We need better work ethic. Somewhere there is someone that wants your job.

      

Is everything an art or a science? Is there anything else… can something be both? Can something be neither?

What about pricing. It’s an art, right? I’ve been trying to figure out if there is anything unethical about charging two different people, two different prices for the same product. I’m pretty sure it’s okay if the price of a product is simply the value of its results. So, if someone values product X a lot more than another person, shouldn’t you be able to price it higher. You are not taking advantage of that person, you’re simply raising the price because the value of the product has raised.

For instance, if you bought a piece of land for $5K and you wanted to sell it for $7K but someone offered you $10K, would you take the $10K?

Of course you would! Their is no difference. And a good price is a price that both the buyer and seller are comfortable with. If you can achieve that, what’s the problem?

      

Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time allocated for it. For instance, if you have a project due in two-weeks it will take you the entire two weeks. But, if that same project is scheduled for two-days, you could still finish it in two days. This was a theory I noticed in high school (before I knew it was published, I thought I was coming up with something original).

A lot of management articles that I’ve read speak about motivation being killed when unreasonable deadlines being committed, faulty software due to pressured deadlines, and lack of quality. Am I missing something or is this just wrong?

Personally when I’ve got too much to do, I turn out the best results. Sure, the quality may be lower but the amount of work I get done is worth the lowered quality. I get more done and ignore the small detail work. Their argument is that when deadlines are enforced, quality is lowered, the product is criticized, and it creates an unhealthy work enviornment. This causes unhappy workers and destruction within the company. My question is how do you react to an extreme amount of responsibility?

      

Well, here’s the thing… everyone has a bad day but bad day’s are always relative to your usual day. So, even though I’m more depressed today than any other day I can remember, there is always something to smile about.

About a month ago we established a working relationship with Governor Rockefeller (current Lt. Governor and republican candidate for the 2006 election). We didn’t tell anyone because we wanted to get further on production. The people that it leaked out to were really excited for us and it was already drumming up new business for us. We were going to make a show-stopping web application with all the bells and wistles. Integrated shopping carts, contributions that followed state/federal laws, blogs, media centers, multiple user accounts, email management, RSS feeds, content management, and more! We made plans to modulize all of it so that we could start developing a new niche (political campaigns).

Today we got word that Rockefeller dropped out of the Governor’s race due to health reasons.

Now, although I’m extremely upset and I wish it didn’t work out this way, I know that I would rather be in my shoes than in Governor Rockefeller’s shoes. I know that no matter what happens to this accout, there are a number of other accounts that need my focus, a number of other accounts that are still in the prospecting stages, and now I have the ability to focus on a new product.

When you get a new account it’s equivalent to winning a big baseball game, getting a surprise birthday party, or winning an election. But when you lose an account it feels like you just struck out in the big baseball game, everyone forgot your birthday, or you lost an election. To win feels awesome… but to lose feels twice as worse.

Being upset is a hard feeling to describe but when I take a step back and look at the big picture I like to think its okay. I think Butters said it best in a South Park episode a couple months ago. He said something like:

In order to know what being sad is like you’ve had to have some really good times so I just take the good with the bad

      

Well, we pitched an offer on the apartment complex and one of his duplexes. He took it… Now, that sounds like a good thing except now we have to convince a bank that we can make the payments. Since the building has 9/12 apartments rented, I think it’s a sure deal. But, we’ll see what the bank says. I’ll be tied up the next couple of weeks trying to sweet talk banks, boasting about my past accomplishments, and gathering random statistics (banks find statistics interesting).

To get the bank on my side, I’m going to have to establish a partner that has credibility or a relationship with the bank. Since Sam showed me the property and we’ve been looking for a project we would both enjoy, I thought it would be a good starter. In general partnerships are really inefficient and generally rob you of your hard-earned money. But, sometimes you can’t do everything yourself.

It’s all about “resources”. To accomplish anything you need resources. Resources could be time, people, an extra hand, etc. If you have everything you need, why establish a partnership? Money is a substitute for almost all resources (money is also a resource itself). If you need extra people, you can pay someone to help you… no need for a partnership. In general, your only partner should be the partner that provides you money… which in most cases is the bank. Or, if you need a partner because the bank wants more people to kill if you don’t pay them.

Do you have a great idea? Go to the bank and get a bunch of money. Then, pay someone to work with you. You don’t have to convince them that the idea will work. You don’t have to consider their thoughts when you want to make an aggressive decision.

PS… I’m glad I have great partnerships that do nothing but help me!

      

I thought I would start the day off by listing some software that would be interesting to a software manager. The majority of these tools are free downloads and are really great tools for saving time and maximizing the available technology.

Listening to Podcasts
Open Media Network

Reading Blogs
Attensa
BlogLines

Instant Messanger Manager
GAIM
http://www.skype.com/ [added August 04, 2005]

Database and Database Design Tools
phpMyAdmin
mySQL
FabForce DB Designer

Outlook Contact Managment
Plaxo

Photo Management
Picasa2

Anti-Virus, SPAM, and Spyware Removal
AVG Anti-virus
SpamBayes for Outlook
Spybot - Search & Destroy

FTP Manager
LeechFTP
FileZilla

Other Cool Software
ActiveWords

      

A lot of people sit around asking themselves the most difficult questions… “Does God exist?”, “Why am I here”, “How is the market going to react if X happens”, “What is the purpose of life”, etc. etc. etc.

The fact exists that we have no idea what lies ahead of us after “death”. So, we have to make the most of what we are given and make our entire life as enjoyable as possible. Notice, I didn’t say, “make each day as enjoyable as possible” because some days you may have to sacrafice to make the next day enjoyable. Sometimes we aren’t dealt the best hand but we have to play our cards so we can see our next hand.

Start asking yourself the easy questions: “Is this going to make my life more enjoyable”, “Will it make me more money than it will cost me (remember: time is money)”, and “At the end of each day will I be glad that I’m doing this?”

      

Well, Sam showed me some apartments for sale and we’ve made an offer on them. It looks like he may accept it and now the hard part comes. We’ve got to find a finance partner (aka “a bank”). I think we’ll start by visiting bankers that know us. The apartments are 12 units and have a current income potential of around $45K per year. All but 3 are currently rented and he has given us the promise that by the time he leaves all 12 will be “rentable”.

I’ll keep you posted.

      

Remember my post on “betting on boxing”?

Well, a great opportunity has come up for a local fighter (Jermain Taylor) and Bernard Hopkins. This means if I can drum up enough local supporters for Taylor I may be able to make some money off of Hopkins losing!

      

Well, we’ve had WheresTheFreeSpace released for a perfect week right now. When we released it, there was nothing in Google, Yahoo!, or MSN when you typed “WheresTheFreeSpace”. I sent out probably 40 emails to different software reviewers and submitted it to search engines… now it’s getting a lot of attention. Not a lot of good attention but definitely a lot of attention.

Google now has over 7 pages of information on WherestheFreeSpace.com, with our homepage coming up as #5. Yahoo! has 5 pages of information with our site coming up ast #1! and MSN has 5 pages of information! And we haven’t released the press releases to the news papers yet!

As of today, there have been over 715 downloads of the installer!

My idea to give reviewers and their readers $10 off isn’t going as quickly as I needed. The point being: we’re creating solid software, getting it noticed, but we may not have the perfect software.