I just have to get back to blogging. I think that I have some good things to say and that day in and day out my experiences will be valuable to readers if they happen upon them. Now having said that blogging is like the cosmic band-wagon. Everyone jumps on but few people can stay on. I mean look at my blog. I haven’t written for months and possibly years. Ugh! So as my wife likes to say… “You need to have a plan.” and I need to consider how I can make daily blogging successful and interesting. What I mean by successful is that I have to be able to sustain the activity over a prolonged period of time. So many of us have good intentions but none of us manage to hold on to them through the entire course of building an interesting blogosphere.

So in my plan I have to identify the time I’m most likely to be successful with writing a blog. I used to believe that writing at night would in fact be the best time but as you can see that’s not been the case. I think before my day gets busy I need to write about the things that were worthy of comment from yesterday. So that is the first piece of the plan.

* Blog in the morning.

The next piece of the plan is to understand how often I can blog and still keep things interesting. So for now I’ll blog daily except on the weekends and see how that goes. Never know I might even blog on the weekends. So the next piece is to blog 5 days a week and see if I can maintain momentum.

* Blog daily.

But what do you write about? I’m a small business owner, software engineer (yes in the true sense), network engineer (who knew?), husband and father. But wait. I believe I have perhaps missed the most important thing especially given our current economy. I am a consumer. I’m also (thanks to my wife) an informed consumer. I like to do the work before I spend the buck. So I’ll write about being a small business owner, engineer, husband and father and flavor it all with the insight of a consumer when it fits and is interesting. But why write a consumer? Why not? It’s the most powerful job in the world. CEO’s don’t have the power of consumers. Generals don’t have the power of consumers not even president’s as President Obama is about to learn have the power of consumers. Consumers can cripple city’s, states, countries and as we are seeing write now they can cripple worlds. So I’ll flavor all of my comments with the perspective of a wary consumer in difficult times.

* Write from a consumers perspective.

I think I have to have a purpose though. Why blog at all? Just to entertain? To make money (ha!)? To vent frustrations? What makes a good blog and how do you avoid pitfalls of tedious blogs? Why write at all? Well I think I’d have to say because I’ll enjoy it. That’s got to be a great reason all by itself so why search for more?

* Write daily and share my experiences because I enjoy it and for no other reason at least yet.

Well there’s my plan. Let’s see how it goes and I obviously reserve the right to change it when and how I see fit. But for now at least… I’m happy having a plan that is simple and thought out with a reasonable amount of time and consideration.

Thanks!

Today’s work force is more taxed than ever to get things done. It seems like more is expected of us and in less time. In response to this expectation workers should be vigilant in seeking out new ways to do their job more effectively. As a work force we are constantly harassed to have it done this makes us ragged, tired and eagerly looking forward to 5:00 PM, the weekend or our next vacation. I believe that over-taxing your employees and expecting too much from them is going to hurt your business in the long and the short-term. Companies trying to milk every hour while pinching every penny are going to be constantly frustrated by mediocre production, high turnover and low morale. If this describes your company or your peers then pay attention. Through this series I’m not only going to show you how to make your employees more productive by employing low stress methods and technology but I’m also going to show you how to give them what they need to do their jobs without breaking your bank and increasing their morale and quality of work. Today’s employers have been consumed by greed and are ruled by a board of directors and investors who want money, money, money at the expense of the company’s most valuable asset the employee.

So let’s talk about some common expectations employers have for todays laborer. As our business becomes more global more employees are expected to be more available. This might mean carrying a cell phone, pager and possibly even a laptop. Off hours request may involve providing technology based support to scheduling emergency visits with a physician. Further you may need to be able to access your desktop no matter where you are at and regardless of an internet connection. Maybe you are a small company and the burden of issuing, maintaining and insuring laptops is not within your budget. What if 2 people need the laptop at the same time? Despite the need you may need a more cost affective way of providing cost-effective off-hours access to systems regardless of internet connection availability and speed.

Now perhaps you are a technology worker and the above paragraph describes your need to be available but let’s take it to the next step. Perhaps you are a software develop or a system engineer. Not only do you need the access I describe above but you also need test systems so you can work out product or system kinks before a production roll-out. In the not too distant past we needed hardware, lots of hardware in order to insure this type of abstraction between development/test and production. The financial investment required made this a cost prohibitive situation and unfairly made IT departments and laborers a cost center instead of a revenue center which they really should be. After-all you are not going to be making any money if you don’t have a functioning network, servers and systems but that’s another discussion.

So to this point we have addressed system portability, availability and scalability. What’s nice is that there is one solution that can reasonably be applied to solve all these problems at once or on a case by case basis. Enter the idea of Virtualization. If you read my opening article where I promised a blog on virtualization and included a link to Wikipedia then you are a step ahead as you have a basic understanding of what virtualization does and some of the problems it solves. If not I’ll provide a brief overview now to provide enough information to keep you aware as the conversation progresses.

Virtualization is the ability for one piece of hardware (desktop or server) running one locally installed operating system to host other fully functioning operating systems as free-standing applications running within the host (or local desktop/server) machine. As I type this I’m working on a machine that has a native installation of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server and is hosting and concurrently (at the same time) running another instance of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Ultimate and SuSE Linux Community Edition. I can easily jump between running instances of all 4 operating systems or I can minimize them and work natively in my local operating system. For an idea please see the linked http://www.code-frog.com/VMWare.jpg of the 4 virtual machines running inside the VMWare Window Manager. You’ll see tabs across the top that let me jump into each running operating system just as easily as I would jump to Microsoft Word or Outlook. It’s nice simple interface that adds a lot of value to what I do every day.

Now that we understand what virtualization is, Installed operating systems (guests) running virtually inside of a local (host) operating system in the same way an ordinary application would run let’s talk about how we can use virtualization to simplify tasks, reduce costs and make us more productive. Let’s assume for this part of the discussion you are a non-technical laborer that has a few basic requirements to increase productivity and minimize cost in your daily work-habit. Your requirements at their simplest are portability (I want to access my applications and data at work or home and regardless of my internet connection), fault tolerance (I want to be able to easily backup/restore my working environment in the case of data-loss or corruption.) and multiplicity (I need to clone a workspace so that all my employees are using the exact same tools and technologies and I only have to manage one instance for as many employees as I want to license.). An example of this would be that you are a doctor. You want to be able to take clinical notes and data with you so that you can interact with them at home or work and you want the luxury of not having to tote a laptop wherever you go. You also want to be able to easily make backups of your environment just in case something bad happens but you’d also like the option to easily roll back to an earlier "snap-shot" in the instance where maybe you’ve done something you regret in your current environment. Lastly, you share your practice with 3 other doctors and you want a system set up where all of you are using the exact same tools, technology and systems and you want minimal fuss in maintaining that system.

Let’s talk about how VMWare Workstation easily solves all of these problems and does so for the very fair price of $199.00. Please note the solution I’m about to describe leaves the onus on you for making sure that you have right licenses for all of your products so that in cloning a workstation you are not violating an End User License Agreement (EULA) with any product or vendor. If you are unsure about any of this please contact the company that you have purchased all operating systems and software from. Using VMWare it’s possible to install on one machine the operating system and all the required software your laborers will need to perform their work. For example you will install Windows XP Professional as the operating system and then you will install Microsoft Office, Medical Practice Management Software, Video and Audio Capture devices and software. You then install VMWare Workstation and using the built in wizard you clone the freshly installed system into a virtual machine that you can now copy to any computing platform running VMWare Workstation. So perhaps you built your environment on a Dell Notebook, using VMWare Workstation you can clone the entire Dell Notebook to a new virtual machine, store that machine on 4 USB drives and distribute those USB drives to each of your medical staff and VOILA you all have identical operating environments to work from. The only requirement is that each of your partners needs a license to VMWare Workstation and they are off and running. You have one master VMWare image that you can update and redeploy as needed. Further, there may be a special case where you want to install a local database system into your cloned virtual machine. To do this use VMWare to take a "Snapshot" prior to installing. Perform your install and carry out your work. When you are done you may no longer have need of a local database system. Instead of going through the complex and error-prone uninstall simply roll-back to your snapshot you took prior to installing the database. You begin to see how powerful this tool is and what it can for you.

So let’s take the approach now that you are a one man consultant making a meager living roaming from job to job as you collect work over the internet. It seems like every client you take has a different environment and keeping up with them all is just mind-boggling. How on earth are you going to keep up with all this and still have time to actually work? VMWare workstation again solves this problem very well. I’ll use myself as an example in this case. I have many clients scattered far and wide that I do work for. Some of them run their systems on hosted shared server environments running on PLESK, some of them host their own sites using Small Business Server 2000/2003. Yet others run a kluge of options and have a very customized environment on Windows 2003 Web, Standard or Enterprise. VMWare Workstation allows me to install virtual servers matching all of these unique configurations and run all of them at once or one at a time from my host operating system running on my desktop or my laptop. I am able to carry out all my work simply by toting around my Western Digital 500 GB MyBook and I work happily away. The beautiful thing is that I can use a variety of snapshots taken at various times within the development process and quickly jump around to test/deploy unique solutions in unique environments.

Virtualization is not some trend. It’s the real deal. It’s been here for 10+ years and VMWare is one of the flagship companies that have pioneered the technology to where it is right now. For $199 there is no reason for you not to make heavy use of this tool within your environments but just in case you are still not sold let’s talk about the tool that makes it to hard to resist. VMWare Player, a free product provided by VMWare that will let you spin up and run any Virtual Machine created by VMWare and run it. It doesn’t take long to multiply out the costs of each seat in your enterprise by each license of the free player to see that you can easily afford this no matter how large a business you are. I hate to be cliche’ but all I can say is "do the math".

Virtualization is ready, it’s bonafide and it’s ready to make your business and your employees more productive. I’ve barely even scratched the surface in this article for the ways VMWare can help you. If you haven’t done so yet I strongly recommend that you download a VMWare Trial today and get started building and deploying virtual machines within your place of business. The free player will add value and time to your bottom line and at the end of the day who doesn’t want more value and who couldn’t use more time. If you’ve enjoyed this time saving commentary then stick around. It’s the first in many I have planned and when I’m done you and your business should be seeing more measurable productivity than you had ever thought possible.

See You Soon!

Rex

Productivity, are we getting better at it or is it slipping through our fingers. Have we become masters of the task or masters of distraction. I was struck today of how productive we can be thanks to tools like VMWare or ClearContext and how distracted we can be thanks to the internet. It seems that with great strides in technology our responsibility goes up. I’m hearing stories all over the place of employees now having to journal their work-day in 15 minute intervals. Stop your task, put aside your thoughts and report by web-interface what you’ve done for the last 15 minutes. Hard for me to imagine being real productive with that kind of demand hanging around your neck. So we have more distractions and we certainly have a responsibility to be productive. If I can get hours worth of work done in 6 hours can I leave 2 hours early? Well that’s an interesting question too. That same capacity for distraction can also help us mine more salt per hour.

So we know that distraction is out there and it always has been. It has many new faces but it’s still the same fruit ripening on the same tree. We have a plethora of distractions available and we simply choose one or many and idle the time away. Let’s talk about productivity though. With email, meetings, project deadlines, phone calls and travel time we still have work to do. It seems like everything is after our time and yet the work won’t wait. I’m going to be doing a series of blogs on this constant struggle between distraction and productivity and how much alike the two can look. It’s essential that today’s worker understands how to manage time and leverage tools and I’m going to share my own insights on how this can be done for a variety of workers in a variety of situations.

In case you are not technical don’t be turned off. Portions of this blog will be mildly technical but I’ll keep it on the surface and you should have no trouble following along. If you see things like VMWare, ClearContext or defragmentation don’t be alarmed. These are terms and products I’ll disclose in human readable form and I promise you’ll learn something. I think that by taking a little time to come here and visit I’m going to save you a lot of time in the long run so check back often. In the area of time management I’m not sure I can exhaust all the possible ways there are to get better at what you do.

Topics I’ll be covering will include but are not limited to:

*Virtualization: Whoa! Big word. See the wiki for more information and yes it’s a powerful idea.

*Wikipedia: Yikes! What is this guy saying? Check it out! What do you want to learn today?

*Windows Mobile Based Cell Phones: A host of products from Sprint, Apple, AT & T, Verizon and more. Which one is best and why?

*Email Management: Is your inbox growing faster than the human population curve? Find out intuitive ways to manage the chaos.

*Computer Management: Think it’s just a simple affair of turning it on during the week and off on the weekends? Guess again. That could be a bad idea!

*Time Management: Is the clock killing your time or helping you innovate. I’ll be the judge of that.

*Organization: The myths, the lessons and the ironies. Why organization is a card that is way over-played in the workplace.

*Resource Management: Hey! Is that an employee or a resource or perhaps an interchangeable notion of one and the other?

*Budgets: Some things are obviously constrained by budgets. Find out how other parts of your workday and life could benefit from some      boundaries.

That’s a wrap for now. Of course that list has a lot more in it but some of the very best things you’ll just have to see when they are revealed or perhaps reviled. Well… you be the judge. But tomorrow I’ll be getting started with my discussion on virtualization and why no matter what field you are in Virtualization could save you a lot of time.

See you then!

Rex Winn

Today I had another run in with Sprint and prior to today I would have had a rather rancid rhetoric to spew about the incident but then today something happened that made me see the world a little differently. Today started out like any other day as a Sprint customer. Which is to say it is wonderful so long as you don’t actually have to deal with Sprint at all. But I knew today I was going to have to bite the bullet and dial *2 on my Sprint enabled phone. Ugh, it’s not without trepidation that I ever dial that number. Why? Well it’s not your run of the mill calls that make me resent Sprint customer service. I think for day to day questions they do a very good job. What I do not like about Sprint is that when you need someone to go above and beyond the call of duty (at Sprint) and actually take some initiative it can be very tedious. I’m not sure what the hiring process is like at Sprint but they are not generally looking for service oriented people who have a will to assist customers. Like I said though, that’s an opinion I once had regarding Sprint.

Today though I learned a lesson about Sprint and definitely about business and success. Whether you are a gigantic company like Sprint or a small mom & pop style company like yours truly you have got to have initiative and the needs of your customers have to be important. The kicker here or should I say the hair pin turn that causes most companies to run off the road and crash is that they don’t look for people with initiative who want to over-deliver a solid result to their customers. Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe it’s not that these companies don’t look for employees with initiative, maybe they do. Maybe they try hard to find them but come on. I mean really how much can your hiring manager do when you are paying the empty position $5.25 an hour right? Okay, okay enough about that and honestly that’s a whole different conversation about what is being done to the American laborer so I’ll shelf that… for now.

So my little voyage began with a simple goal. I say simple goal because in my mind this type of thing shouldn’t be too hard to do. I mean land lines have been doing it for years right? Heck yes! What am I speaking about? Well it’s simple really. All I want is for Sprint to forward any call going to my voice mail to a new number. Geez it shouldn’t be that hard right? I know I’ve written much more complex code than this in fact I’m sure of it. Nanometer code has to be harder but hey… I digress. Ironically Sprint causes me to digress quite a bit but again I digress from my digression. So why would I want to have someone else handle my voice mail? I mean it’s voice mail. Voice mail sucks, you have to pick up your phone, dial your own number go through a mindless process and then listen to some recording. What a waste of my time that is until I ran across this new service http://www.line1com.com/ that will convert your voice mail to text and email it to you and guess what? The voice to text conversion is amazing. I don’t know what they are using but it isn’t Dragon Naturally Speaking I can tell you that for sure. The ability to have my voice mail converted to email and sent to my phone is like manna from heaven. I hate phones, I hate everything about phones. As a developer phones are the anti-developer. Phones cripple your thought process as easy as a falling air craft carrier would crush a pop can. If you write software for a living you hate phones I guarantee it.

So I’ve found my new source of freedom and for $10 a month I can hardly sit still as I sign up for it. They even tell me Sprint supports it. At that point I should have known better I’m surprised Sprint supports smokes signals but somehow you can pick up a Sprint phone, make a call and it works. But don’t ask them to do a whole lot more than that or you will get drug by your nostrils through the weeds and into whatever rubbish heap is closest to their hand. Gosh I’m being kind of harsh eh? Well I’m sorry. Sprint is on my list! That is until today.

Now that I’ve bashed Sprint and really thoroughly conveyed my own sense of derision and revulsion about Sprint as a company I need to do a 360 and confess something. I’m all wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Sprint. It’s a solid service, it works remarkably well and they offer a lot for a very good price. There is nothing wrong with Sprint. But there are people working for Sprint (quite a few of them actually) who simply do not belong there. These people need to go back to their former state jobs and stay there (yeah, I know that was uncalled for). So my opinion has changed and here’s why. You ready? It’s good.

Me: “Hello, I’d like to have my voice mail calls forwarded to a new carrier so they can be dispatched as email.”
Sprint: “Okay, Mr. Winn let me see what I can do. Can I place you on hold for a minute?”
Me: “Yes this would be fine.”
Sprint: {Silence}
Sprint: “Hello Mr. Winn we are not able to forward just your voice mail alone we have to forward all your calls.”
Me: “This isn’t true I know that you are doing what I just asked for other Sprint customers.”
Sprint: “Um. Okay. Mr. Winn let me have you talk to my partner.”
Me: “Okay that would be fine.” (Partner? What you guys have lovers now? What’s up with that?)
Sprint: “Hello Mr. Winn. My name is Connie and I don’t believe this is something we can do but I want to help you so be patient and I’ll investigate this.”
(Now let me tell you here and now that Connie… Was just awesome. She spent 20 minutes trying to find me an answer but she was too low on the food chain to have access to the really good intel on this subject. However Connie was just awesome.)
Sprint: “Hello Mr. Winn, I’m going to forward you on to our advanced technical support and they can assist you further is this okay?”
Me: “Yes absolutely. You’ve been outstanding and I’m more than happy to wait.”
Sprint: “This is advanced technical support and what you want cannot be done.”
Me: “Yes it can be done. Line1Com is doing it for many Sprint customers right now.”
Sprint: “Well I’m sorry Mr. Winn. Legally this cannot be done and they are wrong to have their service doing this.”
Me: “No. I think you are mistaken. Many are doing it and with Sprint’s cooperation. Can you just investigate this and try to help me.”
Sprint: “No. I’m not going to do this. I’m telling you it cannot be done and that’s all there is to it.”
Me: “No, that’s not all there is to it. Sprint is doing it for other customers can you please just ask around and help me. I would like your help.”
Sprint: “I cannot help you. This is not possible there’s nothing more I can do.”
Me: “Yes there is. You can put me on the phone with someone who has initiative, understands customer service and wants to help me.”
Sprint: “I am and I do and you will not get this to work.”
Me: “Our conversation is finished I want to speak with your manager.”
Sprint: “Fine but he’s going to tell you what I just told you.”
Me: “Really? Well let’s let him decide that. Get him on the phone now!”
Sprint: “Hold one moment please Mr. Winn.”
(About 10 minutes passes by and then I’m on the phone with a manager who’s about to open my eyes to the world and what makes it run smoothly and how a lot of people make a lot of money simply by caring, wanting to help and believing their customer is telling them the truth.)
Sprint: “Hello Mr. Winn. I’ve personally looked into this and I think it’s something we can do. Do you mind if I put you back on the phone with Suzy Clueless so you can give her the company name you are working with and the phone number we need to forward your voice mail to. We are going to resolve this for you today.”
Me: “Yes, that would be fine.”

You know how the rest went. So my point in all of this is don’t get mad at companies. It’s not the companies that are causing you grief. The companies do have good people working for them who do want to help you. You must be patient and diligent in your efforts until you reach one that is high enough up in the food chain to assist you.

A true lesson for me. I don’t think I will bad mouth companies as casually as I have in the past. I think instead I’m going to seek hard working, honest people with integrity who want to go home at the end of each day satisfied they have done a good job.

- Rex

In the last few months I think I’ve been through a stiff list of requirements with my development workstation. It has to mirror exactly a clients that I support and I have to keep it running lean and mean. A while back my client purchased VMWare Workstation 6.0 and entered into the Virtualization game. The specs on the servers we use should be impressive but the virtual performance we are getting is anything but head-turning. We are running on Dell PowerEdge 2900s with SAS 10,000 RPM drives and 8 gigs of RAM. We have resources for resources with dual quad-core processors and plenty of free processor. As we installed VMWare and got our VM’s up and running performance tanked in the VM and the host OS. I started by looking at page files and such and really couldn’t find anything wrong. Originally I had recommended we go with Disk Keeper Server Edition Standard as it seemed to do a good job for me. I kept running into a problem where no matter what I did it couldn’t get rid of all the fragmentation. As time wore on I kept getting more and more virtual memory errors and investigation lead me to suspect fragmentation in my page file of which Disk Keeper reported none.

A friend of mine had always been a staunch believer in Raxco’s Perfect Disk and in a bout of frustration I downloaded the trial. I ran an online defragmentation right after install and the effects were obvious immediately. I had 29 days left in a trial I didn’t need. I was ready to buy right then. I cannot tell you much about why Raxco would be so much better than Disk Keeper it just was. I had a boost in performance immediately. The hard part for me is that I was low on cash and didn’t have the money to buy their full license and so I used the trial for a few more weeks.

One day I decided I needed to see how much the full version was going to cost me so I went to the site and checked on the price. My chin hit the floor when I saw they were running a special through the end of September for the server edition at $99. Knowing a good deal when I see one I wasted no time and bought then and there. I plan on purchasing about 10 more licenses for clients I support as my excitement and belief in the product simply cannot be shaken. If you are in the market for a good disk defragmentation product I would strongly suggest you check them out. Their pricing is very fair and if you think you don’t have performance issues you should check it out. I guarantee that one pass of their product on your system is going to produce noticeable results.

- Rex

I’m just now starting to get my legs back underneath me. It’s been a very long 5 weeks that have had lots of trials, struggles and high points. Some of you might have jumped here from the http://www.notreadytogiveup.com site so you might be new to this blog. If so, welcome and I hope you enjoy it. An update on Katie is that the support we have received so far (while not huge) has gotten us to start planning. Last week I contacted her pediatric surgeon and asked for information about the doctor she wants us to go see on the east coast. So even though we are a long ways away from being able to do that we are starting to gather information we need to plan the trip. Kind of an exciting time just to think that it might happen at all.

As a family I just celebrated my birthday this week and thankfully with kids it really doesn’t matter who’s birthday it is. To them it’s “a” birthday and a good cause for excitement. We’ve lived large mainly with a few day-trips to natural bodies of water to get thoroughly soaked and to try and find water snakes. Katie seemed particularly motivated to get soaked and find snakes and I’m pretty certain she’s moving down a path of becoming a veterinarian as an adult. Her fascination with insects, animals and wildlife in general is becoming a visible passion and she’s only 5. We’ll see if that lasts long or not…

Along with Katie’s passion for animals is her passion to watch Man Vs. Wild on The Discovery Channel with dad and older brother Grant who is 6. The new episodes are on Friday night at 10:00 our time so we let the kids stay up until 11:00 to watch the show. It’s a family favorite and it’s the only show we sit and watch on T.V. so we make the most of it.

Aside from that things are moving right along and we are making each day count not just as individuals but as a family unit which is great.

- Rex

So I’ve fallen off the back a few days with my blogging and I guess that’s why my topic for this entry is “Dodging Bullets”. Being self-employed is a strange deal and here’s what I mean. Your phone will not ring all day long and then suddenly four of your clients will call you at once. Only one of them gets you and the other 3 leave messages. You might have 2 months straight without any problems and then in the same week you might be trying to put out 8 fires all at once. These are the bullets and trying to dodge them so they don’t hurt your current efforts is a very true test of your own agility.

Agility is such an interesting word as I really think about it. I mean for me agility brings to mind visions of starting every day carrying a waiters tray with 8 full glasses of water and then starting to run as fast as you can while not spilling any water as you run. As you run though (which would be hard enough) you encounter strange obstacles and unexpected hurtles in unexpected places and somehow you have to clear these obstacles while not spilling any water. But while you are running your phone rings and that’s really the sound of the first bullet being fired. So you put your tray down on top of one of the obstacles so you can answer your phone. Now your obstacles are carrying your 8 glasses and they were never meant to do that. You are on your phone and you aren’t watching your 8 glasses very well and the obstacles keep coming and this process just iterates until 10:00 PM that night or maybe 2:00AM the next morning. So agility means don’t spill any water, clear all your obstacles and manage that phone or your dead.

So today started out just like any other day but honestly it quickly turned in to what the last 2 days turned into and here I am now writing about dodging bullets and I would if I had a chance but it seems like they all come point blank and so I just catch them somehow and keep running.

I think the message here for business owners is that same days you won’t be productive. Some days you are going to burn every resource you have just covering the unexpected. Plan on it. Make sure you leave time in your schedule to handle the unexpected and make sure you communicate to your clients that some unexpected things are going on. Most importantly don’t falter with your current work. Don’t break your stride. It might be tempting to let it all slide but if you do you’ll just get farther behind and the next day will pile on more and you’ll never make it.

Dodge Bullets my son and never tire of running the good race. Sorry today’s post is a bit on the lacking side. I’ll be adding more content as I have a chance but today this is what’s on my mind so I thought I’d write about it. That’s all for now. Time to pick up my glasses of water and keep going on my merry way.

I’m actively involved in 2 on-line communities. When I say communities I mean forums and message boards. In this modern day it’s very difficult to be in a technical occupation without the assistance of forums or message boards to learn and share information. One of the message boards has had a huge impact on my business with customer referrals. The other message board has had a huge impact on my business with knowledge gained. I often marvel at the group dynamic of very large communities that have expanded beyond the point of help-only-content into areas of off-topic discussions or topics that cover anything. I think allowing off-topic or open-topic discussions can be a double-edged sword and it’s one that I’m now beginning to question. It seems that these open-subject areas are most likely to bring out the worst in people and to really taint the positive feeling of community. More specifically I rarely if ever see arguments or slander in help forums. People in help forums are there for one purpose and that’s to get or receive help. Technical help rarely involves the exchange of opinion and is certainly never political or religious unless someone says, “Pray that you can get that working.”. Open-topic message boards seem to have many flare-ups and while these flare-ups do provide a good chance to learn about the dynamics of people I do think they detract from the value of the community. There always seems to be an aggressor that is looking for a fight and I think giving the aggressor a stage to launch attacks from is a mistake.

Now as I’m starting to evolve as a small business and I’m looking for ways to grow. I feel that my participation in the one help-based community is going to shoot way up and my participation in the other open-topic based community is going to drop off… significantly. For me I think it makes more sense to blog on a regular basis about technical and business topics than it does to participate in an open-topic community. I still plan to read the open-topic community on a daily basis because not doing so would have a very negative affect on the growth of my skills and knowledge.

The act of blogging means I open my doors to comments and critique of what I’m doing as a business and in a technical occupation but this will lead to value and maturity. I hope that at some point people will start to find enough content here that they begin asking questions about the how and why of decisions I make. This by no means implies I will change what I do to make the responders happy. What I’m doing has been successful quite on it’s own. In making that statement though I do realize that it might sound like I’m slamming the door on people exchanging ideas with me for doing things better. I’m not at all suggesting that I don’t place extreme value on that. What I’m saying is that the true strength, value and enjoyment of a blog comes from bloggers who stick to their opinions and are not easily swayed. It could be that the blogger might in fact be wrong and it certainly is his/her place to admit such things. But the real enjoyment comes from reading their wrongs and the resulting dialogs. A good blog is strongly opinionated and not afraid to discuss many topics as long as they relate to the vision that is established by the blog and it’s description.

Well, I suppose I digress at this point but I did want to record my thoughts now on community participation and the perceived value of a blog. Only time will tell if I am right on any of this. The evidence will not doubt come from the arrival of new and unsolicited readers who have stumbled upon this blog and enjoy reading the content contained within.

As you might have read below this April will mark the conclusion of my 3rd year operating a small business. Now more than ever before I’m becoming aware of how much effort it takes to keep a small business up and running. On a daily basis I’m nearly overwhelmed by the constant demands of running a business not just a business but a business in a rapidly changing technical sector. When you think about running the business alone the task is quite daunting. When you realize that I’m trying to maintain good physical health, be a father, husband and friend it quickly becomes a run-away-train. I often think that small business owners should be the most soft after people in the world for bigger businesses. As small business owners we must make critical decisions by the minute. What needs done now? What can wait until later? What’s going to be an acceptable definition of later and who will be the judge? Can I afford this? Should I buy that? What does my budget look like for more expensive items and how am I managing my growth. Did I call the people I needed to or is email going to be fine? Do I hire someone today or try to find a new way to squeeze one more hour of productivity out of myself?

Once you push aside the aspects of operating a small business then you have to embrace the tasks of your business. By tasks I don’t mean emptying the trash and dusting the furniture. By tasks I mean keeping your critical skills updated. Being aware of security flaws that exist in both hardware and software deployments. Implementing the technology solutions your clients expect in a timely manner with the right touch of quality. When it comes to implementation it’s one thing to work with clients in the same town or city. It’s truly rigorous to try and understand designs and requirements with clients in other states or across the country. You are a small business and you most likely don’t have the time or the capital to travel and so the logistics of your work multiply the complexity.

I do feel like I’m stretched too thin every day. I feel like I’m taking on too much and I feel like I simply have to say yes because saying no is so final. Running your own business is certainly not a simple undertaking nor is it the “get rich quick” that many people think it is. I know that each day I have to learn something new, forget something old and somehow make it all balance. In the back part of my mind I cannot help but wonder if I’m slowly turning into a precious and rare resource that could be a superstar in big-business or if I’m getting out of touch with corporate culture and slowly working myself into a niche from which there is no escape. I don’t think there is a right answer to this question and as time goes on I’m sure how I feel about the answer to this question will certainly change.

For now all I can do is the work that’s in front of me. I cannot worry or at least not too much about the work that’s behind me and I simply must fight to preserve my health and my relationships outside of work. I will constantly be hunting for new tools allowing me to do more with less and with each new discovery I must decide if I keep the hour saved and share it with my family or if I push yet one more hour out onto the bargaining table of profit. Somehow I just have to keep up but as I go forward I must constantly be vigilant for opportunity. The opportunity to save or grow and vigilance is the key.

Today I was reading about local companies and public statements that were made with regards to their hiring practices domestically and abroad. This caused me to reflect about the particular company and my experience as an employee of that company. Once I started down the path of visiting thoughts concerning my previous employers I became aware of a simple truth. The very best solution isn’t always the best solution.

What I’m getting at here is that sometimes I think individuals and companies make a decision based upon one factor and usually that one factor is money. Admittedly, businesses need money to run. But should money be the largest factor that influences their decisions? When I ask if money should be the largest factor I’m implying that money could be a board of directors, labor costs or geographic operating costs. It sure seems like every company I read about makes their decisions based upon one of those manifestations of money.

When you have companies that make all their decisions based upon money I think you really need to start wondering about the longevity of the company. It’s only a matter of time before the share holders bankrupt the company with their greed or they sell the company to make a huge one-time profit (Anyone remember Albertsons?). American business is struggling and in my opinion, American big business is gasping for air. Why? Because they’ve let profit become more important to them than the employees who generate the profit. Once employees realize they are a resource to be utterly consumed for any purpose deemed useful by the company a feeling of apathy ripples through the employees. This apathy when combined with greed from the top slowly kills a company. How can an automobile stay on the road when the owner puts the least expensive parts it can find into the car and only cares about the cars well being when performance is affected? The car will not be on the road for long and the owner will jump from automobile to automobile. It may make sense at the time for the owner to save costs by not getting a service every 30,000 miles. It may make sense for the owner to replace factory parts with inexpensive imitation parts. It may make sense for the owner to have all repairs done by the least expensive mechanic it can find. All of these appear to be the very best decision from the owners perspective which is shaped by money.

If the owner were more long sited then the owner would understand that their actions and decisions to neglect the car will ultimately result in shortening the cars life span and costing them more money as they continue to roll over into newer cars. American big business is the same way. American corporations now neglect the car and base every decision on cost and making a board of directors rich. You’ve witnessed a massive drop in American innovation and strength over the last 30 years because companies diverged away from concepts like “The HP Way” an idea fostered by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard towards greed. I’m not even going to attempt to describe “The HP Way” here. It’s worthy of an entire book and I believe books have been written regarding “The HP Way” and the vision of it’s founders.

When companies held strongly to their employees, family values and notions such as “The HP Way” they were unstoppable. Companies holding to such ideas grew fantastically and achieved success beyond any one’s wildest dreams. But in time the visions of the entrepreneurs were replaced by the pockets of shareholders and as the founders retired and died off the company started to follow.

If companies want to cut cost and become competitive again I suggest they start by firing the shareholders. Companies need to put their very best back into the only resource they have control of and that’s the employees. Once businesses start to reward innovation and value their labor they will find that success will not be far behind. I’d argue that a company like Hewlett Packard or Micron could make a huge turn-around in under 3 years if they simply reversed the value systems that directed the company.

Instead shareholders think managing money is the very best decision a company can make. I think that the best decision is managing your employees and cultivating innovation. It’s a very sad day for American business I’m afraid but the real tragedy is in what is happening to the American families that used to fuel the innovation driving American business.

Companies need to rethink solutions and decisions and realize that what seems like the best decision for the shareholders is the worst decision for the company.