterday...   Ok, I know what your thinking... its only been 1 day... but I've decided if I'm going to be accountable for these things I need to report some. So far so good! Makes for a short post huh? Well I had some time to continue to reflect more on things today (we are still driving - in Wyoming now), and I am very happy with where my life is currently,...

Now its time to look back on the last year, reflect on what went well, and make goals for the next year. Kristine and I drove across the county for Christmas, and it has given me a lot of time in the last couple of weeks to think about things. Last night the announcers on TV (while watching the ball drop in Times Square) had a poll on whether people thought this year would be better than last year. When I turned off the TV, it was something like 83% said 2008 would be better than 2007....

Well, ok, I'm still not better. Even as I sit here my throat is still a bit sore, and I'm still a bit stuffy. But for a brief glimpse this morning, as I woke up when my alarm went off, I actually felt ok. I woke up and I though "WOW! I can breath! And it's gonna be such a great day!". I think over the next couple of days as I continue to get better, I'm going to use this opportunity to break out of the go-back-to-sleep-when-the-alarm-goes-off thing I've been in lately, and maybe I...

After running last night, and the effects that it caused (coughing for hours...) I decided today that I wasn't going to go running. I decided that I would do some pushups or situps for my exercising today. Besides, my lungs and legs need a chance to get back in shape. Well time went by, and as it got later, I had less and less desire to do anything. I only had about 3 1/2 hours of sleep last night, so I really wanted to just go to bed. I was just laying down and my...

Well... It's official... I am in the WORST shape of my life... I just turned 25, and I can't even run a mile... The worst part about this, and probably the hardest part of me getting back into shape is that in High School I ran cross country (sometimes 14 miles for practice in about 2 hours) and I swam. Both of which are really good for you but when you do them in your prime it's hard to get back to. Usually, when I would finally get the urge up to go running, I would run like...

Ok. I've been saying for weeks now that I'm going to start exercising. I just haven't been able to get myself to do it... It has actually been really easy to put it off with school, work, and then getting sick. We have a trip in a week and a half, and I kept telling myself that it would just be too much to try to exercise over the holiday when I wasn't here. I'd start in the new year when we got back...      This morning however I was reading a post on Get...

About 6 months ago, I signed up with a free voicemail service called Private Phone. It was great. They gave me a free local phone number I could give out as my business line, and I got emails every time I got a message. This week however, I learned that they will be discontinuing service December 15, 2007... Sad day... So I've been looking at other options. I found one I decided I would try. It's called K7 - I guess only time will tell how good the service is. ...

Well this week is thanksgiving break. Finally! It turns out things were even better. I don't have any classes this week. I do have to work today, and I do have to go on a trip tomorrow morning for my senior project, but overall these two days will be relaxing. The other great thing that I figured out the other day - Only 14 more days of classes left this semester! I know, I know... I then have to take finals and all of that, but thats less than 3 weeks! Wooo!...

Last week I setup an account at Mint.com. The site is to be used as a "dashboard" for all of your finances. How it works is you first create a free account. You then log in and add a bank account to their interface. This involves giving them the name/url of the bank or credit union, and your username and password. This aspect is what made me a bit hesitant to want to give it a try. Having all of my information in one place where I don't have any control over it...

Well, today is blog action day. A whole bunch of blogs all around the world are all writing about the environment today. For the past couple of months I've been thinking about what I would write today. One thing that I realized is that in the county in New York where I grew up, we had a recycling program. The county gave everyone a red bin to put out to the curb on a designated day, and they would come by and collect the recyclable materials that you had put out. This was such...

October 15th will be blog action day. The idea is to have all of the thousands of bloggers in the world, to blog about the same issue, all on the same day. This year's topic is the environment, and I am going to participate by writing a post on October 15th. I am joining a great group of bloggers who will also be doing so, and that list can be found here. (edit: Participants link no longer available...) If you have a blog, and you would like to participate, visit...

Well I'm slowly making progress on this site. Last weekend (I'm just getting some time to post this now...) I created a way to add albums to my site. This has given me the advantage of being able to have more pictures divided into their perspective albums. This isn't a difficult concept, but if you click on Photos on the right it should take you to a page with a drop down menu. Pick an album from there, and your set! (link)

So I recently watched Robots and I really enjoyed it. It is a funny movie that has a great plot, and some great character development. I have seen it before, but it is so engrossing that although I had seen it before, three days after my sister-in-law started watching it and I saw the first half, I finished it on my own. One of my favorite lines is when Rodney has fallen in a garbage can, and fender is looking down in there. Fender says "Listen, if I seem to be getting smaller, it's because......

Great news! My wife and I have had our first child. He was born Friday August 3rd at 5:40 PM. He weighed in at 7 lbs 7 oz and is 19 1/2 inches long. He has a full head of hair and he and mom are now both doing well. We've put some pictures up online so that you can all see him (http://jayden.cjhess.com). (link)

Yesterday and today I noticed a problem with my feed creators. It seemed I was getting multiple feeds for each day. I knew partially why this was happening, and that is because my feeds are created by a php page so I created a script that would hit the web page and cause it to create the new feed with the new file. I set this program to run 3 times in the morning so that if one didn't work, at least one of the others would. So when it happened two days in a row...

Last night I completed the creation of the RSS feeds for the Book of Mormon - A chapter a day. There are now two feeds. One is the RSS feed described in the previous post, and the other is a podcast. The podcast links to lds.org giving both a link for the text, and the mp3 file as an attachment. This podcast can be subscribed to on Itunes, or any other podcast reader. I also changed the links so if you subscribed to the feeds previously, you will have to subscribe to the new ones....

Well, I had this great idea for a new rss feed. It is a chapter a day of the Book of Mormon. This is for those of you who, like me, might struggle some with reading everyday. Right now there is only a text only version, but soon I am hoping to figure out the mp3 urls for each chapter and we can have a chapter a day in mp3! The feed can be found on my list, or at http://www.cjhess.com/rss/BOM.xml Happy reading! (link)

It seems that after some stalling and neglecting my sites, I have now got it setup enough that I can make some posts. I even set up RSS Feeds! I decided to setup 3 feeds. One for all of the posts, one for the general post section, and one for the Tech Stuff Blog. If you haven't noticed already, I have also updated the look of the site. This took some work as the original, as much as it looked like this site - was not designed anywhere near with what this one has underneath it. It was fun to...

Beautiful because its interesting I guess... I had to make a wiki entry for my HCI (Human Computer Interfaces) class and I wrote this up. I'm reposting it because unless any of you are in my class, you can't log into the wiki to read it... Wiki #5 - Beautiful Finding a "beautiful" webiste to me proved to be a difficult task. I either saw the websites I use as just useful, but boring, or overly agressive, and hard to use. Therefore I found myself puzzled on what I would use for this 5th wiki that...

Well, as you can see, I can't sleep. Been lying in bed for an hour now, and just can't get to the zzz... But I did read some from a book I got from the library a little while back. Its Don Norman's book called "The Design of Everyday Things". Its actually really entertaining :) Anyway, So this past weekend I spent about 45 hours on a networking project building a chat lab. I really enjoyed it actually. I learned TONS about socket programming, and everything. Basically I created (well started with some help) a...

Well I thought I would share this little tidbit with all of those who might read this. It's called Pandora.com - I learned about it on someone else's blog, and figure why not pass the information on. It takes a bit of getting use to the design of how it works, but basically you go and register there. Then you create a "Station" where you add music you like to listen to. Then they find similar songs, and add them to your playlist - as songs play, you mark them as good or bad and then...

YAY my internet works! After 3 weeks of bumming off my neighbor's wireless, I finally was here when Comcast came by to look at it. Apparently the guy was surprised it ever worked at all because they are coming over the next couple of days to completely rewire the whole line up to the building. They want to bring in 4 lines so that our connection should be better! YAY! So anyway, thats my great news for the day! (link)

So I decided maybe I would write a little note here every couple of days of neat things that I have starting doing, or tricks I found having to do with technology. We will see how long it lasts. But I guess first off... I have been having fun working with this website stuff. I think I would suggest to anyone looking to host multiple domains to get a reseller account because it really makes it easy to divide all of the sites up and keep them separate. I guess they can't share files that way,...

So we counted the days left of school today. Something like 50... Too many if you ask me. Physics is killing me, as is this huge relate project they have me working on at work! Today actually started last night in a meeting when George handed me a paper and said - "Figure out why the numbers are wrong!" So today was completing that task. Well the short answer was that the numbers were wrong because George was looking at the entire thing, and not just the final section. The interesting thing came when I...

Well life has gotten busy! School starts, and thats the end of it! I have to work 20 hrs a week, and now I have labs, homework, and just busy work. Physics is killing me because probably mainly because I don't own the book... I'm thinking maybe I need to buy it. And Probably spend time reading for my classes... Well I don't really like that idea, but I'm guessing I'll have to. I also worked a bit more on the family web page this weekend. It was a day off and I didn't feel...

Well, it seems that I am not very good at this blogging thing... I only choose to do it when I don't want to do what ever it is that I am supposed to be doing. Well this weekend was a busy one... I worked long and hard on the Family Web page. Its looking pretty good, however I noticed that much of the work I did was more fine tuning, and not huge breakthroughs - on the live site that is. I spent a considerable amount of time working with file uploads, and an ajax image...

How fast time flies! I can't believe its already Wednesday, and real soon it will be Thursday! How incredible! When you are busy working, things pass you by... Well, it is the 3rd I know, but Happy New Year! It is 2007! Wow... and to think it was 7 years ago already that they were afraid the whole world would come to a screeching halt! Well I for one am glad that it didn't! So what have I been up to? Well the calendar now works great on the family website -...

Well today was supposed to be much more productive than it was, so I'm hoping to get some work done here now. It seems I don't work as well when my wife is around... I guess she distracts me. Well I have been tinkering with the idea of a family website for a few months now. I had the idea to write it in ASP.net which I am just learning, but I decided that if I really want to get it off the ground it will have to be php. Reasons, I know it better and its...

Well I have been thinking of writing a blog for some time, however I never seem to be able to sit myself down and do it. I imagine many of you know how I feel. I have lists and lists of projects that I am constantly working on, bit by bit, and I just never get it all done. Well, hold the applause, I finished a project tonight. I checked if off my list! AND, its one that really has been on the list for a couple of years now. When I got home from...

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