Category: Personal

There is a certain school of business coaching, where the process seems to be this.

The Interview: This is where the business coach asks the client about goals, intentions, mission and all the tasks and activities to reach those goals.

The Sell: This is where the business coach says to the client  that you can meet your goals by following a process, and my process says do these first set of tasks.

The Process: The business coach talks to the client on a regular basis and nags the client about completing tasks to meet the goals.  This is supposed to motivate the client to do the tasks so the client does not get nagged.

But I do not need the process because I have people that will nag me for free.  Please do not tell any of my free naggers that they should be charging me big bucks.

Research and design by the Online Dating Site

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13222978

This is one of my favorite Internet visits during the day.  It is striking images from around the world.

The reason I like it so much is that it reminds me every day not to be insular.  There are pictures of people from all over the world.  Most of the time they are dressed in ways that I never see in my day to day activity.

Many times they are engaging in activity that I have never seen.  Or celebrating a festival that is unknown to me.  Or recovering from a tragedy or disaster that I had not read about.

The site reminds me of the great diversity on our planet.

Facts about water:

• Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.
• More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
• Every day, women and children in Africa walk a combined total of 109 million hours to get water.
• The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world.

My beard is very long. I spend most of my time working from home, so I do not feel the need to keep it neat and trim like I used to.

People treat me differently now.

• People smile at me.
• Call me Santa Claus.
• People ask me how long it took to grow.
• Other men with beards tell me stories of their beards.
• People yell over that they like the beard.

I need to get a more professional look, but it is fun for a while.  But I am not sure I can stand all the Santa references around the Holidays.

The US post office was always a given. The mail just got through. Now and again something was lost, but it was rare. That is how I always felt.

But now it is different. I have not been receiving all of my mail. Clients send me mail that I do not receive. There are about a half dozen times in the last few months where I did not receive a piece of mail I was watching for. I do not know how many times I did not receive something I was not looking for.

I finally gave up and got a Post Office Box.

Via: Online Schools

I feel damn good today.  It is a wonderful day.  No good reason, just a good night’s sleep and a deep meditation to start the day.

Today is Boobquake day.  See http://www.blaghag.com/ .  This is the sort of fun the Internet supports so well.  I will be watching to see if there are more earthquakes today.

Starting to feel overwhelmed again.  That is going to be my mantra.  Do one thing at a time.  Do it to completion.

The last couple of days have not been very productive.  Time for “back to the basics”.

• Establish the list of things to be done.
• Put them in priority.
• Work on one thing at a time.
• Celebrate each completed task.

It is easy to say, harder to do.

Today I woke up with the feeling there was too much to do in too little time.  Instead of jumping up and getting to work, I took a walk.

• Some trees are in bloom with beautiful white flowers.
• The birds were singing.
• I stopped for coffee.

I still have a lot to do – but I certainly feel better.

I like to stay informed on various topics:  Some examples are RSS and Website planning, design, construction, promotion, and maintenance.

These are the steps I use.

I create a Blog to hold the information for each topic.  I have a blog for

• RSS
• Website Planning
• Website Design
• Website Construction
• Website Promotion
• Website Maintenance

• I use Blogger because I like to use certain tools, but most blog services have comparable tools.
• I do not write the blogs, these are where I store references.  They are link blogs.

I subscribe to information sources about the topics.

• Google Alerts
• RSS Feeds
• Twitter

When I read the sources and want to remember a source, I add the source to the appropriate blog.

• I use the Google Toolbar “Send to Blogger”
• I add my comments
• It is immediately added to the appropriate blog.

• I think about it as creating index cards for a term paper in the days before we used the Internet.
• It captures the link, a summary, and my comments.
• It takes the same amount of effort as bookmarking, but it has more benefits.

Periodically, I go through the blogs, summarize the information, and update my website.

• The RSS Material becomes part of the RSS Tutorial
• The Website information becomes part of the Wizard Creek Website.

Some side benefits

• The Blogs have RSS Feeds that I send to twitter which sometimes elicits comments
• I put Adsense on the blogs and make a little bit of money.
• I add a custom Google search so I can search all the blogs when I am trying to find something.

My colleague Karen Frank has re-branded her business to 3E (Elegant, Easy & Effective) Communications with some grand opening deals.

From her announcement:

“So (may I have a drum roll please) announcing 3 E communications! Elegant, Easy, Effective business communications for the entrepreneur.

And while the new look and logo etc. is still in development, my new website is up www.3ecommunications.net and my new email works karen@3ecommunications.net .

And what would a grand opening be without a grand opening sale?”

Karen can help with your business communication.  Check it out now for some grand opening deals.

Who is Dave Winer?  This is from Dave’s blog.

Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

I do not know whether he bumped up the age yet or not, but it is his birthday.

I read Dave’s blog.  I follow him on Twitter.  I listen to his podcasts. I am smarter for doing so.

Sometimes when I talk to people I share Dave’s ideas.  Usually I give him credit.   Sometimes I don’t.   Thanks Dave.

I met Dave Winer once.  Shook his hand.  Said thanks for all his contributions to the Internet.  And I am pleased to add my good wishes today on his birthday.

Today is Blog Action Day.  The topic is Poverty.

I try to relate to poverty.  I remember trivial things in my life.

• Selling books at the used book store to get money for food, but I drove to the book store.
• Sleeping in my car at a rest stop for 3 nights, but only because I was waiting on my new apartment to be available, and I did not want to spend the money.
• Hitchhiking with little money and accepting change from a generous person, but I used the change to buy cigarettes.
• I lived below the supposed poverty line as defined by the government when I was in the service, but we had lots of benefits.

I have never known poverty in my life.  I always had the capability to earn money.  I had friends with money.  My family always welcomed me.  I have been “short”.  I have had “cash flow problems”.  I have never known poverty.

But especially in this nation of abundance, people should not have to live without the necessities of life.

It seems in this country we are Socialist when it comes to big business, Capitalist when it comes to poor people.  I think we should rescue the poor and not wall street.

I add my blog today to the all the blogs that want an end to poverty.

I read more about politics than I discuss politics.  I read blogs and comments, so I read individual voices, but I do not discuss much.  When I am with people, we are more likely to be discussing business.

Today I was in a conversation that turned to politics.  Even though we were all in essential agreement, the conversation quickly turned emotional, and I heard profanities from this group for the first time.

It was actually interesting to see the heat that it generated.  I have been reading George Lakoff, so I was mentally applying what I have been learning to the conversation.

All in all, I enjoyed it.

A very unprofessional post today.  I am tired.

Every morning at 7:30 the construction crews arrive and begin work in the area.  It has been going on for 3 weeks.

I know many get up earlier than that each morning, but I am a night owl and often work past midnight coding and designing.

I need to make some sort of adjustment.

I am tired.

If I do not post on the blog regularly, I do not know what to write about.   There are too many things backed up and I do not know where to start.

Seems that is the way with many things.  If you exercise everyday it is a pattern and it generates energy to keep it up.  Getting started again after a period of no exercise is difficult.

It is the difference in a smooth running stream of water versus one that is jammed up or backed up with debris.  Getting the debris out the way is required to get it running smoothly again.

I use logmein.com.  I find it to be a good service. I have no financial interest in the service, although as I write this I think I should sign up and be an affiliate.

I have a desktop and a laptop.  Many are getting away from that combination and just working with a laptop, but I still have both.

When I go out on the road, I take my laptop.  If I am working on the Internet, I just connect directly.  But sometimes I want to access a program that is only on my desktop, like Photoshop.

Then I connect to the internet, sign on to logmein.com, and then link up with the desktop.  I can use all the desktop products.

I am certainly aware that there are multiple products and services that do this, but logmein is my favorite, and for what I described, it is free.

The reason that it came to mind today is that the video card on my desktop died.  I will put a new one in soon, but in the interim, I started the desktop and the laptop, and I am accessing the desktop through the Internet.

So I am sitting here using the desktop monitor and keyboard, but running through the Internet using the laptop.  The laptop and the desktop are a few feet away, but I am sending the packets over the Internet.

Now I know of course there are other ways to connect, but this way was already set up, and so it was the most expedient to do.

It is surprisingly quick.

Today, in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Gail Hillebrand, a senior attorney is quoted as follows “You think when you open a bank account that the money belongs to you.  That’s not the way the bank sees it and it’s not the way the law sees it.”

I learned this lesson the hard way.  It is a long painful story, but I know now that money in a bank account is not always under my control. I argued with a bank long and hard about this point, but I lost.

The article tells the stories of various people that also learned the lesson.  They were all shocked as I was.  A most painful lesson.

I have had more client work recently.  I like to do client work for lots of different reasons.

• Clients always push me in a different direction.  They want something done differently than I have done in the past.  They want a feature that I have not used before.
• I work too much on my own.  It is good to get out and work with clients.
• Many of the clients I work with are out of town and I work with them using telephone and email.  Recent clients have been local and I have had face time.  I had to get a hair cut.

Got to go.  Client work to do.

I live in the San Francisco area, East Bay.  In the summer, we get hot days and cool nights.  I understand it is because the humidity is low.  When humidity is high, it holds the heat after the sun goes down.

Yesterday during the day was in the 90′s.  Last night is was so cool I turned on the electric blanket for a while to warm up the bed.  This morning the window is open and it is cool.  I have a light jacket on while working at the desk.

The weather forecast is for the low 80′s today.

In this part of the East Bay, it is regularly hot, so there is Air Conditioning everywhere.  It is always a question of when to turn the Air Conditioning on, and when to turn it off.

And I know when I blog about the weather, it is because I am worrying about things I do not want to discuss.  I suppose it is like making conversation about the weather during ackward moments.  I hope you have pleasant weather today where ever you are.

Opiophobia is the unreasonable fear of prescribing opiates by both the medical professions and the public.

Opiophobia is responsible for the current situation where people on pain medications suffer difficulties from medical professionals, friends, and family.

I want to know where Opiophobia got started. I am doing research which I am capturing on a blog called History of Opiophobia.

I have identied several papers and books on the history of OpioPhobia, but they are either vary expensive or behind a firewall.   I am continuing to reasearch.

There was a fire in our apartment complex.  We are fine.  It did get our attention.

I am writing PHP code for a project that I am working on. There is good news and bad news.

The good news is that I really enjoy writing the code. But, I enjoy the coding so much that I keep wanting to do the code. I keep putting off more urgent and important tasks. That will end today – today is urgent and important tasks only. The code is important but not urgent.

I wake up thinking about the code and ways to improve it. Maybe it is just an excuse to stay in bed for a few more minutes working out the next routine to be coded.

It is certainly a type of system that I have written before, but as always, things change over time. So I bring some experience, but there are always new things to learn.

OK, I will set a goal for tasks to complete. If I complete all the tasks, I will take some time to code.

When I find myself wondering what to blog about on a particular day, it usually means that what is on my mind is not something I want to blog about.

It is like running into an acquaintance who asks how you are doing and answering “I am doing fine”. There is no reason to speak of the fears, the failures, the problems, and the disappointments.

I sometimes think that I should start another blog – an anonymous blog – so that I can speak about what is really doing on.

One of the things that stops me is that I am not sure what makes it truly anonymous. Seems like one can penetrate the IP address of posts and identify people pretty quickly.

Maybe I can look up Mini-Microsoft and see how he or she did it.

It is hard to focus on work because my mind keeps going to the Aids Lifecycle.  The closing ceremonies should be going on as I write this post.  My son rode this year.

My son is a cyclist, and I thought he was riding because of pure altruistic motives – to raise money for Aids.

Eventually I found out about the demographics of the riders.

• Lots of gay men
• Lots of older straight men.
• Lots of young straight women.
• Very few young straight men.

My son is a young straight guy.  He is meeting lots of fit, young, engaged straight women.  Just another benefit of doing a good thing I suppose.

For whatever the reason he rode, I am very proud of him.

Tracy Kidder wrote a book called “The Soul of a New Machine” about a computer design team.

One engineer, Josh Rosen, who burned out fighting nanosecond-level timing bugs was seduced by the attraction of commune living and left to live in the country. His resignation note declared, “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

I was thinking of that quote today. I have been dealing with units of time no longer than an hour, or a least a few hours.

• Is Twitter up or down?
• Is Senator Obama or Senator Clinton or Senator McCain going to give a speech?
• What is the latest on CNN or MSNBC?
• Work on critical client updates.
• Watch a scheduled webinar.

I am going to take some time this weekend and meditate and read a book.  Think about something longer than an hour.

Adding just a few things to my daily schedule has made my day very full.  Time seems to race by.

• Bird sitting for a couple of cute parakeets
• Watching the Aids LifeCycle news because my son is riding in the event
• Paying attention to the Democratic Party nominating process
• Voting in the California primary today.  Yes, the California primary was split and we voted for candidates early, but the other part of the primary is today.
• Along with the client and business work.

Adding just a few items seems to make the day very busy, but it could be because some of the items have an emotional charge.

Today is the start of the Aids LifeCycle. It is a bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for Aids.

My son is riding along with 2500 other riders. I am a typical parent and I am both very proud and a little concerned.

Aids LifeCycle Blog

The 2500 riders will raise more than 11 million dollars for Aids. It is quite a story and quite an adventure.

It feels a little strange sitting at my desk today while my son rides 80 miles on a bicycle. Maybe I will do a walk today.

Today, I am watching the Democratic National Committee Rules and Bylaws Committee.

Some observations:

• I am so happy I am not a Democrat (I am not a Republican either).
• Will Rogers was right when he said, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
• Supposedly, the Republicans are taping angry members of the Democratic party saying they will vote for Senator McCain before they will vote for the “other” Democrat. It will be a coming attraction on YouTube.
• DNC Meeting Protest “DissNfranChise?” is already up on YouTube. The background music is Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved”.
  • I’ve been cheated
  • Been mistreated
  • When will I be loved

There will be no party unity after this meeting. Bet on McCain.

Content is king on the Internet. So they say.

Nontent is lack of content. Nontent.com is for sale. Maybe nontent is the court jester to the king.

There is a certain amount of real content. That content is then re-used, re-purposed, and re-blogged.

Yahoo kills a billion pieces of spam a day. Content killers.

How much of content is someone (like me) expressing their opinions of the content of the day.

As I was finishing my work day yesterday, the movie Curse of the Golden Flower came on TV. I watched it from start to finish.

It was a visual feast. A stunning collage of colors, ritual, martial arts, family intrigue and grand opera themes.

I do not normally check to see what reviewers write about movies, but I did read a sampling of reviews about this movie. It was so magnificent visually that I wanted to read other’s reactions.

Almost every review remarked on the incredible visuals.

And every review discussed the plot that was a stew of intrigue, betrayal, murder, poisoning, and stepmother-stepson, and stepbrother-stepsister passion.

It was a remarkable movie.

Twitter has been a great source of amusement and amazement.

• Some blog posts discuss why the writer will not go on Twitter
• Others bloggers post reasons why they cannot live without Twitter
• When Twitter goes down, some people act like the Internet is down.
• The Gillmor gang would have to shut down without Twitter to discuss.
• Dave Winer uses Twitter as an example of how to develop software which is fascinating
• Twitter will be the poster child for scaling issues for many months.
• Twitter is used as an lesson for centralization vs. decentralization.
• One comment about Twitter: Twitter is Facebook for those that do not have Facebook.
• Some want Twitter to charge super users to raise money to fix it.

And Twitter is free.

Today is Memorial Day – the last Monday of May. Today we remember those that died while in the military service of the United States in any war or military action.

It was originally called Decoration Day, because on this day the dead were honored by decorating their graves.

I remember as a young man getting dressed up and going to the cemetery at this day. There were flowers everywhere. People decorated graves of relatives whether they had died in the military or not.

When you went to the cemetery, there were veterans in uniform giving out poppies and requesting donations for some veterans fund. Usually, we all got a poppy.

It was an obligation of the day, and people dealt with it in the normal way

• Some got up early and took care of the obligation early.
• Some procrastinated and went later in the day.

Our family went early in the day. We had moved a good deal, so there were no relatives buried in the vicinity, so we paid our respects to the relatives of friends of the family.

The decorating of graves seems out of step with life today.

• First, we are rarely in the same place as the graves of our family members that have passed.
• Second, we acknowledge the family members that died by addressing their spirits or memories.

I will take a moment today to remember my Mother and Father. Their graves are too far away to decorate, so I will remember them and smile.

The next function I am going to learn about my new Treo is all the sounds, beeps, rings, alerts, and alarms.

I learned about

• how to set different ring tones
• how to turn off the phone
• how to turn down the phone ringer

but ….

I still get alerts, etc. Some of them go off early in the morning.

I need to find the way to turn off all sounds so

• my sleep is not interrupted
• and it is not beeping during a meeting.

That is the advice given to aspiring writers. Write every day.

I am blogging every day. It is starting to effect my writing. I am starting to think more about word choice and sentence structure.

I did not start blogging that way. I started by just trying to get some thoughts into sentences and hitting the “publish” button. Check. That task done.

I was an English major and an aspiring writer at one time. I discovered it was not for me. But I certainly would like to be able to write better.

I read some blogs that are written well. They are captivating and engaging. When I read good writing I find myself reading more intently and staying with the writing longer.

I would not mind if my readers had the same experience.

I try and blog every day.  Blogging is therapeutic.  It is like motivation and hygiene.  It needs to be done every day to be effective.

There are times when blogging comes easily.  There are times blogging is difficult.

When blogging is difficult, it is usually because what is on my mind is not something I want to discuss.

• Sometimes it is too personal.
• Sometimes it is just embarrassing.
• Sometimes it is not clear.

I am going back to reading about the Law of Attraction.  Get my mind right.

I added Google Adsense ads to this blog. I was interested in the results.

• Lots of ads for computer backups. Yep. I investigated, changed, and monitored new backup systems. That makes sense.
• Ads for blogs and blogging software. Yep. I talk about blogging in this blog.
• Ads for UPS systems. Hmmmm. I guess so. Backups are part of disaster preparedness.

It is like an instant summary of what I have been blogging.

The California Supreme Court ruled that the law prohibiting same sex marriage is unconstitutional.  Same sex marriages will probably begin in California 30 days from the ruling.  There will be a constitutional amendment on the ballet in November so the people can vote to change the constitution if they wish.

The entire issue resolves around the fact that the state gave special considerations to married couples.  If the state gives special rights to one group, it cannot withhold those rights from another group.

Let us step back and consider.  What if the state did not consider marriage in any of the laws, taxes, or benefits.

People could create civil unions to protect jointly shared property and share benefits.  The IRS could give special consideration to civil unions if that is the law.  Social Security benefits could be defined by civil union.

It is not a far stretch to go from corporations to civil unions.  We form groups that are treated as entities by the state.  This would be another one of those entities.

Marriage should just be a issue for the church.  The state should be prohibited from even asking about one’s marital status.  It should be as unimportant to the state as someone’s baptismal or communion status.

If marriage is a religious institution, it would take place in the church as do baptisms, communion, confirmations, and other religions rites.

I do not have a problem if the Muslims have up to 4 wifes.  I do not have a problem if the Latter Day Saints have multiple wives.  I do not care if churches practice infant or adult baptisms.  I do not care who prays to what God.  Those are matters left in the Church.

There would be no marriage license, unless the church issues one.

The state can provide another kind of legal entity called a civil union with tax and benefit laws.  The state should get out of the marriage business entirely.

I am writing some PHP code. It is for a project that I am have been working on. It is the most elaborate code that I have written for a good while. Just about everything that I am coding is something I have not coded before.

The coding process, however, is most familiar. I use a combination of “top down development” and “step wise progression”. We used to have signs that said “programmers do it top down”. That was before we were engineers.

But the system could have great promise.

I will see.

Sometimes I start to blog about something, and it seems I have blogged on the same topic before.  It is not a problem to blog on the same topic of course, but I do not want to write the same blog post more than once.

On the other hand, I am not sure anyone including myself, would notice … or care.  If the thought comes up again, perhaps the best thing to do is just to write it down again.

I could do a search and try and discover if it is in the archives, but I am not sure I want to do that.  Perhaps it will be different enough this time not to matter.  If it is what is on my mind today, why not just write it.

So that is what I am going to do.

If you have a Monday to Friday work or school week, Saturday and Sunday are the weekend.

Sunday is the classic touchstone for optimism versus pessimism. It is either a wonderful full day of no work or school, or a depressing end to the weekend.

Now some of us work every day, so it is a moot point, but it is fascinating to see how people react.

I work on Sunday, but I get very few client calls or emails that need to be answered, so it is a different sort of day. I schedule a project each weekend to take advantage of the uninterrupted time.

It is the weekend. It feels wonderful.

• I am watching the Tweets as my son rides 100 miles today getting ready for the Aids Lifecycle.  The last tweet was at 80 miles.
• I am helping my family move Ethernet wire around the apartment so they can find the coolest spot to work.  I will go out later to get a switch and some more Ethernet to make it all work smoother.
• I am watching Book TV and it is always good to watch people discuss ideas.  I remember the adage that little minds discuss people, average minds discuss things, and big minds discuss ideas.  On book TV, at least some of the time they discuss ideas.
• I consolidated my task lists so there are fewer tasks and a clearer priority.

All is well.

I was up late last night coding PHP to add functionality to my website.  If the functionality works well, I will use it on other websites.  It is so consuming to program.

Today, I am doing all the other business with the understanding that when all my business tasks are done, then I am rewarded by being able to code.  You would think that after being a programmer for 40 years, it would get old, but it does not.

I was a manager for part of that time, but I always seemed to find some code to write.

My son is getting ready to ride in the Aids Lifecycle. It is a bike ride that will take place June 1-7, 2008, as cyclists and volunteers will travel 545 miles through beautiful California from San Francisco to Los Angeles. My son will be one of 2500 cyclists riding in the event.

It is the official cycling event of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center.

The event will raise close to 11 million dollars.

We are enormously proud of him of course. It is a wonderful event for a good cause.

When my children were young, we did not restrict their Internet access. We talked about the dangers openly, asked them what they knew about the dangers from their readings, and asked them what rules they followed. We agreed on the rules.

• Do not give out your name or address
• Do not agree to meet anyone

When they were in elementary school, the computers were in a public area of the house.

That was just about it.

I am not saying that was wise, it is just our style. Having a frank talk about the dangers allowed them to set their own limits. I knew they were going to visit porn sites and other sites, but I was much happier that they did it without having to try and hide it.

When my son was a Freshman in high school, he told me if I ever wanted to go to a porn site, he had account and password hacks.

When I set up computers for parents now, I am often instructed to put on the parental controls. I of course do it, and I always think back about how it was when my children were small.

I do not have any regrets. I still think we were right. But it is definitely worse now on the Internet, so I do wonder if I would put on parental controls now. Probably not.

I use Outlook for Email.

I have been working to reduce Spam and undesired email.  The results are starting to show.

The Junk email folder is now full everyday.  I review it but I will not be doing that much longer.  I will change the rules to delete the spam without checking.  I am just using the Outlook processing for now, and it seems to be working ok.

I make a distinction between mail boxes and mail folders.

• Mail folders is where I store email I want to save
• Mail boxes is where I receive email.  Email is sorted into a dozen or so mail boxes.
• Everything that does not get sorted into a mail box ends up in the Inbox.

When all works well, there are very few if any emails in my inbox.

If email shows up in my inbox, one of the following happens:

• If it is spam, the keystrokes Alt-A-J-B send it to the junk email folder.
• If it is mail that I expect to get more off, I create a rule and sort it into a mail box.
• If it is a subscription, I cancel the subscription.  No email subscriptions; only RSS.
• If it is a one-off email, I process it or store it in a mail folder.

My overall time on email is being greatly reduced.  I am trying to use that time looking at my RSS feeds without flying through them.  More considered reading.

I am enjoying both the process and the results.

Today was shut down day. Time to turn off the computer for a day. I did not do it. I worked on the computer all day.

There were financial reports to do, client websites to tweak, email to answer, and now, a blog post. There were things to look up on the Internet, blog posts to read, and IM’s to answer.

But there was no Twitter to respond to: I am not doing Twitter.

And there was no FriendFeed to read: I am not doing FriendFeed either.

And I found out that

• My son biked 70 miles including a climb of Mt. Diablo
• Microsoft is not buying Yahoo
• My new Treo has many more features than I first imagined

I needed to upgrade WordPress. Today is the day.

I decided to download and try the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

It worked very well. I downloaded it, installed the plugin, and ran it to get a successful upgrade. I am now at the latest version of WordPress.

I ran the plugin in automatic mode, and it went through the steps quickly and successfully. I am most pleased.

We moved from a fax machine to online fax.  It was more difficult than I had imagined it was going to be.

I used to do online fax years ago, but I forgot that was the time we accessed online using a modem.  Fax was built in.

It is not possible to just move to email with attachments.  Most government, health insurance, and businesses want actual faxes.  That is the way they are used to doing business.  It required an online to fax machine process.

I picked out a fax service that is available both online and with a client frontend.

• Faxit Nice is the Web Service
• Faxtastic is the client piece

The difficult part was to get the scan process working effectively. We have an HP All-in-One machine and it is only a few years old, but the drivers had to be downloaded and upgraded.  Some of the software would not work with IE 7 of all things.

At the end of the process I scanned in 14 pages, tweaked them so they looked sharp, and prepared them to be sent off using a nice client package.

That means we get rid of the land line.

Progress.

I am watching the situation with Jeremiah Wright and the presidential campaign with interest as are many Americans. I thought Jeremiah Wright’s performance in front of the Press Club was incredible theater.

In all the talk about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama there is one thing that amuses me, and that is the assumption that Senator Obama had to have known about the fiery sermons in question even though he was not there, because people would have discussed them.

What? People would have discussed a sermon or even remembered it 5 minutes after it was over. How unusual.

My father was a minister, he was fond of asking people during the week if they could remember any of the points of last Sunday’s sermon. People could not. Even if it was incendiary.

I listened to my father’s sermons for many years, and the only part I remember clearly is when he was telling sons to respect their fathers and turned around to the choir where I was sitting and pointed directly at me.  That got my attention.  But I did not discuss it with anyone even though I worked with people who were there that day.  No one that I knew discussed sermons.

I am working on reducing my email. I am unsubscribing from any email that I can. I am doing all I can to enhance my spam filter.

It is interesting to see the varied processes to unsubscribe from an email subscription.

• Some of them are an easy one-click process that takes you to a screen that says you are now unsubscribed. Terrific.
• Some take you to a screen that asks if you are sure, and asks why. Usually that is a check box and a submit. That is ok.
• Some want you to log on using your member name and password and update your subscriptions. At this point, I have usually forgotten my password, so that is another step. Then I log on, change the password, update my profile to cancel subscriptions and leave. Then I get another email that thanks me for visiting. Hmmmmm.

When I am asked the reason, I say I am moving to RSS which puts me in control.

My external hard drive has failed several times now. It does not give any errors, it is just no longer available.

It started when I moved it to the new desktop. It happened several times right away. I had it tucked between two other items, so I moved it because I thought it might be getting hot. It went several days without a failure.

Yesterday when it failed, I lost my Outlook pst file completely. It was just gone. I had a backup, but I lost the email of the day.

Today I am trying on a different USB port. It is an external drive holder, so the next thing is to take out the hard drive and install it into the computer. I did not want to do that because now I can move it to the laptop with little effort.

I will wait and see.

I do not care for computer games that required a high degree of eye-hand coordination. That is just not me.

But I do like the strategy games. I like most of the card games. I like FreeCell and Spider Solitaire.

My favorite is Reversi or Othello. It has strategy. It goes quickly. There is little eye-hand coordination.

My favorite strategy game on the Nintendo was Lolo. After I wrote that I looked it up and found an online version of the game. I tried it of course. It is still challenging and interesting, but it certainly takes longer to play than I remembered. And it requires a bit more eye-hand coordination than I remembered. But it is just as addictive.

That will be a reward when certain tasks get finished.

I heard a story about Lance Armstrong, the famous cyclist.  I have no way of knowing whether it is true.  Lance was asked how he was able to bike up the alps.  Lance responded that to think about biking up the alps was too much, that what he did was look ahead and see a tree or bush and focus on biking to that tree or bush.  Then he found another target and biked to that target.

That is what we should all do when things get difficult.  Find a milestone, and get to that milestone.  Then pick another milestone and get to that milestone.  Do not worry about biking up the alps, it is just too much sometimes.  Just get to the next milestone.

It is a lesson that I need to learn and re-learn.  I am focusing on that lesson again, trying to focus on one set of objectives and not getting distracted by all the things on the horizon.  So far so good.

I am unsubscribing from all my ezines and email newsletters. I am only going to subscribe to RSS feeds from now on. If they ask for a reason, the comment is “RSS or nothing”.

There might be a newsletter that I enjoy so much that I will not unsubscribe, but so far I have unsubscribed as each one has arrived. Sometimes I have immediately subscribed to the same material using RSS.

People think differently about clicking on the unsubscribe link in a newsletter.

• One school of thought assumes that if there is a unsubscribe link, then the sender is following the rules and the email is probably not spam.
• Another school of thought says that it is just another way to encourage one to click on a link that either downloads malware or validates the email.

I am examining the ezine, going to the site, signing in, and unsubscribing to avoid any danger. It will take weeks to get through them all because many are monthly, but each time I unsubscribe I feel better.

Then I suppose I will have to go through my RSS feeds and trim them.

My son got mugged yesterday. He was knocked to the ground by four males who demanded money. He was on the ground with one attacker drawing back his fist over this face.

A plain clothes officer happened to be driving by. The officer stopped his car in the center lane, jumped out of his car, left the door open blocking traffic, and drove off the attackers. The officer arrived in time to prevent any robbery or battery from taking place.

Of course the attackers threw my son down on his right shoulder where he had broken his collar bone several weeks ago. He was on his way to the Doctors to have his collarbone X-rayed and checked. The X-rays showed no new damage.

As is often the case, it was good news and bad news. The good news

• The police officer foiled the robbery before any serious damage was done
• It happened on the way to the Doctor so the collar bone could be checked right away.

And for me, the good news was that we were going to meet that day anyway so I was there to offer whatever moral support I could.

I got a Treo™ 700p smartphone. It is used. It was a gift. Thank You.

I have always used Palm products and I like the Palm OS. This is probably the last gasp of that OS, but that is ok with me.

It is part of the process of sharpening the ax this month.

• Upgraded Desktop
• Recently formatted Laptop
• New Treo that replaces both my cell phone and my palm pilot.

Now I just need to get busy chopping wood.

I am watching Book TV today as I work.  Chinua Achebe is the featured author now.  He wrote a novel called  “Things Fall Apart”  about British colonialism in Nigeria.  According to Wikipedia it is “the most widely-read book in modern African literature”.

Mr. Achebe was announced as the novelist who had a great influence on all the literature of Africa.  He influenced a whole continent.  I had not heard of him.

Mr. Achebe tells a moving story about being raised in a rich oral tradition, but reading a book about Africa where the longest sentence uttered by an African was 8 words long.  He decided to write novels about Africa in part to counteract that.

The new desktop and the revitalized laptop are all set up. It is wonderful to have it done. I feel like I have “sharpened my ax” to quote Steven Covey. I already feel more productive.

Part of the process is getting rid of many of the programs that clogged up the old computer. I try out different programs, and I do not do a good job of getting rid of them after I evaluate them. I resolve to do that better.

I also did not load many of the little utilities that did one small thing. I am going to wait and see how much I miss them. If I miss them, then I will load them.

One of the techniques I like to us is to make sure I understand the top 3 or 4 priority items for the day.

• Write them down the night before,
• and work to that priority.

Today I had a day long meeting with a client that was canceled, so I do not have a list.  It was like waking up to a holiday.  I had to take a deep breath, look at the outstanding work, and then create my list.  But the initial feeling was wonderful.

I am not being rigid about it, but I am trying to blog every day. It gives me a chance to reflect on the day, the accomplishments, the objectives, and the problems.

Then I blog about something that happened during the day. It is therapeutic.

I find myself blogging about the thorniest tech issue I had during the day. I suppose because that is where the intense energy goes.

Setting up a new computer gives plenty of thorny tech issues. As much as I work to keep all downloads saved in an organized way, there always seems to be utilities that I cannot find.

Today it was installing on the Financial systems including Quickbooks. That worked very well.

Tomorrow will have its own challenges I am sure.

I have been working on my to do lists.  I am exploring some new directions, and the plans have generated a number of tasks.  I also want to clear up some outstanding personal business.

Sometimes at the end of the day, I am like everyone else and wonder where the day went.  When I am working on the task list, I can go and see what tasks were completed for the day.

It also gives me the opportunity to go to the task list, select the priority task, and focus on that task.  It is always a helpful productivity technique.

It has been a bit of a rough time, so I took a humor break today.
One of my favorites is Blaugh, the unofficial comic of the Blogosphere.

I have a new computer.  It is not actually a new retail computer, but I installed a new mother board and power supply from someone who upgraded.  It is much faster and newer than what I was using.

It is always so nice to have a faster computer.  It feels so productive.

But like many people, I am a program collector.  I am going to try and work with fewer programs so I can keep this computer cleaner, but swearing off all the little utilities that make my life easier or more fun will be difficult.

I am also going to consider using more server products and fewer client products.

But for now, I am just enjoying the speed of this new computer.

I am considering creating a Directory of RSS Resources to support the RSS Tutorial. I have looked at various products and decided to test out phpLD – the PHP Link Directory.  It looks like a reasonable product to me.  I like PHP / MySQL products and it fits that bill.  There is a free version to start with.  There is a paid version if it checks out.

I am going to try and seed the directory by doing some extracts and loads.  Extract from DMOZ and other sources and load into the Directory of RSS Resources.   The issue is what to use for title and description.  I would like to extract title and description from the HTML so that there is no copyright issue.

Then to maintain the Directory of RSS Resources, I will open the directory for submissions.  I expect it to take a while to get it set up, but it will be a nice complement to the RSS Tutorial.

Paperwork – a fine word that means dealing with the paper that we all still get. All the paperless office did was add email, rss, and IMs to all the paper we deal with. Today it is dealing with paper.

• Look at each piece of paper
• If I am lucky, throw it away
• If it is for reference, file it
• But usually, it means considering, deciding, and spending more time than seems reasonable.

Paperwork these days usually means bills or taxes, so it is not fun.

Email is sounding good today.

What if you called someone Satan? What if you called someone a whore? Apparently, whore is much worse.

Don Imus regularly calls Senator Hillary Clinton Satan with no repercussions. Randi Rhodes on Air America called Senator Hillary Clinton a whore and was suspended.

I am in favor of more civil discourse in politics so I do not care for either, but I do find the comparison interesting. Is not Satan the epitome of evil?

During this presidential campaign, we are examining our feelings on sex and race, so right now it appears that it is worse to be sexist or racist.

So which would you find the most offensive?

I am delighted to have any readers to this blog.  The earlier post was unclear on that concept.  I am surprised, but I am delighted.

Most people that write want readers.  There are exceptions of course.  J.D. Salinger comes to mind.  But there is a class of writers, those that write personal diaries, that do not seek readers.  This blog is the closest I have ever come to a personal diary.

I know for many that this is not even close to a revealing blog, but for me, it is revealing.

But the bottom line is I welcome any and all readers.

When I started this blog, I did not promote it. I did not register on directories or publicize. I did not use this blog on my signature even, using the home page of my website instead. I wrote about various things, some far more personal that I would have imagined I would have written about.

Now there are some people reading this blog according to the Feedburner stats and the Google Analytics. It makes me self conscious. When I first started writing it was for myself, now I find that there are readers.

Now what do I do?

I was up late tonight writing PHP code.  I have spent many late nights writing code.  It is an immensely enjoyable activity.

• It is a mental challenge – the ultimate puzzle if you will.
• It is an effort to bring organization to chaos.  Writing clean code that automates a process helps define the process.
• It is a creative effort.  Creating a system or a process that is a elegant solution to a problem is a creative act.
• It is a constant reminder that big problems can be solved if they are broken down into bite size pieces and tackled one at a time.
• And at this point in time in my life, it is a reminder that when an idea comes, it has to be immediately written down if it is to be remembered.  That is not a problem, it just requires a process to capture thoughts as I work.

Tonight was particularly rewarding because the script I wrote automates a process that I do with some regularity.

I have a cold. It is often called the common cold. Even though I am working every day, it is certainly affecting my productivity.

I have noticed something however, and that is a general feeling that a cold should not stop one from being productive. If I say I have a cold and that I have been unable to get to everything, the general response is to help me out and suggest that I probably have a virus, or the flu, or a bug, or a particularly nasty cold. The general feeling is that it has to be more than a cold or one could soldier through.

But I have not taken the help, and continue to say I have a cold, the common cold. That is enough. We all know the symptoms – sore throat, runny nose, nasal congestion, sneezing, and cough.

We all know that the medications only help with the symptoms. It normally takes 7-14 days to get over a cold. It is the same whether you take medications or not.

My priority is not to pass it along. I try to do all the things to prevent that. I wash my hands. I am very careful not to touch things the rest of the family touches without wiping with a sterile wipe.

So far so good, my cold is going through the normal progression, and no one else in the family has it.

I gave up on my experiment to backup to my Web Hosting site using an FTP backup.  I registered for Mozy and the first long backup has started.  It should take 10 days or so.

What I like about Mozy.

• You can pay by the month
• You can backup an unlimited amount
• You can backup an external drive (which Carbonite would not do)

I will have some vulnerability for a few days, but then I should be ok again.  I do have onsite backups using an external drive.

There are periods in my life when even though I am being productive, I feel like I am in a fog.  Things are just not crisp and clear.  I manage to get through everything, but only because I follow lists and consistently remind myself to stay on task and especially stay on priority task.

Then one day I wake up and all is clear and crisp.  I probably do not look any different to the outside world, but everything in the world is more vivid.  Things get done effortlessly, I get up without an alarm clock, and I look around and see some tasks that seemed so difficult are easily completed or canceled.

There are always minor things that were not done.  The desk is dusty, the monitor is dirty, and the wires are tangled.  As I talk on the phone and do other tasks, these things will be quickly completed.

I never notice when I am going into the fog, but I always notice when I start to leave.

“All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.” Cyril Connolly

I saw this quote today, and in the midst of zipping through the email and RSS feeds it brought me up short. I started thinking about Politicians who are charming.

• Bill Clinton
• John Kennedy

Perhaps their dependence on the appreciation of others was their downfall. President Clinton certainly seems to be able to stretch any story to suit himself, and I say that as a President Clinton admirer. Both seemed to depend on the appreciation of women.

On the other hand, we have politicians who are more often described as forceful, confident and sometimes arrogant:

• Eliot Spitzer

When they get in trouble, it is usually associated with being overly confident.

With politicians, no matter what sort of personality, it is good judgment that matters most in the end. In the debate about experience versus judgment, I side with judgment.

It often happens that when I am discussing something with a friend or colleague, they will mention they blogged about a particular subject.  If I respond and say that I read their blog and did not see it, they reply that is must have been on their one of their other blogs.

I find many people have a public blog, a more private blog, and a very private blog under an assumed name.  Some have more.  I never ask for one of the other blogs, respecting their privacy.

But it makes me wonder how prevalent it is.  Some of the popular bloggers seem to share everything on their public blogs, but they might indeed have private blogs for family, or just a blog they never share for a sort of private diary.

I am working on my RSS Tutorial.

• Set up the htaccess file so that each .htm file processes as a .php file.
• Change all the includes to PHP server side includes.
• Enhance the page footer.
  • Set automatic update of copyright date.
  • Set page footer is a server side include.
• Enhance the header
  • Set the title as a PHP variable to be used in both the title and header information
  • Add Google adsense to header
• Clean up the CSS. Make sure the pages will print correctly.

After the standard code is all set, I want to through the Tutorial and make all changes and updates.

I spent a good deal of time over the last week with my son.  He had surgery to repair a broken collar bone.  One arm is immobile and in a big sling, and he has pain from both the break and the surgery.

He needed help getting through the first couple of days, and now seems to be doing ok on his own.  He is documenting on his blog at http://abain.vox.com/.

My son found a computer game he can play with one hand.  He can type almost 50 words a minute with one hand.

I am behind on everything else.  Today I am back in the office and starting through the pile of stuff.  Not every RSS feed will be read, many will be deleted straight away.  The emails I will read.

My daughter and I went to the local library.  She and I both spend a significant amount of time online, and had lost of habit of going to the local library.

It was fun to be there, to browse the books, to see the people, and to chat with the library workers or volunteers about book selections.

It is slightly amusing that the book I checked out is one that is about the Internet and is freely available online. It is a book I wanted to read with my feet propped up without the laptop cooking my lap.  The book is The Cluetrain Manifesto.  

My son broke his collarbone while riding his bike about 2 weeks ago. It was not healing properly, so today they screwed and wired all the pieces together in the right way so it will heal.

My son is off to college and takes care of himself, but today was parents day. We drove to Berkeley and took him to the surgery, talked with him, waited for the surgery, drove him home, got him all set with pain meds and cold packs.

My son is a typical wired college student. On the way to surgery he was entertaining us with the text messages he was receiving. The tone of the messages was pretty much .. be cool .. don’t die … and text me back when all is done.

We had to take pictures before we got him up from the recovery room bed, and they were immediately posted on the Internet.

On the way home, he answered text messages, updated his blog with the latest information including pictures, and updated his Facebook profile.

Wired.

The work on the hard drives is pretty much done. This is what remains.

• Defrag each logical drive: one done, one running, 2 more to do.
• Backup the two data drives:
  • Backup each data drive to the remote web hostingsite using FTP
  • Backup each data drive to the local external drive
• Delete some files from the Webhosting site that were put out as tests
• Shut down Carbonite by 2/28/2008.

I am reorganizing the data on my hard drives. I am moving folders and files from the laptop drive to the external drive, and from one partition to another on my external drive. There are several reasons for doing this.

1. I have been using Carbonite as my backup system. Carbonite does not allow backups from external drives, so I had been putting more and more on my laptop hard drive so that it was backed up regularly by Carbonite. I am getting frustrated with that restriction from Carbonite, so I am dropping Carbonite when my yearly subscription is up in a few weeks.
2. My laptop hard drive was close to 90% full, and that was impacting performance of course.
3. I wanted to logically divide what was on my external drive into three partitions.
4. I wanted to organize my drives to support my new backup scheme.

My external drive has three partitions.

• One partition is for content that can be downloaded from the Internet again if I lose it. That includes programs, ebooks, music, and video.
• One partition is used for local backup.
• One partition is used for the data that I create.

I am implementing a new backup scheme.

• I will backup using an program that has an FTP function to my Web Hosting account. My web hosting account allows for 500gb of storage, and I am not close to that, so I will use it for backup. I will backup some of the laptop hard drive and the external drive partition with data.
• I will also do a local backup to the backup partition of my external hard drive.
• I am implementing the combination of software and procedure to get everything set up, and it is almost there.
• I will do a complete backup using FTP, then incremental backups after that.

It takes a couple of weeks to do the initial backup using FTP, so I need to get that started. It took a couple of weeks to do the initial backup using Carbonite, but from then on the incremental backups ran quickly and smoothly.

I will have to rely on the local backup during the brief period before the FTP backup is complete.

I have been reading and responding to email, reading RSS feeds, and blogging over the last several hours. I was starting to feel lethargic. Then I ran into this article by Linda Stone entitled Just Breathe: Building the case for Email Apnea.  She noticed that people working on email often stopped breathing or breathed very shallowly.  She calls it Email Apnea.

I stopped for a few minutes and did some deep breathing exercises.  I found myself sitting up straighter and feeling energized.   I was probably not breathing deeply.

I will pay attention to this, notice if I am guilty of Email Apnea, and make sure I am breathing deeply.

We had a fire in the place last week.  It was confined to a kettle on the stove, but it created soot and smoke.  The cleaners have been here yesterday and today.  They scrubbed the bathrooms and the kitchen.  In the kitchen the ceiling has gone from gray to white again.   The stove is clean, the cabinets are free of the tiny specs of soot, and the dishes are being put through the dishwasher.

The cleaners work hard, speak Spanish to each other, and do not take many breaks.  They are polite and gracious.  They are proud of their work.  They call us in to see when an area is finished.

They listened carefully to our concerns about harsh chemicals, they adjusted they approach, and double checked that we were not having any reactions to the cleaners they were using.

The only thing we lost was the kettle and the stove burner pan.  We will replace those later today.  All in all, what could have been a tragedy was averted.

The place is cleaner than when we started, and all is well.

A friend and colleague passed away this week. His name was David. David was a fine man and a good colleague. My deepest sympathies to the family.

David and I were introduced by a common friend. We did a website project together. I was able to provide David some assistance with PHP and CSS on another project he was working on. He was always unfailingly polite and professional.

David had lots of different interests, and he taught me about his passions. He paid attention to the Internet and sent interesting links. I will miss him.

I voted today. I went with my daughter. This was the first time she has voted. She has been waiting to vote since she was 12 years old. We walked across the street to the polling place, voted, and then stopped on the way home for coffee. It was a beautiful day and we sat outside for coffee. A fine day.

He passed away some years ago, but today is his birthday. He was a fine man and touched many lives in a positive way. I have not thought about him as much lately, but today I am thinking about him and remembering.

Some random memories.

He could climb a rope better than anyone I have ever seen. He could climb a rope with one hand while holding something in the other hand. He learned it while working for his uncle’s timber company. It was remarkable. He did it by wrapping the rope around one foot and standing on the rope. He then pulled himself up with one hand, then wrapped the rope again. It makes me wonder why no one has ever used that technique in the movies.

He had an unwavering faith. He once said his favorite poem was

Go on
Go on
Go on
Go on.

When I came home and told mom and dad I was getting a divorce, I thought he would take it badly. He told me that I was his son and that I was a man. He said he did not care what happened, he would support me. And then he said if I wanted to talk about it I should talk to mom. That was dad.

There was a time in my life when I was making pretty good money. I was a very generous tipper in restaurants. When I would go to a restaurant with Dad, I surreptitiously left extra money as a tip. He tipped adequately; I tipped generously. I did not know he noticed. Once when the check came, he took the check, said I could leave the tip, and that he would get off cheaper.
At his funeral, my brother Landen gave a wonderful tribute to Dad. I will remember it always.

When he was really angry he would call my brothers and me girl’s names. He would call us Mary and Francis.
My dad was intimidating when I was young. He was never physically or emotionally abusive, but he had a very strong presence. When he got angry, he would whistle loudly. For years whenever I heard a whistle like his, I would stop in my tracks.

One of my fondest memories was going to breakfast with Dad. A week before he passed, my son and I went to breakfast with Dad at Bob Evans. It is a precious memory.

Happy Birthday Dad.

I am preparing a set of classes on how to improve your Internet presence.  The first class will be on Keywords.

The Super Bowl XLII is underway. Some thoughts:

• I am old enough to remember all the Super Bowls. I was not paying attention to all 42 of them, but they were always in the background.
• The young woman who sang the National Anthem today was wonderful. She is apparently an American Idol winner. I do not watch that show, but she was magnificent.
• The Super Bowl commercial watch is underway. At least one person is live blogging the commercials. I do not remember when the Super Blow commercials became part of the day.  MySpace will have all the commercials after the game.
• I wonder if anyone learns about Roman Numerals because of the Super Bowl.

When I made a commitment to blog more regularly, I was concerned because I am a private person and was worried about sharing my personal life.  I have not exactly been writing a tell all, but I am surprised that the personal category is the one I use the most.  I guess I have become accustomed to writing and sharing more personal items.

I have been working long hours.  I have been working through the night on various projects, sleeping in early morning, and then perhaps napping in the afternoon.

I control my work with task lists on Outlook.  It is a little strange because Outlook assumes a work day for the task list.

If I work 7pm to 4am or 5am, as far as Outlook is concerned, that is two different days.  Half way through my work day, my tasks for the day all become overdue.  All of a sudden all my tasks become red on the task list.  It is not a problem, just an interesting result of working these sort of hours.

Yesterday we had a fire in our apartment. I was out working with a client.

Around noon a fire started on the stove, the smoke alarm went off, it woke up my family, and they responded. The fire was put out, the fire department was called, neighbors heard the alarm and smelled the smoke and came in to help, several joined in to set up fans to blow out the smoke, the insurance company was called, and the clean up was started.

When I got home the place still smelled strongly of smoke and soot, but everything was relatively calm, and we are dealing with it today.

We were most fortunate because there is oxygen in the house for my wife. My wife had some adverse reaction so we will watch that closely, but so far so good.

I am having serious cash flow issues.  I am going to try a number of creative ideas over the next couple of days to try and raise some quick cash.  I will document how it goes.

I got a new coffee mug as a gift. It is a thermal mug that keeps the coffee hot as I sit at my desk and work. I had been taking the old mug into the kitchen to microwave it every so often as it got cold.

This mug keeps the coffee so hot that I am having trouble with it. I have started to pour a little coffee out into another container or cup to drink it. It reminds me of the story of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as they were discussing why there where be two houses in Congress.

A famous (though perhaps fictional) simile often quoted to point out the differences between the House and Senate involves an argument between George Washington, who favored having two chambers of Congress and Thomas Jefferson, who believed a second chamber to be unnecessary. The story goes that the two Founders were arguing the issue while drinking coffee. Suddenly, Washington asked Jefferson, “Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?” “To cool it,” replied Jefferson. “Even so,” said Washington, “we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/blhouseandsenate.htm

I am having cash flow problems. Cash flow issues take up way too much time. I am resolved this year to have a more positive cash flow. I am going to do the following.

• Ask for partial payment up front.
• Invoice Promptly.
• Track Invoices and follow up promptly when they are beyond 30 days.

But the bottom line, if it is a big company, there is not much leverage other than walking away.

One of the benefits of a small business is that it is supposed to be nimble.  I am changing some things about my business, and it does not feel nimble.  There are business cards, pamphlets, websites, profiles, and other marketing material to examine.  There are plans to  change and networking to do.  At the onset, it seemed more a tweak than a big change.

I will talk to a process consultant this morning, and try to understand why it feels more like turning an ocean liner as opposed to turning a powerboat.

More Reading : Less Calories
More Books : Less Blogs
More Webcasts : Less Television
More Exercise : Less Computer Games
More Money : Less Weight
More Meditation : Less News

I know that resolutions need specific targets, but I am not sharing those.

Happy New Year to one and all.  I hope 2008 is a great year for all.