Lately I'm beginning to see ads for "Slashdot Personals". Yay. I think I'd rather give homosexuality a try. Desperate OSDL marketeers ripping of desperate geeks on a site which is desperate for new "news". Woot!

I think the time has finally come to admit that I need help.

Not in the "I'm insane" way (though some of my friends would argue that ;) but in the "This business has grown too big for my britches" sort of way. The fact is that I need one of you sysadmin/programmer gurus to take me, a marketing/sales person, under your wing and grind out all these nifty little things to help me run my business better.

Here's what I'm looking for:
Absolute Requirements

Good grief, it's been a month since I've written here? Wow. I've been really busy. :)

Snopes.com has an interesting article up about LA County banning the use of the terms "Master/Slave" by its vendors (most commonly denoting hard drive arrangements.) A pretty fascinating read on how far political correctness has gone.

I've submitted it to Slashdot. We'll see what happens. ;)

The subject of electronic voting machines and ways to stop political parties from buying votes brings up several interesting questions.

What would you do in the following hypothetical situation?

-- As you're walking in to the polling place, a stranger pulls you aside. The stranger says, "I'll pay you $20 to vote for the Democrat candidate in this election."

What would you do if you had already planned on voting for the Democrat? Would you take the money anyway?

In the course of running a business, I've learned that one or two small mistakes can often ensure that your business doesn't do as well as it should (or could). It's amazing how much people talk on the Internet, and moreso than that, it's amazing how easy it is to be negative about things.

Slashdot has many great examples of this... just look at any TiVo article and you'll see three classic "disses" that are mentioned every time someone says "TiVo":

Where's that "Winders" topic icon... ah, yes, there it is...

Does it f'in annoy anyone else that you can't rearrange the icons on the taskbar in Windows?

Speaking of compulsive behaviors, I must have Outlook first in my taskbar. I always open it first when I start my computer.

Alright... here's an interesting one. I want to hear what you think, especially in light of Cringely's latest article.

One of my high-school friends runs a very informal mailing list that reaches out to graduates of that high school. He uses it to send out notices about the school, party invitations, and more. There are about 120 people currently on the list.

In one of my previous journal entries, Liora made a comment that I've been meaning to reply to for a while. She said, "The interest rates pretty much mandate it such that renting is just dumb. Rent is throwing money away."

This is absolutely true for most of the country. It's absolutely NOT true for the Bay Area (hence the alternate title.)

Well, I've had this rant about MySQL and the GPL bottled up for a long time. I hoped to have it modded up so more people could understand and hopefully enlighten me further about this issue, but it's been modded down as Flamebait (it stands at 1 currently.)

So I was in the car the other day, sitting in traffic, and I pondered what I was going to write about next. Should I wax philosophical about going to college vs. not, since it's back to school time? Should I ponder the deeper issues of using open-source software in a business? Should I talk about the GPL license vs. the BSD license and the merits of each, plus some ideas I've had about putting both to good use?

Yes yes, it's that time again. Not really, I'm just bored at the moment and after reading this bit about some porn peddler being governor of California, I decided it was time to update this thingy again! So, move over Larry Flynt, you amateur! Make way for the professionals!

One day, I stopped in the middle of a bunch of work.

I had been on the phone with clients and potential clients all day. I'd just signed a huge web design contract, I had a fair amount of money in the bank, and I'd finished setting up a new reseller server so Simpli could offer reseller hosting plans.

I'd just finished setting up our last dedicated RaQ 550.

I OKed a lease on a new condo (I'll be moving next month.)

Hey, so I finally got my friend/employee Devon to go post in his Slashdot journal. All together now... "HI DEVON!!!"

Hmm. Slashdot has no "me" icon. Guess I'll have to settle for "User Journal". How boring.

So, in the great saga of my life, I started a business. A lot of you probably know a bit about this, but I'll refresh your memory.

And so it came to pass that pornography became free! Enjoy and stop before it starts chafing, that'd look mighty awkward in the emergency ward. Not a pleasant idea. Maybe the masochists among us are more interested in that. Sandpaper anyone?