This guy found me on Twitter and I gave his new album a listen.  It is really good.  I went and bought it and I think you should too.  I picked it up at Amazon. (Pour It Out – Affiliate Link)

I wish that I could be positive all of the time.  I wish that my faith and trust that God will provide for me and my family would not falter.  But I would be a liar if I brought that kind of sprinkles on top kind of faith to this blog.

The mountain views are beautiful.   But the walks through the valley suck and always look endless from the bottom.  Right now I am on some kind of crazy roller coaster in my heart and my head.  When the news of my layoff came, I was excited.  I saw it as an opportunity to change something and make my story more interesting.  It also helped that I was getting paid for 6 weeks.

I am now looking at the end of week # 6 and not much has changed.  I have done the standard resume dance.  It has been a season of rejection.  I feel a little stuck.  Over 10 years of experience working in the I.T. field and I had 6 different jobs with 3 different companies.  The longest I focused on any one thing was for 3 years.  Basically I feel like my career has dead ended into a pile of crap.  I have nothing to show for my 10 years of work.

The church thing hasn’t panned out either.  I have found that I am under qualified there as well.  I am still hoping that somebody wants to take a chance on someone like me.

It has just been tough lately.  Some days I am without fear, and other days I am fighting off the worries.  I have heard all of the lines about “God has a plan” and “God will provide”, but I always tire of hearing about it without actually experiencing it.

Because I am not the type of person who sits around and waits for God to magically wire me money out of the sky to pay my bills, I am taking action.  I am starting my own computer support and repair business.  I want to help people with their home computers.  I want to be the guy that people trust with their computers like your buddy mechanic who won’t rip you off when your car breaks and you don’t know how to fix it.

I have setup a website at http://www.familypchamilton.com that I am not totally satisfied with yet.  But it has the details there if you or someone you know is interested in helping me pay the bills.  I am trying to keep my prices fair and well below the average for this kind of service.  It is half the national average and lower than Geek Squad.  Plus you get a lot more personable service.

So I will continue to ride the rollercoaster.  I am looking forward to the next mountaintop, but it is so hard to see from right here and now.

Last Week’s Weight – 269 lbs.

This Week’s Weight – 269.6 lbs.

Total Weight Loss Since Jan 1st – 9.8 lbs.

Ok, so I am going backwards a little bit this week.  I feel like it is getting better though.  It is still very difficult being at home.  It has also been super hot outside so we have spent more time inside.  I need to get back on the elliptical when I can’t go outside.  I really have just not been very good about watching what I am eating because sometimes I just don’t care right now.  I hope to have a better week next week.  We’ll see if I can live up to that.

House of Heroes “Love Is For The Middle Class” lyrics video from Gotee Records on Vimeo.

This is the 4th and final post in my series on filtering facebook noise.

Hide the Crap

The part of Facebook that drives me more crazy than anything else is how all of the applications and games get into my news feed and try to strangle out the valuable updates.  I admit that I did play the games for a while and got addicted enough to Farmville that it started to crunch on my free time.  So I have quit messing with that stuff all together.  But it isn’t just the games that show up.  Its the horoscopes and love meters and all kinds of other time wasting crap that i don’t want to see anymore.

So here is how I get rid of it.  When viewing you live feed you can move your mouse over the updates and a link for hide will appear to the right of the update.  When you see one of the games or apps that your friends posted that you don’t want to see anymore, click on that hide button over it.  It will verify that you want to hide all Farmville requests or whatever it is and you will say yes.  Then it disappears and you won’t see those anymore.  This is something I have to do on a regular basis because there are always new apps.  So when I see one, I hide it.  Now my live feed only shows me updates from my friends without all of the games and applications asking me to do something.  If you want to see the updates from a particular game, then make sure you do not block it.

This makes my live feed a whole lot cleaner and less of a waste of my time.  I can usually catch up on Facebook in a matter of minutes instead of dealing with all of the extra crap.

Today, I am going to show you how to follow the pages that you like.  To see what pages you have currently selected to like, click on accounts in the upper right hand corner and select edit friends.  In the left column you will see an option for Pages.  When you select that, you will see all of the pages you have liked.  You will see that you can add them to lists just like you did with your friends as I showed you in yesterday’s post.

To strictly track my pages, I created a group called Things I Like.  I then added all of the pages that I like to that group.  Now you can go back to your news feed page.  Click on friends in the left column.  Click on More to see your groups.  Then click on your new group that you just created for your liked pages.  Now you will only see updates for those pages that you have liked.

On a personal note, I see my friends liking new things on Facebook everyday.  Many of them are not worth the effort to me other than just showing others that I like whatever the trend of the day is.  I like pages from my favorite bands, sports teams, ministries, and many other types of pages that actually update me with information that is valuable.  So you may want to take some time to remove the useless pages from your likes or just don’t add them to your list that you want to see updates from.

On Monday, I will share my last tip on filtering the noise out of Facebook by showing you how to hide all of the annoying game notifications from your news feed.

Last Week’s Weight – 264.6 lbs.

This Week’s Weight – 269 lbs.

Total Weight Loss Since Jan 1st – 10.4 lbs.

It has been a rough couple of weeks on the diet.  I am up 4.4 lbs from 2 weeks ago.  I am definitely a stress eater.  Being home all of the time has proved to be more difficult on the diet than I estimated.   I am hoping that I can get caught up again here pretty quickly.  Tune in next week to see if I can get my act back together.

This is the second post in a series of how to filter Facebook so that you can see what you want to see.

Create Groups and Use Them

I have 17 groups created to help me sort through all of my friends.  You may not need that many, but you can create as many as you like.  I have not found any limits yet.  I have groups created for my friends from high school, college, coworkers, and family members.  Your friends can be in more than one group, so you can create broad groups and drill down to more specific groups later.

When you accept a friend request or request one yourself, you can add that person to a list.  If you are already friends, the easiest way to add them or create groups is through the edit friends menu.  In the upper right hand corner of the Facebook page you can click on Account.  A window will drop down and you can click on edit friends.  This screen has all of your lists on the left hand side.  If you have not created any lists yet, you should see by default Friends and Pages.  Click on friends and you will see a place where you can remove your friend or add them to a list.  When you click on add to list you will see a drop down of your lists to select from and a blank box at the bottom.  You can pick a list or create a new one by typing the list name in the box and hitting enter.  If you have no lists you will just see the blank box.  From here you can scroll through you list of friends and add them all to a list or multiple lists.

The lists will generate on the left hand side.  Once you have created a few lists you can click on them in the left column and see everyone who is in it.  You can edit the list from there and search for people in your friends to add them.  So there are really multiple ways to update you lists.  I like to scroll through all of my friends to see who is not on a list to make sure everyone is somewhere.  It may take some time to figure out how you want to do your list. You can always change them and move people around to different lists until you are happy with the organization.

Once you have your friends organized into lists, you can now use those lists to look at only the groups you want to.  On the left side of your news feed page, click on ‘friends’.  You will notice that column will expand below ‘friends’ and show you things like ‘Recently Updated’ and ‘Status Updates’ as well as an option for ‘More’.  Click on more and it will expand further showing you all of your groups.  When you select one of your groups, you will only see updates from that specific group.  This way you can create groups of people who you want to see updates for and other groups for people you could care less about.  Then just look at the group you want and you can completely ignore others.  This will give you a good idea of how you want to group people.

Tomorrow I am going to share a special group with you that allows me to see only updates from pages that I like.

I have a little over 250 friends on Facebook.  There are about 50 pages that I like (Used to be called “A fan of”).  This means that there are easily 1000 or more updates in my little Facebook community everyday.  That is a lot to keep up with.  There is a lot of things out there that I don’t really care about.  But I don’t want to miss the stuff that I do care about.  So how do I do it?

This is the first post of a 4 part series on how to filter the the noise out of Facebook so that you can see what you really care about.

The first step is going to seem counter productive because we are going to create more noise before we actually begin to filter out all of the excess chatter.  Facebook tries to filter some of the noise for you by limiting the number of friends you see in your live feed.  The problem is that you don’t get to pick who gets filtered.  You want to increase the maximum number of friends shown in the live feed so that you can see all of your friends’ updates.  This will guarantee that you are not missing anything before we start to filter.  At the bottom of your live feed click on the edit options link.  This will bring up the News Feed Settings Window.  At the bottom of that window you can change the Maximum number of friends shown in Live Feed.  You will want to increase this number to something greater than your number of friends.  I changed mine to 5000 to make sure I also see all updates from the pages I like.

I originally found this fix when I realized there were things that I was not seeing in my feed that I knew people were posting.  This will increase the amount of updates that you see, but tomorrow we will begin to organize the noise by putting all of your friends into their own little groups.