If you live in an area long enough you just get to know what’s best around you. You’ve got your favorite pizza parlor, burger joint, Mexican restaurant, movie theatre, and if you don’t know anything else you know the best amusement park! If you’re in new Jersey the best Amusement Park around is going to have to be Morey’s Piers hands down! Whether you’re just visiting New Jersey, or live their the place for an exciting weekend will always be Morey’s.

Oh wow, I’m so freakin excited!  I’ve been up all night working on ApplyMyWay.com and it’s looking good!  Yeah I know, here I am like a year later FINALLY putting the site up, but that’s okay.  Things are coming along smoothly, and if everything continues looking how it does… we’re talking 2-3 weeks before everyone can make their own applications and host them for free!  Be it you own a business and need to hire some new employees that you’d like to screen with an application first, or you want to get into the dating scene and found some people online that maybe you’re less likely to ask some questions directly too but need to know some things.  The application process features unlimited questions, unlimited choices for answers (along with essay style, short answer, check all that apply, and multiple choice).  You’ll also get your own profile where you can display what applications you’ve created, which you’ve taken, a picture of yourself, and a short bio.

The site is basically just awesome… I can’t wait to get it up and rolling!  It honestly shouldn’t be too long before it’s ready… just needs to go up!  When I get it up though, I highly expect lots of peoples help in promoting, testing, and just generally using the site.  Have fun, and get those signed up for your ninja forces.

“I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Hebrews 13:5

That’s not the whole verse, but that is what I’ve been reminded of throughout this week.  Actually, the entire verse is much more ironic and appropriate for my situation.  I know the original short verse ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.” comes from Deuteronomy but the verse from Hebrews is much more appropriate as when Jesus is quoting that verse he is speaking of marriage… something that for myself I’ve considered to be at least a year or more out before I had to worry about it.

I’ve been kind of silent on here, and there’s good reason for that.  The news I have to bear is something that I’d prefer to tell my friends and family in person, so if you’re close to me and not heard anything of my life recently, stop reading now!  haha, no but seriously this is the kind of thing best heard in person, so if you don’t know, just ask the next time you see me.

My Bible translates that passage as “I will never leave you, nor forget you.”  something that us humans have a hard time comprehending, because we forget about people all the time, and can’t be around everyone at every moment.  We’ve got plenty of examples in the Bible of God not forgetting His people… and yet we still doubt.  God has always been faithful, but we don’t quite comprehend that either.  I see a lot from people online, visiting the many social networking sites that I frequent there seems to be more debate about religion than ever… one question that comes up often is “If God is this (fill in the blank loving, compassionate, just, etc.) why does he allow (fill in the blank death, disease, murder, etc.)” the general Christian response isn’t bad, most of the time going along the lines of “well God gives us the choice to either live in sin, or live in His Grace” not incorrect… but it also leaves out a key element.  We live in a world at war.

In Daniel there’s a story of how Daniel had a dream or something that he couldn’t quite interpret.  He started fasting and praying more intensely for the meaning… it didn’t come to him for 21 days.  On the 21st day an angel appears to him out of breath and barely able to speak the message he came to deliver.  The angel starts out by apologizing for taking so long, The Lord had sent him the first day of his fast, but he ran into a very powerful demon who delayed him.  The angel fought for days before going back to Heaven to get Michael to help him break through the lines.  We’re in a world at war… and the greatest trick of the enemy is to get us to believe that everything is how it should be.

Even in all of this The Lord will never leave us, nor forget us.  It’s a good thing too, you don’t realize how comforting those words are until you’re in a situation where you actually see the invisible war of this world.  Recently I’ve been in a position to more clearly see the danger of the world around me.  A little more than a week ago I got the news that Rose is pregnant… It’s not the worst of news, but certainly on the scary end of things.  Never-the-less God has managed to provide just as the time is right.  In fact, because of how God has been taking care of things I’m more excited about being a father than scared of how things could turn out with the situation.

haha, so I was at ZLB Plasma donation center earlier today.  Long story, but one day I was telling Rose about how I used to go all the time when I didn’t have a job (see that’s the problem with freelance work, some days you’ll have a job, others you simply won’t).  She’s just out of nursing school so of course wants to get into nursing, well in the mean time she’s been watching her bank account slowly dwindle down.  In an effort to help her keep afloat and paying for groceries we decided to go back to donating plasma… well back for me, it was her first time selling her body to the medical industry.  It’s kinda funny because in all the brochures and stuff they show these college age kids smiling, excited, dressed all pretty, totally more happy than they should be about being stuck with a very large needle and having their blood drained, plasma seperated, then the blood pumped back into your body.  First of all very few of the people in there are anything like that… I’m one of the few skinny college age kids that comes in.  Most of the people in there are… well less than savory people.  And you don’t get many skinny little guys like myself either.  Your first four visits you get $40 then after that you’re paid by your weight… me at 145lbs I only get $15 a visit, so it’s really not worth the trip after that… I’ll keep going as long as Rose wants to since it does mean twice a week when I see her my gas is paid for!

Back to the regulars at ZLB though.  There are more than a few that I know for sure are hobo’s, a few drug addicts (even though they generally keep them out because you’ve got to clear all sorts of qualification tests), and nobody is all prettied up when they go in.  You don’t just walk into a plasma donation clinic unless you’ve got some sort of need… and it really doesn’t help with the neighborhood it’s in, which is probably intentional.  It’s not actually in a really bad neighborhood, but not far from.  So of course you get a lot of the people from that neighborhood in there… because if you’ve got a good job and are paying the bills there’s no reason to come and spend 5 hours in the plasma donation clinic for $40 (at the most).

Well the people working there aren’t much better either.  Besides the fact that you’re being stuck with a 17 guage needle by someone who has absolutely no medical training (just on the job training of how to shove a needle in peoples arm), many of them are just as scary looking as the people in there.  Your fears are only amplified by the words that come out of their mouth.  When I was getting my “mini physical” to make sure I was healthy enough to donate plasma, first she’s almost surprised by the fact that I’ve got no tatoos or piercings, then you’ve got to go through a series of questions about if you’ve ever had sex with another man, or if you’ve had sex with a man who’s had sex with another man since 1977, or if you’ve ever taken drugs or money for sex… you know the standard questions then you take a short quiz on what activities could increase your risk for AIDS.  It’s pretty easy besides I’ve read the stuff a hundred times before but when I didn’t get any of the questions wrong she says to me “You remember real good.” I didn’t know how exactly I was supposed to respond to that… I mean seriously… I wasn’t sure if I should correct her on her grammar, go into my whole “Yeah I’ve got a great visual memory” speech, or what.  I chose the “Smile and nod” out but was sort of stunned that people actually use that kind of language in their every day speech.

So I finally did it… 100% of all my sites are now on the new server I’ve got rented.  It only took me all night to do!  Things started out okay, I mostly just set up all my sites to download into named folders… not a big deal.  When you’re downloading 14 websites it takes a little bit of time though.  After the downloads were complete the DNS changes could begin… this is where it got interesting.  I’ve never really had any troubles with DNS changes before, they always give you the “This could take up to 12 hours” message… blah, blah, blah.  I’ve never had it take more than 20 minutes… until last night that is.  One by one some of the sites would pop onto the grid and I’d upload the files for it, create whatever databases needed to be made, and move onto the next.  This continued until about 5am when all of the remaining sites that hadn’t come into view for me decided not to (including this one).  Figured if after 5 hours they hadn’t shown up they weren’t going to I went to sleep.  At about 9am I woke up and CodySortore.com had finally become accessible.  Shortly after uploading the files for this site, and setting up the database ArchmailleDesigns.com became accessible.  I’m still waiting on three of my sites, but all of my important sites are up and running now so we’re happy with that!  I started getting tired again after having breakfast, and uploading the sites that I could so I went back to sleep.

I was rudely awoken by a dream… of course about my sites.  I was having a dream that I was checking HollysFund.com when all of a sudden after a page refresh the site was gone simply with the message “This site has been hacked by so and so h4xz0r group” I just remember my heart dropping as I didn’t make a backup of the site last night since I was working on essentially backing up and moving all my other sites.  Needless to say I got out of bed and checked the site immediately, and made a backup.

Among one of the sites I’m still waiting on to get all cleared in the DNS settings is applymyway.com which just so happens to be the one I’m going to begin work on.  I figure if I can kick out a site ASAP using CakePHP here within a month or two have a fully functional application building site, then I can launch it and start pulling in hopefully a decent revenew from it, and if not then at the very least start building a good sized mailing list.

Rose and I just spent the last 4 days together and one of the things that we did during that time was watch “The Princess Bride” as I’ve been told by a number of my friends that I need to watch it anyways.  In general it’s been an amazing week, to start off I’ve spent the last few weeks either coding or this week promoting HollysFund.com a site for my mom’s friend who’s been diagnosed with breast cancer, doesn’t have insurance, or vacation time so it’s an attempt at getting her some help.  It’s been pretty successful so far, which is always exciting.  The outpouring of love and compassion for her has been great.

Then the uh “weekend” came a bit early for me as on Thursday Rose and I started hanging out and stayed together until Sunday.  Even today we ended up hanging out again for a little get together with some of her friends.  It’s always been joked about between my friends that I can’t be around anyone for more than two days without going crazy, which in the past has always been true, humans just annoy me… all of ‘em.  No matter how intelligent or funny you are, chances are something about you will annoy me if we are around one another for very long.  But I can honestly say that after this weekend I’m more in love with Rose than ever… don’t get me wrong I’d like to be able to get more work done than I did, but at the end of the day I’d like the opportunity to have her in my arms.  I like how Rose put it, I think it was Sunday or maybe one of the other days we were together refering to one of her work week days she said that she wishes that she could come home to me… I do too, being around her relaxes me, we’re just comfortable together, and it’s amazing.  So yeah, even though I’ve still not even really said much on here about Rose, she’s my girl, and I’ll do whatever I must to keep her.

Speaking of not keeping up with things on here that’s actually partly due to Rose… but not entirely.  A few factors contribute to that 1) spending at least two nights a week with Rose, and usually more I’ve got to keep up on my work 2) been working more for MTV 3) been doing some actual coding work, and kicking out sites of my own… just finished up on the Holly’s Fund website, and have done what I know to promote it, the rest I’ll leave up to God for that.  Now that I’m done with that I’d like to move on to coding either AgapeBeacon.com or ApplyMyWay.com probably the latter as it’s a little easier, and also could grow quicker giving me a platform (and email mailing list) for launching Agape Beacon.  So it looks like that’s how things are going to go… however I really need to move all of my websites over to my new server (this ones not even been moved over yet).  I’ve got this killer server rented, and the only sites I’ve got on it are brand new not even coded sites so it’s really a waste of money.  I need to move all 17 (seems like that number grows every day) of my sites over to the new server, and slowly get to building sites and coding platforms to make them all unique, and hopefully profitable.  Since as of now I’ve only got three profitable websites because I’ve never established some of my others.  My goal is to have that change over the next year or so.

Wow, so I can officially say that I’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity that has been shown to Holly.  A couple of weeks ago my mom asked me to make a website for her friend Holly Fannin, so I did.  The reasons she wanted me to make a website for Holly is because she was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.  In fact this is her diagnosis sheet:

I’m not sure what everything on there means, but I know it’s bad.  What’s worse is that Holly has no insurance, no vacation time, and is the sole provider for her family.  When I heard this coming from my mom I accepted the challenge of creating a fundraising site for Holly.  Of course it’s not all about funds, prayer is much more important in this situation than a few measly dollars.  But what I’ve seen in the last few days since I finished up the site and began spreading the word is an amazing generosity!  Numerous comments left on the site, tons of prayers, and help beyond belief in the department of spreading the word.  Magnus Grafex of Family Help Tree gave the most amazing donation when I was asking bloggers to help spread the word through their blogs.  Magnus went above and beyond what I asked and not only blogged about Holly’s situation, but put up a $100 campaign on PayPerPost at $5 a piece to get other bloggers to help in spreading the word!  The FaceBook group has grown to over 100 people in a matter of days (even though it is depressing to see the “snowball effect” group with 90,000 members after 7 days and the growth of Holly’s group growth slow to a crawl), and last night over 300 people visited the site via StumbleUpon.com in less than a 30 minute time period!

The outpouring of love for Holly has been amazing to watch over the last few days… but it’s also been exhausting.  I’ve promoted a Mixx submission, passed around the StumbleUpon link, sent out invitations to the FaceBook group, and been to hundreds of blogs asking for any assistance they can give.  Needless to say I’m tired, it’s been three days of promoting and watching stats to see what’s working and what isn’t.  So I’m taking a break today.  When the articles start coming in from the PPP campaign I’ll stumble all of them to get more traffic, and I still have yet to beg the people of BlogCatalog.com to help me out, but I still only have 60 friends on there so I’m building up the friends list first, and then it will be time to ask for help.  Today I’m going to do a little bit of room cleaning, and put up my mom’s blinds in her room, don’t let the message stop though!

Have you ever lived outside of your comfort zone?  I don’t mean like, walking out of your comfort zone to talk to some poor stranger, or even a day or two out side of what your norm is… I mean living it, week in and week out.  That’s pretty much how I feel right now… for the last 8 months or so I’ve actually tried staying out of my comfort zone, makes things more exciting.

Anyways, what have I been up to?  Not that many of you care, especially when I’ve not updated in some time.  but that question can be answered pretty simply.  Two things pop into my head when I think of what’s been going on with me, I’ve been dating Rose and working!  Rose is probably the biggest reason why I’ve been out of my comfort zone.  I don’t think she even knows it, I’m used to being my usual anti-social, blogging, website building, gamer, that rarely leaves the house for more than a few hours a day to ride my bike around Parkville.  With her I’m out of sorts, and I’ve got to be strong still… it’s a good stretch and I actually really like it.  I’ve not really been on here to say that I’m dating Rose, and at some point in time I’ll really write something meaningful, I’m in all business mode right now though!

As far as working goes the biggest project I’ve been working on is HollysFund.com which has been great, but I’ll be glad to get the finishing touches on it this week.  Holly is a woman my mother has known and worked with for five years, who has breast cancer and is in great need of support.  My mother commisionned me to build a website for her and see how the community of the interwebs could help her.  I agreed and have been pounding away at that.  The site is up and ready to go!  There are a few finishing touches for me left, pictures, some more divisions in the CSS for the pictures and comment box stuff… but it’s good.  I’m only hoping that you all out there on the net show Holly the love and support that can be found in this world.  I’ve seen the power of community on the internet, now show it to someone who really needs help!  The most you could do for Holly would be to pray for her, I know you probably don’t know her, I just met her this last week… but God knows who she is, and loves her.

Ok, this is for all you silly people who keep complaining about me buying you on MySpace with the own your friends application, get over it.  If I have owned you on the app it’s because you’re cheap, nothing more.  Yeah, there are a few of my friends that I’ll pay a lot for, other than that you’re being used to make a little money.  I don’t pay over $700 for anyone to insure that I get the most out of gifting you, because I only make $1,250 for each person I give away… so in order to keep my costs down I’ve got to find cheap people, which I do through several means.  If you are going to complain or ask why I own you at least let me respond too!  lol, I love it that all the people that have complained so far with the “who are you, why’d you buy me, and all my pets?” messages I can’t respond because only their friends can send them a message… and of course I can’t add you as a friend to send you the message because gotta know your last name and email address in order to do that… so my message to you is QUIT COMPLAINING!!! It’s just a game, you’re being used to make a little money in the game, get over it.

3am and I’m outside walking down the desolate road as the rain falls around me.  I must of caught the end of the storm because the rain was light and sparse unlike I was expecting from looking out the windows.  My goal was still within reach, even with the dissipating storm.  My goal was the creek, I hadn’t been down to the creek in some time as with only three days a week to work around faire it had been a good month since I’d had “time” to visit my old friend of rushing waters.  The storm created an ever inviting time to reacquaint myself with the rushing waters.  I hadn’t been down to the creek during a storm in years, but it was refreshing.  I came barefoot this time as I planned to spend some time in the waters.  Walking across the six inch deep water that rushes fast enough to knock you on your butt and wash you downstream if you don’t keep your footing is intense during the day… and nearly petrifying at night.  One of the main reasons I went down there was because of the rushing waters though.  When we were younger we used to explore the creek all the time, and went down to it a few times during big storms because the fast moving water just made the whole exploration situation more fun!  One thing we learned back then was to “water ski” by holding onto the edge of the bridge and putting your feet in the water you could glide atop the water if it was moving fast enough.  That’s what I was headed for at 3am!  By the time I was ready to move on I had hardly noticed but there wasn’t even a light drizzle of rain any longer.  I took the opportunity to go and walk around the neighborhood on my way home.  The clouds are what intrigued me most as I walked home though.  Sometimes they glow orange at night during a large storm, and tonight was one of those nights.  I speculate that the reason for it is similar to why fiber optics work.  The clouds carry sunlight from the other side of the world and bring it to us in their densly formed water droplets.