Lost In Madison

In about an hour I am heading off to watch an AC/DC cover band at a local sports bar here in Madison (well it’s in Middleton technically). Anyhow I will try and snap some pics and get em up here so you all can see what it was like. Well I am out for now, gotta go get ready and work on my Gene Simmons tongue thing!
………………….
OK I am back, it was a really cool band, they sounded great! Lot’s of cool people, lot’s of beer, lot’s of good lookin ladies.. Ya it was fun. Now for those of you wondering, no I did’t hook up with anyone, after all it was a bar!

I am getting quite a few names regarding yesterdays post. COOL! Keep em coming! For now I am not going to be showing the comments with those names in them, just adds a little security on my side to ensure that the names remain available until I select one.

Thanks for the help all!

Most of you are aware that I have and occasionally do tech support, web design, web hosting and consulting on the side from time to time. In fact as you are aware this was the case when I lived in California.

Maybe here is where I should clarify things a bit. While in CA I had my own company (Martinez Tech Consulting), during that time I was approached by two people during a “Shasta Technology Meeting” this was back in 2002??? Anyhow, because of my want to expand and the promise of more business I soon entered a partnership. Let me preface this whole thing by saying this. I WOULD DO THIS WHOLE EXPEREANCE OVER AGAIN IF I HAD TO. It really did open the doors to more business, however several factors stacked against me.

When entering the partnership I agreed to a minority share of the company (essentially) 40/60 because of some of the talks we had before entering into the partnership. We acquired several decent size accounts and were doing fairly well, but in truth we were not making enough for the amount of overhead that came with some of the partnership terms. With that said, I will own up to 40% of those issues, after all that was the split.

After some time together it began to become painfully obvious to me that in order for me to make a real living at this I would either have to attempt to take back over full control of the company or ???. During several talks with my partners I expressed a want to do just that. Each time one of my partners was 100% for it, the other never would give me a serious answer, always playing the teacher and wanting to “explain” things to me about … well I never was quite sure what the hell he was attempting to explain to me to be honest. Basically he just filibustered the whole time the discussion came up. It became obvious me taking back control of the company would not happen. We parted ways, me with a contract and a semi non compete clause and them with the company.

Shortly after I moved back here to WI. AGAIN SOMETHING I WOULD DO OVER IF I HAD THE CHANCE. Here I tucked in under my brother in laws roofing company as the office manager. I want to make this very clear also, I have learned a million times more about business and sales in the last few years then I could ever learn in school, I have no doubt! I am not saying that there is nothing more that I could ever learn about business or sales, quite the opposite, I think if you are not constantly learning or trying something new then you will soon fall by the wayside.

All along my adventures I have never let go of my technical side, I moved more to remote support AKA virtual support (where I log in remotely to fix issues) and web design / web hosting. I started a simple company back here (Mad City Computing) where I only serviced accounts that I earned from personal connections or word of mouth. It is far from anything substantial at this point, basically extra pocket change every once in a great while if you will.

I am now ready to start making a go at being serious about my own company again. However I should DEFINATELY clarify this point. I am going to cherry pick accounts no exceptions, you see I have a full time job, and I have NO desire to give it up. In fact quite the opposite, I love it! I am left with quite a bit of free time though and was thinking, why not spark my money making hobby back up into a real business again?!

What is the difference this time than the first? Well a ton of new experience and the fact that I am a little older and not so much of an arrogant bastard. What happens if it starts to eat into my “normal” job? I am not sure at this point, maybe I will hire someone part time to pick up the slack, but I will find a way to keep my hands on both my current job and my business to what extent I am unsure of at this time.

All of this leads to my title “Company Name”. I am in search of a good, solid company name. Here are my requirements:

1: Must be a “global” name. I want the ability to be anywhere in the world and this name not appear to limit me to a specific region, state, or city.
2: Must be able to get a .com domain name for the company name.

Pretty simple right? Sure……….

This also leads to a few other items:

1: Catch phrase or tag line for the company name.
2: Logo for company.

Don’t think all of this is that important when starting a company? I simply point to Jellyfish.com who was purchased by Microsoft. I had a meeting with a part investor in Jellyfish.com at one point about something unrelated to this and was told that they (Jellyfish.com) had spent over $500,000.00 (yes that is half a million) in researching the perfect name, logo, tag line and such. This along with actually executing a well thought out business plan (A major key point obviously) made the unknown company very well known. So well know Microsoft purchased them for the small sum of $50,000,000.00 (Yes FIFTY MILLION US $$).

Now reality sets in and I fully do not expect to ever be purchased for that sum of money. However, it does prove that EVERY aspect of your company is VERY important, even down to the name, logo, and tag line… Don’t think so? Talk to Nike, Coors, the NFL, Coke, McDonalds, Microsoft…. the list goes on.

I got a new comfy bed and it’s HUGE! Takes up damn near my whole room. I had to take this pic from inside my walk in closet.. While in there I realized how much stuff I have. 15 pairs of shoes one side for only pants. One for only shirts… If I ever decide to get a girlfriend I wonder where the heck she will fit! Ohh well…

This last weekend my 7yr old nephew was showing me his latest creation on GarageBand and asked if I wanted to give it a try.  I thought sure what the heck!  We had a blast messin around with that software so I decided to find a Windows like product that will do the same thing.  It didn’t take long to find Mixcraft 4 so I downloaded the trial and started to mess around with it.  Both programs GarageBand and Mixcraft 4 are a bunch of fun to play with.  It’s amazing the stuff you can do in a short amount of time.  Here is what I created with both programs in less than about 45min total!

From GarageBand:
[audio:http://www.lostinmadison.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/01-simple.mp3]

From Mixcraft 4
[audio:http://www.lostinmadison.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/02-boredom.mp3]

It may just sound like noise but hey it was fun noise! I will have to see what I can do with more time and actually being serious about creating something…

Here is a slight variation of the flowers posted earlier. This time color is added to the sky and rock in foreground while the valley is in grayscale. I was a little sloppy with the brush but was just messing around and not to worried about detail.

Click image for full view.

Obviously this technique of photo enhancement has been around for a long time.  I was just bored and thought I would do it and share it is all.

Click image for full view.
 

2. Task Management.. Well kinda..
I love post it notes, in fact I should own stock in them!  Most of the time these handy little yellow notes are good enough for the obscure items I need to remember with in a day or two.  Where they fail me is when I need to arrange a group of items I need to take care of that hinge on other things being done first.  More often then not I will have four or five categories of “Action Items” and in each category I end up with normal need to do items and items that I need to do once I have done what I needed to do…  I will pause here for you for a minute…  OK you with me again?  Good.  Basically I need a good VERY SIMPLE project management program or a very detailed task management software.  To date all the project management software I have found all work really well, for larger projects, some of my projects may be done in a few days, few weeks or farther out.  I finally found what may be my task management solution for now.  www.hitask.com.  This allows me to create a simple project (group may be a better name) and then create tasks that I can share with people and put them in the group I want.  The only thing it doesn’t do is allow me to have sub-tasks.  I really hope they add that.  Anyhow more about hitask in a future review.

3. CRM (Customer Relationship Management).  Your joking right?!
QuickBooks definitely is NOT a CRM software.  But you already knew that.  So on my hunt for CRM software I ran across things like ACT!, SalesForce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and many others.  If you know anything about these companies you realize that I need a way to track future and current clients, all conversations with them, get sales data reports, invoice clients… the list goes on.  There are free versions of some of these solutions but they are typically limited to use with one company and one user.  I need to be able to hold company data from multiple companies (basically the ability to switch company databases) and have multiuser support, and since I am wishing it would be sweet if it could all be accessed from the internet so that business could occur anywhere.  By the way, if you are in the market for any of these things in that above list expect to spend anywhere from $300 per user access license or a set monthly fee per user all the way up to $30,000 – $40,000.  No that’s not a joke!  I still have not found the solution for me, that’s where item four comes in.  Again.

4. Being a web application developer.  Screw that I can just build it!
Ya, that about sums up the solution for most of my problems to date.  This is a great moment to bring up this fact.  If you are like me and have the ability to program some of this stuff and are feeling the need to.  Let me just remind you of one thing.  Once you make the switch to your custom application YOU are now responsible for all that data, and all the future data your system will be holding.  I am very aware of this and was before my projects began.  However my need for something tailored to my situations finally drove me to accept that responsibility.  To this day I would not have done anything different.

5. Being the funnel.  BOTTLENECK!!!
It happens a lot trust me.  At some point during that week or that day I begin to feel like progress on key items has fallen to the side of just doing business for that day.  I start to put out fires and then before I know it my day is gone, at least all the fires are out though.  This is where I have to stop and reorganize myself.  The trick to being a funnel and avoiding the bottlenecks (as much as possible) is to stay as organized as possible and accurately prioritize your “Action Items”.  This is where my task management needs are vital.  I first quickly look at my list of projects and find the priority one.  I make sure all the tasks that need to be done now are taken care of then determine if I need to add new tasks or if its time to move on to something else in that project that needs to be done.  If not, I set that project aside and find the next project in line and so on.  Remember, if your the funnel there is only so much output you can do before the stuff on top starts to overflow.  The key point is to stay as organized as possible and manage your time wisely and efficiently.  If you still find you are not able to keep up, it may be time to hire someone to help you.  If so then COOL!  It’s time to double your production and hopefully business as well.

6. Insomnia. the necessary evil?
Possibly… At least that is how I deal with some of it.  Lets be honest though, that’s not healthy.  I will admit there are just those times that you can’t rest.  Maybe for days at a time, but you do need to take the time to recharge at some point during the week.  It could be sleeping all day, going for a drive away from everyone, vegging out in front of the TV all day or just relaxing at home with a beer and the BBQ going.  I do all these things, and most of the time I do them alone.  Partly because I am single and partly because I just really enjoy the silence.

Well that wraps up my bitching about my big pain.  Sorry so long winded, just a lot on my mind at the moment.

Josh-

Most of you are like me and have a delicious account already.  If you are not aware of what delicious is then you really need to read this http://delicious.com/help/learn.  However, to put it in a real simple term, it is designed for you to keep, tag and share your bookmarks online.

Why would you want to do that?  Well if you are anything like me you have multiple computers that you work on.  This is the best way to take your bookmarks anywhere you go when you are in the ongoing fight to keep your data the same in all locations.  You can literally access your bookmark information anywhere in the world as long as you have internet access.

I am constantly working in multiple locations.  From home, office, on the road, or where there are no computers.  I basically need to have my data at my fingertips everywhere I go.  If I can’t access my home computer or my office computer then I definitely will be able to get it on my iPhone.  Delicious is just one of the tools that I use daily in my quest to keep ALL my data in front of me 24/7 – 365.  I guess that might make me an information and tech junkie…  I am OK with that.

I will start to bring you some of the tools I use to accomplish this task in future posts.  I hope you find some of the items as useful as I do.  Also if you have any items you use to keep you on top of your information everywhere PLEASE let me know!

I am sitting here at 11:00PM on Wednesday night thinking… I was wondering what some of my friends are doing on a stereotypical middle of the week night after work when nothing is planned.  I will bet that I am doing stuff that I find exciting that most of you would find really boring, maybe even put you to sleep.  The funny thing is that I am being 100% honest! LOL

Here is what I did:

I started off around 6ish with a new coding quandary from work that made me come right home and start to do some research on the specific issue.  After quite a bit of reading and some more cracks at the issue at hand I ended up on one of my favorite coding sites www.phpbuilder.net.  I made more cracks at the problem and finally left a few posts in the forums.

As I dug around at www.phpbuilder.net I ran across a few posts that made me question if you could figure out a persons city (at minimum) exact zip code (at best) from information tossed back and forth between their web browser and the server.  After about a half an hour of playing with code and research on my new question at hand.

But we just started the night… Ohh yea there is more!! LOL

Sometime close to 8PM is where I finished up with my two issues and started to think about my tomorrow so I jumped into setting up my list of “Things to do”.  I was doing this in my new Task Management website I found last night (ok you caught me, I was doing this same stuff last night too..  /sigh) at www.hitask.com.  That’s all I am going to say about that site cause I will be doing a write up on it in the near future.  During the list creation I began to make a second list of things I need to find solutions for as I can.  Things like SVN hosting and SVN software.  OK time for more research…

Around 9PM I am stumbling on some really sweet ass SVN hosting solution that just blows me away with its features!  HOLLY SHIT DUDE!  YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW EXCITED I AM RIGHT NOW!!

I stopped playing with my new free account over at xp-dev.com somewhere around 10:30ish.  WHAT?!  Ohh common now!  I found a sweet ass solution to my problem, did you really think I wouldn’t spend the next hour and a half on backing up source code?!  LOL  Anyway more about that solution in another future write up.

10:31… I realize that since I had just installed a 64bit OS on my home computer last Friday (yeah I am seeing a pattern also..) I had not taken the time to install my local web server for home development yet.  So I downloaded XAMP and went to town!  And since I had just downloaded a clean backup of a website just earlier I ought to just get my local server up and tested.  And since I had a clean backup of that website I also figured it was a perfect time to move my source files over to my shiny new SVN host xp-dev.com.  I know I know, you guys are thinking “Fuck ya man! That’s awesome!!” right…?  Sweet!  Same here!

11:30ish… I was so excited by my evening I had to share it with you, so now I have and it’s 11:45PM.  Time to get ready for bed.  I can’t wait to get to work tomorrow so I can update and sync my source code at work with the new SVN host!

So, yeah, what did you do tonight?