Archive for the 'Small Business' Category

The First Annual George Bush & Government, Inc. Bashing Post

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on April 23, 2008
in Economics, General Stupidity, Libertarian Party, Life, Politics & Other Objectionable Subjects and Small Business
. 5 Comments

No, I’m not dead. Yes, I know it’s been over a month since I posted anything worthwhile. Hopefully that will change.

I am currently in the midst of making some major decisions about the direction of my business, so that has been occupying my time. I’m also now in charge of audio and computer stuff at church, which took an immense bite out of my time because I had to figure out on my own how all the sound stuff at church worked together because nobody else knew everything about the system. Finally, I’ve been trying to spent more time with my wife and daughter despite all of the above and all my other commitments. Fun times …

This month I did manage to find my way onto television. The Hamilton County Libertarian Party staged its annual tax protest here in town, and I got interviewed since I’m now the party chair. I didn’t do so hot on camera, but I got a small sound bite (and a quote on their web site) nontheless. It’s not what I would have preferred they quoted … but oh well.

On to basic complaining …

Yesterday on the radio I heard a GWB sound bite. It went something like “We’re not in a recession … [pregnant pause] … it’s just a slowdown.”

Um, George … I think “recession” and “slowdown” essentially mean the same thing. What you said is about as logical as saying “I don’t drive a car … I drive an automobile.” Or “We’re no sailing the ocean … we’re sailing the sea.”

Next gripe … there are advertisements on WGOW for the “First Annual Southside Blues Festival.” People, people … don’t call the first ANYTHING the “first annual (fill in blank).” You’ll just look stupid if the whole endeavor goes toes up and you don’t have a second one … and of course having the event for multiple subsequent years is a qualification for something to be “annual.” MAYBE after the first year you can call the next one the “Second Annual _______” but I’d wait until the third year.

It reminds me of when one of my former churches held their “first annual missions conference and dinner” … there was no “second annual missions conference and dinner.” Or, in another vein, it reminds me of when I was on the way to the Outer Banks in 1998 and saw a sign for a restaurant that was “famous since 1996.”

That being said, I hope the blues festival is a great success and we do have it regularly. I hope to be there … it sounds like it’s going to be good.

Backups, Backups, Backups

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 25, 2008
in Life and Small Business
. 0 Comments

Right now, I’ve very, very, very glad that I got burned a few years back by not backing up my data and have been doing so diligently in the years since.

When I was in college, I had a catastrophic hard drive crash and pretty much lost everything. That taught me a lesson. I started by backing up to floppies, and soon moved to CD-ROMs when they are more affordable.

Now that I’ve got a home office and a business, I keep the majority of my business stuff backed up to a NAS (network attached storage) device in the office, which is backed up to an external USB hard drive. 95% of actual project code is saved to a versioning server (which lets me go back and see previous revisions of code) down at the datacenter, which of course has mirrored drives, and is backed up nightly to yet another machine, and every so often (in theory, weekly) I take copies of those backups to my bank vault.

Oh, and I still back up stuff to DVD-ROM every now and then.

All of this has paid off as of last night, when the hard drive in my laptop started complaining about “invalid node structures” and “I/O errors.” Not good.

I can still get data off of the drive … most of it, I think. So, I’m busy cloning the drive right now (to yet another external hard drive) to be sure that I have a really good idea of what software I had on there and have as good of a copy as I can of my preferences, etc. Then I’ll replace the hard drive over the weekend and get back up and running.

In any case, I’m still able to work this morning. However, I am, unfortunately, remined of one thing I didn’t have a backup of.

The laptop itself.

I’m a Mac user, and right now I’m having to use the Vista machine I keep in the office so I can test things on Windows, etc. Ick.

It’s not all that bad, really. It could be Windows ME.

The only real down side to this is that I can’t work in Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash right now since I only have those for the Mac so far (I need to rectify that, or have a spare Mac on hand), and that this is going to slow me down during a period where I’m already behind on work.

Oh, and congratulations to me! This is my 400th blog post! Whee!

Airnet 1/4 Rack In Full Effect

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 5, 2008
in Geeky Stuff and Small Business
. 0 Comments

Tonight Philip and I got our servers moved to our new 1/4 rack spot at Airnet, installed our fourth server, and moved out the old eight-port switch in favor of a twenty-four-port replacement.

The third server that has been sitting unused for so long now is officially our Zimbra mail server. The fourth machine is our (local) backup machine, and also is running Tomcat plus the eXist XML database (which is a Java web app).

Moving the mail, backup, and eXist services to full machines (from VPS machines) allows them to leverage more disk I/O, and I can already tell a difference in how fast things load. I expect that we’ll continue to use virtual machines for things for the time being, especially for things like Subversion and web hosting.

The fifth member of our family should be arriving next week and going in by mid-month. It appears we could be adding a sixth soon as well …

Year-End Business Review

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on December 31, 2007
in Small Business
. 0 Comments

Well, the last workday of 2007 is over (and boy was it a doozy … I got nothing of note accomplished, and wasted approximately two hours of my day on plumbing repairs). I can now say definitively that this has been an amazingly successful year for my business. My gross income this year was approximately 2.1x what it was in 2006. My net income was about 1.6x what it was in 2006.

The increase in expenses this year comes from having begun to spend considerably more on hosting fees and equipment leases and also spending a good deal paying my brother for contract work.

My overall growth has been slow but steady over the year, and I expect it to get slightly better as my brother, who started doing contract work for me mid-year, learns more about programming and transitions to a part-time employee (and hopefully then becomes full-time by the end of the year).

As far as the hosting goes, I now have four leased Dell servers and a full quarter rack leased at Airnet in downtown Chattanooga (the folks at Airnet have been nothing short of wonderful in my dealings with them over the last nine months; if you need colocation services in town, I highly recommend them), and I suspect I may add a fifth and maybe even sixth server in the next three months.

I’ve developed my (open source, BSD-licensed) SwitchYard (formerly IntuiSite) PHP web application framework into something that I’m thoroughly proud of, and if I ever find the time I’m going to wrap up some basic documentation for it. I’ve released a seminal improved set of SOAP classes for REALbasic. I’m on the verge of releasing some additional minor open source PHP libraries as well.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit at work trying to keep up, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The decision to launch my own business has been without a doubt the best and most rewarding decision I’ve made career-wise. I have absolutely no intention of ever being a simple employee again.

Now for next year … my goals for 2008 are to finish paying off all the business-related debt I accumulated during my first 1.5 years of being self-employed by mid-year, have my brother be full-time (and a partner in the business) by mid-year, hire another programmer, finish one major service-oriented project I’ve been working on for the better part of two years, and find an office outside of my home.

Oh yeah … and finally retire the four-year-old PowerBook that has been my mainstay for so long in favor of something more modern. :-)

Ron Paul and Free Competition in Currency

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on December 28, 2007
in Economics, Ron Paul and Small Business
. 1 Comment

Whew. The hustle and bustle of the holidays is starting to end, and boy do I have a passel of things to post about (though we’ll have to see if many of them ever see the light of day).

Most interesting to me is the news that Ron Paul has introduced a bill called the “Free Competition in Currency Act” (and let me tell you … finding the actual text of the bill, as opposed to just Paul’s speech introducing it, took a bit of Google digging).

It will be interesting to see just what happens with this particular bill. I can think of absolutely no good reason that the government should not allow competing currencies. I suspect that if people started exchanging actual gold and silver it might well further destabilize the dollar, but I count that as a positive thing since the Federal Reserve’s meddling with the money supply has essentially been defrauding people of the fruits of their labor for some time now anyway.

That defrauding is the exact reason that I’ve started to track the gold and silver markets and invest there. In fact, I’m even considering pegging the rates I charge for my business based on something like a 30-day moving average of the price of gold in USD. We’ll see where that goes, though …

Online Sales & Use Tax Filing for TN

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on November 19, 2007
in Small Business and Twitter Updates
. 0 Comments

Yes, I can’t sleep. Maybe because I slept from about 9:00 p.m. to midnight Sunday night. Anyway … I realized that I hadn’t received a sales & use tax filing form for the previous month … and the taxes are due tomorrow (Tuesday). So, I got out of bed, and went in search of a tax form on the TN Department of Revenue’s web site. Well, whaddya know … you can file the blasted thing online. Now why didn’t the DoR people tell me about that when I first got started with this mess in January?

One Giant Step for Four-Eight-Four Software Works

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on May 29, 2007
in Small Business
. 0 Comments

The beginning of June marks yet another important moment for my fledgling business … it will be the first month that I’ve hosted all of my client sites (as well as internal stuff) on my own equipment.

My first hosting setup was a virtual server with Linode. I can’t say enough good things about Linode … they provided me a true Linux VPS, let me install the distro of my choice on it, and provided nearly flawless service (outside of some hardware hiccups) for the duration of the time I was a customer … about a year and a half.

Unfortunately, by the end of the summer last year, it was becoming clear that the breadth of services I was offering my clients was too much for a single VPS to handle, so I started leasing a dedicated server, and set up a few virtual servers on it. Among other things, this allowed me to have VPS machines for both PHP4 and PHP5 sites, and I was (finally!) able to start developing in PHP5.

However, last month I became dissatisfied with the company that I had been leasing the server from, and as a result I began looking into other options, and for the first time seriously began to consider colocating my own machine.

I ended up ordering a dual-proc dual-core AMD Opeteron machine with 4 gigs of RAM from Dell, and I’ve got it colocated in downtown Chattanooga. At this point, I’m anticipating adding a second low-end rackmount machine to my setup in the next few months, mainly for the purpose of storing backups on a different machine … and I’m now going to be able to do my own off-site backups pretty easily. Today I signed up for a safe deposit box at a bank downtown, and once I get all the hardware I’ve ordered for the backup setup, I’ll begin taking full backups of the machines to the vault every two weeks.

As if this wasn’t exciting enough, in about a month, my brother is slated to become the first official employee of my company. He’s coming to town next week to find himself an apartment or house, and will be moving here around the first of July.

Things are starting to look really good. The first year and a half of this endeavor was hard, and the last six months or so have been … well, better … but now I’m starting to see that the momentum I thought I saw building around the end of last year has been sustained, and my growth has been consistent … and honestly, a little better than I had expected it to be by this time this year.

Now … maybe in a few months I can start looking for an actual office!

Saturday Wrap-Up

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on March 31, 2007
in Geeky Stuff, Getting Things Done, Life, Small Business and Work
. 0 Comments

Well, this Saturday almost went by without me doing any for-profit work. It did go by without me doing any for-profit programming work. What that means is a) I did do for-profit work, but not programming; and b) I did do programming, but not for-profit programming.

The not-for-profit programming work I did wasn’t extensive. I wrote a quick and dirty survey form for the church; the long-range planning comittee is trying to get an idea of what people in the congregation think needs to be done to improve our existing facilities. It may have taken me an hour and a half, if that much

On the for-profit end of the spectrum, what I did was continue to work on getting myself back into a good “Getting Things Done” rhythm … by forcing myself to learn a new GTD application I downloaded last week.

The application in question is iGTD. When I downloaded it a few days ago, it was at version 1.2.2. However, I went back to the web site to see what I could find in the way of documentation (more on that later) and was thrilled to discover that version 1.3 had been released today.

I haven’t done much with it so far except start entering tasks and processing them, but it seems like it’s on the right track. It’s definitely faster than Midnight Inbox … which isn’t much of an accomplishment, but hey … it does count.

Since giving up on Midnight Inbox in frustration a few months ago, I’ve been using OmniOutliner (without the Kinkless mod) to keep up with my task list. It’s basic, but all it does is allow me to group my tasks hierarchically. I don’t have any “inbox” or context-type functionality.

Yeah, I tried Kinkless, but I just can’t get used to it. Perhaps when Omni’s OmniFocus is done, it will be slick and worthwhile … but they’ve yet to produce a public beta yet (though all indications are that one will be coming soon).

For what it’s worth, Midnight Beep is promising an update to Inbox in the very near future … as in days, from what I’ve read. I’d love to use it, since the interface makes me drool … but I can’t abide (to use an old North Carolina expression synonymous with “can’t stand”) the glacial slowness and weird quirks of the current version.

iGTD does a number of things well … maintaining contexts and projects, letting you set priorities, etc. There is a nifty QuickSilver plugin that allows me to easily add items to my inbox with a few short keystrokes. For each item, I can add extensive notes to help me remember what I’m doing. I can drag and drop stuff into the program. It integrates with iCal, which is super-nifty.

The down sides … documentation is lacking. As in … there ain’t any, outside of some tips and tricks, and a limited discussion of features on the web site. It would be nice … but hey, it’s a free project, so you get what you pay for. And, in this case … you really get a lot, even despite the missing documentation. Also, when you process items in the inbox, there doesn’t seem to be any way to select a project to place them in, although the pane you’re working in seems to indicate that such a feature exists. Other than those things … it’s been smooth sailing so far!

Here’s a screenshot of iGTD, just for good measure:

igtd-1_3.png

I’m Not Really Absent-Minded After All …

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 17, 2007
in Getting Things Done, Life and Small Business
. 0 Comments

Last night I was sitting at Stone Cup talking with my mother-in-law about Getting Things Done (and other assorted topics directly or tangentially related to GTD) and suddenly I had an amazing revelation.

I’m not really absent-minded.

Yes, for those of you who know me, that probably is shocking, and you’re probably thinking that I’ve been smoking whatever Mike Nifong smokes during the day while he’s working as D.A. in Durham County, NC. I’m also well aware of the fact that I’ve sold myself as absent-minded for years now. But, hear me out …

The fact of the matter is that I’m remembering things I need to do now better than I ever have before. That’s saying a lot, because I had thought I was getting more and more absent minded as the years went by … last year I had a terrible time remembering everything I needed to do.

But … the problem wasn’t that my memory was faulty. The problem was that I was floating way too many tasks around in my head, and trying to keep up with all of them. The reason I thought things were getting worse is that my life has been getting ever more complex over the last three years or so. For instance:

  1. On November 27, 2004, I got married (see Rachel, I remember our anniversary!). Suddenly, I had to not only remember the tasks I wanted to do, but the tasks that Rachel wanted me to do as well. That probably increased the amount of things floating around in my head by at least 25%.
  2. On May 1, 2005, I entered the ranks of the self-employed … initially as an independent contractor, and of course now I’m a small business owner. Suddenly, I had to think of all sorts of mundane things I didn’t have to think about previously. At first, it wasn’t too bad … I didn’t have a lot of concurrent projects, so keeping up with things was easy. However … starting last year, my workload started to increase, and the number of projects I was juggling at any one time increased as well. So, I would say by the end of the year last year, being self-employed increased the number of tasks floating in my head by at least 75% of what it had been prior to May 2005.
  3. In mid-July 2006 (sorry, I don’t remember the date … but it could have been the 13th, because it was a bad day), I moved to Chattanooga. We are doing a lease-purchase on our house, and we are contractually responsible for any maintenance on the house. Things that I used to call my landlord to have fixed … I now have to worry about. Not a large jump in tasks, but a jump nonetheless.
  4. On October 1, 2006, our first child was born. I doubt any estimate of how much that increased my task load would even remotely be accurate. Factor in the fact that sleep is not always a given now … and things become even more complex.

So, what did I think of that prompted me to decide that I wasn’t really absent-minded? Well, two things.

First, as I was talking about how I was getting more things done around the house, I thought of a moment from earlier in the day, when I had been talking to Rachel. She had reminded me about some task she had asked me to take care of a few days before (something that was a regular event previously), and I replied that I already had it on my project list (without having to look), and then proceeded to list off about 2/3 of the other incomplete projects on the list she’d asked me to do in the last few days (something that would have never happened before … I’d never have remembered more than one or two of them). It actually amazed me (and Rachel too, I think) … because it wasn’t something I’d experienced in recent memory.

Then, I connected that event to a quote from David Allen in Getting Things Done:

The short-term memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized "stuff"—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term memory space. And as with RAM, there’s a limited capacity; there’s only so much "stuff" you can store there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

And then … I had one of those moments of complete clarity. I never was absent-minded. I was just carrying too much ’stuff’ around in my brain, and there never was any hope of me remembering it all.

The reason why I was able to instantly recall a good number of tasks on my ‘Home’ task list for Rachel yesterday was that I had reviewed my list entire list of projects and action items that morning, and the ones I recalled were the ones that I had made priority items.

In fact, the only times that Rachel has reminded me of something I wasn’t in some way consciously aware of in the last two weeks has been when I failed to follow the GTD method and write something down in one of my inboxes as soon as she asked me to do it.

Wow.

Thanks, David Allen!

p.s. My wife thanks you too!

Tags: ,

One Week with GTD

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on January 12, 2007
in Getting Things Done, Life and Small Business
. 0 Comments

I’ve had a big, busy week, which has resulted (as you may have noticed) in me not posting a single thing for the last five days or so. There are two major reasons behind this lack of updates. First, I have been incredibly busy because of the effect that Getting Things Done has had on my life. Second, my brother arrived on Monday and stayed all week, so I spent the vast majority of my non-working time hanging out with him and doing crazy stuff like watching Das Boot.

As I previously noted, I first started using David Allen’s Getting Things Done methods to organize my life last Friday afternoon. By this Tuesday, I felt like I had completely emptied my mind of any tasks that I had been storing there. The end result was a very, very long task list. In fact, it was much longer than I had anticipated it would be.

Despite the length of the task list, I still had a more productive week and I was better able to focus on my tasks than and time I can remember in my life. In my opinion, the main reason for this enhanced productivity and focus is the fact that by using the GTD methods, I was able to compile a single exhaustive task list that I could easily find and refer to whenever necessary. Not only did this mean that upon the completion of one task, I could quickly and effectively choose the next best task to work on based on the amount of time available and my priorities … it also meant that I had a visible reminder of how much I had to do, which made it much harder to allow myself to goof off and procrastinate.

However, despite my improved productivity, I wasn’t able to make as much of a dent in my task list as I would have liked. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing … previously, I had realized that at some point in the future, I would need to find one or more people to regularly help out with some of my tasks. As a result of having my unified task list, I was able this week to definitely determine that I’ve arrived at that point … and I was able to see that by having someone regularly work on some of my less advanced tasks, I would be able to be able to focus on other tasks and increase my overall profit.

You’ve probably heard that 95% of small business fail within the first two years. While that’s not true, 33% of them still do fail during that time period. Based on my financial records for the last one and a half years, I think I can say with a pretty good amount of certainty that I’m at least within the 66% that will succeed. However, I’m still at a critical point with my business.

Not only do I need to continue to grow my list of happy clients who want to continue to do business with me … I also need to continue to focus on providing services (by way of web app hosting, specifically an e-commerce application I’m working on), and focus as much as possible on programming, and less on tasks involving server administration.

Enter my brother.

While my brother was here this week, he spent some time helping me out with some of my tasks. So, I suggested he move to Chattanooga and start working for me as a contractor. Surprisingly enough … it looks as if he’s going to do that.

I’m going to start him out doing some small taks that I have on the table … mostly involving server maintenance. Hopefully, by having him here, I’ll be able to work with him and increase his PHP proficiency so that he can help me with programming projects as well.

This would be an ideal setup. Though he hasn’t done much PHP programming, he’s got experience doing server administration, and I know he has the ability to learn some advanced PHP concepts and be productive in short order. Besides … I can’t imagine who I’d rather have being a part of my business than my brother.

Now … the effects of the Getting Things Done methodology on my life don’t just stop with realizing I need help and being more productive. If you’ve read Allen’s book, you’ll probably remember that he says that in many cases, when he’s coached people in using his methods, once they cleared their minds of “stuff” they had very productive and creative periods.

I had that very experience Tuesday night.

Last Friday night, I located a pad of paper, a pencil, and a small flashlight by my bed, so that if I thought of anything at night while awake, I could immediately write it down. On Tuesday night, I hadn’t been in bed for more than about 15 minutes before I had a creative idea come to my mind … and I wrote it down. That started a period of productivity that lasted about an hour and a half. By the time I was done, I had filled nearly two pages of the pad with ideas related to projects I was working on as well as projects I have in the works. I was utterly amazed.

So … I’m pleased with GTD so far. Now I just have to find time to finish reading the second chapter, and then the book!