This true story from Napoleon Hill’s timeless book, “Think And Grow Rich”, is as relevant today as it was back in the Gold Rush Days in the early 1900′s. We all struggle with setbacks during our life. Do we give up or do we learn valuable lessons from these struggles that propel us forward? Listen to the following story and consider how it can inspire you to push forward another three feet to rise above any current challenge.

What lessons have you learned that you would like to share to inspire others? Thanks.

This is a moving and beautiful tribute to our military and the fallen soldiers and the families that miss them.

In the following video, Radney Foster, Darden Smith, and Darius Rucker talk about the inspirations that led to the creation of “Angle Flight”. This is a very touching and moving account. “Angel Flight” honors all the United States Military men and women. They dedicate this song to the ones that made the ultimate sacrifice, their families and the aircrew who bring them home.

Regardless of why and how we become involved in any military conflict, it is important that we always remember the sacrifices that so many have made so that we can continue to enjoy the freedoms that we cherish.

The annual EAA AirVenture gathering held 7/26/10 through 8/1/10  in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was billed as “The World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration”. This is an airshow that I really would like to visit.

This year there were 10,000 aircraft, 535,000 people, 36,000 campers, 777 exhibitors, 1000 presentations, and over 100 performers. First, let’s check  out the following short promotional video to get your adrenaline pumped up.  Expand video to full screen and turn up your speakers to get the full effect.

Next, let’s take a look at this excellent video posted on YouTube by Mr Serious. He arrived 2 days before the show and took over 3 hours of video and created over 730 video clips that he reworked into this compilation set to the music “Clocks” by Coldplay. Be sure to view full screen for the best experience.

Here is another excellent video produced by slickhutto compiled from over 8 hours of footage. Fasten your seat belts for more flying performances.

Here is the 2009 presentation from slickhutto. As I view these presentations I have to wonder how in the world these photographers were able to find such excellent viewing positions for many of these fantastic scenes. I can only imagine that they have been to Oshkosh before and did a lot of strategic planning to get into position for such excellent recordings. Enjoy.

Check out EAA AirVenture Oshkosh to learn more about the Experimental Aircraft Association and next year’s gathering.  You can also check Military Aviation for possible air shows in your area.

In this May CNBC interview, Steve Wynn forcefully expresses his concern about the bad policies being enacted in Washington and the disastrous consequences awaiting America if something isn’t done to reverse this trend.

Steve Wynn is a very successful entrepreneur who has been credited with spearheading the dramatic resurgence and expansion of the Las Vegas Strip in the 1990s. The Golden Nugget, The Mirage, Treasure Island, Bellagio, Wynn, and Encore are some of the properties his companies have built or refurbished.

We need entrepreneurs like Steve Wynn who understand how to get things accomplished. His observations in this interview are very relevant to America and the entire world. You owe it to yourself to watch this interview and spread the word.

The following video will display where it is shown as 512×288 using mp4 that should be compatible with the iPhone.

Click on the following photo to display the same video in a larger lightbox as 640×360 using mp4.

At the beginning of May I was driving back to Albuquerque from Dallas from the Glazer-Kennedy SuperConference and took a couple videos with my Kodak Zi8 pocket video camera as an experiment. I got ahead of this train and looked for a curve in the road. I didn’t have a tripod with me, so simply hand-held the camera for this video.

Now I could have posted this video to YouTube and then included it here, but I wanted to learn how to display the video directly from this website. If you have ever embedded videos from YouTube, you know how simple it is. Just select the video and then copy some code that YouTube gives you to the location on your website where you want the video to appear.

For this video I wanted to upload it to my website and then learn how to display directly from that location. I also wanted the first frame of the video to be visible without the user having to click on the “play” button, which happens automatically like magic when displaying a video from YouTube. For now, let me skip the steps needed to accomplish this.

Instead, let’s take a look at some video quality issues and how that affects what is possible today. The original video was recorded at a width of 1280 & height of 720 at 15 fps and looks great. But the size of this 85 second video is a whopping 107.6MB. Even with a 1.5Mbit DSL connection, this takes way too long to display.

So I started experimenting with different ways to reduce the size of the original and still maintain a reasonable quality when displayed above. The first step was to reduce the size of the original from 1280×720 to 512×288 (maintaining the same width to height ratio) for the space allocated above. The file was still way too big and too slow to display. I finally reduced the size of the video file all the way down to 10.1MB and the display quality is still respectable for here. The resulting file size has been reduced by more than a factor of 10!

11/17/2010 Update: This video was originally being displayed with the help of the Flowplayer For WordPress plugin by David Brachhold. Recently I upgraded to Easy Video Player 2.0 and discovered a conflict between the two since both use Flowplayer to display video. Therefore I switched the display of this video to use Easy Video Player and all is well again.

There are a lot of other lessons learned in this exercise. If you would like to learn more, just leave a comment.