I wish setting up a Google calendar in iCal was simpler and worked better but unfortunately it pretty much sucks ass. I’ve waisted countless hours with my team trying to get this to work well, or work at all. There’s a few different ways you can set it up that seem to start working but as for my own experience it’s never reliable.

I finally broke down and bought a subscription of Spanning Sync so far it’s working well for me. From time to time I’ll see a duplicate but at least it’s on my calendar and accurate. Until iCal comes out with an update that will support Google Calendar or vice versa I’m going to stick with Spanning Sync.

I looked around for a promo code and it took a while to find one so if you’re going to buy spanning sync I’d be more than happy if you used my promo code. It will get you $5 off and it will also get me $5 off my subscription.

Spanning Sync 3 promo code: DHQNWN

The iPad was unveiled today and as I was anxiously anticipating details of the eReader functionality my excitement quickly turned to disappointment when I realized they went for a “Book” looking UI. I personally don’t understand why they felt the need to use the turning page graphic and the remaining side of the book pages for the iBook app. I mean that’s nifty and all but I know I’m not holding a real book it’s not making it a better user experience for me. In fact I might rather that space to the right (where you can see the remaining pages) be used for the controls, where I can adjust brightness text size and maybe even flip the page with the flick of my thumb. Although as I stated before I could do with out the the turning page graphic. Maybe I’m being a little hard on this on aspect of the iPad but this [eReader] is the part I’ve been anticipating most and I was prepared to have my mind blown with the genius of Apple. All said, I still plan on getting one. Maybe using one “in my hands” will change my mind.

Check out the Mag+ concept below. Yes I understand it’s called “Mag” and not Book+ but it’s extremely inovative and honestly gets me super geeked about hand held reader / eReader formats.

Tom Watson also discusses “A New Canvas“

I didn’t realize that other people were using the same terminology but I’ve said for quite sometime, when I feel like I need to make great steps, that “I need to get uncomfortable.” I was delightfully reminded of this idea this morning as I read Liz Danzico’s latest post.

I’ve always heard of the person who goes in for an interview for a job in which they have no skills or previous experience but boldly lies about his knowledge and achievements, ultimately landing the job and becoming notably successful. Of course I have to imagine a Catch me if you Can scenario considering the number of high paid professionals with phony college degrees but it’s still relatively brave to go for something knowing that how you perform and how confident you appear to be will be the difference of getting said job or looking like a complete moron.

Faking yourself in to complete confidence, this is how you motivate yourself. We’ve all said, “I know I can do this” a few times in life in order to reassure ourselves that we know we can do this thing that we’re not really sure we can do. Whether you’re pulling a Tony Robins or Stuart Smalley, for the purpose of getting a job or asking out a girl [or guy], being confident or at least seeming confident is the key to making great steps towards a particular goal.

So you’ve made your first steps towards getting that job. Well now you actually have to perform. You have to do the work and push through unfamiliar uncomfortable territory and as long as it’s doing what you want to do it’s worth it. It means you care about what you do and that you’re concerned about the result of how you’re doing it.

So next time you get an offer to do something that you’re interested in, you should probably just say yes. You’ll probably kick ass and even if you fuck shit up royally you’ll either learn that you don’t really want to do this or even better you’ll learn how not to make the same mistakes you did before.

Hey I’m just beginning to write, something I’m not completely comfortable with. So feel free to critique or bash as you so desire. I’ll get better.

So my good buddy Ray was giving me a hard time about getting some shots of him. Finally we caught up last May while he was in town and we were able to get some good stuff. Thanks in part to Ray’s lovely wife Doan, she got some sweet shots too.

Steady dippin’

“Heh?!” -Ray

If you’re already familiar with the title of this post than you know project 52 is a project created by Anton Peck as a challenge to write a blog post once a week for 1 year, or 52 weeks. I saw Anton’s tweet some time ago but thought to myself, “Man, I’m not signing this I’ve had hard enough time trying to think of something decent to write about in the past two years.. once a week ain’t gonna happen.” I couldn’t commit. It sat on my mind a bit and I started thinking of why it was so hard for me get motivated to write something. It’s not that I don’t want to write [or try to write], I do, I want to improve my communication skills across the board. Something I realized I need to work on. In fact I’m probably going to write about that at some point but I digress. I realized that part of it was that I hadn’t been happy with my site design for quite a while. Not considering my site a priority in my project list, I pushed this p52 challenge to the back of my mind and continued on.

Time goes by and I haven’t thought about p52. I did however go to St. Croix over Christmas and to Miami a week later. While in Miami with my wife Nycole, we meet up with My Cousin (in-law) whom always happens be working on some interesting projects as he’s and his father are both entrepreneurs by heart. So while we’re chatting about books and interweb stuff I say, “Hey you should check out this guy Gary Vaynerchuck, I’ve been wanting to check out his book.” Then it’s in my head. I’ve been wanting a good read and I know a lot of my buddies have read it but I hadn’t really asked how it was. So I sent @cdharrison a DM asking if he thought it was a good read and would recommend it. I think that was my way of justifying a new book purchase while I’ve got 3 or 4 unread books laying on my dresser. He said it was good so I got it. Great read btw. Thanks Chris!

Well in Garyvee‘s book Crush It! he kept talking about creating content, creating content, creating content.. So I thought to myself, “Shit, I really have to start posting something!” I get in to the office the following morning and see a tweet from @anton and thought, “Okay now I ready to commit to this thing.”

So here you have it my first post for #p52 and as I haven’t completely figured out what my focus is going to be yet, I’m going to continue to write one post per week. I’m sure it will be somewhat random at best and… well… I’ve never proclaimed to be a poet and I can holy hope that my future posts are remotely intriguing or entertaining.

Thanks go out to Anton Peck & Gary Vaynerchuck for the inspiration to balls up and start posting.

Let me know what you think. I would also love your feed back on any post. If I’m writing or posting something that you think is nonsense or just lame, Let me know!