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Resurrection

Hello there again. After year and a half hiatus I am trying to resurrect the blog and continue (although in a new form) to write about technology and small business. The break was due to the fact I worked for an e-commerce startup which required pretty much 24×7 commitment. The startup was closed exactly one year ago, which wasn’t much fun. Then I picked a short consulting assignment with one of the largest payment processing shops. Now working as a systems analyst, doing more thinking than coding which makes my fingers a bit restless. Hence the blogging again.

Last year I helped start a new business – a laser hair removal place in midtown Manhattan. Running a brick and mortar business is very different from running things online, so while not fully unknown this is still in a lot of ways an uncharted territory for me. What I wanted to do is document my experience and learnings in a form of a blog.

First thing you realize when you open a business like that is that the operations are really small. There is no marketing department. No budget meetings. A lot of small things to take care of because there’s no one else to take care of those things. So business owner ends up with a lot less money but a lot more hours on their hands. That’s where technology can help, but not everyone can understand, properly implement or, sometimes, even afford, a proper technology.

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    Fall-Back

    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.

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    Quick Friday Recap

    One thing that truly amazes me is what people search on this blog. A lot of spam-beloved words, the reason why – escapes me.

    From the outside world this blog is being bombarded by queries like “outlook 2007 to thunderbird” or “outlook 2007 thunderbird” or “export outlook 2007 to thunderbird” (all within top 10 of queries). The answer is here: Outlook 2007 to Mozilla Thunderbird conversion.

    Another big bunch of people are searching for SitcomTV.com domain. Well, it is for sale if the price is right. Click here to contact me. Alternatively, you can offer a donation that would make the web site (about sitcoms) up and running. Either way – we all win.

    Last, but not least bunch is divided by two interests – HTC Advantage 7501 (truly amazing device, but a bit too bulky for every day use – learned it the hard way) and people who are looking to install Pandora on Windows Mobile devices (an amazing service, pretty much the only radio I would like to listen all the time). Preferably for free.

    Newcomers this week are attracted by new posts dedicated to .NET technology that I’ve been using for a lot of time now. Since this seems like a great interest – there’s more where it came from. Stay tuned.