Congress decided to pass on bailing out the auto industry--good for them. Thankfully, I think Congress is sick and tired of companies hearing that Washington is giving away free money and running to Capitol Hill hat in hand to ask for huge sums of money with no plan and no accountability. The Big Three automakers have had huge fundamental problems for a long time--products that don't fit with what consumers want, too many brands, too many dealers, bloated compensation for both executives and workers, etc, etc. Speaker Pelosi put it very succinctly: "Until they show us a plan, we can't show them the money".

It's not that I am against bailing out the auto industry. But, just as with banks, there needs to be strict terms and conditions for any government help, just as there would be for a loan from any other lender. The auto companies should present an exact amount of money they need and a detailed plan for how it's going to be used. The taxpayers should get a stake in the companies to secure the loans and there should be a detailed plan for how the government will get its money back, with interest. And the auto companies need to show that they have already started taking concrete steps to fix their problems and position themselves for future success. Come to think of it, replace the current leadership of these companies while we're at it, just as we should with the banks. I'm getting a little sick and tired of corporate executives making millions for running their companies into the ditch and then running to Uncle Sam hat in hand for help.

If you go down to your local bank and ask for a small business loan, the bank wants to see a plan that includes exactly how much money you need and exactly how it will be used and why you need this money in order to be successful. Any business that went to apply to any lender for a loan and had only the vague and half-baked answers of the Big Three CEOs would be laughed out of the building. These clowns couldn't even manage to give some satisfactory answers to a Congress that, by and large, wanted to give them money. The Big Three have shown quite clearly that they just don't get it. Maybe the US government needs to start helping out businesses that actually care about positioning themselves for the future instead of failing industrial behemoths.

And besides, didn't we bail out Chrysler once before?

The New York Times
Monday, November 17, 2008 -- 8:35 PM ET
-----

Jerry Yang, Yahoo Chief, to Step Down

Yahoo said Monday evening that Jerry Yang, who helped build the company from an early directory of Web sites into a sprawling Internet giant, would step down from his role as chief executive after the company finds a replacement.

I suppose it's just as well, since Mr. Yang didn't seem able to produce any progress in turning the company around. A failed sale to Microsoft and a deal with Google that had to be scrapped because of concerns about anti-trust law made Yahoo seem more like a soap opera than an Internet property in recent months. Still, it's sad. Jerry Yang and David Filo were the first to deploy any sort of large-scale tool for trying to organize and search through all of the information on the Internet and it's too bad Mr. Yang seems to have lost his touch in this area. Hopefully his talent will quickly lead him into another opportunity.

Lost in all the doom and gloom of airline industry news is the fact that one airline is making a hefty profit, even in the current economic climate: Southwest. The secret to Southwest's success is that it foresaw that fuel prices might become a problem and planned accordingly. The airline has a longtime program where it hedges fuel prices by locking into long-term contracts that allow it to buy fuel at well below current market prices.

Of course, spikes in fuel prices were something that businesses should have been able to see coming if they had been paying attention. Southwest was and now the airlines who didn't plan as well are whining about not being able to make money. And now I sit here waiting for some government announcement that the taxpayers' money will end up having to be used to bail out an airline or two. I just know its coming, but I'm still going to be extremely annoyed when it does.

As the old saying goes, poor planning on your part does not constitute a crisis on my part.

Meet Todd Davis. He's the guy who started a company called Lifelock, which for $110 per year will renew fraud alerts on your credit reports at the three major credit bureaus every three months. They'll also have your credit reports sent to you once a year. By the way, you can actually do all of this yourself for free.

In order to get millions of people to pay $110 per year for a service they can do themselves for free, Todd Davis came up with a clever marketing plan. He posted his own authentic social security number on magazine and TV ads, on his website, and in general all over the Internet. Its 457-55-5462, for all you identity thieves out there who might be reading this. Todd Davis was so confident in his "system" that he dared hackers and thieves to steal his identity.

Hackers and thieves were only too happy to oblige. A mentally retarded man used Mr. Davis' social security number that he got off Lifelock's website to obtain a $500 payday loan. Before the police could investigate, Davis sent Lifelock's goons to coerce the man into signing a confession that would be completely inadmissible in court. Result: Police were unable to prosecute.

Then it turns out that Davis' partner in Lifelock is an accused identity thief himself.

You probably already guessed how this story ends. Todd Davis is now being sued.

His defense? The fact that he had his own identity stolen proves that Lifelock works. Wait a minute...huh?

Maybe its just that he's unfamiliar with the whole irony concept.

People and companies put up websites for all sorts of reasons: as a point of contact for friends, associates, or potential clients; as a way to promote a business, a skill, or a hobby; or as a platform to sell things. Regardless of the reasons for having a website, what makes a site effective and keeps people coming back is not rocket science. Make it easy for visitors to see where they are and what options are available to them, make it easy for them to find what they want ("don't make me think"), give them reasons to keep coming back, and leave them with a pleasant memory of their visit.

The people who design and manage shopping malls understand this. Too often, the people who design and manage websites don't. Its very easy these days to simply grab some simple tools and throw up any old kind of website with no thought or planning put into it. Its also painfully obvious that a whole lot of sites are actually built this way. But a poorly designed or poorly thought out website will, at best, be ineffective. At worst, it will reflect badly on the person it belongs to.

So here's a few of my website design pet peeves. I'm not talking about nitpicking over obscure and technical details; I'm talking about the things I see over and over and over again that make me want to go and beat my head repeatedly against the nearest brick wall every time I see them. Without further ado...

Vague section titles and file names

How many websites do you see with sections like "About us" or "Contact us"? A lot. Too many. A quick Google search tells us that there are 1,970,000,000 results for "About us" and 1,830,000,000 results for "Contact us". Imagine trying to work your way up the search engine rankings against nearly 2 million other sites.

A website must be able to be found by search engines to be of any value. This means rich descriptive content and keywords. How many people do you know who go into Google or Yahoo and search on the phrase "About us"? Personally I don't know of any--even though there's nearly 2 million results if anyone actually did. Or how about websites that have pages with titles like "Memories"? Memories of what exactly?

Mystery Meat Navigation

I've seen websites where the only navigation available was a series of tiny little pictures that could mean almost anything. Some sites will even add insult to injury by making these little pictures into Flash or Javascript rollover effects that appear seemingly out of nowhere in random places on the page.

If I click your little picture of a camera, am I going to a place on your site that sells cameras, a gallery of photos you've taken, or some videos of your Aunt Bertha's latest trip to Maui? Making me guess what's on your site is not something I find amusing and is probably just going to make me go elsewhere.

Poorly thought-out navigation

A lot of web designers seem to have lost sight of the fact that you can make anything on the page into a link, not just the menu bar. I've been to websites that will actually say something like "To contact us or to request more information, please select the "Contact Page" link from the left-hand navigation menu". This to me is just bizarre. Why not just say "For questions or more information, contact us" and make "Contact us" a direct link to the Contact Page?

Or how about the people who write "For more information, click here". "Click here" contains no information whatsoever, either for the user or for the search engines indexing the site. Even worse, for a blind person viewing the site with screen reader software, there is no "here" to click.

Using graphics for text

Yes, the web has a limited number of fonts that you can safely be sure will show up as you intended. That's just a fact of life and at most its a minor inconvenience. There's other ways to brand your site besides use of a particular font. Using graphics--or worse, hundreds and hundreds of inline images for your site text--is no solution, its just incredibly annoying. My favorite sites are the ones who do this on their contact page--I'm sure their potential customers really enjoy having to type in email addresses and other information instead of simply cutting and pasting the text into their email program.

Frames

Wonderful way to send the message that "Hey, I designed this site in 1996 and haven't learned a damn thing about web design since." Frames break, they don't always show up right in some browsers, and more often than not, as a user, I'm going to come across at least one "orphaned" page in your site--that is, a page that shows up outside the frameset that I therefore have no idea what to do with and I'm simply left to guess about where it fits in with your site or how to navigate to anywhere else.

And as for search engines, given a choice between an index page that's nothing but a bunch of code on how to display other html pages and an index page loaded with descriptive text and keywords, which would you suspect will be ranked higher by Google or Yahoo?

There's no good reason to use frames anymore, as there is always a better way to do something. And with the advances in web technologies over the past decade or so and the huge amount of (often free) help available online, the ease-of-use argument doesn't even work anymore. If frames were not a web tool, I would say they need to be taken out back and shot--just do yourself a favor and stay away from them.

Flash introductions

God, please, just...don't.

Flash can be a very useful and powerful tool, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the most commonly abused technologies out there. Which leads us to...

Abuse of Java applets

At one time, there was this fad of people putting Java applets on their websites that showed this 3-D looking shimmering lake with twinkling stars overhead or other such nonsense. Yeah, really cool effect there--that is, until about the fifth time that you have to wait for the damn thing to load. Not even counting the five thousand other websites I've already seen it on.

Fortunately--praise be to whatever deities may exist--Java applets, largely thanks to such widespread abuse, seem to be on their way out these days. So this one's not so much of a complaint anymore.

And on a related note, unless you want to be pegged as completely clueless when it comes to the web (in other words, one of the people who keep me in business), don't confuse Java with JavaScript--they are two entirely different things. In fact, they were developed by two completely different companies--Sun Microsystems in the case of Java and Netscape in the case of JavaScript.

Page layouts with tables

At one time, it might have been a cool little hack to design pages with tables to get around some of the limitations of HTML in the web's ancient past (circa 1995). Actually, I used to do this myself back in the late 90's. But again, this is a great way to convey to everyone who comes to your site that you haven't learned a thing since that time.

This isn't to say that tables must be discarded. But tables have a purpose: to convey information in tabular form. Statistics, data, anything that you might put into a spreadsheet in other words. Page layouts are simply messy and limiting when done with tables and CSS layouts are far more flexible anyway.

...and a bonus pet peeve, which isn't limited to just web design.

"The computer made a mistake"

No, it didn't. Somewhere along the line, someone operating the computer made a mistake. Computers don't make mistakes. They are simply stupid machines that follow the instructions programmed into them by stupid human beings. Computers are tools, nothing more--and certainly not a substitute for critical thinking skills.

In the days before computers when businesses kept their records in paper ledgers, would an employee have responded to a customer complaint by saying that the ledger made a mistake? And if he did, would he have kept his job for long?

In any state in the country, if an employer refuses to hire someone because they're black, that's considered illegal. Same for any number of other factors that are protected from discrimination by federal and state laws. But in most states, its perfectly OK to ask women applicants about their marital status and whether or not they have children.

And many women are denied jobs based on having children--particularly single mothers. Its called maternal profiling and is more common than most people think.

A recent American Journal of Sociology study reports that women with children are half as likely to be hired as women without children who have nearly identical experience and qualifications.

This information is disturbing enough, but certain ways ABC News chose to present it makes it even worse. For instance, they interviewed a guy who stated that maternal profiling is all about the bottom line because women with children are, economically speaking, less attractive and less valuable job candidates. The reporter did not ask any follow up questions about what evidence might back up this gentleman's statement--though the story did allude to a general perception that women with children were less reliable employees. Naturally, no mention was made of where this perception may have come from (gee, could it be that blatant sexism still exists in American society?) or whether it is true.

Hey, here's a thought. Maybe its not so much women with children being "unreliable" as it is companies with outdated policies and ways of doing business that place unfair and unreasonable obstacles in the way of their employees' ability to do their jobs. With modern technology, there are all sorts of innovations from flex-time to tele-commuting that are perfectly suited to leveling the playing field and enabling many different types of people to be valuable members of an organization--women with children, women without children, men with children, etc. Perhaps society should start asking why companies refuse to take advantage of such technologies instead of the constant game of victim-blaming and excuses we see with discrimination issues.

On the level of abstract theory, I tend to be uncomfortable with things like affirmative action or hate crimes laws or anti-discrimination laws. In an ideal world, none of these would be necessary and opportunity would be based solely on merit. But obviously, we are a long way from an ideal world and injustices are not just things that happened "in the past" that marginalized groups should "simply get over"--injustices continue in the present day too.

The fact that we keep seeing again and again and again how companies will continue to ask any absurd, irrelevant, and obnoxious question they can get away with simply to find new ways to discriminate against people shows why these laws are in fact necessary--at least until we find some kind of acceptable alternative. Or until people stop being complete asshats, but that's probably not too likely any time soon.

What does martial status or family status have to do with one's ability to do a job anyway? And why is it that men are not asked such questions, even though there are countless examples of men who raise children? If we have to pass yet more laws making it illegal for employers to ask idiotic questions that have nothing to do with someone's ability, then I suppose that's what we need to do. Do I like it? Absolutely not. And I'm sure its possible that an increasingly restrictive legal environment might very well interfere with an organization's ability to make the smartest hiring decisions.

But blatant discrimination interferes with the affected person's ability to make a living and to live their life as they see fit. And that is something that deserves consideration as well. Its time for the business community to start remembering that and stop acting as if their right to do business trumps every other consideration.

The bright side to all this might be that companies that continue to insist on discrimination are probably cutting their own throat in the long run. More and more, a diverse workforce is an asset to any organization and discrimination prevents the very diversity that businesses need to succeed. Its really no wonder that so many small businesses are started and run by women. And its small business, not giant exclusive "good ol' boys network" corporations that are increasingly the driving force of the economy of the 21st century.

There's no more common new years resolution than "getting organized". For the most part, I'm a fairly organized person. That is, I know how to be organized, but sometimes I have to work on the self-discipline to keep up with it all. Now my business partner, he's not organized at all, but I digress.

Anyway, we're in this reorganization/re-evaluating phase with the business, simply because its good for all businesses to go through those phases periodically. Part of this is that we've been trying out some new software to help us keep track of everything that's going on.

I've looked at a lot of organizing and collaboration software over the years. But recently I found Egroupware and I'm impressed, to say the least. It has everything one might need to keep track of things--project management software, file management tools, a wiki, calendars, a knowledge base system, and a lot more all integrated into one package with a well-organized, attractive, and intuitive interface.

The website and user manual are nice as far as getting help. The installation instructions could use a lot of work, especially with explaining how to deal with the numerous problems that seems to come up. To put it bluntly, installation is a complete pain in the ass. It took me most of this evening, in fact (would have been a lot easier if I knew MySQL better). But the program is well worth it.

It requires a server and a database to run, but all that is easy enough to get with one of the all-in-one packages like DeveloperSide.net. Egroupware runs fine on your standard WAMP* or LAMP* configurations, so if you've had any experience running applications like WordPress or Drupal, you'll already be familiar with a lot of the installation tasks.

And you can synchronize it to use along with programs like Outlook, Thunderbird/Lightning, and iCal. The best part is that its completely free and open-source. By the way, if you were wondering about Outlook--what the hell are you doing still using Microsoft products for anyway?



*(Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP or Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, respectively. For the non-techies out there, this refers to a standard configuration of operating system, server software, database, and PHP, a programming language that's particularly good for database applications. Many of the projects we work on in my company are built with programs that run on these configurations.)

I've been thinking a lot lately about bad behavior on the part of big corporations. rpeate recently wrote about an experience with his bank and its "service" of "overdraft protection". The alleged protection provided by this service ended up costing him--the bank's customer--a ridiculous amount of money. At one time, if you wrote a check and there wasn't enough money in your account to cover it, the bank would simply not cash it. Now a bank will cash a check that is no good and charge their customer an obscene amount of money. To add even more insult, this often creates a negative balance which causes additional money deposited by the customer to vanish into the electronic abyss instead of being available for the customer's use. Some "protection".

Yes, people should make sure their checkbooks are always balanced. But there are bound to be oversights from time to time as people live increasingly complex lives with packed schedules. And sometimes even the banks themselves make mistakes. I read about one lady who wrote a check for her mortgage payment and the bank somehow applied the payment twice. This meant that all of the other checks she wrote bounced and because of "overdraft protection", the mistake cost the woman over $800.

If banks would simply not cash checks when there is not enough money to cover them, the parties to the transaction could simply straighten out the matter, which in most cases is usually a simple oversight. Banks, after all, are mere facilitators and not a party to the transaction. What right does a bank have to decide to cash a check that is no good? Shouldn't banks be interested in actually protecting and serving their customers instead of finding excuses to rip off their customers? And if its a crime to intentionally write a check that you know is no good, should it not also be a crime for a bank to cash a check that it knows is no good?

If corporate executives are truly all that confused about why Americans have such a low opinion of big business, they need look no further than how they treat their own customers.

As any small business owner can tell you, if we abuse our customers and treat them disrespectfully, we'll be out of business faster than Bear Stearns. Yet, somehow, corporations actually have the audacity to abuse and steal from their own customers and then turn around and call it a service, as if their abuse is a privilege we should all be thankful for.

I can't, for the life of me, fathom why people continue to put up with this.

Someone told me recently that the Democratic primary is showing her that the country is still more sexist than she thought. I have no idea where she would have gotten that idea...

In business news: Some clients are just Incredibly. Frustrating. That is all.

Wow. Where did January go? The whole month has been completely crazy and more than a little stressful. It seems as though things have improved over the past several days, in spite of being insanely busy. The exception was the headache we had to deal with last night--a major scare with the business because our web hosting contractor's servers went completely down again--just two weeks after the Great Server Crash of 2008. Needless to say, I'm through with this company and I'm working on finalizing a plan to switch all of our clients to a new service with as little pain as possible.

Fortunately, our clients have been understanding almost beyond reason and none of them are pulling their accounts. One of our clients was even so nice about it that he went out of his way to assure me that his company would still stick with us and then, talking to me "as a friend", gave me a lot of helpful advice about dealing with crisis and setbacks in business. I'm extremely grateful for both the advice and the vote of confidence--and of course for the fact that we're keeping the account.

We also had a meeting this afternoon with another client, one we've had some difficulties working with up to this point. It turned out to be a good meeting, as we were able to work out some issues so that we could get back to working together and be on the same page. It also helped that he gave us a large payment on his account, so that combined with other payments we're getting early this coming week will help take some of the financial pressure off the company. We're now in extremely good shape financially for the next month and its nice having some breathing room with the finances so that we can get back to focusing on our work.

I haven't mentioned it on this blog before, but I've shifted to a new role in my part-time work with our community's anti-poverty efforts: working on building a permanent task force to handle special projects for the IFC--events such as Poverty Awareness Week and Project Homeless Connect. I'm sure I'll be writing more about all of that in due time.

One thing I do feel very behind on (again) because of still more delays and false starts is the USA 2020 project, but we're working on getting that back on track again as well. In other political news, I didn't have a chance to write anything about Thursday night's Democratic debate, but let me just say that I appreciated the fact that both candidates seem to be toning down the negativity, focusing more on issues, and thinking about the need to unify the party going into this summer. I thought Senator Clinton did an excellent job in the debate and really seemed on top of her game. What really made me happy was the last question of the debate when neither of them ruled out the possibility of a joint ticket in November.

Thank you all so much for the birthday wishes. To the people I still owe messages and emails too, please be patient, I'm getting to them. I haven't actually done anything for my birthday yet, since it fell in the middle of the week. But I'm taking the rest of today and most of tomorrow off for that (until a meeting Sunday evening), which I suspect will be nice since I really need a break. I have plans with a good friend this afternoon and one of my business partners is taking me out tonight for Mexican food, pool, and al-kee-hall. I'm sure much fun will be had.

And now I'm gone for the next 24 hours or so. If Livejournal burns down--well, don't call me. :)

We have two major clients who are significantly behind on the payment schedule that we agreed to, creating an untimely cash flow crunch at the moment. Any of the business owners on my friends list have any experience in dealing with delinquent clients? Thoughts and advice would, of course, be appreciated.

One idea I've had is to raise our prices and start being more firm with new clients we take on about meeting payment deadlines. I have to wonder if our somewhat casual approach to business is giving people the impression that we don't consider our time and skills valuable.

This has me thinking about where I am these days, though. Food is now discretionary spending. High-speed Internet access, on the other hand, is a vital necessity. We prioritize our spending accordingly. This amuses me to no end, because it seems completely absurd yet makes perfect sense, all at once. Anyway, I digress.

Lest anyone worry, things are in general OK. No one's destitute or going hungry, but still, this is annoying because the cash flow shortfall is setting us behind on our plans for continuing to grow the business. As I keep trying to explain to these people, our ability to stay in business and operate at a professional level depends on people paying us in a timely fashion. Incidentally, I borrowed this approach from an email that joedecker blogged about where he told someone who stole one of his images that he is able to eat because of the fact that people pay him for his skills and expertise.

I have to be in Raleigh all day tomorrow for client meetings, so I've been planning that out tonight. I'm finding the trip planner at GoTriangle.org to be immensely valuable. Its an excellent tool for breaking down exactly which routes to use and how long each leg of the trip will take. Admittedly, it is a bit surreal to be able to use Google to view satellite photos of the offices of potential clients.

This has been a stressful week so far. On the bright side, I have a long weekend ahead to look forward to after not actually getting a weekend at all the past two weeks.

I guess working until nearly midnight wrapping up the details of the next phase of a project for a big client is a fitting end to a working weekend. Though if it hadn't been for wintersweet being so kind as to save me from a Photoshop blooper, it might have been much later. I'm glad I could at least amuse some of my fellow geeks with the tale of the transparent JPEG.

It is cold outside. We haven't seen single digits around here in quite some time. Brrr.

Patriots-Giants in the Super Bowl. Ho hum. Didn't they just play that game a couple of weeks ago? I wanted to see the Packers, if for no other reason than to see Brett Favre be able to retire on top after a great career. On the bright side, I'm not torn between two compelling storylines anymore. I loathe the Giants and I'm not a big fan of the Mannings either.

I didn't even have a chance to do my Sunday political notes. Suffice it to say that I'm endorsing a candidate so I should have that post up soon.

And now, rest for me.

The aspect of running a business that can be amusing and annoying all at once is some of the requests we get from clients. I'm half tempted to borrow an idea from pdx42 and start doing something similar to a "Help Desk Call of the Week" feature. There's certainly enough material.

Today's example: A client is paying us to convert an illustration of his organization's website into a working site that can be put on the Web. He gave us a CD with a lot of the images we'll need, including the organization's logos. The problem is that his logos are in .jpg format and the background doesn't look all that great when they're put on the site. The natural thing to do is simply to convert them to .gif format and make them transparent. But he doesn't want us to do that; instead, he wants us to keep the exact file he has in the exact format he has, only make it transparent.

But .jpg files don't support transparency. We're left with the inescapable fact that he wants a logo in a format that can't exist under the known laws of physics: the transparent .jpg.

Maybe we should just go ahead and design a perpetual motion machine for him while we're at it.

I've had to spend most of the weekend working due to last weekend's Great Server Crash of 2008. The crash seemed to set the tone for the whole week, which had me wondering several times where I was going and exactly what I was doing in this handbasket. The week ended on the same note it began when a series of problems caused me to miss getting to have coffee with a good friend I haven't seen in over a year.

But this weekend's not so bad really. I'm working on a website for a client, listening to classic rock tunes, and watching the snowflakes falling outside the window in front of me. And naturally, that cup of hot chocolate next to me. Bad weeks notwithstanding, I've had a lot of good luck the past couple of years; after all, how many 30-year olds get the chance to run their own company?

The only thing that makes me feel old is when I think about how in the technology industry, its usually the 22-year olds running their own companies. Like the kiddos who started Google and Facebook. Ah well, I'm just waiting for one more Internet bubble.

My business partner's kitten doesn't seem to like the snow all that much. I took her out for a few minutes and she just wanted to go back inside. "What's all this white shit on the ground and all this shit falling on my head? I'll just go take a nap." Heh.

Today's first meeting with our new web design client (a consulting group) went very well. We left with a check for a sizable deposit and a signed memo of understanding that gives us the rest of our fees within a few weeks. That's about as good as it gets.

I know I have at least three people with their own photography business among my readers. I wish one of you were local. I could use a good photographer to work with me on an upcoming project we have with a local art gallery and I'd like to be able to give the work to someone I know. Le sigh.

After the meeting, my business partner (Bruce) and I grabbed lunch at the food court at Southpoint Mall--Subway for me, some Japanese food for Bruce that apparently wasn't all that great. I was reminded of why I avoid malls like the plague this time of year--the place was an absolute madhouse and too many places had too few people working on the busiest shopping day of the year.

We then spent a good chunk of the afternoon browsing Barnes and Noble, getting ideas for books we want to get both personally and for the business with our anticipated increased cash flow. We didn't buy any of the business books today, but we did write down a lot of titles so we could check online to see if we can find them cheaper. There's a really great book we found on designing website navigation, but of course it was around $50--hopefully we can at least find that one cheaper. I also spotted an interesting one called Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

I realized just how much of a racket newsstand magazines are. I bought the current issues of two business magazines (Business Week and Entrepreneur) and they were $4.99 each. Turns out I can subscribe to either of them for $1 an issue or less. I'm going to start avoiding buying magazines at newsstands anymore unless its just one issue to evaluate whether its worth it to subscribe.

We also browsed a store called Sharper Image and my impression was that I've never seen such an amazing and extensive collection of stuff that I can't imagine anyone ever actually needing. A solved Rubik's cube in a glass case that's apparently just for display purposes, which I suppose is to convince potential customers that you're smart enough to have solved it yourself. A computerized chess board that somehow moves the actual pieces automatically. A flame-less candle. And a Star Wars light-saber. That last one tempted me. What company wouldn't need its own light-saber?

I've decided I really need to go ahead and jump on the cellphone bandwagon. Its amazing how much of a necessity they've become in the business world. I worked out a deal where the company will pay half and I'll pay half personally to get a higher-end plan, since I'll also be able to have the phone for personal use. Of course, the company can just write its half off when we file our taxes. I'll probably go ahead and write off part of my half on my personal taxes too, since, after all, I'll be using the thing for business purposes half the time. It seems only fair that if the government can tax you twice, you figure out ways to take deductions twice.

Ended the day with a nice late evening phone call with my friend Stacey, who I hadn't talked to in way too long and it was great to hear her voice again. We're getting together to hang out on Friday. After a lot of talking about our good intentions, we finally got around to making some actual plans--for some reason, that's no small feat for us. Hopefully, that's something else that will end up changing in the coming year though.

Even though this week has been completely crazy, I feel as if I've taken some huge steps forward in nearly every area of my life. And the timing couldn't be better, with a new year right around the corner. I'm still mulling over what I want to do for New Year's Eve; my life seems to be all about the "new beginnings" theme lately.

Happy solstice, everyone.

And Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it, either culturally or religiously*.
* -( A brief explanation of my views on the Christmas holiday. )

No matter what traditions you keep or how you observe them, my best wishes for a wonderful season and a great new year for all of you out there.

Hmm. Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk? Anyway...

One of my computers (the one running XP) has been having some major problems lately, randomly freezing up and things like that. After having it checked out at the local computer repair place we use for the business, there's been no improvement and they found no real problems with the system itself. I suspect it could be a virus, because there's a hell of a lot of processes running in the background (over 40) even when there's no programs running, including multiple instances of the same process and so forth. None of the virus scans I've run have turned up anything, nor did any of the stress tests they did at the computer place.

Bottom line is that I've decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. Naturally, the most annoying thing about that is jumping through all of Microsoft's hoops. Somehow I misplaced the installation disk, plus I'm going to have to call the bastards at Microsoft to reactivate since I can't seem to find the damn product key. I'm half tempted just to install Linux on the thing and I probably would if I didn't need it to have Windows to be able to work with other computers that I use.

Yes, there could be other, easier things to resolve the problem and reinstalling and then setting up everything again can be a pain. But the computer's been in use for quite some time and a lot of clutter and junk files and what not have built up over time, so starting fresh with a clean version of the operating system is something that appeals to me anyway. Plus its probably guaranteed to fix whatever the problem is, instead of having to keep trying different things and losing use of the computer while I'm doing all that. And it'll get rid of any corrupted files in the process. With the setup I have, its easy enough to back up everything, so except for the minor annoyance of reinstalling programs and getting all the settings back the way I want them, the inconvenience of reformatting will be minimal.

However, I'm bored. Needless to say, I'm doing a full system backup before reformatting the drive and even with a fast wireless network, that's taking some time (almost 13,000 files on the computer, and that's not even counting the Windows folder and other files I'm not even bothering to back up). Fortunately, there's people around on AIM to amuse me in the meantime. Of course, after the backup's done, then comes the real work.