Dialectical Reasoning

I am so annoyed with Spirit Airlines. I purchased tickets to fly from Aguadilla Puerto Rico to Atlantic City New Jersey about two months ago. Since then, I have received numerous emails explaining to me that my flight plans have changed. In one of the emails, it says that we are being re-routed through Detroit! Are you kidding me?

That isn’t the worst part. I can handle a little bit of a change, and if I don’t like it, I would call and change my ticket right? WRONG! Spirit Airlines makes it nearly impossible to find their telephone number on their website. I am not going to post the URL here because I DO NOT want to provide them with any inbound links, but I challenge you; go to their website and try to find their telephone number. The bad part about that is that I think they are hiding there number to save money. I can hear the excec’s now; “If we don’t put a contact number on the website, people will be forced to use the online form and we’ll save money on operators!”

Once I finally found the telephone number, it didn’t work properly! I was prompted for an English / Spanish speaking operator, and as soon I hit the corresponding number, I would get a super fast busy signal. I called back a few times to see if it was just a glitch, I even called back and didn’t hit any buttons (impersonating a rotary phone) but I was unsuccessful in my attempt to speak to a Spirit Airlines representative.

I have uploaded quite a few copies of WordPress 2.5 for clients now, and I have had no problems with it at all…until my last upload. This copy was for my friends Dana and Jamie so they can have a WordPress blog about The Adventures of Keegan Tosh Kelly (and family). The problem didn’t occur during the installation, the problem occurred when submitting comments. The 2.5 version of WordPress was showing a 404 Page error after I would (and everyone else) would hit the submit button. It also seemed like it was getting all hung up for a while, thinking of where to redirect the user before returning the 404 page. The weird thing about it though, it was still sending the comment moderation emails to the admin’s email account.

I thought for sure that this must have been a bug with WordPress 2.5 because I hadn’t hacked anything and I was using a very basic theme. I started Googling terms that might help me find a forum or another blog posting similar errors, but there wasn’t much indexed since this most recent version of WordPress just came out a few weeks ago.

When Summer and I transferred our www.ca2pr.com wordpress blog to our new server, we were getting 404 pages also. Summer figured out that because we were using the mod_rewrite option for Search Engine Friendly URL’s, we may have to reset that option (turn off and back on again) so that the new server would now how to handle URL requests….and TA DAAA! It worked.

I wasn’t having the same problem here, but it did have something to do with the URL (404 error) so I decided to head on over to the Settings button on the right hand side of the Wordpress Admin screen. That is when I saw my mistake that caused the 404 error when posting comments. I screwed up the Custom URL structure.

You see, I like to skip the category in the URL structure, and go right for the post title. So, to achieve this, I add a “Custom Structure” to my settings page like so:

My mistake was leaving a space after the last % and before the /. I took out the space (as shown above), republished the blog and now it is no longer returning a 404. I was misdiagnosed the problem from the start; the comment button was working just fine, the Thank You Page was not found. I am glad I didn’t start hacking up the core files trying to fix it. :-)

Yesterday was an extremely productive day for me. Although, I worked close to 14 hours, I accomplished more things yesterday with my new Puerto Rican business than I have in the past two weeks.

Yesterday, I successfully uploaded an opensource content management system on my new corporate website, uploaded a “Client Relationship Management” software and imported all of my current client data and uploaded vBulletin. I set up all of the proper databases on the server, transferred my old vBulletin database to my new server and successfully connected to all the old data on the new server.

It really does feel good to get all of that stuff done. Not just because it is behind me, but because knowing how these things work and having the ability to do them (quasi-efficiently) is very empowering for me. After all, I work on the web for a living, and up until this point, I have always paid employees or 1099 contractors to do these things for me.

Database Creation and Transfer completion list:
• New Database created for Joomla (User created and granted permissions)
• New Database created for SugarCRM (User created and granted permissions)
• Successful Import of old Database to new server for vBulletin ((User created and granted permissions))
FTP Transfer Success:
• All directories and files associated with Joomla
• All directories and files associated with SugarCRM
• All directories and files associated with vBulletin

Nice!



Author: admin

This morning, after using open source software WordPress for a client, I decided it was time to transfer my personal blog from Blogger to WordPress. There were tons of tutorials online that explained how to make the transfer over to the open source content management system, but none of them seemed to work!

I know just enough coding to know that I could be dangerous if I were let loose on files that were not backed up. I found about 8 tutorials on the first page of Google when I searched exporting Blogger to WordPress, but they all required me to change settings on my server, then the Blogger settings interface and included multiple warnings to back up my site. Shhhhhh…I thought this was going to be much easier.

After setting up wordpress on a new domain, I simply went to the “Settings” tab in the new WordPress 2.5 interface and clicked on “Import” and chose “Blogger” from the menu. I have three blogs with Blogger, but I only wanted to import the posts from one of them. After I authorized Google for my new URL to access the posts, I was sent back to another user interface page with listed the amount of posts and comments it could import for each of my blogs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t showing anything for this blog (about 165 posts and 300 comments).

After tons of searching around, head banging and kicking the dog (no animals were truly harmed during the transfer of my Blogger to Word Press) with no luck, I decided to try one more thing.

The only Blogger site that WordPress was able to import, was the only site I have hosted with blogspot. With that knowledge, I decided to open a blogspot account (I created a domain.blogspot URL and chose to keep it private so the search engine spiders wouldn’t crawl it) so I could try to import from there. It seemed a bit dodgy though, because I then had to go to my blog and go to the “Publishing Tab” and changed my settings. I changed my settings from my custom domain to Blog*Spot Address. I then saved my settings in Blogger.

I then went back to my new WordPress admin panel, clicked on “Manage”, then “Import”, then Authorize (when I was prompted by Google whether or not to Authorize my new domain to the data) and within seconds, it showed all of the posts in the admin section of two out of my three blogs. Both of the ones that were showing posts were hosted at blogspot.com.

From there, you simply hit the Import button next to your desired blog and like magic, your Blogger account has been imported into your WordPress 2.5 account!

What was I doing 10 years ago?

… Working 90 hours a week June - Septmber

… Surfing Australia and Hawaii all winter

Things On My To Do list

… plant more fruit trees

… organize office paper work and book keeping

… play poker at 7:00pm

… work on taxes

… get ARPE paperwork done

… Surf

… water plants

Bad Habits

… trying too hard

… french fries

… loosing at poker

Places I have Lived

… Vermont (Brattleboro)

… Jersey (Ocean City)

… North Carolina (Wrightsville Beach)

… Kauai (Kapaa)

… San Diego (La Jolla, Encinitas Carlsbad)

… New South Whales (Newcastle AUS)

… Rincon Puerto Rico

Things Most People Don’t Know About Me

… Ayn Rand is my idol

… I get sea sick

… I’m afraid of flying (just turbulence)

I just got an email from US Airways regarding their baggage policy. According to the email, in order to offset rising fuel costs, they will now be charging $25 for your second bag. They explain it by saying;

We’re making these changes to offset record fuel prices and rising airline related expenses. We simply must make changes to the way we do business to provide all of you with the high level of service that you’ve come to expect from US Airways. Also, we’re doing all we can to keep fares low. With this policy change, we’re able to give you the choice to avoid the fee and pack fewer items. With fewer bags to process, we save both money and fuel and can pass that savings on to you.

I guess that is cooler than raising the fares…especially since if I ever travel with a second bag, it is a surfboard and I get charged for that no matter what. Hopefully that won’t apply to new parents that are lugging around all the ‘kid gear’ that is required to raise a child in this modern world.

I posted a few things I found online while researching my tax liabilities as a sole owner LLC. Pretty interesting stuff that could help you out too…I’ll keep posting tidbits here and do my best to keep it organized.

Single-Owner LLCs and Taxes

The IRS treats one-member LLCs as sole proprietorships for tax purposes. This means that the LLC itself does not pay taxes and does not have to file a return with the IRS.

As the sole owner of your LLC, you must report all profits (or losses) of the LLC on Schedule C and submit it with your 1040 tax return. Even if you leave profits in the company’s bank account at the end of the year — for instance, to cover future expenses or expand the business — you must pay income tax on that money.

If your California LLC will regularly need to retain a significant amount of profits in the company, you (and your co-owners, if you have any) may be able to save money by electing to have your LLC taxed as a corporation.

The self-employment tax rate for 2006 for business owners is 15.3% of the first $94,200 of income and 2.9% of everything over $94,200.

Expenses and Deductions - Taxes and California

As you no doubt already know, you don’t have to pay taxes — income taxes or self-employment taxes — on most of the money that your business spends in pursuit of profit. You can deduct (”write off”) your legitimate business expenses from your business income, which can greatly lower the profits you must report to the IRS. Deductible expenses include start-up costs, automobile and travel expenses, equipment costs, and advertising and promotion costs.

California exacts a hefty $800 “minimum franchise tax” per year from LLCs

Can Corporate Taxation Cut Your LLC Tax Bill?

If you will regularly need to keep a substantial amount of profits in your LLC (called “retained earnings”), you might benefit from electing corporate taxation (which you can do as an LLC). Any LLC can choose to be treated like a corporation for tax purposes by filing IRS Form 8832 and checking the corporate tax treatment box on the form.

Because the corporate income tax rates for the first $75,000 of corporate taxable income are lower than the individual income tax rates that apply to most LLC owners, this can save you and your co-owners money in overall taxes.

I highly recommend you watch this video carefully…even if you don’t live in America…this issue can effect you.

Live From Congress: The Skull Fucking Bill Of 2007

I flew out of San Juan two days ago to go to Oklahoma City on business and made a horrible mistake, I wore flip flops and a t-shirt on the plane. It was a 5 hour flight to Houston and within the first five minutes of taking off the temperature in the cabin went down to about 65 degrees. Now, this isn’t my first time flying so I should have remembered a sweatshirt or maybe even a ‘triple fat goose’ jacket because flights are always cold…but I didn’t. For the entire 5 hour flight I was freezing…Summer and I stayed up hanging out playing poker and blackjack in the casino, went swimming around 4:00am and went to bed around 5:00am…I woke up at 9:00 to explore San Juan’s bath stores for a new vessell sink for our guest bathroom so by the time I got on the plane…I was tired…real tired, but I was too cold to sleep.

I had about a 20 minute layover in Houston and grabbed a sweatshirt at a kiosk while running across the giant Houston Airport. The sweatshirt had the words “Texas” on it and a picture of a longhorn bull on it. I didn’t think much of it besides it was something to keep me warm…but I should have known better.

Apparently, the Texas Longhorns are a football team and they are arch rivals with the Oklahoma Sooners (also a football team). Well, in this part of the US football is a religion…and me wearing this sweatshirt around Oklahoma City is kin to wearing a ‘Muslim’s Rule’ shirt to a private meeting with the Pope in Vatican City. This morning I wore this shirt out of the Skirkin Hilton in Oklahoma City to go get some coffee and from the point of leaving my room to walking one block to “The Buzz” cafe I had 4 people tell me I had some guts wearing that sweatshirt in Oklahoma City. I laughed it off when 2 of the four people in the elevator gave me a hard time…I thought twice about it when a full size Ford pickup with a bunch of plaid button down mustached cowboys yelled about me from their truck while driving by me and I all but turned it inside out when I hear this story from the barista in the coffee shop.

Last night on the news, he heard that there is a man in Oklahoma City being charged with aggravated assault after he got into an altercation with a man in an Oklahoma City bar for wearing a Texas Longhorns t-shirt. Now, this ‘altercation’ was pretty gnarly. The Sooners (University of Oklahoma Football Team) fan was heckling the guys wearing the Longhorns shirt…the Longhorns fan went up to close out his tab and go somewhere he would be more comfortable drinking when the Sooners fan grabbed the Longhorns fan balls (testicles) and would not let go . The Sooner fan unloaded a bunch of left and right hooks on the guys face, but he still would not let go of his balls. Well, he didn’t let go until he heard them rip off of his body. Yes, the Longhorn fan ripped the balls off of this guy requiring him to receive 60 stitches to reattach his testicles.

I have two things to say.

1. Hey sports fans, it’s only a game.
2. “Easy on my balls, they’re fragile as eggs” Old Dirty Bastard

I know what you are thinking, so get your mind out of the gutter. I am not going to post any pictures of my sexy girlfriend in lingerie here. What I am going to do is brag for her..because she won’t do it.

Summer works her ass off. She works a minimum of 10 hours a day 6 days a week running her company and is constantly exploring new ways of running her team and business more efficiently as well as researching new products her customers will like. One of the very important things she does for all of her Vicious Enterprises stores is Search Engine Optimization. It is a very time consuming part of her business but it is also fun because you always get to explore new ways of generating traffic to your site.

Here is the fruit of Summers labor…her LaLaLingerie.com store is number 1 on Google out of over 60 million results for the term “Lingerie”. Great work Summer!