Michael & Sky – She really was his dog… She loved him the most out of all of us…

He even took her swimming with him in the pool…

Sky you will be missed…

We all love you very much and will miss you dearly…

“The Rainbow Bridge”

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge.
There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together.
There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor; those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.
The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent; His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.

You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together….

Author unknown…

Happy Birthday Gramps (In Heaven)

In Loving Memory

George  Valentine Warnett

February 14, 1910 – November 18, 2002

Today would have been my grandfathers 100th birthday if he was still with us here on earth. I miss him and think of him almost everyday.

I have been reminded of him a lot lately as I have been doing work for Friends of Van Cortlandt Park. There were many days that I spent in Van Cortlandt Park picking berries, getting spring water or collecting birch branches with my grandfather.

I hope you and Nana are once again happy together in a better place.

Happy Birthday Gramps, I love you!

There are several ways of doing this, but I am going to show you how to do it using the tools Facebook offers directly.

If anyone uses a service to do this like TwitterFeed or something similar, feel free to post in the comments below and let me know your feelings about their service. I for one don’t like to rely on third party services unless it is absolutely necessary.

To start, you must first have a blog, it could be self hosted on your own domain name or it could be on Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. It doesn’t really matter where your blog is you just need to have an RSS feed which all blogs do.

If you are using a Wordpress self hosted blog and you have not redirected your feeds to feedburner or the like, then your feed url will be something like http://philmcdonnell.com/feed if you have redirected your feeds to another site you will need to get your feed from there.

Once you know your feed url, you need to login to Facebook and follow the steps below:

( For the impatient here is a short cut to edit your blog feed url: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import you have to be logged in.)

Once logged in to Facebook, on your home page, hover over the settings tab and then click on the applications setting selection:

Once on that page scroll down to the Notes application and click on it’s link.

You will then be directed to the page that holds your friends notes. On the top right of the content section of this page you will see a link that says ‘Edit Import Settings’:

Go ahead and click on the Edit Import Settings link. You will then see the following:

Here you can enter your blog feed url so that Facebook can automatically pull your posts from your blog right into your stream for your friends to see. This all happens automatically once you have it all setup so you never have to think about it again, unless of course you change your blog address :)

Your blog posts will now appear in your notes tab on your profile and they will also appear in the stream on your profile and your friends news feed.

Well that’s it for this small tutorial, I hope you found it helpful. If you have any questions please leave me a comment below or feel free to use my contact form to contact me.

Do you want to know how to easily get your blog posts to feed to Twitter? Stay tuned for the next tutorial that will help you do just that.

~Phil

Since I said I wanted to start simplifying my life, I figured I would tackle the easiest things first.

Photo by: boite-en-valise

I am limiting my online presence to only a handful of social networks, one instant message network and reducing my email accounts as well.

I don’t want to eliminate my entire online presence since I do most of my work online I still need to be available, but I don’t need all the noise that extra IM’s, social networks, etc give. Plus it will make it easier to focus if I don’t have to constantly be bombarded with information that I probably don’t need.

If I was going to totally go cold turkey and kill my entire existence online I would probably use a service like Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. This service is incredible in what it does, if you want to completely wipe your online world you simply enter your login information for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends, messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in.

( Warning: This will really delete your online presence and is not revocable. )

Since I don’t want to totally eliminate my presence and I still do want to connect with my friends, family and clients online I am selectively reducing my presence.

As of right now I have a short list of what I am keeping as follows:

• Facebook – For family and friends mostly
• Twitter – To meet new people and connect with other business minded people
• LinkedIn – My business social network
• Youtube – For all my video posting needs
• Picasa – For all my picture posting needs
• AIM – AOL Instant Messenger to have live text/video chats
• SKYPE – Mostly for business text/voice/video chats

I am also consolidating email addresses for my personal and business life.

What would you recommend adding or removing from this list? Have you ever done something similar? Let me know in the comments below.

~Phil

Happy New Year!!! 2010 is here and I hope it will be a great year.

( Photo by Patrick Hoesly )

Looking forward to the new year, I am going to apply several concepts and ideas. Whenever I am thinking about doing something or taking on a new project I am going to ask, “Is it a Hell Yeah idea or project?” If not then it is not worth doing, this is going to be my mantra…

As far as my existing responsibilities, projects and ideas I am going to ask, “What’s not working?” This is a much better approach I believe than trying to figure out what the overall problem is. If I know that I am doing something that is not working then I don’t really need to know what the problem is I just need to do something different that will work.

What questions do you ask yourself to keep your focus and make decisions?

~Phil

Of course the new year approaching always brings out posts like this;

• What to do for the new year?
• What resolutions to make?
• Where to start…

( Image by: Optical Illusion )

Many posts also want to reflect on the past year and see what has changed or stayed the same. I for one don’t like to look back but to look forward to see how and what can be improved on in my life.

However, I thought I would look back at the last decade since we are moving on to a new decade and see what has changed.

I first must say that the last decade as a whole has not been that great. Yes I have my health and my children are doing well but overall it has been a very trying decade to say the least.

To me it is almost like the time has flown by, but yet it is almost like I have been standing still. I am not saying that I haven’t done anything in the last ten years but in the grand scheme of things not much has really been accomplished. I have grown older and hopefully a bit more wiser. But somehow I feel like I have not lived up to my full potential. I have created several online ventures that have been somewhat successful but nothing that would lead me to quit my day job. Perhaps that is the problem, my day job… I feel like I have stagnated because I have fallen into a routine that just pays the bills. I get up, go to work, come home and start all over again. Sure I do things but not things I really love to do, then again I am not sure what I love to do… I have read a lot about finding your passion in life but to me it is too hard to narrow it down. I love to do too many things.

When I look back at the last ten years I see my children growing up, my family going through many different turmoils (which is normal no?) and life just generally going by. I am in no way saying that I am unhappy in life, but I would like to change many things. So this is the year to set out to do it, 2010 a fresh new year and decade to begin my quest.

For the new year I have decided to make some big changes. No resolutions but more like life changes and goals. Time to grow up?! You would think I was already grown up at 43 but somehow I feel like I never really grew up.

I am going to start the new year off by living more simply, I am trying to do everything possible to lead a more simplistic lifestyle. Does this mean throw everything out? Not exactly, but it does mean to reduce the unnecessary in my life and focus on what I need to be focusing on.

It seems like I spend so much time trying to make money to pay bills that I lose track of why I am doing it all in the first place. I don’t spend nearly enough time enjoying my children, before I know it they will be grown and gone! My focus here will be to spend more time playing games, going places and just doing things with my children before they are too big and don’t want to do things with me :)

Another focus will be on personal development, this entails my physical being (getting in shape), my intellectual being (reading more/learning more) and my artistic abilities (learning to play music, drawing, whatever). I need to learn to take time for myself and do things to enrich my personal being so that I can be happy with myself which will allow me to be happier with others. I plan to devote time for fitness, doing things I like to do along with finding some new things that I like to do.

Personal relationships with family and friends, I am not even sure where to start… I will leave this one for a separate post when I can sort things out more. This is not to say that I don’t have many friendships that I consider to be close and trusting it is more of a family issue than friends. Although I have let many friendships just slip away because of the mundane tasks that life throws at me. I plan to work on making new friends or reviving old friendships and plan to do more things that involves my friends.

Finances… This is a biggie, it will take more than a year to really focus on what needs to be done here, but I have many goals when it comes to finances. I need to pay down some debt, fix some financial issues and move on to buying my own home. For those of you who know me, you know that I have been living in the same house that I grew up in. My parents house which is fine but it is not mine, it doesn’t feel like I really belong here, I am not sure if it ever felt like home (except for when I was a kid growing up here). It is time to cut the apron strings so to speak and move on to my own habitat. When? I don’t know, but it is in my five year plan that I am working on.

At my day job there is not much that can be changed because it is a job plain and simple. There is no room for advancement but yet it is too comfortable to just up and leave. I have spent 22 years of my life there and really can’t throw it all away on a whim. Perhaps one day in the future if my business becomes successful enough I will be afforded the ability to just leave, but until then I am stuck in that daily routine.

In my personal business life I have plenty to change. I plan to narrow down my focus, instead of being everything to everyone I plan to have a narrow focus and offer only a certain amount of services. I no longer will feel obligated to take on anything that I don’t want to, from now on I am only going to take on tasks that I really and truly want to do. My plan is to concentrate on web development for the small business and non-profit sector along with all the other things that go with web development (blogs, social media, hosting, support, application development). I still plan to support my existing businesses but I am going to combine them into the main business (Black Cat Technologies) to make it easier to keep track of everything. I am going to eliminate unnecessary websites, redundant email addresses, redundant chat/instant message accounts along with web profiles. Of course Facebook is staying along with my LinkedIn account and Twitter, but most others will slowly be terminated.

Why the sudden need for all these changes? Well of course since the new year is approaching it gives everyone a sense of starting fresh, I too am not immune to that feeling and so now is a better time than ever to really take stock and look forward. Life is short so you have to make the most of it while you are here, not to mention that everyone should have the drive to advance and not stagnate in life.

Here is wishing you a Happy, Healthy and Successful New Year! Let me know what changes you plan to make for the new year in the comments below.

~Phil

I just want to wish all my family and friends a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy & Wealthy New Year.

This was just too funny not to repost it.

If you use Linux at all you will understand the above image, if you are stuck on windows well you have other things to worry about :)

Anyway thanks goes to GeeksAreSexy.net for posting this.

~Phil

Just say NO!

This is going to be my new mantra in life. I am always willing to say yes to most anything just to keep people happy. Well the time has come to say NO!

If i am asked to do something I really don’t want to do then I am going to say NO! If I am asked to take a job that I think is not a good fit for me then I am going to say NO! If I really don’t feel good about doing something then the answer is… NO!

I have thought about this for some time and I realized that just because I tell someone NO it doesn’t make them like me less or even make them not want to hire me in the future. It will not make their project come to a screeching halt or make the sky fall in.

What it will do is give me the freedom to choose to do what I want to do and not what I think I have to do.

I read a great blog post about this very subject. The following sums up the post best;

Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying:

If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then say no.

As we approach the new year I am looking to change many things in my life, some are business related, some personal and some have to do with personal development. In the end I think that by releasing myself of things I don’t want to do I will have more time to do the things I do want to do.

Does that make me sound selfish? It could appear that way, but who said the things I want to do are just for myself? Perhaps I want to spend a day fishing with my Son, or a day playing basket ball with my Daughter. Whatever I choose to do at least I will be wanting to do it!

What do you think? Am I right or wrong? Am I selfish?

Or am I finally beginning to realize that there are only so many days that you can truly appreciate life and I don’t want to spend those days doing things that I really don’t want to be doing.

~Phil

First it was J.P. Morgan Chase then it was eBay and now Paypal!

When is it going to stop?

Do these phishing emails really work?

Do people actually click on a link that look like this:

http://rolexwatches2.com/images/.www.paypal.com/

If you would consider clicking on a link like that can you tell me why? Why would you think that a domain that starts with http://rolexwatches2.com has anything to do with Paypal?

Here is the email I received today and have since forwarded it on to Paypal.

(Click image to enlarge)

If you receive one of these phishing emails make sure you forward it on to spoof@paypal.com and then delete it.

One thing Paypal does is use secure urls for everything. So you would never get http://www.paypal.com you should always get https://www.paypal.com (notice the ’s’).

If you did happen to enter your real Paypal information into a phishing site, go to Paypal and change your login information right away and monitor any withdrawals from your account.

Now-a-days you have to be very vigilant when you are using the internet. If you receive an email like the one above, it is most likely fraudulent and should not be followed. Most companies do not send you an email with login links and tell you to login and change your settings, they send you an email telling you to login to your account but don’t offer any links to do so.

Have you been a phishing victim?

Did you get any of these emails?

Let me know in the comments below.