fromjumpstreet.com - Learning and Relearning Computers and the Web

I believe the headline comes from Pastor Robert Schuller. I’m not taking time to check.

The last 12-18 months have been incredibly tough. Florida Incorporators, my bread-and-butter business since the mid ’90s is experiencing very tough times. A St. Louis Fed graph tells the tale, showing “self-employment” plummeting in the fall of ‘07. It has not recovered, and incorporations are way down.

I’m developing a number of business ideas right now, working on each in the hopes that a clear frontrunner will emerge. Some are related and dovetail with each other, others are standalone:

markhankinslaw.com - a basic offering of my services as a business, tax, and estate planning lawyer

textament.com - online sales of a digital Bible translated into text message speech.

leadprompter.com - a business that buys PPC clicks wholesale and sells leads retail

northoftampa.com - a local social media portal for the northern part of the Tampa Bay Area

financialhopeseries.com - the site from which I plan to sell “Debt Hope: Down and Dirty Survival Strategies” an e-book for those with serious debt problems.

eChirpy.com - a service that allows users to e-mail mini-blog entries which are then tweeted out to their twitter followers

There are also a couple of other ideas lurking: a foreclosure clean-out service (this would require the Bay area’s woes to become much worse for it to be seriously needed) and a “Geek Squad” type service to provide help with home technology (a friend who possesses all the skills is currently out of work).

Each day I try to spend my time in the best possible way to move one or two of these a few yards down the field. Some days go better than others. I do a lot of praying now.

After all these years of having my own thriving business, it’s tough to reinvent, and I wrestle with the need to potentially re-enter the job market in order to keep food on the table.

But in the end tough times never last. Tough people do. I’ll do whatever I have to do.

George Will undoubtedly needed a provocative piece to keep his name in the news, so echoing  a Wall Street Journal diatribe by Daniel Akst he has assaulted an American shibboleth: blue jeans, calling them “the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances” and childish to boot. He blames them for what’s been going wrong with the world since the French Revolution, as though things were perfectly peachy when Marie Antoinette thought the solution to peasant starvation was for them to eat cake. Indeed, his thoughts remind me of Lady Bird Johnson proposing a beautification program in America’s ghettos (singer Eartha Kitt told her off right in the White House, and Will needs to get an earful too).

Of course, the antithesis of blue jeans (for daily purposes anyway) is the power suit. Dark blue, grey or black, pinstriped or chalkstriped, accessorized strictly in accordance with John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success and its spiritual progeny, it has brought America such blessings as Worldcom and Enron, Fannie Mae and Bear Stearns and ultimately the entire financial crisis and near-depression. Among the schemers, thieves and fraudsters you’ll hardly find a pair of Levis … no, all of these jokers wore Brooks Brothers suits on Wall Street and in the halls of Congress. Meanwhile, young people in blue jeans rejected communism and were the ruin of the Soviet empire.

The guys who show up to work every day at GM and Chrysler to build the crap cars that have had the souls that were put in by talented engineers and designers ripped out by suit-wearing bean counters wear–you guessed it: blue jeans. The people at Apple who design and sell products that provide one of the few bright spots in our economy go to work in what else?: blue jeans. Same goes for Microsoft. George Will decries the false egalitarianism that blue jeans seem to provide and perhaps he has a point. Maybe we would all be better off if that investment banker had to give up his disguise. Because this time, people who call themselves businesspeople really were the perpetrators of massive financial crimes, and it’s the people in blue jeans who are having to live with their consequences. He seems to want us all to disguise ourselves as them so they can once again blend in … or at least to put a pretty face on a sick patient.

Maybe he thinks he can revive the rag trade. Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada deftly humanized and explained the raison d’etre for an otherwise monstrous woman as providing a little excitement in the lives of ordinary women while keeping the factories and printing presses humming. After all, you can get a good five years out of a pair of blue jeans, and that just doesn’t juice up consumption.

George Will has had his say. And I doubt he has swayed a single American to give up blue jeans. We’ll wear our blue jeans because we strive to be a classless society, knowing that classes, castes and other social divisions were what made Europe and other parts of the world sick places that decent people wanted to escape. That big statue in New York Harbor has nothing on its plaque about skimming the cream of the crop from countries content with their quality of life. We’re looking for the people who want to strive for something better. And the suits better watch out: we’ve got our eyes on you!

Here’s something fresh: A search engine that displays the pages it finds about your subject scattered around a semantic map (represented as clouds of varying sizes that gather together related terms). http://www.kartoo.com/

It reminds me quite a bit of a site I formerly happened upon occasionally that graphically showed the connections to any person whose name you would enter. The site wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done, unlike what the FBI has apparently been working with. On Coast To Coast AM a few nights back George Noory interviewed author Peter Lance, who bemoaned the destructive corporate culture at the FBI as well as their information systems, which apparently are designed *not* to be effective (and any agent who uses an outside resource to do a better job is at risk for reprisal from an upper-management type who doesn’t want to be made to look bad).

Oh yeah …. that site was http://www.namebase.org

So it seemed very important to me that the Textaments be available on Mobipocket.com. There were just a few hangups, some of which I found out later rather than sooner. I signed up for a Mobipocket account and downloaded the Mobipocket Creator software, then took the Textament .PDF files and imported them in the software. PDF files are not Mobipocket’s favorite way to go, however I decided to give it a try rather than import the Microsoft Word files one at a time. What could go wrong, I figured. Unfortunately, I was not able to create tables of contents and the program would hang when I tried to finalize a file. After a couple of days of frustration I discovered on Mobipocket’s forums that Mobipocket Creator isn’t compatible with Windows Vista. Luckily, all I have to do in a circumstance like that is turn around and use an older XP box that is sitting right behind me. But because of other duties it took me a couple of days to get around to downloading the software onto that machine and getting to work on the files over there.

A second headache that presented itself was Microsoft Word’s messy way of making HTML files. Believe it or not the files wound up back in Microsoft Word for editing before being finalized in Mobipocket Creator, though they were in HTML and not native Word files at that point. Mobipocket uses HTML as the basis for the files that ultimately wind up in the .PRC format, and for Mobipocket’s purposes the cleaner the better–without styles and CSS. Although Microsoft Word doesn’t use CSS, it does make extensive use of defined styles, as well as throwing in metadata and a lot of random tags with nothing in between them.

Fortunately, a user named JVOG had posted a fix to the Mobipocket Forum in the form of a VisualBasic script and even described how to use it. Unfortunately, it was cut off in mid sentence and lacked the handful of commands needed to close it out and write the final output file (chance are it was also missing a lot of the commands that clean up the HTML, but I wasn’t too worried about that). I needed the script to work. I don’t know any Visual Basic, but because the program created, saved (and then destroyed) two temporary files in the course of doing its work, there was just enough information there for me to dope out what VisualBasic needed in order to close out the loops and write the final file.

I had also downloaded the ConText text editor, so between Microsoft Word, Context, and the Mobipocket authoring software I was ultimately able to convert the Textaments into Mobipocket format and upload them to the Mobipocket site and activate them for sale to customers.  You can download them here if you would like: http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/searchebooks.asp?Language=EN&searchType=All&lang=EN&searchStr=textament

One user on the Mobipocket forums described uploading revised versions of his books numerous times, and that’s what I will have to do as well. For instance, there is still no table of contents yet.

Last Friday I traveled to Orlando with a family friend to Inc. Magazine’s Grow Your Business Expo (known as Growco) as an invited guest. I had been contacted by Athena Schindelheim and asked if I could pass the word along in some way so I included mention of Growco with the billings I send for my annual registered agency renewals. Later I was contacted by Brent Williams, the Marketing Manager and he offered to comp me and a guest or two, so I included Tina Walker of First Data/Colonial Bank when I went on Friday. First Data is a large credit card processor. 

The venue was the JWMarriott Grande Lakes not too far from Universal Studios. It is a massive hotel with first-class conference facilities. Inc. Magazine was sharing about half the facility with Holland & Knight, the undisputed 800-lb gorilla of Florida law firms.

I wish I could comment on Thursday’s program, but I just couldn’t spare two days out of my schedule. So let’s get straight to Friday. First up at 8:30 was Keith McFarland, author of “The Breakthrough Company,” which explores exactly what it takes for a growing company to achieve market dominance and tremendous growth, and “Bounce”, about companies that have survived tough times. One observation he made was that many of these companies are one and the same … those that break through typically have had to develop extraordinary discipline and focus to survive one kind of existential threat or another. After a short video that illustrates perceptual distortions in business, Keith described the manager’s role as that of absorbing the troops’ anxiety about what’s going to happen to them and replacing it with anxiety about what’s going to happen to them if they can’t effect change in the company, as well as managing money appropriately by cutting things that aren’t working early rather than cutting late and across the board in a misguided focus on perceived “fairness”.  

He pointed out that in many cases the company will need a facilitator to draw out the employees’ real knowledge and wisdom. As an example, he pointed out that a contestant on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire will improve his position to 50% accuracy if he uses the 50/50 option for help. Phone-A-Fried is right 60% of the time. But polling the audience produces the correct result 90% of the time. However, only with a facilitator will the company have the right process to get the right result.

As for the makeup of those employees, Keith pointed out that the best companies spend 10% of their effort finding the right people and 90% of their effort grooming and retaining those poeple for years and years.

Keith was followed by a panel made up of Inc.’s Bo Burlington, World Poker Tour founder Steve Lipscomb and Jack Stack, the CEO of SRC Holdings Corp.

Steve describe how World Poker Tour has had to reinvent itself, because the TV money is gone and so they are now entirely sponsorship based. He bemoaned the fact that the Justice Department is making minimal efforts to enforce the anti-internet gaming laws on the one hand, while as a publicly traded, legitimate company he can’t get involved in it at all on the other hand. For his part, Jack described competitors who cut too much during tough times as the competitors who will be outsourcing their functions to your company when they can no longer service their customers as they once could.

Tina and I attended a breakout session by Mike Faith, the founder of Headsets.com, who described how to grow through Customer Love. Essentially, his company had plateaued and he realized that you’ve either got to charge twice the price or give half the service. He decided to focus on service. As a result, he began to measure customer satisfaction and to focus on choosing phone reps who could stand to sit still all day on the phones and smile while doing it, as well as pass periodic tests about product lines and policies. Instead of measuring the length of their calls and driving them to keep them short, he measured whether customers thought they gave outstanding service and got rid of the ones who didn’t–including the automatic attendant. He put all of his key staffers’ names and e-mail addresses right on his website for any customer who had a problem or question to contact. Every year he sends customers a thank-you letter–minus any sales pitch. Mike also advocated being your own customer … calling and using your own website to make an order from start to finish (actually receiving and inspecting the package rather than abandoning the cart before checkout).

Finally (for us) we attended another panel sessionwith Christos Cotsakos, founder and CEO of Pennington Ventures and Gay Gaddis, CEO of T3. Gay recommended highly LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, and described her internal social network, “The Tank” built on Jive software’s platform. Cotsakos recommended converting the unproductive time that employees are surfing the internet and playing games into social networking time … the employees will still be recreating rather than working, but their recreation will have benefits for the business. He mentioned that social networking’s next frontier is mobile phones because there is a 4-1 ratio of mobile phones to PCs. Although Cotsakos didn’t discuss it, Korea is the undisputed leader in this area … their mobile phones will alert you to the presence of a member of the opposite (or same) sex nearby whose dating profile dovetails with yours and even cause both phones to ring. Also you can have a feature on your mobile phone there that will pick out your friends as dots on the map. Cotsakos pointed out that it’s free to be on social networks and that they provide extremely low-cost marketing platforms to any business. He cited the surprising statistic that at 175 million users, Facebook would be the world’s 5th largest country. He advocated collecting prospects’ e-mail addresses and delivering periodic e-mails that they would find valuable … if opt-out ratio creeps above 1%, the messages are either too frequent or not helpful enough to the recipient.  Gay stressed updating a website’s content frequently because search engines like new content, and also adding Google Analytics to the site. She pointed out Angie’s list, Yelp and Citisearch as websites important to businesses. She pointed out that video blogging could best be done with a $300 Flip Video camera that is designed for immediate uploads to websites like YouTube. She also advocated website owners spend the money for an SEO Audit and described ihandy.biz as a site she admired for its simple, focused approach.

Tina and I unfortunately had to return to Tampa and our respective family responsibilities before we could hear Ping Fu, a computer pioneer who worked on the Mosaic project that ultimately became the Netscape Navigator browser and who has founded a company that amazingly can take a 2-d photograph of an object and render it as a 3-d engineering drawing. Since she did so without the benefit of formal schooling, I’m sure it would have been a fantastic story to hear.

I’m also leaving out a handful of very interesting people we met among the vendors and at our lunch table … one of the contacts I made could well affect what you see on TV in the near future (don’t worry, you won’t have to look at me).

In a post entitled “Retreat!” Christian blogger Tim Challies decries the ubiquity of cell phones and texting among Christian youth, rightly noting that they can’t stand going a few minutes without talking or (nowadays) texting. The martial art of Judo teaches us to use an opponent’s own weight and momentum against him, and a small group at the Willow Bend Community Church of Lutz, Florida has figured out one way to do just that by translating the entire Bible into mobile message text. A confession here: it was my wife’s idea, she discovered a way to do it as well, and I actually did it. We have created a site to sell d Old Textament and d New Textament at Textament.com. A Mobipocket version will follow soon.

Technorati Profile

First, I want to thank Trevor Turk, Eldorado’s creator who chimed in with a comment a couple of posts ago. He must have an RSS feed from Technorati that caught my posts and afforded him the opportunity to make a comment that eventually sent me down the right path.

Briefly, I had Eldorado in two folders on my development machine’s Ubuntu drive partition dedicated to Rails development. Only I hadn’t clearly understood that at one point, and at another point (or more) I had taken steps in Trevor’s README file in one place or another, but never consistently in both. To top it off, I had bollixed a “rename” in Trevor’s README file (because I was looking at it in Microsoft Notepad and all the paragraph breaks were ignored so all the text was run together). This caused me to copy config/database.example.yml to config/database.yml2 when the latter should have been config/database.yml.

So I concluded that the Eldorado folder under the “root” folder was hopelessly buggered and I copied the contents of the relatively unscathed Eldorado folder that was under the system’s root (and not under a folder named “root”) to the root folder. Then I performed the steps as outlined in the Eldorado Readme file and Eldorado loaded and ran flawlessly.

There was no need to edit any “routes.rb” file. Nonetheless I will be needing to edit, so my advice to newbies is to make sure you learn the following:
1. Make sure you either load a Ubuntu distro that has the GUI on your Rails development machine or on a separate machine on your network.
2. Make sure you understand permissions and set up an icon that invokes nautilus and gksudo so that you can have admin status in your GUI session.
3. Know how to “mount” a drive from within the GUI session so that you’ll be able to reach your Rails development folders on the separate partition while still in the GUI session.
4. Load a basic editor like Emacs that gives you a simple editor in your GUI session. If you’re ready to
pay for something more advanced, Radrails would probably be the pick.
5. Know how to log in as the “root” user on the non-GUI partition where the Rails environment lives.
6. Know how to change directories (the CD command, just like good ol’ MS-DOS) under Linux.

If you get those basic things under control you will save a lot of time and headaches.

For the moment I have to back-burner the project I’m working on though and pay more attention to some quotidian billing concerns at my business.

Well, since my last post I started eldorado running using the “script/server” command and got this:
“NameError in WwwController#index
uninitialized constant WwwController

RAILS_ROOT: /root/eldorado”

Apparently it’s the result of the default route I set up in the routes.rb file “map.connect ”,
:controller => ‘www’” which was supposed to “work like a charm”

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/70135

Not so much. But getting rid of the statement entirely (and commenting out the two operant statements in the routs.rb file set me back to:

“Routing Error”

No route matches “/” with {:method=>:get}”So that wasn’t the solution.Now it was time to punt. This site said eldorado could be installed automatically.http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/10/20/automatic-production-railsThe trouble was, the “wget” command didn’t work on the Ubuntu install where rails lives.I’ll try to get that working next. 

I’ve been able to get a basic ruby on rails installation to boot, however in order to get my chosen package, Eldorado installed it hasn’t been easy. I downloaded Eldorado from the http://almosteffortless.com/eldorado/ website. Then I unzipped it on my PC and wrote it to a CD-ROM. Trouble started after that. I got a quick hard, lesson in LINUX permissions, as Ubuntu wouldn’t let me load Eldorado onto the hard disk. Finally, I found a page that taught me how to make an icon called “root” on my Ubuntu desktop that would log me in temporarily as the root user (a status that the user on the Ubuntu desktop does not have, just as the Vista user doesn’t have “admin” access unless he specificially invokes it).  I created a root access Icon using this set of instructions: http://www.instructables.com/id/creating_desktop_shortcut_for_root_permissions_in_

More detailed discussion of how to get temporary root access is here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

Once I did that, I was able to launch Firefox in ubuntu, download the Eldorado zip file, and unzip it to the newly created “Eldorado” folder on the partition set aside for Ruby, which got the ball quite a bit further down the field.

So Eldorado’s creator, ‘foo’ included four instructions for how to get the thing going:

1) Copy config/database.example.yml to config/database.yml

(I was able to do this)
2) Create your database (”rake db:create”)

This one went wrong … the database work hadn’t been done, so I had to get mysql3 going. The error message was “no rule to make target” and the fix was described here: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/aa726882c3bbb2e6?fwc=1 Specifically, I needed to issue two commands:

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

3) Load the database schema (”rake db:schema:load”)

This step worked.

4) Start your web server (”script/server”)

And the web server could be started. That’s where things got murky again, because the standard Ruby welcome screen came up and said to do three more things:

1. Use script/generate to create your models and controllers

   To see all available options, run it without parameters.

2. Set up a default route and remove or rename this file

   Routes are set up in config/routes.rb.

3. Create your database

   Run rake db:migrate to create your database. If you’re not using SQLite (the default), edit config/database.yml with your username and password.

I was pretty sure that 1) had already been taken care of, leaving 2) and 3). Trouble is, the newbie has no idea where “this” file is and no idea how to set up the default route.

“This” file is /public/indx.html.

There is some help on the default route problem here:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/70135

I’m working on the problem now but I don’t have the answer yet.