Who am I?

No, Really? What makes me different than the 42 billion million other wanna be someone bloggers? As of now? Not to much, and to be honest… I don’t really care. I don’t write here for anyone per se, I kind of use it (currently and historically) as a bookmarking or link sharing site for anything I find interesting.

But that’s wrong. No really… It is. The web is full of junk. Full of crap… similar to this post. It’s irrelevant to literally everyone out there. No joke. No one actually cares. To me this is fine because… I don’t care too much about this site. But to the other blogs that are exactly like this: I’m bored. Constantly running across people’s diaries is a waste of what this amazing series of  1’s and 0’s can do. I mean there is nothing wrong with expressing your ideas… but most of it is the same old stuff. There is nothing original. I am guilty of this. I’ll just repost something that’s interesting. But that shouldn’t be what Blogs, or Websites are for. That’s twitter. Seriously… that is what twitter does… and it does it well! Blogs are for content, ORIGINAL content… stop wasting space, sign up for twitter/tumbler/friendfeed and buy a diary to kill trees and publish something only when it’s worthy of being published.

More recently I’ve grown tired of users around the web. I’m sorry for not being tolerant. Because of amazing, amazing, web apps like wordpress and anything Google does, people seem to think that everything is simple. When it’s not… they complain! Or feel angry when a legitimate member of the community wont go completely out of his* way to do something for them for free. This might be something that others have noticed, but as I learn more I find it annoying. The internet is full of knowledge(once you get past blogs on twilight and the jonas brothers), but you have to try in order pick it up. If you don’t want to try… then you should probably pay someone. I’m cutting this rant off, and skipping to my point. *”If only defeating sexism were as easy as throwing in an occasional he/she, she, her or hers. I use the masculine pronouns merely as a shortcut… …Don’t look for sexism where none exists” – Guy Kawasaki

So what? I can only control a minute portion of the web. And I’ve controlled it wrong. For that I’m sorry, I apologize, and here is what I propose:

1. All posts on my site categorized as “uncategorized” are showed only as titles with a few exceptions:
   1. The latest post created (first post shown) will always be displayed in a summary view.
   2. Any “uncategorized” post with comments will be displayed in the summary view to encourage discussion.
   3. Viewing the “uncategorized” category will show all “uncategorized” posts in summary view.
2. I will post original content that does (but isn’t limited to) the following:
   1. Informs readers of something new. Could be like News, or could be an explanation of something commonly mis-understood.
   2. Inspires readers, or it will be my intention to inspire readers. (I can’t be held responsible if they do or don’t get inspired)
   3. Teaches someone something.
3. I will attempt to make every post of the highest quality I can provide at that time.
4. I will only write posts I feel are worth reading (with the exception of “uncategorized posts).

What are the posts going to be like then? That will entirely depend on What I’m interested in.

What Am I Interested In?

That’ll change. Or at least I’m assuming it’ll change. As of right now I can see four major things I will be posting about.

• Web Design
  • Why? Cause I love it. I like looking at trends, I like playing around in Photoshop. I like hacking together little pointless sites.
• Web Development
  • I see most of this being quick hacks for wordpress.
  • I also think I’ll cover basic html, javascript, and css
  • I’ll hopefully be posting tutorials on how to do things, that I had to figure out myself somewhere… so that the next person can implement it quickly
• Start-up Businesses
  • Highlights of some cool start ups or businesses that I may have found
  • Ideas for businesses or new business plans
• The mobile tech industry
• I see this as being the new computing industry. This may just be news, It may be more… not too sure
• General thought provoking knowledge.
  • I guess that covers a lot

If you’re looking for the random videos, or stupid pictures, or pointless rants… They’ll be here… they just wont be prominent.

Where is this Site going?

As always… I don’t know. This site is going where I take it. Right now it’s going with my interests. Maybe one day I’ll be important enough for the domain “brennanmceachran.com” to be valuable to me in more than just a bloggy sort of way.

More than anything I want to encourage discussion. Not only does it give me feed back, and make me feel good, it answers a lot of questions I may have about you, or questions someone else may be thinking. OH, and ontop of that the comment system looks super sweet… so… use it!

What do you think? What do YOU want to see on the site? Where do YOU want it to go? Leave a comment.

Pay Brennan . com [visit]

This is an idea that started out with my father and I playing on Domai.nr possibly one of the coolest domain apps out there. I was discussing the idea of writing some tutorials on and helping some kids out on the forums, and hoping to get some money through a donate button. At the time I was playing around with the jQuery library, and decided that I wanted to make something super simple, but not ugly… like the standard “donate now” paypal button.

We came up with

Well, what you see is what you get. I registered some single purpose domains that I thought were useful or funny. PayBrennan.com, FeedBrennan.com and HireBrennan.com the latter being what would be classified as useful. Only PayBrennan is finished and working. I’m looking at finding a way of getting direct pizza orders or something for FeedBrennan.

The Revamp!

Some of the closer Brennan followers may have seen the first version of Paybrennan.com. I can’t say I loved it, even when I first finished it. Usually I end up liking the things I finish, then a week later getting sick of seeing them, and hating them. In this particular case, I wasn’t necessarily proud of it at launch. It was really a test of coding more than design. However… I felt I needed it to be “branded” with the other brennan sites. I really liked how McEachran.ca turned out, so much so that it became the basis for the “2.0″ revamp of this very site.

Once the other two sites looked similar, I decided that was going to be my “brand” identity. So naturally Paybrennan should look similar…

…and here we are! Check it out (put in a test payment ?) www.paybrennan.com

To fill you in on some background details: I was walking down by my waterfront a couple days ago, when a man walks up with his family. I catch him in the corner of my eye, and I turn to look at him noting that he was obviously walking towards me to ask a question. I try and look inviting so it’s not awkward when he opens his mouth. At this point I didn’t know how awkward it was going to get…

You see, this was July 5th, and here in Canada July 5th would be the day after the end of Canada Day celebrations (Canada Day being July 1st for people who aren’t in the know), and not the day after Independence Day. Canada Day is probably the biggest event of the year. It’s not an event like Christmas where people anticipate it for months, but when it arrives YOU KNOW! Canadians love their country and it’s our day/night/weekend to show it.

So when this gentleman walked up to me and asked, “Hey, was it some sort of Canada Flag Day here or somethin?” My inviting face dropped and I looked shocked and appalled. Who is this Canadian looking fellow who doesn’t know what we just celebrated our (thick wool) socks off?!

I think i responded with “uhhmm…. (with an *are you stupid look on my face*) ” but it wasn’t in the famous friendly Canadian manner I’d normally put it in. He informed me he was from around here and noticed all the “Canada Flags” (siq) around here and was wondering. First of all he’s probably not the best ambassador to America. So I wont attack them, but this character is fair game.

Canadian Flags are what we put up when Canadians want to show they love their country. And we do love this place:

I happens you know, every once and a while, you’ll be asked to speak in front of people. Asked to talk about a particular topic… or even worse asked to talk about whatever you want! The latter being the worse of the two no doubt.

The obvious questions comes up of what you’re going to say. And then how you’re going to say it. Most other speech writing articles help you with the structure of the writing, but often that’s the easiest part. The harder part is structuring your idea. Well have no fear, I’ll help you out… right here:

Note: for some help and examples I’ve block quoted what I did for my valedictorian speech, which you can view in full here!

Speech thinking

Decide on your message.

The message is the soul of your speech. Look deep and analyze what you want your audience to get out of your speech. This is an important step, and is commonly overlooked because you never actually get to write it out. But I encourage you to do so just to keep it in your mind when your actually writing the speech.

The message doesn’t have to be a sentence, or a piece of information. It can very well be an emotion or an idea. For a goodbye speech you could make it a bitter sweet goodbye, which would make the audience sad, but at the same time excited and happy about the future. It’s up to you, but your message should be woven into each paragraph of your speech.

For my valedictorian speech I chose a simple message of chasing your dreams, and living up to your potential.

Decide on your theme. (probably the hardest part)

The theme is similar to your message, but can be literally anything you want. A theme should tie together the entire idea in something simple and common to the audience. A common theme throughout your speech should be referred to throughout but only make complete sense at the end. It’ll help the listener understand your message.

For my valedictorian speech I chose my new puppy to be my theme. It was quite simple really. My new puppy was taking over my life, and one day while teaching him fetch and mulling over speech idea’s it all came to me. And that’s the best way to describe it… Once I knew what the theme was… I just knew. It could connect to my life and my target audience really easily and it’s something that everyone loves (no one can not like a puppy). He was so innocent and naive, and during his dreams he would run and bark, being a part of something huge. Something that could easily be related to my message of chasing your dreams and living up to your potential.

Don’t skip this part, don’t skim this part, this is the hardest part of a speech. It’s really the only thing that can hold the entire speech together, and in the end people can look back and understand more. It makes for a really polished piece of work.

Speech writing.

Some places will bog you down with crazy formatting… but what’s the point. You’re speaking it, you wont hand it in anywhere… You can write it in one large paragraph, you can write it in a million little ones, whatever is easiest to remember for you… write it that way. Keep in mind these three basic structural points.

Opening.

It’s not really an intro, because you don’t have to introduce anything, if you don’t want to. It’s really just a start to your speech. Many people will start the speech off by saying hello and thanking people for coming. Possibly congratulating someone who deserves it.

What you can introduce here is your theme. Don’t explain it, just subtly refer to it or use it as an analogy.

I could say that I recently got a puppy, and it reminds me a lot of how a teacher would see us as students.

Body.

The meat and potatoes – i guess – of your speech. Pick a few points that you want to talk about, and remember your message. You should be able to easily tie them together no matter how unrelated they are to each other with your common theme.

As a general tip, odd numbers seem to work better. You’re able to have a distinct middle and for some reasons humans feel comfortable when they have that.

Write out the points separately, and then organize them based on how strong they are, and what emotions you want to evoke at a particular time.

For my speech, I wanted it to be funny to please the jokers, happy to please the majority, and sad to close the chapter on our life. Hopefully your theme will build up a stronger presence as you continue through your body, reaching a climax in the closing paragraph

Closing.

This is where you have everyone’s full attention, and hopefully they’re eating up what your saying. If so you can do with them what you please. But the closing paragraph is generally where Sherlock would explain his genius.

It’s time for one last referral to the theme. But this time it’s not to enhance a particular point; it’s to enhance your message. Use the closing as your area to pass the message along to your audience.

For my speech I simply explained why I decided to talk about my puppy, and that was enough.

Afterwards, remember to say thanks for listening, and you’re off the hook.

Some general tips to concur the universe.

• The part of your brain that is used for noticing repetition is not the same part that is used for logical thought. How can this help you? Well since your theme can be repetitive (YES WE CAN), you can easily fend off most people who will refute any of your points by adding an extra ounce of repetition to that particular area. Did Obama know this? Maybe… i’m not sure.
• Don’t have your speech written out in full in front of you. This will encourage you to read it, try memorizing it and have cue cards just in case you get lost.
• Speaking slowly is much better than speaking too fast.
• Practise, Practise, Practise! The more “uhms” and “ahs” you can get rid of the better your speech will sound.
• Build on emotions that are already there. If you audience is happy, it’ll take extra work to make them sad, it’ll be easier just to build on the happiness.
• Read this post on public speaking!

Read my ENTIRE valedictorian speech here

You may now do so from your favourite mobile phone! Yeah!

That’s right, you’re favourite website… that you’ve never heard of… is now mobile! Check out the screen shot to the right, then check it out on your mobile phone!!!

As the slogan says, get read for:

A More Dense Version of Stupid

Let’s forget about the nerd defence for a second. So I’ve added to my speech bubble. Shall we call it the Brennan Bubble for lack of a better name? I have my tweets (which was the original purpose of the Brennan Bubble) and now a few knew goodies.

1. The first new thing is the “most popular posts.” These are ranked by the amount of comments. So hopefully they’ll spur some conversation.
2. You should see some quotes. Mine and other peoples. I actually really like the look of these and I’m looking for more.

Which leads me to ask:

What are your favourite quotes?

• Let them be funny, inspiring, stupid, or weird.
• Keep them short enough for them to be nice and bold in the “Brennan Bubble.”
• I’m thinking less than 60 characters UNLESS it’s a great quote.
• Keep it original and not a well known one, again, UNLESS it’s a great quote.

Comment Your Favourite Quote to Add them to the Site!

Quotes recieved from twitter:

• “May the best of your past be the worst of your future” from http://twitter.com/krilana
• “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” – Hunter S. Thompson from http://twitter.com/Max_Mertens

This is how small I am.

2 diggs, one me… and I know who the other is (i think)

Score one for me!

Watch out other Brennans

(still not in the first 500 listings on google for “brennan”)

Edit: To clarify… this is a declaration of a page rank war for everyone who is higher than me on the google search for Brennan.

The combatants will be myself vs. anyone who is above me on the google search for “Brennan”. Meaning www.brennaninc.com would most likely be my final and most challenging opponent.

For the sake of having them here are the rules.

1. All rules are more like guidelines to keep a basic foundation for the series. 
2. You may only boost your own website, and not try and decrease the opponents.
3. This is a friendly competition for purposes of fun only… I however will accept bribes.
4. I should always have the unfair advantage of being the only competitor who knows there is a competition.
5. If any of the other competitors find out about this competition contact me here, I would love for you to make a guest post or participate in the competition.
6. I shall always be the David, and them always the Goliath. Therefor  getting the support of the vast majority of the Internets.
7. None of the rules matter.

I’m not expecting this to be an easy task for many reasons.

• First and foremost the website at the top are mainly companies that hire people to get them and keep them there. While I’m just a goof ball.
• Brennan is a common first and last name which means there will be a lot of bloggers and companies competing. A quick check from wolfram|alpha shows some stats.
  

Past that… Let’s see how it goes.

Using this awesome tool it’s quite obvious I have some work to do.

So I’m off to fight for the qualifiers. This is only step one. Check back periodically to watch the fight.

If anyone has a tip or a way to help. Post a comment, send me an email, or link to this on your site!