That’s right! This humble website right here turned six years old today! I’ve been too busy lately to post, but I have a lot of work started in the way of improving the site and the quality of the content (i.e. better apps pages). This website has come a long way and I can’t wait to get the new version launched in a few weeks when I launch my next app!

Hey everyone. I’ve finally relaunched my website. This is a new theme that I designed from scratch (I’m calling it R3BOOT – aren’t I awesome?) and it was inspired by Kevin Rose’s minimal blog, Engadget’s large fonts on their redesign, and Windows Phone 7‘s focus on typography. It’s still got a few bugs, though.

You’ll see new sections of the site for apps and some of my older videos (including daveTV and Dave in the Closet).

I’ll be posting a lot more programming-related content in the coming months – namely some solid tutorials and screencasts. I look forward to sharing information with everyone. Thanks for visiting!

PS – Apologies for the audio being out of sync on that video above. Quicktime must have done that to me behind my back. What a jerk.

Update: The video has been reuploaded and the audio is back to normal!

Should I close shop on The Forest Burns? I’m thinking yes. I want to download the posts for posterity’s sake, but they really don’t offer much to my personal brand. My twitter feed has taken the place of my traditional “This is how my day was” blog (which I know no one cares about but it’s nice to write about), and there aren’t many quality posts left on TFB. Obviously it’s a lot to think about, but I have a hard time blogging there. If I’m just going to be posting everything here, there’s no point in me keeping that site active. I can then use the hosting for the RMX project.

I started The Forest Burns in the interest of separating my sometimes highly opinionated and politically incorrect blog entries from the name of davidstrack.com – in an effort to prevent scaring off any future employers. Since I ended up aiming all of my search engine optimization efforts at remaining to be the #1 David Strack on Google, I completely undid that separation and plastered my name all over the site.

Of course I now realize that separation is unnecessary, even harmful to my online image. I need to be myself 100% of the time for people to know I’m the real deal. No self-censorship and no pretending. Just 100% pure, raw David Strack.

I’ll inform everyone what I eventually decide. I think I’ll figure out a way to archive the site so none of the comments or articles are lost. There is some good stuff in there, its just that most of it is no longer relevant.

So I just signed up for Tumblr. It’s a really nice blogging service that I can see myself using a lot easier than my traditional WordPress blog. I discovered the service after I read about it in @garyvee’s AMAZING book, Crush It. Seriously, if you want to figure out how to make a living doing what you love most, or if you are just curious how you can use social media to build awareness of your personal brand, check it out! I recommend reading it on Vook.com. The Vook only costs $7 and it has videos from Gary himself spread out through the chapters. It really adds a ton of value hearing and seeing Gary explain with all of his take-on-the-world energy how every person in America can “Crush It” and make a living by working hard and sticking to their passions. It’s a very inspiring book.

Before I go on, I should mention that I’m running on no sleep, and that the only energy I have has been given to me by a shot of 5 Hour Energy and a Red Bull. So this is going to be a little lengthy, but I have a lot so say.

Anyway, that book has me thinking a lot about personal branding. I’m going to be starting up an app publishing company soon with a couple of paid apps for Palm’s WebOS phones (the Pre and the Pixi so far). Since I’m known virtually everywhere on the web as rmxdave, I figure it’s appropriate that I take my meaningless prefix to my username and create a brand from it. RMX will be the name of my new application development company. Today I bought three domain names: RMX.CC, RMXAPPS.COM, and RMXDAVE.COM. Obviously, RMX.CC is a very nice domain name, it’s only a total of 5 letters long, and it embodies my brand perfectly. I’m super stoked that it was available.

What does RMX stand for, you ask? Nothing, really. About 9 years ago I was known on AIM as remixdave, because of my obsession with taking perfectly good songs and putting them into a sound editor to cut them up and create what I called remixes (which were really just more or less rearrangements of the same song). Once I started playing CounterStrike online with my friends, I shortened the name to [RMX] Dave. As time grew on I dropped the special characters and now register every site as rmxdave. It just stuck with me.

I’ve never been particularly fond of the handle, it always seemed so plain and uninspired. Lately though I’ve accepted that rmxdave is who I am online, it’s a part of me. It’s time for me to embrace my unique, quirky, and funny personality and make it known across my entire online presence. Time for me to indulge in my passions, such as music production and video blogging, social media and cell phones…all the geekery that I can’t shut up about when I’m around friends. I can’t be afraid of failure anymore.

All my life I’ve wanted to run my own business. I’m not talking like my little web design side jobs that I’ve been doing since I was 14, I’m talking about a full blown, pay the bills, put food on the table type of business. One where I’m entirely happy with what I’m doing and one that will make my family proud. I always thought that the correct route to take was to work a regular 9-5 job for 20 years, build a savings, and then carefully open my business in the right economic climate.

I now realize that I’m currently living in the best time to start living my dreams. The Internet is still young and there is plenty of money to be made. I have a lot of hard work ahead of me, and a lot of learning to do. I also have to graduate college and get married soon, too – not to mention maintain a steady day job. It’s a lot to juggle, and when you throw in my inherent desire to be social with friends and family, to still be a 21-year-old, I’ve definitely got my plate full. But I’m loving my life, and I’m loving all of the endless possibilities that God has given me. With enough persistence, patience, and prayer, I firmly believe that I can achieve anything, and the RMX development project is the first step. It’s a great way for me to be creative, which I believe is my greatest passion, and make some serious money as a result.

I know I’ve done this sort of thing before. Gotten all excited about some new idea and after a week or so I drop it. Actually the last time I stayed up all night was when I had a grand idea for a hilarious internet sketch comedy show, which fell to the wayside after a few weeks. This time it’s different, this time I actually have a plan for survival. I have a bad habit of not finishing anything I start, but this is something so important, I can’t let it slip by. I would be doing a great disservice to myself, and more importantly to those who will be depending on me, such as my soon-to-be wife and our future children. I won’t let that happen. I am going to dive in with both feet to make my dreams come true and to some day have my passion provide for my family.

This very lengthy post is if anything a permanent reminder to me of what I’m aspiring toward and how much I believe in myself. I know there will be times when I just want to give up or when I will feel like it’s too much. I’ll then be able to come back to this and say, “Gee, I guess I made sense at that point in time.” I know many of you will think I’m nuts and on drugs or something, but that’s okay. I love you all anyway.

Stay tuned, I have some awesome ideas that I think everyone is going to love.

Thanks for reading

Well, it’s that time of month again! I redesigned the site today (as you may have noticed). As I always do with my personal site, I like playing around with pre-made WordPress themes and making them my own. I’ve been doing that on davidstrack.com and theforestburns.com since October of 2005. It’s fun and its something that I feel is appropriate for a site like my personal blog, but not other sites like USC Hotline and the countless freelance sites I’ve designed. Don’t worry, those are 100% legit. This time I based the theme off of Pixeled by Sam. Sam was awesome enough to offer the Photoshop file that he used to create the theme. This allowed me to customize the background image and add my logo up at the top. The image of the forest burning was taken from a post at Massively.com (a site for MMO games). Apparently its a screenshot of a forest fire in the game Guild Wars. I thought it looked cool and since it’s from a game I figured it was okay to use. I’m sure I’ll change the background somewhat regularly once I have everything straightened out.

I like the layout of this theme. You can see that at the top of this content section there are a bunch of horizontal links for each different category. I finally arranged my categories into parent and child settings so when you mouse over the ‘Life’ category, for example, you can see the different children under that link.

I still want to fix the colors on the site. I don’t like the harsh white on black, it hurts my eyes. I’m going to try to come up with some more subtle colors like I had on the previous theme. I also have to do something about the page links waaay at the top. I feel like they are hard to notice. Also, at the footer, there are links to search, view archives, and other links. I need to change that stuff still.

Finally, I want to add a bunch of widgets to the right sidebar. On a previous version of davidstrack.com, that big red theme I made (that I called HZRD, thought it was trendy…) I had widgets for Digg, Last.fm, Flickr, and more. So I want to get stuff like that working again.

Over the next few weeks I’ll tinker with the site. It’s a good break from coding VB.net or designing websites for clients. It allows for creative flow! Anyway, stay tuned for whatever comes next!

My site has become so awesome that I want you to know when new updates have been posted! All you have to do is click on the big SUBSCRIBE link on the left and enter your email address! Then I’ll have my legion of gnomes and elves send you a nice little message whenever its time for you to come and pay your dues.

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