Personal on Justin Carmony

The Power of "You Are Awesome"

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 21:10:52 +0000

I received a very nice email today from Elizabeth Naramore, someone who I’ve met through the PHP community. In it she made a simple statement:

“You are awesome.”

Now, I don’t know how much I deserved this email. The other people on the recipient list I’m guessing have had to go through many more trials than I have, but I’m very appreciative never the less. It got me thinking about the power this statement can have, and how this type of positive & sincere compliment can have a profound affect on people.

Personal Post - Infertility

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:32:41 +0000

Thursday morning at 12:36 AM, Joanna’s water broke. Eleven hours later, Marshall, our first son was born. It was an amazing experience. I’ll likely be posting in the future about the wonderful, and truly humbling, experience of becoming a father. However, I want to talk about something very different.

One year ago, Joanna and I were in a very different state. We were struggling with infertility. We were undergoing tests after tests, trying to diagnose why we were unable to get pregnant after trying for two years. While no diagnosis had been found for our infertility, Joanna was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. We struggled month after month of trying with no solution in sight. It was completely humbling as our life plans and hopes were slipping through our fingers and I could do absolutely nothing to “fix it.” We watched as dozens of friends, family, and neighbors got pregnant, gave birth to their babies, and lived a dream we thought we might never have. It was a very serious personal trial for my wife and I, one which can still bring tears when we look back, even though we’re “passed it” now.

The Skill of Making Habits

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:39:17 +0000

Each New Year, people around the world make their resolutions. While I’m not big into making new year resolutions, I thought I would give it a shot. Well, one month later, I was only really successful at one of the goals. I’ve stopped drinking coke completely, and my overall sugary drink consumption has drastically dropped. Instead of several cokes a day, it more of a root beer once or twice a week. However, my other major goal of working out every morning was a total flop.

Project Management & Entrepreneurship

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:51:51 +0000

My dear friend Eric Ping pointed out I only had a few days left before I’d break my year and half record of posting at least every month. I was wondering what to write about, and last night I figured out what to write.

Yesterday after going to dinner with Joanna, my wife, we went to our guilty pleasure store: Barnes & Noble. Since I already have the entire Wheel of Time series to re-read for the upcoming books, I walked over to the technical section of books. I looked over the majority of titles, most of them for beginners learning a new type of language. It got me thinking. Over the last five years I have spent most of my time and energy working on becoming a great web developer. I’ve been working hard on my design skills, searching the web for examples and resources. I’ve been trying to make my PHP code more maintainable, efficient and clean. These last years I’ve been asking myself over and over “how can I do this better?” “How can I be a better developer?”

Father Sued Over Freedom of Speech

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:22:31 +0000

I thought I would step in and write about the total non-sense that has been going on with the Linspire/Freespire debacle. Today I just found out my father, Kevin Carmony and ex-CEO of Linspire, is being sued by Michael Robertson over “… cybersquatting, trademark infringement, and unfair competition…” for “$100,000 and other damages.” You can read the entire post on Kevin’s blog. He summarizes the real intent behind this lawsuit well:

The lawsuit even states, “Although the FREESPIRE mark was recently assigned as part of an asset purchase, [Robertson] expressly reserved all rights in and to all claims against Carmony arising from the freespire.com domain name and website.” Now, why would Robertson want to carve out that one thing to hang on to? He’s no longer involved with Freespire, so why does he care? Is he desperate for money? With Robertson’s companies struggling and laying employees off, does anyone really believe this is the most important thing Robertson should be concerning himself with? His motives are pretty transparent–to suppress freedom of expression that is critical of Robertson.