Will Bridges

When the iPhone came out I really did want it. But I was curious if it was all hype and so I waited and the price dropped. I thought “cool, I’ll buy it next check I get”. Sure enough, a check came and I decided it was time for new tools & equipment. I put aside a certain amount of money for new tools each month and I had enough. New tools increase efficiency and allow me to do more. The iPhone was a great investment for many reasons. More importantly, because I love the iPhone so much my next computer will probably be a Mac Pro Desktop.

So, why was it a good investment? Well, it allows me to sync calendars and contacts through itunes. I can store all kinds of valuable map information. I have enough space to store all kinds of video, audio, and pictures. Come on, who can say “I’ve got the video of my first born son’s birth right here on my phone!”… me. I can buy music right on the phone. It hooks to wi-fi where I can surf the internet and full speed. The touch screen navigation is amazing. I love the keyboard. Texting in the old fashion never caught on well with me so I wasn’t used to it. The iphone is worth the cash. There’s a bunch of other features. Plus, with apple putting out a software developers kit for programmers to start building apps for it in February I can’t wait to see what other apps I can have at my finger tips.

Apple is an awesome company, even if they are closed source at least they listen to their customers and provide quality products. Microsoft needs to take a lesson from Apple’s success.

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There are really two major things to figure out in any business but especially in this business. You need to figure out how to get high quality clients who will pay a fair wage in and then you need to figure out how to best find the cheapest and highest quality labor to satisfy the work you have promised. Then you have to keep your labor force happy and employed. These may seem like easy things to figure out but they are most certainly not easy. I have worked for 8 years and have just now figured out a formula I am pretty sure I can make work in this industry at least for the next 5-10 years.

Being wealthy is about finding windows of opportunity and exploiting them. You cannot expect something to last forever and you have to constantly have to adapt your strategy to stay relevant. Even when you find a window of opportunity and are successfully exploiting it you should save and build for the next window of opportunity you come across. This is a constant effort of prediction, strategy and balance which can only end when you are ready to get out of business.

The great thing is I finally figured out what tools I need to grow, how I can catch up and overtake past difficulty and start really building my empire. Wish me success.

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I really don’t want to do a rant on things but I really feel like doing it. Here’s the thing about buying CDs. I ‘evaluate’ music by going and downloading it. I’m not saying I do this illegally but I do go and download music. Now, sometimes I do this before the release date actually hits and sometimes I do it afterwards. Most of the music I get is garbage and I don’t go buy it from the store. However, if I support the artist and love their album I will go buy the album as soon as it hits stores. I don’t feel that I buy less music because of the digital age. I just have become very picky about the music I buy. If your album sucks and only one song on it is good don’t expect me to go buy your album. I think what the RIAA is really pissed about is that the digital age has made it harder pull the wool over people’s eyes any more and make them buy crappy albums by having one hit single.

Their waving their fist saying “Damn you! Educated consumer! We’ll sue!”. Like it’s going to stop people from downloading music. All people will do is get more clever and technology will get better to make them less able to protect their garbage. You want money? Provide a good product at a reasonable price and the American consumer will buy it. (Or have an overwhelmingly strong marketing department… *wink* *wink* Microsoft).

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I’ve been told that most great advances have been out of necessity. I guess my next advancement is no different. I have truly a ton of information and tasks to do and almost no help. It will be my own personal evolutionary leap to take myself and my company to the next level with the resources I have and my own ingenuity. I believe that this is probably the quickest way to advance but also the most painful. Many people back off and give up when they are up against so much pressures. It’s when people step up and take the full force of a challenge that they become the next strongest person they can be. It’s when people back off and give up when they regress or become stagnant.

I’m sure this philosophy has made those who care about me think I’m constantly putting too much stress on myself and that eventually I will break. On the contrary, eventually I will find a way to figure out the problems, advance and learn to defer the stress. I’ve had friends who say I approach things very non-emotional and that it gives me a very inhuman quality. I’ve tried to press on to others that getting emotional doesn’t solve problems. It usually creates problems. If I feel something, I accept that feeling and understand that most negative outcomes are things that I could have prevented. If I feel negative I accept that the path I chose lead me to that negative feeling and take responsibility for that. This way, I’m always in control. I can never be a victim to any one or any external thing. I feel I’ve probably went over this in my blog before but I like talking about it because I see so many others fretting over their individual issues and feeling victimized. It bothers me because I see their pain is self-inflicted and no matter what I say they will continue to feel like they do and make it more difficult for themselves to move past issues. I don’t like seeing others in pain when I know they can prevent it as most people don’t.

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This past Saturday Ron Paul came to Nashville. I was able to go with Yendis (my girlfriend) and we had an incredible time. Ron Paul was an exceptional speaker to see in person and being there really motivated me to get more involved in the campaign. If you are interested in seeing what I saw. The War Memorial Auditorium was packed. They said they were turning people away. 1440 people showed up. It was really high energy. Here’s the full video of the Ron Paul rally below.

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I’ve been working with AllstarLoding.com for years now to improve their site and their business. They went from being relatively small and managing about 20 cabins to managing 100+ properties in about 3 years. I attribute a large part of their success to their website, of course! They now dominate their area in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and are still expanding. The company is also doing well because it’s run by a very sound business man, Carlos Ruiz. He has a lot of foresight and vision. I came to him a year ago when he was thinking about revamping the software I had built him. He wanted to go with an ‘out of the box’ solution and was researching the massive amounts of reservation software out there. I asked him to let me do it in Ruby on Rails and let me sit in on the demonstration for some of these ‘out of the box’ or pre-built solutions. I sat in and gathered all the information I needed to build a very solid reservation system in rails. Now, mind you, I was very new to rails at the time and I’m still cleaning up things that I should have done a different way but it was a learning process and I still created a magnificent piece of software, which is being improved on all the time.

I’m actually working to generalize it so it can be sold to other companies and re-used. There are parts that I built in a very modular fashion but some parts I built very specific to his business. So, now is the tedious part of generalizing, writing tests that should have been written (at the time I wasn’t doing BDD or TDD) and building test instances of the software. This software is not just a reservation system but a complete software solution to vacation rental management and I like to think of it as the tool to use for any vacation oriented business to take over their respective area.

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Generally, I trust everyone till they give me evidence that they cannot be trusted. A lot of people say ‘trust no one’ and make people earn your trust. But, I make people earn my mistrust. I have a problem with ‘trust no one’ because it gives the impression that most people are bad and out to get you. If you believe that way I think you draw those types of people to you. Everyone should be innocent till proven guilty. Even when people break my trust I tend to look at their circumstances closely. You can only expect a person to act a certain way given their circumstances don’t change drastically. Given the wrong circumstances even a good man can do evil things. There are no evil people but evil actions are widespread. You’re good could be my evil and my evil could be your good. Life is relative that way.

I do have a certain level of assumptions that the people I associate with will act a certain way. However, I don’t expect those people to always act like that and when they don’t act the way I assume they will I closely look at their circumstances and ask myself “Would I act that way given those circumstances were upon me?”. If the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ then I’m understanding but I may tell them I am displeased. However, if the answer is ‘no’ I will let them know I wouldn’t act like that towards them and don’t want them to act like that towards me. I believe this way gives me more empathy and allows me to be very diplomatic. It’s problematic to have solid expectations of people because if you know them long enough they will let you down and you will find yourself very disappointed. If you act on that disappointment without thinking about being in that person’s place then you could lose some very good friends, allies and supporters.

It can be difficult to have faith that most people are actually kind hearted and well intentioned but I’ve seen for the most part that is true. Others will help you if you are willing to help them without question. Have a little faith and a positive outlook and you will draw others in your life that have faith in you and have that same positive outlook. If you are always looking for what you can get out of people then people will do the same to you and you will always come up hungry, without fulfillment and short handed.

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I jumped on the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) band wagon for development not to long ago. Also, before that, when doing Test Driven Development (TDD) I worked at this company called Outdoor Central. They had it setup where if you committed code to subversion and the tests failed the whole group would get an email saying that you broke the build. That was entertaining and worked okay. But, what if I don't want a commit to be put in if the specs/tests don't pass. Well, that's why I built a pre-commit hook script in ruby and put in in subversion. Now, when someone checks in the server checks out the most recent version of the respository to a temporary location, applies the subversion changes via 'patch' to the temporary check-out and then runs specs against it. If they don't pass it doesn't let them commit. If it does pass they get to move on right along. It's pretty cool. Further it emails me, the admin, a pretty html report of the rspec results so I can see what's going on. I was thinking about implementing an rcov email with every successful commit too but I don't see a need for it yet. However, if you would like to implement it, go ahead. Heres's the scripts for my pre-commit hook:

#!/bin/sh

# PRE-COMMIT HOOK # Save as 'pre-commit' without the .txt in the hooks directory of the subversion repository

REPOS="$1"REV="$2"

# Might need explicit path to ruby instead of just 'ruby'ruby /path/to/runtests.rb "$REPOS" "$REV"

http://wp.invisiwill.com/files/runtests.rb

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So, my partner has left the organization and the flood of incoming work occurs. I still have him part-time at about 80-100 hours per month. But, the lack of a full-time programmer is something I'm handling in stride. It does mean that until I find an accpetable solution to my human resources problem I will be wary to accept new projects without start dates that put the start of any new projects in November at this point. But, it doesn't mean I can stop the company's natural progression. So, there's a fine balance between work load and ability to do that work load. However, now that I have less time all the possible clients are coming out of the wood work with new work. It's like someone turned the faucet higher after I just went to get a smaller bucket to receive the water. But, you know, life must go on and I cannot fret too much about more business.

I do have a very strong candidate I am interested in for my partner's replacement but I'm still unsure if he will be coming aboard or not. So,temporarily, I'm going to post an ad on jobs.rubynow.com and look for some contractors that may be worthwhile. This has turned out to be less than useful in the past but it did provide some very good information on the market forces in regard to Ruby on Rails work. This time I actually intend to find someone. I think it will go a lot smoother. And hey, it's free to post a job offer.

I find myself looking at my new computer system setup and realizing that it has improved my efficiency. I don't doubt my ability as a good business man never doubts his ability but still seeks to improve it. I feel very positive about what's going on right now and I feel that this is a golden era for my company and my family. I know that I will still need to find someone soon that has even more to bring to my company than my old partner. But, hopefully a new set of tools (computer system) and a new outlook with a fresh chance to go back on my own for a couple months may be just what I need now.

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I have now, fully functional:

2 Computer systems (laptop: compaq C571NR, $450 retail & 2 year old desktop, cheap, custom built)
2 Operating systems: Latop is running ubuntu linux and desktop is running Windows XP
3  Monitors (22 inch widescreen acer p221w, $330 retail, laptop 15.4 inch monitor and old 19 inch flat screen monitor from wal-mart  $200 about a year ago)

I have all 3 screens and both computers running at the same time. I am using a program called Synergy to be able to use my keyboard and mouse on my laptop and be able to navigate both systems. (Can copy and paste from windows to linux and back, awesome!)
The laptop was a bitch to get working with the proper resolution (1680×1050). Had to hack it but got it working and that took some time but it works now. I'll put the documentation at the end of this on how I got it working.
I have a 750GB external hard drive that cost me $200 at Best Buy, watch those sales…
I have a logitech camera (5000 pro or something) Using it on xp. It was like $70.
I have surround sound logitech speakers. Can't remember cost but less than $50.
I have an HP Officejet 5610 all-in-one which works great with windows or linux. It was about $100 or so when I bought it.

So, on the cheap. Maybe a combined value of $1400 I have one of the best systems I've had in years and can be mobile because of my laptop. A truly incredible combination.

• Ubuntu, of course… http://www.ubuntu.com
• To get the laptop working I followed this document…  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=560087
• To get the monitor working I followed this document but had to modify it for my monitor slightly… because they are not the same. I have an acer p221w but if you use common sense and a little know-how this article will help http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2702458
• Got synergy working…  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynergyHowto & for the latest version stuff (maybe not necessary but I started here) http://eightpence.com/install-latest-synergy-on-ubuntu/

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