Daniel Dessinger

Month: September 2010

  • The Pursuit of Happiness: Which Part is Guaranteed?

    If you follow my Twitter account, you probably already read this. But it was good enough I wanted to share here, and maybe expound a bit. The context was a larger political rant which I’ll spare you.

    The Right to Pursue Happiness vs the Right to Happiness

    this country was founded on the right to pursue happiness. to have the right to pursue, you have to have the right to fail at your pursuit.September 22, 2010 6:41 pm via TweetDeckdanielthepoet
    Daniel Dessinger

    I object to the political parties who say we need bigger government in order to control all the poverty, and solve all the needy people’s problems. Each nation is built to fulfill a purpose, and it’s laws are constructed in such a way as to uphold that vision.

    The United States of America were built upon basic inalienable rights. The right to life, liberty, and the PURSUIT of happiness. Having a right to life means no one has the right to take your life from you. Having the right to liberty means no one can take your liberty from you. Having the right to pursue something means no one has permission to prevent you from pursuing happiness.

    Our founding fathers were very careful and deliberate with their word choice here. Part of having liberty means you can pursue your own happiness to the degree that it doesn’t squelch anyone else’s life, liberty or pursuit. That leaves the door rather wide open.

    Freedom to Fail

    If you have the freedom to pursue, that means the outcome is uncertain. It’s your right to pursue happiness. You might get it. You might not. But if you drink away your house and marriage, it’s not the government’s responsibility to hand out money so that you can continue your lifestyle of choice. You get to pursue happiness through the means you choose. But if your choices fail to bring you happiness, you have no one else to blame or demand reparation from.

    If you are free to pursue, you are free to choose HOW you pursue. And if you are free to choose how, then you are free to royally screw up your chance. And that has to be okay. Because you are free to try.

    Here’s a bonus:

    I agree with the Democrats’ concern for the poor, the unfortunate, and the minority. i disagree that it’s the government’s job to fix.September 22, 2010 6:13 pm via TweetDeckdanielthepoet
    Daniel Dessinger

    Caring Doesn’t Equal Solving

    It saddens me to see that the Democratic Party has become known as the sympathetic party. I love their heart for the poor and oppressed and unfortunate. I really do. But it’s not enough to care. Caring doesn’t equal solving. You can be dying of a gunshot wound to the chest and I can care so much for your pain that I run to the street corner and petition people to form committees to investigate the bullet hole, the cause of shooting in America, and what type of lifestyle needs you might have as a gunshot victim. I can spend time and money organizing. Meanwhile you’re dying. And you won’t make it another hour, much less in the time it would take to conclude our investigation and appeal to others for funding.

    But I cared about you! I tried to help you! So much more than those other snobs who walked by and only said they cared. At least I DID something! But wait. This isn’t about making ME feel good. It’s about saving your life. It’s about doing what actually needs to be done, rather than what satisfies my need to feel charitable. I should have just laid my hand on you, commanded your body to be healed, and then driven you quickly to the hospital if nothing happened instantly.

    You are not guaranteed health. You are not guaranteed happiness. You are given the freedom to pursue those things. But the government is not your parent. It’s not their job to clean up your mess.

    The Right to Accept Favor and Grace

    Let’s stretch our minds here just a second, and apply this to the Kingdom of God. We read about what God has said He’s given us: favor, grace, mercy, love, forgiveness, righteousness, etc. But I know many Christians, including myself, who aren’t experiencing these all the time.

    Some will argue with my word choice here, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be more accurate to say God gave us the freedom to pursue favor, grace, and mercy. It’s more than that, I know. He actually HAS made it available. It’s really there, for the taking. But we don’t automatically walk in the realization or experience of those things just because we believe. We can accept Christ as Lord and Savior and still misunderstand plenty about who He is, what His intentions are, and what He thinks of us after we mess up.

    And some of us will wait on our duffs for the day when God drops the answer out of the sky. But what if He already did? What if your answer is already there, and you’re just not seeing it?

  • Meet My Baby Boy

    I’m still reeling from the reality of another child in our family. My son, Micah, is amazing. I’m still in shock. With our first child, Katie, we had nine months to obsess over every little detail of what we would do when she was born. This time around, we were trying to sell our house, trying to force open the door to a new season of life, keeping up with a toddler, and Micah sort of just crept up on me. I was so busy with life and suddenly it was time for him to be born.

    I still feel like I’m recovering from the shock of what it means to have two children. But every time I hold him and hear his little sleeping whimper, I know this is the best possible outcome of 2010.

    Welcome to the world, Micah. You are my firstborn son. I am amazed.

  • Meet My Baby Boy

    I’m still reeling from the reality of another child in our family. My son, Micah, is amazing. I’m still in shock. With our first child, Katie, we had nine months to obsess over every little detail of what we would do when she was born. This time around, we were trying to sell our house, trying to force open the door to a new season of life, keeping up with a toddler, and Micah sort of just crept up on me. I was so busy with life and suddenly it was time for him to be born.

    I still feel like I’m recovering from the shock of what it means to have two children. But every time I hold him and hear his little sleeping whimper, I know this is the best possible outcome of 2010.

    Welcome to the world, Micah. You are my firstborn son. I am amazed.

  • Overcoming the Orphan Spirit

    This teaching by Dudley Hall is changing my life. I’m listening over and over so I soak up all the stuff I’ve needed to hear.

    Dudley says:

    “…They (Adam and Eve) say, We’re hiding because we were ashamed. Now, they are so conscious of their flesh, they aren’t conscious of the Father’s love. By the way, that’s the first description of “flesh” – the whole flesh we talk about in the New Testament. You know, my flesh and spirit. Flesh is that perspective of life that’s developed by orphans.

    Adam and Eve

    “Because now Adam and Eve introduce into the human race, for the first time, a fatherless mentality. They are identifying themselves apart from their relationship to the Father. They are trying to identify who they are, what they’re here about. So, the orphan mentality gets introduced into the whole thing. The orphan mentality is a striving mentality. Because when you are conscious that you are separated from the Father’s love, then you start taking on responsibilities of the Father. Like, “Well, I gotta take care of my provision.” So worry becomes part of the deal. Then you gotta take care of your protection, so fear becomes a part of your experience. And you gotta take care of your promotion, that is your significance, and so pride and selfish ambition become a part of your experience.

    “So now you have those things that are driving you. And one of the differences between a son and an orphan is an orphan is driven by internal things to meet these needs, whereas a son is free to follow. To respond. To respond to the Father. Jesus said, “I can do nothing except what I see my Father do, I can say nothing except what I hear my Father say.” So there’s a difference between responding to the Father and being driven by these needs in your life.

    “By the way, if you want a description of these needs in your life, go toGalatians chapter 5:19 and it will put it under a list called “works of the flesh.”

    If you let this teaching seep into your mind and let it percolate, the truth will change your life.

  • Why Don’t You Use Thesis Since You Promote It?

    I’m anticipating a future question and answering it here. As you can see, there is a Thesis theme banner over there to the right. I’m a strong promoter of the Thesis theme. I don’t use it, however, because of cost. Not the cost of Thesis itself, mind you, but of a custom design made and implemented onto Thesis. I’m not a developer or a designer, per se. My core skills are writing, explaining, editing, and strategizing. So when I do a project for a client, I bring in developers and designers to collaborate.

    For my own blogs, I typically use other premium themes because I haven’t given myself much of a budget to start the project. I tend to lean on the “show me you’ll do something with it before I spend money on it” mentality… sometimes to my detriment. But if I’d paid a developer/designer team to provide me with custom designs for every blog I’ve started, I’d be both poor and foolish.

    Down the road, once I’ve ensnared you all and convinced you that you can’t possibly survive more than a few days without returning, I may knock it out of the park with a custom look and feel. If I do, Thesis is likely the theme I will begin with. Until then, however, I’d rather have an attractive, semi-unique looking blog. I’ve seen plenty of not-really customized Thesis sites out there, and I get tired of them. It’s a basic structural design without customization, sort of like blogging with the default WordPress theme.

    So yes, I do love Thesis for its functionality, flexibility, and regular upgrades. No contest. But I’ll hold off on using it for myself until I’ve proven to myself that I’m in it for the long haul. And maybe decided on how to monetize.

  • Obox Delivers with Premium Theme: Left Handed

    I Like to See Drawrings

    I’m still not sure how I found this theme. I’d never heard of Obox before today. Credit to TweetDeck search column, I guess.

    Left Handed is a premium theme for WordPress. “Premium” means you have to pay to get it. It’s one of the less conventional looking themes, in that most of the theme’s design is hand drawn, giving an underground, cult-classic type of feel.

    It’s 3.0 compatible, which means you’ll be able to use the extremely useful menu editing functions.

    Custom Sidebar

    We usually see free or premium themes slightly modified with shareware buttons that six thousand other bloggers will soon have on their site if they don’t already. I love it when a blog theme provides custom imagery like the conversation bubble next to Latest Comments, or the plane in the clouds above Categories.

    The upside of custom imagery is that they complete the unique feel of the site.

    The downside is that everyone who buys the rights to use this theme will have the same custom imagery.

    I like to take premium themes like this and use every inch of custom work as an inspiration for my own custom possibilities.

    I don’t do the art myself, and I can’t claim to be the most creative person ex-nihlo. But I can edit with the best of them. Give me something on a canvas and I can tell you how to make it better.

    So if you purchase this theme or any premium theme with custom artwork, I strongly recommend you get a designer to replace some of the custom pieces with your own unique stuff. You get the benefit of starting off with someone else’s creativity and you turn it into your own unique site.

    Color Options

    You can choose between three colors: blue, army green, and red. The plane and other artwork remains the same color, but the tabs for each sidebar widget, arrows, and comment count clouds change.

    Custom Footer

    It’s a solid preview here of footer functionality. Flickr, which is generally useless for a blog except that it shows a little of the blogger’s personality and interests (kind of a window into the soul kind of thing). Twitter, which I think every site should have, in case your visitor comes from any other referral site and has no idea that you’re even on Twitter. And the don’t-leave-home-without-it contact form.

    It’s well rounded and each widget comes in at relatively the same size, so your footer box can avoid that massive flux of one super long widget beside a second much smaller widget. That always throws off a blog’s chi.

    Other Features

    Custom Logo Input – upload your logo with a click of a button.

    Ajax Comments – no need to reload the page after you submit a comment. You could watch a video and leave a comment at the same time.

    Page Templates – Archives, Portfolio, and Full Width page templates included.

    And More

    Theme Pricing

    Ready to purchase? You have three purchasing options for Left Handed theme with Obox.

    1) Single Use License – You can purchase a single-use permission for $30 and get a second single-use permission theme absolutely free.

    2) Developer License – You can purchase a developer license for $80 and still get a second developer licensed theme absolutely free.

    3) Subscription – You can purchase a subscription, which gives you access to all themes as you pay $99, or $15/month.

    ———-

    DISCLAIMER: I chose to become an affiliate of this site after seeing this theme. I like the product enough to recommend it, which means I have no qualms profiting from your purchase.

  • Cocoa&Creme.com

    This is not the usual fare for me, but I couldn’t help it. After stumbling upon this site, I couldn’t take my eyes off the design (no, really, I’m just talking about the design). Cocoa&Creme.com is a fashion, makeup, and celebrity tips site for African American women, or any woman with a darker than pale shade of skin.

    Crush Factor:

    Twitter: Following 16 / Followers 890 / Listed 42

    Facebook: 663 Fans (“Likes”)

    Alexa Rank: 425,067

    Compete Rank: 177,138

    Look at this custom sidebar creative. Look of the Day? That’s killer. Not only do they provide fresh sidebar content each day, but the look has the customized look and feel of the rest of the site. I’m so impressed. I don’t even care what the look of the day is. I just know I like that they have one, and that it looks this good.

    Three font styles broken up by a color change keeps the eyes intrigued and reading this specialty content. Now I know that Monique Coleman looked like at the VIP screening of “Gimme Mo.” I would have never known that otherwise. Seriously.

    Clean. Good contrast. To the point. A winning piece of creative.

    Then there’s the actual post. We haven’t touched on those yet. Check out this creative below. Not quite an infographic, this falls somewhere in the middle. Again, while the content doesn’t appeal to me personally, I love the way they envisioned this graphic.

    Want to look like Rihanna? Here’s all the makeup she used. Heres’ how she applied it. And we’ll show you in a way you can’t resist looking at. Near perfect presentation. Only complaint is the title of the post. Uh.. where is it? Oh. WAAAYY down below the photo? “Get the Look: Rihanna’s Aqua Eye Lids.” Weird.

    From a usability standpoint, I’m more likely to click The Daily Blog: Submit News + Tips link above the image, thinking it’s just some weird link to the post content. But I would be wrong. That’s how you subscribe to the site. Just because you WANT the title to be above the photo doesn’t mean it will be. Sadly.

    Most surprising was that this site has only been around since early July 2010! Cocoa&Creme came onto the scene with a vengeance. Featuring two to four posts per day, this site has quickly built an archive and a following most six month old blogs would envy.

    I can’t imagine that it’s the only site dedicated to the subject, but Cocoa&Creme pulls it off with more style than even the more traditional online mags. I predict that this site will grow by leaps and bounds as it carves its own niche loud and proud.