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Quite often I find myself at a point in life where I am unchanging in how I think and act. I don’t utilize my experiences in life as much as I should sometimes. I could definitely expand my comprehension. I just plain fail to realize how much I could be growing mentally if I would allow myself to. During the last few months I have been expelling this desire to change and grow, which has built up over the course of a year (possibly a few years) of dealing with the problems of life, pains of physical problems, and just generally still being kind of stagnate despite changing my scenery and social life.

With the many different attempts I am making in different areas, I have been trying to get a feel for what would help me change and what things I can do to improve my situation. Specifically referencing the “how I think” part of this whole equation I have been utilizing a few different sources for the motivation to improve and expand how I think and act.

Sometime last year my friend Sam and a few others showed me the series of Ted Talks that highlights speeches at a conference in Monterey, California by guest speakers who are invited to talk about “ideas worth spreading”. If you haven’t heard of ted.com and what they do, you are in for a treat. You are as long as you are in to expanding the way you think and seeing what some of the worlds brightest people have to say.

They are very good at choosing who they ask to speak usually. People who know their fields well, or have made an impact because they dared to do something no one else would. There are people with different kinds of wisdom who want to share it with the world, and are good at it. They discuss everything from art, music, global issues and human desire to physics, genetics, technology and even spirituality.

I wouldn’t say I have enjoyed ALL of these speeches, but I really appreciate TED and the effort they have put into organizing all that TED has become. The speakers come in a huge variety of people from Bill Clinton to Ze Frank, Bono to Tony Robbins.

Found below, I have embedded one of my favorite speeches from the TED Talks line of free videos, which is from Sir Ken Robinson.

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After going to high school in Sacramento and serving my mission in Los Angeles, I was less than excited to move to Idaho while being single and in my mid 20’s. Despite living in Idaho as a kid, I was scared that my social life was going to be absolutely non-existent and that everyone in Idaho would drive me crazy. I had some confused judgments on the area, and basically feared the worst: Potato eatin’ farmers kids everywhere whose idea of fun was moving irrigation pipes.

My parents live about 25 minutes west of Boise Idaho now, and I lived with them for 8 months before my mission, and an additional combined 18 months after my mission. I was really surprised to find so many people that weren’t actually from Boise. There were lots of transplants like we were. Many of which were from California same as us, in addition to a vastly varied population that came from many other parts of the United States.

When I attended Boise State I started seeing more of the social scenes in the area in addition to meeting a great deal of cool people. Yes, I admit that meeting many of the people I did out here surprised me at first. I worked as an installer for custom home theaters in an extremely nice part of Boise called Eagle which is actually absolutely nicer than anything I have seen in UT. This combined with my mother working in real estate all at the same time when Idaho had it’s single largest growth period ever I got to see some amazing changes happen in the Boise area and meet some great people.

Though many of the locals have always feared the growth, and hated the “Californians stealing all their land” Boise/Eagle and Nampa have really improved quite a bit over the last few years. Aside from having a good solid variety of quality restaurants, independent movie theaters, art festivals (jazz festival and a Shakespeare Festival included) as well as large University which has also had some amazing growth. Boise has the largest Basque community in the United States. The Big Easy concert house has had almost every band and musician come through that I have wanted to see and they always sell out, the whole green-belt around the Boise River has been improved time and time again. Urban Outfitters ven built a store here before they built one in UT (to many people that means nothing, to me though it’s a pretty big deal).

Since moving to UT, I have seen an unusually high number of people that I really have no desire to meet or get to know. I am lucky to already be friends with some of the coolest people in the state anyway, but maybe you will agree or disagree that all over UT county at least there are quite a high concentration of “Bro’s” we call them, and “hair school” girls. The term “hair school girls” can also apply to students at BYU or UVSC and doesn’t mean necessarily that they actually go to hair school, it’s more of a train of thought and character label.

Boise on the other hand actually has a large number of locals and transplants who are genuinely interesting and diverse people. They are not obsessed with telling everyone they play the guitar even though they don’t (pretty much every other single guy in UT county), and they most definitely don’t have a large population of guys who fake tan and wear pink popped collared polo’s. A lot of people here are approachable and friendly, and usually end up being people I want to be friends with. With a growing culture of it’s own in recent years, the people and activities here are growing more attention than most would imagine. There really are very few farmers in the area anymore. A few of the companies that have their headquarters in Boise are Micron, HP Printer division, Washington Group International, Albertsons, WinCo, and Simplot.

Just a 10 minute drive from down town is Bogus Basin Ski Resort. A few hours to the north there is the prestigious Tamarack Ski Resort. In the valley there are two accessible reservoirs which I have enjoyed wake boarding and boating on. If you like watching insanely crazy football games, Boise States last 3 seasons have been jaw-dropping from start to finish.

This image from Wikipedia’s article on Boise, the city is called “The City Of Tree’s” which I made fun of at first because I thought Sacramento would probably fit the name better, but actually Boise really does have a large quantity of beautiful tree’s which set’s the city apart from the surrounding dry sage brush and farm land areas.

In 2006, Forbes named Boise as #4 on their “Best Places to Own a Business”. National Geographic did one of the best articles I have read about Boise, naming it one of the last great cities in the west and the premier pace to live for outdoor activities and lifestyle..

I enjoyed my time at Boise State, and always enjoy my visits here. I may not move back here ever again, but props to you Boise. Maybe people will stop assuming no one in Idaho has indoor plumbing, and stop wondering if everyone eats potatoes for every meal.

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I know my blog has had a few, limited posts which really have only done moderately well on Google organic searches. Usually when I notice a group of terms from a specific article that bring traffic to my website from Google, I usually do some link building online to that post anchored (meaning “anchor text” devin) with related terms to the traffic I get for that post.

I know my website is still a relatively new blog with just some basic traffic on random things. Nothing to really get any attention, except for recently. For the first time this Easter I have started climbing into some decent visitor numbers. Apparently there was a large quantity of people searching for Bunny Cake. Easter is here officially, and for possibly just a few days, the main bulk of visitors being referred to my blog was strictly for a term I never thought I would even get one visitor for. The Bunny Cake post.

My top 4 referring terms from Google have been dominated by “Bunny Cake”.

I am not sure if I should be embarrassed that Google has made my blog more popular online with people who are looking for make a small edible rabbits than anything else I have written about. Or if I should just appreciate the traffic and feel good that my SEO work is slightly successful. It’s seasonal and temporary traffic I realize. I doubt I will get so many people every day continuously in the future for the term “bunny cake” now that Easter is over.

It does go to show that finding the right niche online, and doing some classic SEO work is actually successful on getting people to read my stuff, regardless of how random the term’s are compared to what I have written about.

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I left work early on Friday to come up to Idaho for the weekend. It’s Easter and in my family, there are a lot of random traditions that we still follow. Most people thought going home for Easter was slightly odd, because it isn’t a major holiday. . . . . . . . tell that to the Sandersons.

Generally we almost always play lots and lots of games, have a great BBQ, and just generally enjoy one another’s company. Easter was different for me growing up than most people. It is a little more intricate than just having an egg hunt, and candy filled basket’s. One strange tradition is the use of M&M’s as a mark that the Easter Bunny had visited us. When we get up, there are tracks and trails of M&M’s all over the house and we were told it was the Easter Bunny’s poop. We would run around and try and gather as much as we could. I know it’s a little odd. . . Easter Bunny excrete’s name brand chocolate peices.

Easter weekend is also spent playing poker as strange as that sounds. When we were younger and went to Craters of the Moon for our Easter Break, we were stuck in a camping trailer surrounded by lava fields with tons of candy. Oh, and we had a deck of cards. Against our mother’s wishes, my father taught us all the poker variations that he knew and we spent the weekend trying to win more candy from each other and from my father. He always had 5 times as much candy as we did, so he felt the necessity to lose some to us.

Recent years we have pretty much entirely replaced Black Jack and 5 Card with Texas Hold’em . The pot gets bigger and the game is much more enjoyable to play anyway. So as you can imagine, I have spent the last few hours playing poker with candy and will probably spend a few more through out the weekend winning even more candy, that I will most likely just give to my nephews and neice if I don’t finish it off before I go back to UT on Monday.

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I have worked in various support services departments for different companies. I did tech support/customer service for Nu Skin/Pharmanex which didn’t require a ton of knowledge, but they did require us to know everything in our scope of support. If someone came to us with something we didn’t know, we found it out. I felt like a slave, but at least our customers were satisfied with out service. I later worked for Apple iPod Tech support. Here the training was surprisingly rigorous. Apple really did want us to know as much as we could about the products we were providing support for, despite the fact that if someone couldn’t figure out how to use an iPod, they probably have a fairly low intellect. 85% of the time the hold button was on or it was out of power.

Recently I was informed of a tech support department who not only didn’t know how to help their customers for some of their products, they decided that rather than finding the information out and teaching the rest of the tech support team it would be easier to just actually send the customers to another companies tech support. I know . . I know . . it’s absolutely ridiculous.

Newegg is a huge company who has a fairly dominant position in online retail. On a number of occasions they have referred customers to Sewell Directs tech support department for products and questions concerning Newegg’s products. It has been known for a long time that Sewell Direct has had an amazing Tech Support and customer service department, but honestly think about how sad it is that Newegg is a company willing to lose customers and taint their online image by trying to earn money but not support and help their customers.

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