Year: 2009

Today I was driving to a meeting and for some inexplicable reason I started thinking about inertia.

Inertia is, of course, the tendency for an object in motion to stay in motion (or at rest) barring any external force. And I think all of us tend to have inertia in our lives. We do the same things (or don’t do things) not necessarily because they’re the “right” things or the “best” things, but rather because they’re the things we’ve been doing for so long that it’s just easier to keep doing them than to change and do something different.

Since my business is a big part of my everyday life, I tend to think about ways to improve it or expand it or just generally be more successful. And I wonder if I have too much inertia in the way I do business. I’ve been doing it more or less the same way for almost nine years now, and although I’m happy with my progress and proud of where I am, at the same time I can’t help but wonder if changing this or that would take me in new directions that would be even more rewarding.

The hard thing about inertia is overcoming it. I guess one of my New Year’s resolutions should be to do just that. And not just in business, but in my life in general. How many of my daily activities are nothing more than inertia? How many more great things might I be able to do if I overcome that inertia and move in a different direction?

Geeky thoughts from Slashdot:

Good question. Back in The Day, my trusty old Apple IIe booted in maybe 20 seconds, and most of that was spinning up the five-and-a-quarter disk drive. Now it takes ten times that long for my Linux system to present me with my KDE desktop. Yet the hardware is literally millions of times faster than it was back in the 1980’s.

Hmm.

I just got an awesome piece of spam titled Claim your share of Government BAILOUT!

Apparently it’s that easy! Get this little blue box (shown in the lower left corner) called the “Government Grant Kit” and you’ll soon be riding a yacht through an ocean of money. And your wallet will literally be spewing one-dollar bills.

Wait, one-dollar bills? Couldn’t they even get twenties for their hokey ad?

Snippets of a conversation between me and a designer friend of mine:

Me:

Her:

It’s funny only because it’s true. If it took me ten times longer (and I charged ten times as much) then I’d be just like the big agencies in New York and Los Angeles.

Today at lunch Tony posed a teaser question:

Today the phase of the moon is waning gibbous (meaning it was full just a few days ago, so it’s nearly full now but getting smaller each day). What’s the phase of the Earth as seen from the moon?

We debated it for a few minutes and basically decided it would be opposite. In other words, the Earth would currently be waxing crescent (small and getting bigger).

Tony joked that I’d have to look up the answer tonight to make sure, so indeed I did. Here’s what I found:

Props to Tony for a puzzler.

The other day I was down at the co-location facility where I lease space for my web hosting servers. I’ve been continually growing for the past few years, adding servers and other hardware to keep things running smoothly as the need for more capacity increases. I decided to take a few pictures of the servers so I can track everything for maintenance (and insurance) purposes.

When I looked at the photos I realized this whole setup looks like quite a mess.

And that’s only about half of the refrigerator-sized rack that I have: there are more servers (and wires) above the top of this photo, and a few below as well.

Amazing that things work as well as they do…

My friend Rick took a surprise trip to the hospital this weekend, and I texted him today to see if I could come over and visit. His response was awesome.

Hot nurses! A nice reclining bed! Jell-o for every meal! What’s not to like about the hospital?

A hilarious de-motivational poster that caught my eye:

Every now and then God looks down on His creation and decides that it’s time for a good ultimate game.

So yesterday, in His infinite wisdom, he graced us with an absolutely gorgeous day: sunny, 60 degrees, and a slight breeze (hey, He has to challenge us just a little bit). And fourteen of us headed out to the fields and had a great time.

Disclaimer– this photo wasn’t taken yesterday.

Of course it made me realize how out of shape I am; it’s been a few months since I went running around for a solid hour. But hey, at least I wasn’t the only one huffing and puffing on the field.

Now today it’s chilly, windy, and they’re predicting snow. So it goes. Hopefully the Almighty will give us another nice day next week.

Well, it’s that fun time of year again: the part where I have to send an estimated tax payment to the IRS. Since 2008 is over, I owe personal taxes against the profits of my corporation. And if I don’t pay them by January 15th the IRS gets all huffy and demands interest and other fees.

I always hate writing checks to the IRS, but these days it feels particularly hard because I know that my money is just going to get channelled to some big corporation who happens to have persistent lobbyists. So I decided that I might as well suck it up, face reality, and encourage the government to do what they’re going to do anyway.

I wonder if smart-aleck comments on your tax checks flag you for an audit…