Tag: Aaron A Day

siliconpalms vlog

Inspire and motivate self-improvement and harm-reduction. The siliconpalms vlog is a positive attitude outlet, with the objective to create a good vibe every day and to provide value to anyone who watches and listens to the meaningful message.

Combat the blues and overcome lethargy by changing the way you think about the world. Improve your lifestyle and defeat dystopia by reducing your consumption of substances, put down that bong and pick-up a pen. Design your own movie script, starring you, as the ultimate escape-artist. Escape from the Drudge Report, escape from Facebook and escape from whatever might be holding you back and hanging you up.

One of the reasons I started the siliconpalms vlog was to document my own transformation. You see; I found myself in a challenging predicament, by the age of 55, something I never expected or planned, something that started-out so innocently and over time grew into a bigger and bigger problem, until I was carrying a monkey on my back. Yep, you guessed it, I woke-up one day I knew I’d become an escape artist with an addiction to fun, that’s why one of the themes of the siliconpalms vlog is good vibrations, which is my method for putting negative thinking, in the rear-view mirror.

This is a new and exciting chapter in my life. I’m making something positive out of something negative and it’s my sincere hope that I’ll inspire and motivate someone to take action and stand in their power. Face yourself and make a decision to make the lifestyle changes necessary to get the monkey off your back, whatever it may be.

My story is compelling because I have a unique perspective and I live in one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in the world, Sao Paulo, Brazil. I’m a people-person and have friends all over the world, not virtual friends, real-world, real people friends but what makes the story interesting is the day-to-day interactions with regular folks, everywhere I go. It’s all about love.

February 22, 2016
Living by Design

Stop to smell the flowers – life by design

Design is in everything, anything can be designed. Life is by design, as well, you can design your own life. To live without design, should be a crime because all it takes is imagination to create a designer lifestyle. Just ask yourself if you’re happy, in all aspects of your life? If there’s some aspect that sucks then redesign it, or plan to eliminate it. Get a new game on, if the old one bores you and I don’t mean on TV.

My opinion is that television is the biggest waste of time that most people have in their lives, although movies and documentaries can be enriching, the majority of programmed television content makes you worse, not better. Self-improvement is a personal choice that can, and should be, designed into everyone’s lives. From babies to seniors, we can all make the world a better place by improving ourselves – just step away from that remote control.

Here’s my suggestion for redesigning your life and increase your happiness factor. It’s’ called “Radical Time Management”, also I recommend designing yourself an electronic journal using Evernote. In Evernote (or MS One Note) make 12 notebooks, one for each month, then each morning of your life you create a new note, in the appropriate notebook (i.e. July/ Tues July 8). During the day you’ll need to update the journal so you can detail how you spend your time. Then before you retire for the evening, sit down and give the day a good review, make some comments and give yourself a score between zero and one hundred. Now you have the tools for designing your life to increase the time spent, doing the things that make you the most happy.

Happy times, by design.

As for my designer lifestyle? [quote]I often wonder; am I happy because I tell myself I’m happy, or am I happy sincerely? The answer – it doesn’t matter why I’m happy, whether it’s perceived or real is not important. What matters; is that good things happen often, by design.[/quote]

I’m lucky to love website design, it presents a variety of concepts from style to function. Like learning how to blend eye-catching appeal with user friendliness. There’s allot of psychology involved in commercial graphic design. Assuming the topic content is popular and extensive enough, the web designers mission is be bring the subject and information to life on the web, in a coherent and stimulating way. Often-times the website project has design specifications (i.e. colors, logo and theme etc…), in which case the designer would look to enhance, improve or streamline the layout and/or user interface.

[box type=”info”]Sometimes the logo needs an overhaul, or maybe the website header could be improved? Design never ends.[/box]

[box type=”note” style=”rounded”]Silicon Palms is about 16 years old and the site has been re-designed about a dozen times. Even the logo has never stopped changing. Although in it’s most recent design we discovered a Google font called “Pacifico” to be what we had always wanted, since it has the “retro” flair like a Palms Springs Hotel from the 20’s, just needed a bevel and emboss. Next we added a color theme from the Adobe Khuler called “beach on sunset”, then 2 palm tree icons over a transparent background and voila the new logo was born. Simple, elegant and functional.[/box]

July 8, 2014
Conflict of Conscience

I hand-coded and published my first HTML web page in 1993, ever since then my thinking about what I should be doing with my web-publishing passion, has vacillated between projects for helping disadvantage children in third-world countries, or providing information and services to help wealthy North Americans invest offshore.

Living in South Florida at that time, every day we watched images, or in one case I eye-witnessed, Haitian families coming ashore in home-made rafts because they were so desperate to escape the poverty of their Island Nation. It prompted me to start-up “PC on Earth” a non-profit organization that would find ways to get information technology to schools in the Caribbean.

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November 6, 2007