Hey all, sorry to go so long without a post but life has come and smacked us with college apps so we have to take a blogging break to get back into things. And right after a new makeover too!

But to keep you guys updated, we’re not shutting ourselves away from the Internet forever. Kevin has remade his personal website into imkevinxu and regularly updates his Tumblr with funny stuff he found on the web.

Josh has an internship doing what he loves, programming, with Secure Data Software, Inc. working on the Andromeda Project.

We have also decided to take on our previous idea about your Faith in Humanity and really turn it into a reality. It is going slow at first and we will keep you update.

Until then, godspeed!

We have been working long and hard on finalizing this theme, leaping through loads of different design ideas. The launch of this theme symbolizes an important step in our journey to impact the world and get our ideas heard.

The first thing you probably notice is the change in color scheme. Our old theme looked very…blue. We had blue links, blue backgrounds, blue header, blue everything. We wanted to add a new color into the mix, so we introduced the color brown. Brown is a great color, and we feel that it harmonizes well with the blue in this theme. We tried to introduce orange, grey, and white instead of brown, but they simply did not have the same effect.

We aimed to have a very simple design, and as a result we had to remove a lot from our previous theme. With each post, we only list the author and the title. We removed the categories listing as we didn’t feel that they were necessary. We removed a lot of other things because we wanted to remain at the bare essentials: content, header, navigation, footer. If there is anything we removed that you feel is essential to our blog, please, let us know! We are very open to suggestions, just send us an email or post a comment.

Unfortunately, because this is our first time truly releasing our own design, there are bound to be a few bugs. Here is a list of some of the known bugs as of right now:

• IE 7- On some pages the body tags float a little too far from the posts, and fixes itself after being refreshed. This is a weird problem we are trying to fix.
• Opera- Each brown bar at the bottom of each post has a background that extends a little to far on top and bottom.
• Firefox- Everything works perfectly. You lucky dawgs.
• Resolutions < 1024 by 768- The background colors do not extend beyond the screen, so when you horizontally scroll to the rest of the navigation at the top you will not see any color there.

We are currently working on fixing all these problems. If you notice any problems other than the ones listed, do not hesitate to email us! We want to make our readers super happy and have the best possible experience on this site =).

Last but not least, you may notice the projects tab next to the blog tab up top. It doesn’t work…yet! That is a new feature we are planning to add to our blog ASAP.

Stay tuned for my next post, where I will talk about the evolution of our design. You’ll get to see our first design for the blog (It’s Horrible!), and many other older designs! We are not responsible for any potential eyesight loss.

~Josh Belanich

Community is a funny thing online. People tend to start going to the same websites, interacting with the same people and all of a sudden you get that feeling of friends and community.

When I started Can The World Hear Me with Josh, we never thought it would grow to a blog with dedicated readers. Maybe some random passer-bys or maybe one article would go viral but never the thought of readers that would leave comments on every post and threads to keep talk alive.

Today I want to thank all those readers we have noticed lately:

• Bamboo Forest is one of the most notable readers of our blog. He comments on almost every post and it’s always 100% insightful.
• Jessica Mah is the one person that helped get this whole thing about startups started and I give her a huge thank you as a friend and as a reader.
• Christian T is a friend of mine thats been keeping up with this blog. It’s nice to know that people I know are reading this as well.
• Ellis is another friend that’s been reading my blog on RSS feeds. It’s nice to know someone’s actually subscribed to it, haha.

~Kevin Xu

Being a leader is tough work, I wrote about it here before but next week I’ll be at FBLA State Officer Training.

Sounds all official right? So they will probably train us to organize events, make speeches, “lead” and yadda yadda but then what? I think there is one very important aspect of leadership that just can’t be taught. And that is having the ability for others to look up to and respect you, aka charisma.

It is very important for leaders to have charisma so that in an instant, people will trust you and do what you say in order to get things done. It doesn’t matter if a leader has this super powerful vision for the organization and makes great speeches; if a leader doesn’t have charisma then nothing gets done.

So how does one attempt to be more charismatic? This wiki how-to is a good start, but I’d also like to note one specific about the article, the part about the confidence. Being assertive and looking confident when one really isn’t goes a long way with people and all aspiring leaders should try it.

Just another of my 2 cents.

~Kevin Xu

*Photo courtesy of mjp3000

Introducing my latest internet creation, ikevinxu!

It has been up for a while now but I wanted to have some posts up first before presenting it to my Can The World Hear Me readers. For now, its just a blog, a micro-blog aka a Tumblr, started by the genius 22 year-old David Karp. I along with many others got turned on by its super simple UI and stress-free posting.

The only down point of Tumblr was that the posts don’t have an auto-save feature meaning the drat I was writing yesterday got lost after my web browser crashed. But I have to give serious props to their support team as when I emailed them requesting an auto-save feature for Tumblr, they emailed me back almost immediately saying they’ll get on it. Now that’s customer service!

So I post regularly from both sites now. My priority with ikevinxu is just to have fun with it now but I hope to one day convert it to a real site with a portfolio of my latest ideas and ventures and have the tumblr blog as a subdomain.

Look forward to it!

~Kevin Xu

How about a free idea?

In the business world you are always trying to monetize what you are good at so what if all you are good at is coming up with ideas? Wacky ideas, tech ideas, dangerous ideas, funny epic ideas, or even dramatic serious ideas! I involuntarily come up with many ideas during the week but never have the time to see them through! Even more woeful is starting a new project but never finishing it…

So perhaps a website dedicated to giving out free ideas? It’s first come, first serve for whoever wants to take the idea and turn it into a reality. I can already imagine three separate people all trying to turn the idea into a reality at the same time and seeing who can be first. Of course I would also then be displaying the winner and all the other attempts too on the front page.

This sort of reminds me of the Idea Shower, a portfolio of all of Nate Weiner’s awesome ideas, some public and some private. But those are all his ideas while this site would be ideas for the public.

On the other hand, as an entrepreneur this can be the dumbest thing in the world to do. The idea is perhaps the single most valuable part of a startup other than the team and I’m just giving out ideas for free?

Any suggestions to monetize this free idea idea?

~Kevin Xu

*Photo courtesy of bartendermagic_com

Update: Interesting to note that www.freeideas.com is already taken and looks pretty unique. But its still in the development stages as its full of the “Lorem Ipsum Dolor” crap. Registered by a Carl Free so I assume the domain is a play on his last name “Free” rather than the concept of “free”.

You know the phrase “I lost all faith in humanity” or “I have faith again in humanity”?

Well imagine this… a website with a huge ass horizontal bar on top, like a thermostat, with something like “fuckin doomed” on one end and “godly saints” on the other end. Yes a whole website that will gauge the current faith in humanity.

The idea would be to have users submit various real news articles to the website about something really horrible or really awesome that humanity did and then a person (one of us) will read each article and depending on how we feel about it, either our faith in humanity is lost or gained and we would post the article on the main page.

Or we can have it democratic like Digg and have users vote on whether the gauge should go to ‘doomed’ or ’saved’…. we all know how that is turning out.

This is just another random project we might take on this summer.

~Kevin Xu

*Photo courtesy of Hans van de Vorst

Everyone loves procrastinating right? While productivity pays off in the long run, laziness always pays off now so why bother doing anything? We could go days at a time playing games and surfing the web before we tackle that paper that could probably be done in minutes. The major enemy? Lack of motivation

Ever find yourself fighting to find that lost motivation? You know at one time you were just so psyched to be productive but then what happened? Maybe something came up or you found something else to do? Or maybe just too much time passed. This is what’s been happening to me in what I call the “cycle of procrastination”

Quick Example: I wake up at 10:00am and want to do work. I procrastinate until 12:50pm and realize I need to do work. 1:00pm comes along and I need to go out with my family for lunch. Come back at 2:30pm and want to do work again. Procrastinate/nap until 5:30pm. Start work with the most motivation ever but dinner strikes at 6:00pm. Finish at 7:00pm and game/TV until 9:30pm. Decide I REALLY need to do work and get maybe one paper done. Then something called ’sleep’ takes over and I make a promise to myself to get everything done tomorrow as I have a whole free day tomorrow. Repeat…

Sad isn’t it? You can always try some Lifehacks or Zenhabits to get your motivation back. Godspeed!

~Kevin Xu

*Photo Courtesy of nav.it.singh

Re-starting a blog is a lot different than starting a blog from scratch as you already have a history of posts, an index on Google, and a dwindling audience. But just like in a good chess game, depending on how well you make your moves you can still come out on top!

I started reading ProBlogger a lot during my absence and it really taught me a whole world of blogging I never realized. I was essentially reading the teachings of a ‘master blogger’ who’s conquered the techniques of good writing and good networking.

So I posed to Darren the question about how to ‘restart’ a blog. He hasn’t responded yet but I will report back if and when he does. In the meantime I came up with my own few tips that I hope to execute.

• Apologize for your absence- Just like I did here, apologize to the readers that stayed for your absence. Explain why you were absent but don’t try to make up some excuse or blame something. Just suck in your pride and apologize for neglecting to write.
• Outline a plan- Either in public or in private, make sure you have a plan to re-engage yourself in your blog so that it doesn’t falter again and you have an idea where you want to go with this.
• Networking Making Friends- Does anyone else get that cringe when you hear the word “networking”? I try to think of it more as making friends and a following on your blog. Try submitting some posts onto Digg or Reddit. More advanced bloggers can utilize Twitter and other social networking sites to their huge advantage.
• Give your blog a checkup- This is often overlooked but in your absence you have probably never even visited your blog so you want to make sure its still in top condition. Check your ‘about me’ page to make sure its still updated. Make sure all links and pictures aren’t broken. Even check your used bandwidth to make sure nothing odd happened while you were gone.
• Keep on Writing- Most important is to keep on writing fresh new posts so that when your readers do come back to you, you give them a reason to stay. Check back on your first posts and remember that enthusiasm and new ideas will naturally come to you.

People still have this huge misconception that the new “green tech” businesses will lead to cheaper oil. Disturbed by yesterday’s huge rise in crude oil, I ask people what are we going to do when gas goes to $5 a gallon. The response was surprisingly about investing more money and time into “green tech”.

Now I’m all for this new surge in green tech but do most people even know what green tech is all about? Green tech is the trend towards more environmentally-friendly technology such as electric cars or recycled materials. It also consists of finding an alternative source of energy or a renewable source of energy for the sake of keeping the environment clean.

The main difference between investing in green tech and investing in oil companies are their goals. The goal of green tech companies is to clean the environment for a better tomorrow while the goal of oil companies is to find more oil to meet the demand and hopefully lower prices.

While everyone can agree on lowering oil prices, one needs to understand the goals of any company they invest in. By investing in green tech corporations, that’s me saying “I hope this business will keep the environment clean and lower oil prices are only a bonus” while investing in oil companies is saying “I’m a selfish bastard who wants cheaper oil”.

~Kevin Xu

*Photo courtesy of Jonathan Gayman