PressTitan Products

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It has been a while since I’ve talked about PressTitan on my personal blog. Can you believe the company has already been around for more than two years?

Right now, David Krug and I are working on refining our product suite by adding in some lower cost items in hopes that we can expand our reach.

I always thought that the length and breadth of experience we had (over thirty-two combined years) would have people kicking down the doors and we expanded our business initially thanks to the referrals we received from our customers, but acquiring new customers outside of those referrals has been difficult. We are a small business without a ton of connections that need our specific set of services.

My expectation with these new products is entirely that we will do amazing things for our clients and either they or someone they know will need our services and our lower cost services will, in a way, pay for the continued growth of PressTitan. It is a bit of a gamble, but one I’m excited to explore. I love meeting with people at different points on their WordPress journey and I want to be there to help their websites grow.

After two years, I am only more passionate about what I do. I love helping people. I love solving problems. I love having a different set of things that need to be done each day.

If you visit this blog and haven’t checked out PressTitan before, please do. We are still in the process of refining our new product suite, but if you run your own WordPress installation, we now provide off-site, cloud-hosted backups for only $9 per month or a one time payment of $199 and we will back up your site for as long as PressTitan is around (hopefully at least twenty more years).

We will be rolling out a refinement to our Managed WordPress hosting plans, options for search engine optimization and marketing, content development and marketing, and of course a continuation of our speed optimization service as its own thing. Making sites load quickly is something I’m very passionate about.

UBI: A Transitional Economic Tool

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US Presidential Candidate for the Democrats, Andrew Yang, has been travelling through the US talking about a Freedom Dividend, or what amounts to a Universal Basic Income, but one of the key concerns people always have when it comes to a UBI is that people will become lazy or that no one will want to clean toilets.

I, personally, love when people bring up these points as it opens the door to having a discussion about what UBI is and isn’t. UBI isn’t an end-point. It is not a solution. It is a transitional tool as we move away from a strictly capitalist society to a post-capitalist society.

Yes, some people will forgo work and just take their UBI money and sit at home playing video games or whatever, but the labour market doesn’t have room for everyone to work anyways. We’ve had massive unemployment for a long time. Currently, almost six percent of Canadians are unemployed and it has been around that number for a long time. The US has almost a 4% unemployment, the UK is the same, and Germany is around 3%. So not everyone has a job currently and this number will grow due to automation. There is no way to get around that in my opinion. The technology we have today is being used to figure out how to build better technology tomorrow and this development cycle is only getting shorter and faster.

As for people doing jobs that most of society don’t want to do, I can only see one outcome: if they can’t be automated, then the rates to acquire people to do those jobs will have to rise. If you doubled the starting rate for a janitor, how likely would it be that people would apply? Or, if the only jobs available were janitorial and you wanted a better life, what choice would you have? These are the labour market decisions that come about due to UBI.

UBI is a safety net making sure that we all have money to fall back on to fill gaps, but as automation gets smarter, cheaper, and faster, the government will have to work with corporations to make sure that UBI payments either keeps up through taxation on those businesses, or those businesses will have to pass on their cost savings from automation to consumers so that the UBI funds can give enough that the products the companies are producing are purchasable.

Universal Basic Income is one of those things that will have a huge effect on the world market as it comes into existence, but I believe all people in all countries could benefit from it. It requires an immense amount of strength and commitment from our governments to see it through so that corporations don’t continue to concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller pockets of people.

I also believe that after four to six decades of UBI being part of the world economy, we might see another transition to a post-scarcity, post-capitalism society that may remind people more of Star Trek, which would be my ideal. Even today, I feel that no one should need to choose between medication for pain and glasses to see. No one should struggle for some small shelter from the elements. No one should want for food and nutrition.

As a society, we are smarter than this.

Our technology can make this all possible. It will all be about willpower, pushing back against the bastardized capitalism that exists today and making sure that we all work together to look out for each other. Our fear of losing the little we have often keeps us quiet, but the wealthiest in our society are realizing that once people have nothing to lose, people will speak up and push back and that’s not in the best interest of those wealthy people.

I am excited about the renewed interest in UBI, but I wish people were more willing to call it what it is… a transitional economic tool.

Geek Made Healthy

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I have launched a new site so that I can have all my health and fitness stuff, as well as some of my mental health stuff all in one place so that my personal blog can hopefully just be random stuff happening in my life. The new site is called Geek Made Healthy.

It is a WordPress site built on Divi, using a few other fun pieces to make it as fast as possible. It is hosted on similar servers to what we do for our clients at PressTitan.

So you won’t see any more updates on my 1 Million Calories Challenge on this blog. If you want to keep up with it, check out Geek Made Healthy.

1 Million Calories – Week 10

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March 4 – Today, like most days, I woke up early to take care of the puppy. I didn’t really eat breakfast, instead, I had a lunch of Cool Ranch Doritos and some Coke. I know I can do better, but I’m really not feeling all that great mentally. I spent time today editing last weeks big update video, so I’ll be posting that soon along with my notes. I have to eat better tonight… I tried to eat better in the evening but ended the day eating McDonald’s. I stayed under my calorie limit, just barely.

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1 Million Calories – Week 8

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Feb 18 – Why does Cobs Bread have to taste so good? It is Family Day here in Ontario, and while I’m not off from work today, pretty much everything is closed, so there were limited breakfast options. I ended up getting myself and my wife some scones and her a drink from Starbucks. Overall, I know I didn’t eat as good as I was intending. I tried to make sure to have a large serving of sugar snap peas and made sure to put spinach on my pepperoni pizza at Score in the evening. I need to do better if I’m going to stay under 280 pounds. That’s right, I weighed myself this morning and was under 280!

Feb 19 – Woke up this morning feeling super down. My brain is very unhappy today. I still struggle with depression and anxiety, and when I have days like this, I either want to eat all the junk food or like this morning, I want to eat nothing. I now have two weeks worth of calories at 2200 calories a day that I’ve banked for the future. I still have yet to have a day where I go over my calorie limit. Sometimes, I end up feeling pretty hungry at bedtime due to how calorie dense some food is, and how little it fills up my belly.

Feb 20 – I got a good amount of sleep, had a breakfast of mini-wheats and coca-cola and tried to get used to my new glasses. I spent some time studying for my SCRUM exam that I want to take at the end of this month and didn’t do well. I need to spend more time studying. We had ice cream in the evening from Marble Slab, and while it was good, I forgot how expensive it is both in calories and in money. I used up pretty much all of my calories for the day and didn’t even have a real supper. I’m not complaining as I didn’t go to bed hungry thanks in large part I’m assuming to my beef jerky.

Feb 21 – Woke up and weighed myself in anticipation for tomorrow’s official weigh in and I’m doing okay. I am still under 280 but I was hoping to see a continued drop since my last unofficial weigh in on Monday. I have this idea that I’ll be a certain weight by the end of February, but with seven more days, I’m not sure if I’ll make it. The whole thing is pretty silly since the primary focus was never about weight loss.

Feb 22 – I was so focused on work today, but in the evening, as a nice celebration of my wife starting her reading week, we went to get a Beaver Tail. It was so good, and not as expensive in terms of calories as I was expecting. I thought it was going to be 500+ but my cinnamon and sugar one was under 400. Overall, it was an okay day, but I did use up far more calories than I was intending. I still struggle with not beating myself up over using all of my calories.

Feb 23 – Even on the weekend, the puppy wakes up at seven and needs out, and while Annie offered last night to do the morning shift, I know that the puppy would wake me up and there is no way I’d go back to sleep, so I might as well get up and let her have the extra sleep. I weighed myself this morning and I feel bummed. While I’m still under 280, I was really hoping to get down to 275 by the end of February. I have been so focused on work, Annie and the dog that I really haven’t been eating as well as I should be. I feel very bloated this morning. I now have between 12 and 15 days of banked calories available.

Coworking Spaces in Kingston, Ontario

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Over the last couple of years, co-working spaces have popped up in Kingston and another is about to open in less than a month, so I wanted to take a moment to see what is out there and compare them.

I haven’t really needed a co-working space as working from home has suited me well. It provides me with more flexibility that works better for my lifestyle, but I can definitely see the appeal of being able to timebox your life more like a regular company with clearer divisions between work time and home time.

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