Whether I have them on stickies on my PC monitor, Tweeted them recently, repeat them to myself in my mind or have simply connected with the wisdom, there are certain quotes, phrases or sayings that have particular meaning and resonance for me these days. Here they are.

• Let go or be dragged.
• Wanna be right or you wanna be married?
• Never underestimate others’ actions being motivated by feelings of inadequacy.
• Don’t let great be the enemy of good.
• You can bury your emotions, but you bury them alive!
• The only way past difficult emotions in through them.
• Don’t compare your insides with others’ outsides.
• Don’t let a terminal diagnosis from your doctor get you to start living and appreciating every moment. Do it now.
• It is almost never about ‘me’. It is almost never about ‘Jason OConnor’.
• I’m too old to know everything.
• When you fight with reality, reality wins, but only 100% of the time.

I have two sons, 3 and 4 years old. They never cease to amaze me. They bring out the best in me, and the worst. They seem to be relatively accurate mirrors that reflect back all my perceived deficiencies and insecurities. They also make me feel tragic love for them. What I mean is that often when I look at them, at the risk of sounding trite, I am reminded of how precious life is, how fleeting it is, how much joy and suffering there is, and just how delicate it can be.

Last night after work, I took the boys to our playroom/home gym and rode the stationary bike while watching them romp. They don’t often get along, but they were last night. They played with toys, chased each other, dance like Elain Benes on Seinfeld, and generally acted like two beautiful boys relishing life. They were so awesome to watch. They were so precious and wonderful.

When I look through their eyes at the world, I am sometimes magically and instantly transported back to my own childhood. Things become so much clearer when that happens. I see how my perceptions and thoughts have changed over my life, how I used to process experience so differently. For whatever reason, I just wanted to record that moment here, because, like everything, it’s transient, slippery, ephemeral in that it comes and goes leaving only a slight memory that gets jumbled up with all the rest of the memories. What beautiful boys I have.

My four-year-old came home from pre-school recently, ran up to my office and exclaimed, “We all go to heaven and stay there forever. Are you going to go to heaven too dad?” Just writing this gives me chills because what do you reply to this? My wife and I had never discussed death with him; our thinking was that he may be a bit too young. But the pre-school apparently thought differently. Oh well, you roll with the punches as a parent. But it’s a tough subject because as a parent, I don’t want my child to know of death, or ever experience it. I don’t want him to die, ever. I also don’t want to die relative to him, because that will mean he is fatherless.(And I don’t want to die, period.)

The subject came up again when my older brother unexpectedly died. We didn’t take our boys to the wake or funeral, wanting to protect them against such harsh and vivid reality at such a young age. But predictably, my pre-school son asked if he too went to heaven. I told him ‘yes’ and when he inquired when he was coming back I had to face the reality that the only answer is ‘never’. And that’s what I told him.

So when he asks me if I am also going to go to heaven some day, I have to reluctantly also say ‘yes’. But I took a page out of my mother’s handbook. I said, “By the time I go to heaven, you’ll be so sick of taking care of my elderly self that you’ll be happy.” Not so delicate or philosophical, but it’ll have to do.

For a few years now I have been meditating, sometimes five days in a row and other times once a week. But I have kept up with it and I recommend it to any person reading this. I practice insight meditation. This involves sitting upright and concentrating on an anchor, such as your in-breath and out-breath. When a thought arises, which happens every second it seems, I gently label the thought and let it pass through me till I can go back to concentrating on my breathing.

Sometime my label will be “thinking”. I’ll catch myself lost in thought and realize that I have drifted from my anchor of breathing and say to myself in a non-judgmental way, “thinking”, and then go back to the breath.  Other times my labels will be more specific such as “self-denigrating”, “arguing” or “analyzing”. I have a top five that repeatedly and relentlessly pop into my head, without warning and without invitation.

Over time, this way of meditating for me has become a little more sophisticated. Since I am a visual person, I have found that if I imagine myself in the third person sitting by a river, watching theses thoughts float by, I don’t get as easily stuck on any given thought that comes. And this is one of the goals of insight meditation, to not get stuck in, or identify with your fleeting thoughts.

This particular mindfulness practice involves me becoming the ‘witness’ of a person named Jason OConnor sitting by a river. I the ‘watcher’ or ‘witness’ am about 15 feet behind and above Jason, who is sitting crossed-leg on a river bank watching the river, and the thoughts borne on the river, flow by at a stately pace from right to left. Each thought attaches itself to Jason as it goes by. In my mind’s eye I see Jason package each attached thought up, place it on a simple wooden raft, and kick it down the river. Immediately afterwards there is peace and no-thought once again. Temporarily.

A little ways down the river there is a waterfall. After being kicked, the raft and it’s freight of thought violently fall down the waterfall. Of course that’s not the end of it. Thoughts have a way of returning again, and again, and again.

In Escher-like fashion my imaginary river is a loop that eventually returns back to me. When the same thought arises again, I the ‘watcher’ or ‘witness’ again see Jason repeat placing the thought on a raft and kicking it down the river.

This particular practice has greatly helped my meditation and my ability to avoid identifying with my thoughts.  It helps me be more mindful in my day-to-day life. If any of this interests you and you would like to learn more, here are some of my favorite teachers/authors/gurus/Buddhists:

• Rick Hanson
• Thich Nhat Hanh
• Ronald D. Siegel
• Jack Cornfield
• Pema Chodron
• Eckart Tolle
• Alan W. Watts
• Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Chogyam Trungpa

I’ve been a Web professional and consultant since right around when the Web went mainstream and have been using various software tools to help my job ever since. There have been countless tools to choose from over the years, but only some are really worth the money and effort to learn. Here are the ones that I find myself using these days.

I have some basic, everyday programs to start with. I use Dreamweaver and Notepad for HMTL development. For browsers, I always have both Internet Explorer and Firefox open, with many tabs in each open, and will check search engine rankings and how my websites look in each browser. Sometimes I will also use a third browser, Google’s Chrome.

For website diagnostics I use Xenu Link Sleuth, it is one of the best broken link tools and offers a whole lot more. I use GTmetrix and Zoompf to learn about how a site is loading, how fast it is and how well it technically performs. And I use Advanced Web Rankings and SEOMoz to see how well keyword phrases are performing in the search engines.

For competitive analysis I use compete.com, Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer.

Google, Wordtracker and SEOBook all have keyword research tools and I like them all for various and differing reasons.

I recently found a terrific little program called Ecobyte Replacement Text which does a great job at finding and replacing anything, including partial strings.

So these are the top tools in Jason’s webmaster toolbox and I hope you find these as useful as I do.

It wasn’t all that long ago that my wife and I, with baby in tow, upgraded from a condo to a house. Well, it’s been a few years now, but it certainly seems only a short time ago.

One thing I realized right off the bat about owning your own home is that you are indeed responsible for every socket, toilet paper holder, nail, pipe, window and shower head. And that was just the inside. I got a wake up call when I realized our property needed some serious landscaping. And it seems anything you or your wife wants to do to make the yard better costs a small fortune.

After we moved in it became evident we were going to need a whole host of contractors to make the necessary upgrades we wanted. For example, there was an unfinished room that the builder intended to be storage space, a kind of attic. I wanted to convert it into a home office. So we had to hire some Boston-area carpenters to finish the room, add walls and such.

Then we needed to find an HVAC specialist to pipe in some heat and air conditioning. He had to extend the existing HVAC infrastructure. Of course I then found a Boston electrician to add electrical outlets and more lights. I also had two sky-lights installed and needed someone to come in and finish the floor as well. The office came out great and I am sitting in it now in fact as I compose this.

There were good points and bad points to buying a new home (as in a home that was never lived in before and sold directly from the builder). Since it was a new, we luckily didn’t need to hire any roofers, masons,  plumbers or the like. But little things like bathroom mirrors, towel holders, lighting fixtures and window dressings and more all had to be purchased after we moved in. But owning a new home is definitely a wonderful feeling.

After adding some trees and bushes, and a lawn, the out side shaped up nicely. But there’s no question that I have hired more contractors in the last few years than ever before in my life. And after some of the latest home upgrades, my friend remarked, “I can see the headline now, Jason OConnor Stimulates Local Economy”.

I got a new iPad II for my birthday the other day and so far it seems pretty cool. I have been a Windows PC guy (and a Linux) guy forever so I never really delved into the world of Mac. My old college roommate, who allowed me to use his original Macintosh for my word processing assignments back in the early 90’s, moved over to PC’s right after that and never looked back. So after I received the iPad I was having a chat with him and he said to me, “O’Connor, ya gotta try out the iPad, I use it for everything.”

So, as I sit here and write this, my laptop PC running Windows is hooked up by a little white USB cable to my new Mac iPad II and is synching all my music. (That’s what we ‘Mac-heads’ call synchronizing the music on our computer with that on our iPod or iPad). I’ve already downloaded some cool apps, some for productivity and a couple of games and I am really enjoying it. Pretty cool so far anyway.

Google+

Recently I came across two really fantastic quotes, one in a book, the other in an email signature:

“In a world of fugitives the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.”
- T.S. Eliot

“There is a field out beyond right and wrong. I will meet you there.”
– Rumi

I just released the latest edition of my Web marketing newsletter,  The Net Gazette.  This October issue’s theme is ‘How to Write for the Web’. It includes articles written by both me and one of my top writers. Follow the links below to read the various articles and get ready to learn.

• How to Write for Visitors AND Search Engines
• How to Write for the Web
• Resources from Around the Web
• How to Conduct Online Research
• Ten Extremely Useful Marketing Blogs

I’m reading a couple of good books right now that are business-related. Or at least related to my business which is owning and helping others who own businesses utilize the Web.

One of them is a book I read a while ago and am now reading the latest edition (the hardcover is orange), The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. It’s primarily helpful for business owners although there are many things that an employee would find helpful as well. The book explains how you can significantly reduce your work week by following a number of strategies.

One of the ways for example, is to outsource all your administrative and repetitive tasks to cheap, but reliable overseas labor. The way Ferriss explains how smart, useful and easy it is to do, it will make you wonder why you haven’t been doing it all along. The book, and the updated version I’m reading now are a fantastic source of new ideas, strategies and paradigms. And there are a number of good suggestions for utilizing the Web to help save you time. In the latest edition Ferriss actually explains how you can even outsource most of your email reading!

Another really interesting book I’ve been slowly reading is called Yes We Did! An inside look at how social media built the Obama brand by Rahaf Harfoush. This book explains how Obama’s campaing was aided by online, social media efforts done by a team dedicated to that end. Whether you like his politics or not, you can’t argue with his extremely impressive ‘08 campaign and win. This book sheds some light on how they did it in the Web 2.0 world.

Will control over the Internet remain in the hands of users and innovators like us? Or will a handful of telephone and cable companies determine which Web sites you see and which you don’t? Urge the FCC to protect Net Neutrality once and for all.

Net Neutrality is the engine of innovation, free speech and democracy on the Internet.

The FCC must protect Net Neutrality by enacting strong rules that keep the Internet free from blocking, censorship and discrimination and ensure that Internet service providers disclose all efforts to manage content.

More than 1.6 million Americans have already called for Net Neutrality protections. Please stand with us by passing a strong Net Neutrality rule.

Please consider telling the FCC — in your own words — to stand up for Net Neutrality.

Here’s what I wrote:

It is vital that the Internet remains out of the control of private entities such as telephone and cable companies. Please make every effort to keep the Internet the way it is today. I am a Web professional who believes that this is an extremely important issue. Allowing private entities whose sole motive is making profits to determine who gets to see what websites based on pay scales will ruin the Web as we know it and cause millions of small business websites rendered invisible to large amounts of people. Don’t allow the collapse of the Web and thus our economy. You think the Internet bubble of 2001 was bad? This will make that look like child’s play.

http://www.savetheinternet.com/fcc-comments