Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

I should probably have packed my suitcase for my trip sooner.

But one thing led to another this weekend and I ended up packing it in the wee hours of the morning. However, I did manage to get a fairly decent nap in before waking up to return to packing my bag. At least I won't be complete exhausted when I arrive in San Francisco.

I will be attending the O'Reilly Etel conference (for those of you that haven't been paying attention).

I am hoping that we will have a great week while we are out there, the past week ended up a bit of an up note, so continuing the streak would be nice. For the last month and a half or so I have been working diligently and occasionally until the wee hours of the morning on Jaduka's new DevZone. This new site combined with the new Jaduka API will be our focal point of the conference.

Well, I better get my bag in the car and myself on the road to the airport.

Laterz.

("30 Benjamins agree" is a reference to the "30 Helens Agree" sketch from Kids in the Hall.)

This post is brought to you courtesy of a story Jeremy just got done telling me.

Key Logistics (Jeremy's wife Nicole's family business) was recently shopping around for a new copier. In doing so they solicited bids from everyone Jeremy could find. He gave them all a list for features that he wanted and the various vendors came back with offers and bids.

They finally decided on a nice Ricoh copier (I will get the model number from Jeremy later), but it is a nice copier. It does scanning, printing, faxing, the works. Which is good for Key Logistics as much of their business model centers are the fax machine. The coolest feature that I think is that you can receive the faxes and have it email them to you, rather than waste paper printing them. The additional benefit of having a networked copier with fax capability is the fact you can digitally send a fax to it and have it send it out automatically.

The sales guy for a rival dealer that sells Minolta copiers was not happy that they signed the lease with the new vendor. I guess not happy isn't quite right, apparently they guy cried. Jeremy called me to tell me that the guy said he was coming back at 3 pm (eastern) to try and win the business back (the Minolta vendor apparently leased them their previous copier.)

I mean, OK, yeah it is the end of the month. So I would expect some pricing shenanigans or even possibly a sob story about how he needs the sale. I remember back one time at my previous employer, in a shipment I got from Cisco once we had all of this extra equipment (about $2M). I asked our sales guy "WTF". I was informed that the extra ($2M) equipment was going to be shipped right back, a few days after the quarter ends. Whatever, I wasn't the one in charge of the ordering.

Apparently, the Cisco rep had convinced our sales guy to agree to this, because not only was it the end of the month, it was the end of the quarter. This extra $2M would help him make his numbers, keep his job, and make that much needed extra commission money, or some such BS. All I know, is that I had to safeguard $2M worth of extra gear until it could be picked back up and taken to a secure facility.

But never anywhere in that whole transaction did anyone shed a tear. There was cursing and ranting yes, but no crying.

I mean I can applaud the guy for tenacity, a good sales guy has to have tenacity. A great sales guy knows when enough is enough, because your just embarrassing yourself (and ultimately the company that you represent.)

I mean, they already signed the lease with the other company, and they don't need two copiers. So why, why even come back at 3pm. Set an appointment for 4 years from now (when the lease runs up) and check in with them once a quarter to find out if they are being treated well or if they have need for additional equipment.

But whatever you do, for pete's sake keep your composure and don't cry. Even if it is the end of the month, that happens to be at the end of the quarter, that just happens to be the end of fiscal year, don't fscking cry.

Ok, I need to run out and grab a sandwich.

Laterz.

I need to get Gina to take pics of my hair now. I tried taking some but it is just too hard to get a good angle with my new camera.

The old camera had this handy little shiny button on it, that allowed you to line up a self portrait. Innovative.

Since I was playing around with my copy of Jasc's animation studio, here is another animated gif.

I think I am going to grow my hair out even longer than it was in this picture.



Night.

I have had the urge to watch Kids in the Hall lately. So much that I was looking at buying the DVDs.

I LOVE sketch comedy. The Kids in the Hall was one of the best sketch comedy shows out there.

However, I didn't necessary feel like owning the tv show, I just want to watch the show. Thus, Netflix to the rescue. I mean, they saved the day when I wanted to watch DS9.

So I have loaded up my queue with the 20 discs of Kids in the Hall.

I watched the first disc tonight as I ate dinner and worked on the computer. I got the urge to take some pictures. I tried my hand at making some animated gifs.



I tried to crush my trusty dog bud, but just couldn't bring myself to finish the deed.



I am sure that the blog is in store for some Kids in the Hall quotes as I watch the show.

Laterz.

I still have some congestion in my sinuses but overall I am feeling worlds better.

So much better I stayed up till 3am on Sunday night coding on the DevZone.

I got a lot done in the last 2 hours.

I definitely have a long day ahead of me tomorrow. But thanks to the work I did tonight it should be much easier.

I got the new DevZone to the point where it calls the api methods to create JadukaDeveloper. I got the functionality built in to allow folks to log out, and log back in. (Essential things)

There is some stuff that I have had to cut corners on, like page redirects. However, I coded in some fail safes that should keep folks from hitting refresh and getting an unexpected reaction.

I have to say that without mod_rewrite this project would have taken much, much longer.

Well, I am going to go and hit the hay.

I see that Jeremy weighed in, down to 281. A round of applause for my buddy Buddha. He is sure to break out of the 280s any time now, which means that our battle royal will begin soon. And needless to say, I am not prepared. But such is life, I will get my ass in gear and give it my best.

"Do or do not, there is no try." - Yoda

Sorry, HBO has had the Star Wars movies in high rotation the last couple of weeks.

Night,
Laterz.

I first heard about RSS at the Nexpo trade show almost 2 years ago.

At the time I dismissed it as just something related to newspapers. In part that could be because of how it was pitched at the trade show, in regards to the ability to syndicate content.

Notably, my interest in things that were Web 2.0, was not yet what it is today, I am not even sure that the term Web 2.0 was in full swing yet. But I have to say that RSS is fscking sweet!

It is so very, very useful. There has been a lot of news lately about feeds, given Yahoo's recent launch of its new web services "experiment" Pipes.

I have been using the Google Personalized Homepage for about three or four months. I configured feed objects for some blogs that I liked and of course the weather.

Today, I was poking around and reading something about Google. And saw that I could get a "Add to Google Button" for my site. The button allows folks to more easily add my blog as a feed to their Google Personalized Homepage or Google Reader.

Anyway, if you haven't tried out the Google Personalized Homepage or an RSS feed reader in general, you should check it out.

Laterz.