I can think of few things less worth our national time than the whole birth certificate issue. Why?
Let's say that Obama was born elsewhere and not eligible to be president. Waving my wand of hypotheticalness - poof -he's gone...
Now who's in charge?
Biden? Hillary? Howard Dean? Whomever... it doesn't really matter.
Does the agenda change? Nope, not at all.
It's not about the person, it's about the agenda and its impact on the country, with $5 gas and high unemployment and small business owners (i.e., job creators) being reluctant to move forward at all due to all of the uncertainty of what the government will do next.
The direction of the ship is far more important than a single person. If everyone in the wheelhouse agrees with the current direction, removing one of them is pretty pointless and could be a Pyrrhic victory.
Homes, Membership Cards, Doctors, Non-Profits, and Such
Here are a few of the web sites that I've built:
You won't find more beautiful, custom-built homes than those designed by Pinnacle, and their web site needed to showcase the elegance of these livable works of art. Purple Circle Marketing worked with me to create a site that embodied the feeling of detailed attention that Pinnacle gives its customers.
SourceCORP helps companies gain more loyalty through their customized plastic card service. Membership cards, gift cards, loyalty programs... these guys bend over backwards to create a solution. It was a pleasure to work on their web site.
West Des Moines OB/GYN's web site was written in collaboration with Purple Circle Marketing, and features not only a beautiful layout, but a versatile administrative backend that allows the OB/GYN folks to change the text of the pages themselves. Additionally, it features a blog function for their patients to tell their stories to share with others who need great OB/GYN doctors.
Common Cents is owned by Energy Stewards International, and allows HVAC professionals to optimize and certify the energy savings in homes and buildings through the use of a very detailed and full-featured web site. I implemented a flexible architecture that includes an Excel-like formula engine and survey mapping. This architecture gives the system admins extraordinary latitude for every solution they need, while simplifying the experience for their customers.
Environmental Professional of Iowa needed a membership management system with event capability, and Creative Leap and I delivered that to them. The site's ecommerce facility is easy to use, and makes signing up for events a breeze!
Venture Net Iowa works with start-up and early stage companies to help grow them to success. TalentNetIowa uses a platform that I developed to capture the skill and talent profiles of the C-level executives who want to help these young companies achieve success.
Nobody knows the annuity business better than Duane Goodwin, and to help people get to know him better, I built a very simple web site for him quickly. As I said, from the simple to the very complex, I can provide every of solution that you need.
I watched the Ayn Rand movie tonight. It was well done and stayed true to Rand's dialogue - which is a bit stilted at times to get its point across, but the point's worth it.
I invited my sons to accompany me, but no interest. Which meant that since my wife is in Minneapolis this week, I went solo.
The woman who played Dagny was great. The guy who played Rearden was good, too, but I expect to see more of her in other things.
More movies like this, please...
ETC: Talking with Jonathan about it, he brought up this parallel between Obama's doings and what occurs in the film. I mentioned that through several parts of the film, I thought about how prescient Ayn turned out to be. To which he said:
Which just goes to prove how obvious the consequences and solutions are once you have a firm grasp of validated principles.
So much of what's going on now was easily predicted. Grow government, and this is what you get.
As I was waking up this morning, this was my dream...
Two monkeys are loose at a gate in the Los Angeles airport. A supervisor turns to someone and says, "Get me the director of lax security."
And the supervisor literally said "lax" and didn't spell out "LAX." I woke up chuckling.
I've had similar things like this happen in the past, where something too quick for me to take credit happened in a dream and it cracks me up. How is it that our own brains, in sleep, can act almost as a separate entity from our conscious mind and surprise us with the content of our dreams?
When I first built 247Toolset, it was a tool for administrators to find people, and since there was no need for administrator to discover herself, she never filled out a profile.
But the market talks and I do my best to listen, and 247Toolset is becoming a CRM suite... which means more rewriting to make it clearer yet.
People aren't always explicit in telling you how a product isn't clear yet.
Vivian from Florida called me two days ago with this question: "How do I access organizations?"
I told her that it was on the People tab, but what her question told me was that the interface wasn't clear. So now it's not the People tab - it's the People and Organizations tab.
At the moment, I'm creating a Communication tab, which will house Conversations, Email Newsletters, Email Blast, and Text Message Blast.
The writer Stendhal said: "I see only one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, then my entire world crumbles into nothing."
Yep - pretty much. And universal clarity is hard work.
THE STATE OF WISCONSIN HAS stopped withholding union dues from employee paychecks. And despite all the sound-and-fury, this is what the Democrats are really upset about. Plus this: "With the law now in effect and paychecks getting an increase since union dues are not being withheld, Democrats are the party arguing for a reduction in state worker paychecks."
If a person chooses to give their money to a union, more power to them. But forcing union dues deduction is theft, plain and simple. It's now up to the unions to prove that they're worth the freewill contribution, just like it's up to the rest of us to prove that our service or product is worth the money we ask.
Welcome to the free world, unions.
And as an aside, I wonder how many of those formerly-auto-deducted households will quietly be very, very grateful for the extra income.
1999: I built a shareware application called Project Tracker and had a few hundred sales.
2001: Newsletter Ease, email newsletter software, was born.
2002: After a board meeting for NLE, Cindy Rockwell asked me what I was going to do next. I told her that a résumé is only a list of things that people have allowed me to do, but it's a poor indicator of what I want to do or what I think I'm capable of doing - so I wanted to work on something that would allow a person to showcase their skills and passions. At that time, I bought the domain TalentBench.com (which I still own). (As an aside, all of the tables in the 247Toolset database are prefixed "TB_" for this reason.
2004: After separating from Jackie, I started working on something I called Ezolo, which featured a geographic search engine. I then bought the domain EverybodysCalendar.com and built what become the prototype for the EverywhereCalendar technology that is in 247Toolset today. I stopped working on that in 2005.
2006: I approached John Myers of Paragon Employment Solutions and told him of the TalentBench concept and wondered how that might work for recruiters.
2008: Paragon and I worked out an agreement where I would build what then became known as the 247Toolset platform. I would own all of the IT, and they would share some of the revenue that they made through it. Unfortunately, it didn't really fit their model, and we parted ways later that year.
2009: I was one of the founders of the Des Moines Tea Party, and it occurred to me that all of these passionate people were dying for a way to get involved. I started retooling 247Toolset for volunteer recruitment, and released an early version in June that was reviewed by my good friend, John LaMarche, who also purchased the first portal for $2,500 (TalentNetIowa.com).
2010: Realized that my pricing model wasn't right for the market or for the economy, so I mothballed my sales efforts until I could arrive at the right model, which occurred 4th quarter in the year.
2011: Significant enhancements and 80-hour work weeks on it. Sales are regular and word-of-mouth is strong
I wanted to make two points in all of that.
1) Entrepreneurship isn't just an idea and financing and suddenly you're rich. It's evolving ideas and experiences and a service attitude and a lot of elbow grease. Everything rides on the single-minded belief that the effort will pay off. Whenever I read of people who think that business owners are just lucky folk who make their money off the backs of the poor, I'd love to sit down with them and share my story. Across the entrepreneurs I know, mine is not an unfamiliar story, and people who think "the rich" are just lucky people are deeply ignorant of the extraordinary work that makes successful folk "lucky."
2) I want my kids to know this story. I write my blog mostly for my family to have my history. Dumping stuff out of my head helps me to get ready for pulling more stuff into my head. But my chief reason is for them... someday, my kids and my grandkids will read through all of this.
