October 2019 - iWatson Blog

Inspire…? Dream…?

Have you ever watched a video on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever that gave you the warm and fuzzies. One that really motivated you for 2 or more seconds. 🙂 This is my favorite kind of videos to watch. I do like watching the fail videos, but if I cringe or have to feel sick inside after the video, I try and void it. 🙂 There are a few content providers that I watch that have videos that make you feel good and spark deep thought after watching. Here are a few, of the many, I watch regularly…

Prince Ea is one of them that I like to watch. He is pretty good at his video production. I don’t like some of his click bait, and I usually avoid the ones that seem like click bait. For instance, the video title “STOP saying ‘I Love You'”. I have yet to watch this video. I love saying “I love you” to my wife. He usually has that, but he has a reason for his advice, but WHAT? I’m going to have to watch the video after typing this now. For the most part, he has a lot of really good videos. They leave you feeling good and wanting to change the world.

Here are a few (of many) I like:

Dear Future Generations: Sorry — I totally feel for the future generation. My son is going to have to deal with a lot of crazy stuff. I’m sure my parents felt the same.
What if? — This one is short, but I found it very interesting.
Before You Punish A Child, See This — This one makes me want to be a better father/person. Be mindful about what you say. Very powerful.

Dan Mace is another YouTuber that has some videos that inspire me. His videos are put together pretty well and very interesting. In his second season, he started this thing where you can go to his site and ‘plant a seed’. “A seed is a thought you’ve always had and wanted to act on” (www.notnormalshow.com) It is an awesome idea and he explores some random ideas.

Breaking the law in international waters (with cop and gang lord) — This one is pretty interesting. Have you ever looked at someone and made a quick judgement and profiled them before you even got to know them? Have you ever been able to get to know someone you’ve done that too? How did it turn out? I think about this all the time with Criminals and Cops. Cops are generally pretty cool people. Some “hoodlums” are pretty cool if you get to know them. You have cops keeping you behind bars, because you broke the law. The criminal hates the cop because he is keeping them in jail. I find it interesting. These two could look past their differences and become pretty good friends. 🙂

Yes Theory is another good channel with awesome content. They have a lot of excellent videos that inspire and leave you feeling good. From their About page it says:

“We believe that life can be as authentic and fulfilling as you wish if you seek discomfort. “

These guys had an Instagram challenge over the summer called “100 Days of Sweat.” I never participated, but I followed the updates from many of the other viewers and it was pretty inspiring. A lot of people made some great changes in their life and looked great! A few of my favorite videos are:

2 Strangers Swap Lives Across the World for 72hrs!! – What a crazy video. They find two strangers that agree to take a flight and swap lives with someone. They find the perfect people to switch and it turned out to be a pretty epic video. It is definitely worth the 23 minute investment 🙂
I Took My Pizza Delivery Guy Around the World — This video is just crazy. Kind of cool random event that you could do with a stranger. Would you do it? I would.
Overnight on the Most Dangerous Bed in the World!! — I am scared of heights! So I can totally feel the pain the one guy is going through with this challenge! It looks like a beautiful place to visit, but I don’t think I could make it out on their without passing out or dying. Facing my fears is one of the things I do not do well. Aside from heights, I think public speaking is another big fear.

Check these videos out. Feel free to post some videos that inspire you! I’d love to see them.

Where are you from?

We are owners of a timeshare. Yes, I was a sucker once, or I still am, but I bought into the dream of owning points into a timeshare where I could vacation all I wanted. I could “even sell the points to family and friends to make back my dues”. It’s a bunch of crap they tried to feed us so we would buy into their property. Now it is 19 years later, and they are still trying to find ways to make you spend more money. Timeshares are a bunch of crap, but there are some cool benefits from using them and going on vacation.

Strangers are one of them. There are many opportunities in life where you can talk to complete strangers, but there is nothing better than sitting in the hot tub with complete strangers and striking up a conversation. It seems like no one is phased by you asking “so where are you from?” It is a pretty simple question. We’ve spent the last 5 days here and have met some pretty awesome people in the hot tub. We all come from completely different backgrounds. We’ve met people from all walks of life: A Plumber, A Oil Field Worker, A Single Mom with 4 kids, and Even a Marine just getting out of boot camp. It’s been pretty awesome. Some of these people you would never imagine meeting.

It’s pretty fun playing the getting to know you games with complete strangers. We usually sit in the hot tub until the security guard comes and kicks us out at 10pm. We usually say our good byes “It was nice meeting you”, “Have a great trip”. Some of them we have talked to a couple of times. We never share Facebook links or Instagram names. We may never see them again. It would be fun to keep in touch. With Facebook, you can at least see their feed and be like “Hey, I know these guys from Tuscan, Arizona.”, or “There is that crazy guy from California that likes to grow stuff in his back yard.” The 30+ minutes you spent connecting with a complete stranger was well worth it and it has meaning, to me at least. I enjoy those times.

It reminds me of a time over the summer, where we were staying in Park City, Utah. I went for a walk to check out the homes up there. Some other random stranger was taking a walk, he was a resident up there, and we crossed paths. He ended up inviting me to go for a walk with him. He had a daily route he took, so I walked it with him. He told me about his failed marriage and his crazy ex-wife. He talked about his kids and his plans to sell his house in Park City and move to some ski town in Idaho. It was pretty interesting. Real cool guy. I’ll never see him again, but it was an awesome experience.

I say take time to talk to random strangers. Get to know those around you. Everyone has a story to tell. It doesn’t take much to sit back and listen and ask questions.

New Home…

About 6 years ago I purchased a hosting account with a company called host4asp.net. I was looking for a place I could host some NODE applications on as well as C# .NET applications. I do a lot of custom software at work and we’ve hosted sites before. My boss was the hosting guru, I just helped write the code for the sites. He did all the work to get it setup. I wanted to learn the magic, so this was my chance. Hosting with them has been the worst experience so far. They work, but they are super slow and have switched companies a couple times since host4asp.net.

I’ve had a lot of troubles with them, but lately it has been the super slow response times with WordPress and various other issues. My coworker told me about this cool company he uses called Vultr. They have super cheap plans, so I wanted to give it a try. I setup a super small machine, hosted in NJ (Furthest away from my home) that is $3.50 a month. He also mentioned a site called Ploi.io that is super easy to setup and deploy your machine. I was able to setup my machine with MySQL, WordPress, ssh, etc really quick. When I say really quick…I mean it was fast, but I did have a bit of a learning curve. I accidentally setup a new beefy server that probably cost me $0.03 to run for an hour before I realized my mistake. Super easy though.

I’ve spent the last week moving this site over from host4asp.net to https://blog.iwatson.net – It’s been an interesting adventure. My domain is hosted somewhere in an old account and I’m working on moving it over with my other domains. I had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to create a new A record for the domain. Forwarding my old site to this new url.

I’m sitting in a condo in San Diego, family vacation, at 12am and I’ve finally figured it all out. Vultr has sped up my WordPress site a good deal. I’m super excited! I have everything forwarded over and hopefully everything is setup correctly.

I can’t wait to start migrating over some of my other sites to Vultr. My next adventure is to try and get the mail server setup, so I can completely remove this domain off the old hosting company. I’ve prepaid for their service, and I’ll continue to use it until I can close the account. I will keep you updated on how Vultr is going, so far so good! I’m pretty happy!

What is that?

Football is hardly ever on at my house, but I turned it onto “Thursday Night Football” for some reason. The announcers were talking about the team supporting Cancer and my boy asked “What is that?” Hmm. I wasn’t sure how I was going to respond. I could have said:

I would have just said “OK Google: What is cancer” and she would have read something like:

“Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body. Cancer develops when the body’s normal control mechanism stops working. Old cells do not die and instead grow out of control, forming new, abnormal cells. These extra cells may form a mass of tissue, called a tumor. Some cancers, such as leukemia, do not form tumors.”
https://www.cancercenter.com/what-is-cancer

I didn’t do that, but I did say something like

“It is something that happens in your body where your cells in your body get sick and it ends up taking your life.”

I told him that is how his Grandma Watson (My mom) passed away. Unfortunately, she passed away in 2007, many years before he was born.

Even though I have had several people near me experience cancer, such as Leukemia, Skin Cancer, Cervical Cancer, Brain Tumors, Colon Cancer, etc. I still feel like I’m pretty uneducated about it. It’s something I see in the news daily. Reading the obituaries and stories about people of all ages dealing with it is heart breaking. When a child is involved it is even worse!

A few days after the football game, we saw a St. Jude Children’s Hospital commercial and he wanted to know if that is where people go with cancer. I don’t know much about St. Jude, but a quick search has revealed that it is a very good place. They do a lot of research on cancer and are dedicated to help children with cancer. If you want to check it out here is a link: https://www.stjude.org/

When my mother was battling her cancer she was the recipient of many units of blood. There were surgeries that required blood or times when she just needed it for some reason or another. I made it a goal of mine to try and donate as often as I could. I have recently been unable to due to some blood pressure issues, but hopefully I will be able again soon. If you can donate, I encourage you to go out and donate. If you can’t, encourage those around you who can. You can learn more here: RedCross. I have also signed up with Be The Match to see if I can help someone. It’s been over 8 years since I’ve done it and I haven’t heard anything.

I definitely need to learn more and help my son learn more. I found this cool site on the St. Jude website where you can send Halloween Jokes to the children of St. Jude. It sounds like fun!