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Category: blog
After taking a rather long vacation from this blog I am back. This fall is promising to be rather interesting as during summer I have picked up a few new business engagements. All in due time, of course, but this is a brief update of all things.
Informal Project Management is always around us – interesting thing, I thought about it exactly 3 years ago, in September 2007. This time, however, it wasn’t a home project, it was a photo shoot, and it had more to do with actually organizing things rather than building (although going from mock-up to beta to release is there undeniably). What has caught my attention this time was how administrative flow of things tend to greatly influence the outcome of the process. You have to gather resources, make sure they present on time and at the place to complete the project, then you get your project going and at the end you have your lessons learned thing, if you are lucky.
Small Business owners still need to be educated – you thought they would know by now everything about Facebook, Twitter and search engine optimization? Wrong! Your average small business owner is having a hard time getting the idea of how these things work. Latest quote: “But I have these 5 domain names, if I point them all to my web site I should be on top of Google, no?”. Yeah, how, exactly?
It’s Upgrade Time – PHP4 is almost dead of old age. How do you make your clients switch on the basis that the technology you have used to build their web sites 3 – 4 years ago is already obsolete and they need to upgrade. Not all of them lease cars, so idea of “new every two” (or three or four) isn’t entirely their motto. And they don’t buy into all this technology talk either. However, what they do buy into are security concerns. Old technology equals less secure environment.
Stop That Gadget Rainfall – personally I am hair away from being fed up with all the new gadgets that revolve around same decade old concept of a shiny thing that you poke with your fingers to watch a tiny little screen show you something. Whether you take iPhone 4, HTC Evo or whatever else will be running Windows Mobile 7 – it’s same old thing nonetheless, limited by “revolutionary” 3G technology. Reminds me of an old game of Civilization I used to spend hours playing. The funniest scenario was when you thought you’re on top of the chain, you have just invented Gunpowder and two turns later you get a visit from some other nation with battleships, carriers and tanks. Same seems to be the case with our wireless technology in US.
Back From Vacation
If you think the troubles with Advantage Rent-A-Car were over – you’re wrong. We lost another hour on our way back to airport when we brought the car back. Aside from numerous annoying mechanical issues with the car itself (nothing major – just annoying) it turned out that the contract on it was closed, so a new one had to be created. How these people get anything done – is just beyond me. Literally spent between 40 minutes to an hour just dropping off the car. Would have been more, but some manager type said he wants us out of there so the sales rep had to fill out some forms by hand to enter them into their system later.
I remember I was complaining about car rental companies before, but Advantage Rent-A-Car has truly beaten all the expectations of bad customer service.
Aside from that the vacation was anything short of amazing. Had a lot of fun on the beach and in parks, rested a lot and came up with new project for myself.