Yesterday Jessica went to the Celestial Seasoning factory in Boulder with Jillia and my Mom. She bought some small individual tea packages for travel (or to spend more money) there. Abby has been walking around the apartment waving the tea bags over various things (in a sprinkling motion). She keeps saying, “Peppers.” I love my silly girl!
Category Archives: News
On Being a Consultant
So far I haven’t had a lot of experience at this, but here’s my thoughts so far:
Getting Work Done
A lot of folks (three) have commented on how they didn’t think they could actually be determined to work. They claimed they would be lazy and never get anything done. However, I’ve got three motivators:
1) Self Control
2) Fear
3) My Wife
If I find myself not wanting to work on the Self Control level, where I will myself to work, Fear kicks in. If I don’t get things done, my clients don’t pay me, and I’m hosed. If neither of the other two are working Jessica will kick my behind (she works out every morning) and say, “If you don’t work I can’t buy your crumby wheat-free foods and you’ll starve to death.”
Organization
I’m still working on this, but I think that organization is good, everyone should do it. When you figure it out, please let me know.
Actually, I find that because my days are structured almost exactly the way they were when I worked at Alt-N as an employee that I am getting much more done. Primarly because folks aren’t stopping by my office on the way to the bathroom. Oh, and Arvel’s not jamming in the room next to me 😉 [Arvel, you know we love you and your jam times. Props for the headphones.]
Billing
Yeah, I’m working on this, too. I have to bill for my first two weeks of work and if I don’t get a bill to my clients, I suppose they’ll have no reason to pay me. Not getting paid would stink because then I’d have to face #3 from above :).
Getting Known
I’m working on getting known by constantly interacting on various forums and also by networking with people who have, do, or know people who have or do web sites.
One example of sites that I’d like to redo is: http://www.burtkunihonda.com/en_US/
Their site dies in any browser besides Internet Explorer and uses more frames than I’ve ever seen used. Seriously. What kind of customer base do you hope to keep if your site won’t work in anything but the latest Microsoft product?
Organ Donor
I’m an organ donor, you should be, too. If you’re not, then I’ll have you know that there are plenty of churches out there that don’t have organs. And on top of that, when I got my Driver’s License today they asked me if I wanted to donate my organ, and you want to be like me [maybe?]. I agreed to let them have mine, once I was done with them.
What’s weird is that they harvest organs. I know we harvest other things, but it sounds funny to harvest organs. What I’d like to know is how they’re marketing what they’re harvesting. I hope that when they sell mine (if they sell mine) that they don’t mislabel them as ‘organic.’ 🙂
Funniest Thing
My friend Tony wrote a funny thing on his blog.
But then screwed up and it got erased. You know, I had high hopes when I saw the title.
Rockies, Also in the Background
Today, after a fabulous time at church Jessica and I went to a Colorado Rockies game with Brian and Jillia and watched them trounce the Atlanta Braves. I expected more from a team who had been to the World Series a couple of times. The Braves lost by 9 runs {13 to 4 was the final score}. When we arrived, a few minutes late we sat in the ‘nose bleed seats’ along the first base line. What made the game, and what makes most baseball games fun, was the fellowship and talking. Brian and I talked about all sorts of things because in the end the game was kind of lame.
When the home team is whooping up on the visitors like that you sort of feel bad. It looked like the Rockies were playing a college team.
Jillia is ready to have the baby at any time, and Brian’s birthday is on Thursday, so he’s hoping for the best present ever, a baby girl!
Coffee
To help me reduce my coffee intake Josiah (from church) gave me freshly roasted coffee. He roasts and grinds it all himself, which I thought [the roasting] would take a huge furnace. I was wrong. Instead it was a little device that looked like a cross between a hot air popcorn popper and a coffee pot.
He gave me some beans so I ground them up and am making a pot right now. These beans smell so different from Starbuck’s beans, probably because they’re fresher than Starbuck’s can make them and distribute them to 5 million, bazillion, quadrillion stores.
Thanks Josiah!
Happy Birthday Hadley
Yesterday Abby went to her first CO birthday party (for kids). Hadley turned 2. We had a fabulous time and it was a neat time of fellowship. We’re looking forward to getting to know these people.
Abby got some little rubber animals, a frog and a snake, a lobster and a sting ray. Abby quickly introduced the frog and snake to one another and they were shortly sitting on the couch together, which is what people do when they get to know one another 🙂
Gotta love kids.
Struts in PHP
php.MVC The Model View Controller (MVC) Framework for PHP Web Applications is a really cool looking open source API being developed. It’s based on Jakarta Struts, a powerful Java Based Model View Controller inferface. If all of this means nearly nothing to you, that’s fine. Just know that I expect that if this things gets completed it’ll be a hot download and set of tools for the PHP development community.
Freakazoid
When I was a kid I used to watch Freakazoid (or, I may have been a young teenager). I’m watching an episode now. I love non-sequiturs. I also love how the show makes absolute fun of popular culture. It’s like ‘Weird Al’ the cartoon 🙂
HP Celeron Web Surfer
Last night I went to Micro Center [Sadly, there’s no Fry’s, yet.] and bought an HP [an HP is not grammatically correct, but I like the way it sounds better than ‘a HP’] a305w refurbished machine for cheap. I bought it so that Jessica could have a computer out in the front because I’ve hogged all of the other machines in my office, which is finally up and running.
I’m actually sitting in my office right now coding. The DSL modem got here yesterday, it’s not what I wanted and it doesn’t work with my NETGEAR router yet, but I’m going to keep it just so I can work. I love my setup, with the exception that I’d like to have four or five more monitors.
Right now my setup consists of:
1 Dell D600 Latitude laptop
1 Frankenstein Desktop with Soundblaster Audigy ZS
1 Both computers are attached to a Dell 18″ Flat panel monitor – source switching enabled.
1 Microsoft Ergonomic (“Natural”) Wireless Keyboard and Mouse for the laptop
1 Roland Dinosaur (D-10) keyboard
1 Alesis SR-16
1 Sony Tape Deck to record tapes into MP3’s
1 Altec Lansing Surround Sound speaker package – which can’t be turned up loud enough at the present
1 Really nice desk given to me by Phil – a really nice guy at the church
1 Epson ‘perfection’ scanner
1 HP Deskjet 950C printer
1 Wacom tablet for graphics work
1 Wife who wishes she could get her husband away from the computers for a few minutes
1 Daughter who thinks CD’s go in a VCR that now doesn’t work
1 Broken Crystal Lewis ‘Hymns – My Life’ CD
pictures are forthcoming:)