Archives for 2010

It’s great to be a Barbershopper!

October 6, 2010 by Leave a Comment

The Barbershop chapter that I’m a member of — the Ridgewood Cavaliers of Harmony — recently performed at the Belmont PAC at Cedar Crest on September 26, 2010. Lucky for us, Shirley Keller had recorded our performance and generously provided us with a copy, which I was able to chop up and upload to YouTube.

So, if you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing every Monday night for the last few years at rehearsals … this is it! And, if you’re interested in checking us out and possibly joining us in singing some songs, or if you’d like to book us to sing at your venue or event, let me know! I’d love to hear from you.

Filed Under: Barbershop, Music, New Jersey Leave a Comment

October is Breast Awareness Month

October 4, 2010 by 2 Comments

Causes come and go, but Breast Awareness Month is a keeper.

In support of such a good cause, I’m trying to be extra-aware this month of all the lovely breasts I see! Please, don’t get all bent if I’m staring at your chest — I’m just doing my part to support the cause!

Can you imagine what life would be like in a world without boobs? Sad, sad indeed.

pink-ribbon-pasties.jpg

Oh, and apparently those pasties pictured above are available for sale on eBay.

Filed Under: NSFW 2 Comments

Should I start another blog?

October 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

So, lately I’ve been thinking … maybe I should create another blog. One that is totally separate from this one and as anonymous as possible.

You know that saying, “if you’re shocked by what I do say, you couldn’t begin to imagine the things I’m thinking that I won’t say.” Yeah, it totally applies to me. But, I’m realizing that I really need an outlet to get those things out and share them, despite the fallout they’ll create.

…

I’ve been sitting on what I wrote above, thinking about it more and more. Then, the synchronicity of Chris Brogan’s latest post, “Don’t Be Chris Brogan“, helped me make my decision.

Screw it. This is my blog, for better or worse. Writing here is supposed to be mine. My intent isn’t to drive away readers, but at the same time, if I’m not putting 100% of myself into everything I write and post, I’ll never be happy with it. And, it’ll show. And, I won’t write as much, because I’ll always be doubting whether I should post it or not. And, the stuff worth posting might not get posted and that would be a real shame.

I guess consider this fair warning that, from here on out, Dossy’s Blog is going to be my space to publish whatever I feel I need to get out there. If it strikes a nerve with you, I welcome you to either respond in the comments, or if it really bothers you, stop reading. But, I just can’t do what I’ve been doing. It’s just not working for me.

Filed Under: Blogging, Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy! Leave a Comment

Eleven years ago, today

September 25, 2010 by 2 Comments

September 25, 1999 … Looking back, I can’t believe it’s already been 11 years. (That’s ridiculous. It’s not even funny.) It was a time of incredible flooding. Google came out of beta. 1999 was The Year That Changed Movies. Y2K was quickly approaching.

… and, Samantha and I became legally married.

Dossy and Samantha wedding picture

It hasn’t been an easy eleven years, and I suspect the next eleven won’t be, either. But, they’ve been great in all aspects of the word, and I have no doubt that trend will continue.

I’ve been blessed with a beautiful and amazing wife. She has given me two very special daughters who have changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. I could never have gotten this far without their love and support.

Samantha, I love you so very much. Happy anniversary.

Filed Under: Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy!, Family 2 Comments

In the car, on the bus, revisited

September 18, 2010 by 12 Comments

So, my friend Gabrielle asked on Facebook:

Why do people say IN the van or IN the car but ON the bus? Why not IN the bus?

Seriously, this is such an oddity of English, one that must have come up before and certainly have been researched and answered by someone of authority, right?

Well, the best I could find searching the web was this entry in the old Language Log blog at UPenn which describes the phenomenon but doesn’t quite explain it. Not being satisfied by this dead-end, I decided to try and come up with a plausible explanation, myself.

What I came up with was this: “In my opinion, if you can ride while standing on a vehicle, you ride on the vehicle. If you must ride sitting, you sit in the vehicle.” This seems to hold for most of the examples cited in the Language Log entry linked above, except for bikes, which you certainly ride on, but ride while seated.

I guess I’ll have to admit that I’m a closeted wanna-be linguist, because I find languages so interesting. I’d venture to guess that most above-average intelligence native English speakers can naturally choose the correct preposition, either “in” or “on”, when referring to modes of transportation, but how do we do that? It seems natural and innate but there’s no way to codify a rule that describes its correctness? How can that be?

What do you think? Can you see a rule or set of rules that correctly describes the proper preposition in all these situations? Do you have insight into how we can naturally determine which preposition to use, but fail to express concise rules for such selection? Do you even care about this at all?

Let me know in the comments below.

Filed Under: Geeking out, Linguistics, WTF 12 Comments

The first sale doesn’t count

September 13, 2010 by 3 Comments
People waiting in line to enter a building.
(Flickr: dominicspics)

When I used to do freelance work, I’d focus on getting it done and wrapping it up then moving onto another project. I’d seek out projects that, once complete, had a minimal amount of ongoing maintenance. Basically, once I was done with a project, that was usually the last I’d hear from the client, despite the glowing praise that they’d give me at the end.

In other words: I sucked at sales.

But, how is that possible? I’d find clients, engage them, close the sale and deliver the goods! Sounds like I’m a great salesperson — there’s plenty of sales people out there who can’t even do this much, right? Sure, I might not be the worst salesperson ever, but I forgot the golden rule of sales.

The first sale doesn’t count.

Huh?! “Of course it does,” you’re probably thinking. “You got their money, why doesn’t it count?” Let me explain …

Many years ago, my friend Peter, who I consider to be a master salesperson, when I first started freelancing, let me in on a little secret. He simply told me, “The first sale doesn’t count.” He went on to explain that anyone, willing to do or say anything, can get just about any qualified lead to buy at least once. However, the cost of new customer acquisition makes this an infeasible, unsustainable way to do business. The real money is in continued sales with existing customers.

I totally ignored this essential rule. Basically, I’ve been a wage slave, trading hours for dollars, except this time with only myself to blame. I wasn’t building a business, I was just earning money. And, for a long time, this was okay, because I had steady income and I had no reason to do things differently.

Now that I’m doing doing this full-time, without the safety net of that steady income, I’ve spent a lot more time studying what I do, figuring out what’s working and what’s not. I realized that I have to change the way I operate — the way I do business — and remind myself that the first sale doesn’t count.

So, what do I do, then?

I need to focus on improving my up-sell and cross-sell skills. I need to find ways of turning good customers into sources of continuous, incremental revenues. I need to invest my time in creating products that can generate passive income, so I can stop trading hours for dollars. I have to build a network of reliable contacts who I can hire to do the work that doesn’t necessarily require my direct involvement.

Sure, this all probably seems very obvious, but it’s surprised me how many entrepreneurs and freelancers I’ve talked to seem to have missed learning this vital lesson, myself included. Perhaps you’re making the same mistake, or you’ve moved past it or avoided it altogether. I’d like to hear your story in the comments below!

Filed Under: Business 3 Comments

Trying out the Genesis theme framework

September 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment

After all the fallout about Thesis, the premium WordPress theme that everyone loved so much, this past July and everyone’s mass exodus to the Genesis theme framework by StudioPress, I decided it was time I checked it out for myself.

Right off the bat, I’m pleased that Genesis is GPL’ed, it means I have the freedom to take it and do what I please with it, including building child themes that depend on it, and sell them.

So, how did I decide to give Genesis a try? By converting the theme for my own blog, dossy.org, to use it. Yup, might as well really live and breathe it and see how it wears, right?

screenshot.png

It took me about 2 hours to rewrite my theme using Genesis, which was really pleasant to use and flexible enough to suit my needs. Of course, my theme isn’t really elaborate and doesn’t have a lot of functionality, but I do have some peculiar bits that weren’t hard to reproduce in a way that would fit in with Genesis’s way of doing things.

If you’re looking to switch from Thesis or otherwise have a custom WP theme built using Genesis, this is definitely a service that Panoptic will now be offering. Lets talk and discuss how I can help you.

Filed Under: Panoptic, WordPress Leave a Comment

Three months later …

August 29, 2010 by 2 Comments
Money

Soon, it will be the end of the third month of my full-time self-employment. On one hand, I’m very pleased–business has been very good–but on the other hand, it still isn’t enough to cover all the bills, yet. Conservatively, I’d say I’m half-way to where I need to be on a monthly basis. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ecstatic about the progress I’ve made in just three short months! I also know that there’s these bills to pay … and I need to come up with the money to pay them.

I’ve been truly blessed with some fantastic clients, tremendous opportunities and an incredibly supportive family. I’ve always had dreams of doing this, but never felt that the timing was right. To be honest, I’m not sure that the timing is right now, either, but one of the things I’ve learned these last three months is that I don’t need to be sure. I’m going to do everything it takes to make this succeed, and if that’s not enough, I’ll just have to find ways so I can keep trying.

I think the challenge for September is to try and figure out what Panoptic is going to specialize in. Being a very broad and varied generalist is making it hard to sell. While I could take on many projects that come my way, it’s hard to explain how that’s possible to a potential client. It also complicates the decision-making process around what leads to generate and pursue. Focusing Panoptic through specialization should simplify the sales process, which could help me achieve my business goals and be able to pay those bills.

Filed Under: Employment, Panoptic 2 Comments

Review: Samsung Captivate on at&t

August 12, 2010 by 16 Comments
Samsung Captivate on at&t

Despite the news that RIM was going to finally launch a new touch screen slider phone “any day now,” which did finally launch as the BlackBerry Torch 9800, I decided to give an Android phone a serious look.

After looking at the various options that at&t offers, I decided to give the Samsung Galaxy S-based Captivate (details: Samsung, at&t) a try. I ordered three new phones–one for me, one for my wife, and one for my Dad–at the start of August, and by the 6th, we had our phones in hand.

Right off the bat, I’ll have to admit that I went into this with extremely high expectations. I know, big mistake. To be honest, after dealing with BlackBerry phones for the last two-plus years, I was excited at the prospect of finally getting on a modern platform that didn’t involve using that crappy iPhone OS.

On the surface, it sounds really promising: a fancy 4-inch Super AMOLED display; lightweight at 4.5 ounces; 5MP camera; 512MB of RAM and 16GB internal SDHC; Samsung’s 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 Hummingbird CPU. With these specs, there’s a whole lot of potential to build something really incredible.

My first disappointment was the “Email” app that ships with Android 2.1 on this phone. Apparently, I’m not alone, so much so that folks have forked the code and released their changes called K-9. However, K-9 still has its warts: I can’t figure out how to copy-and-paste text from an email message, without “replying” to it and copying from the quoted text area, then discarding the reply. Perhaps I’ll “fix” this and submit a patch.

Next, the lack of out-of-the-box wi-fi tethering was disappointing. I went and rooted my Captivate and then installed Android Wi-Fi Tether on it. Having a free, open source “solution” is a great thing, but certainly not for the average, non-technical consumer.

The Calendar app. isn’t too bad, but I sadly discovered a shortcoming in it: there’s no way to duplicate an event. I’m not talking about creating a recurring event, but taking an event and duplicating it. Suppose you have an event, like a doctor’s appointment. You go to your appointment, and at the end, you schedule your follow-up appointment. It’d be really convenient to be able to just copy your current appointment, and paste it on the new date and maybe adjust the time. Can’t do that with the stock Calendar app on the Captivate. You have to just add a new event and enter in all the data. Annoying, to say the least.

Battery life also seems disappointing. The specs claim over 300 hours (over 12 days) of standby time, and over 5 hours of talk time. Given the amount of email and Twitter and Facebook I get, even at an hour interval for refreshes and K-9 mail set up to do IMAP “push,” my battery seems to last around 4 hours before needing a charge. I suspect the 3G data use of the cellular radio uses more juice than voice “talk” time … and the notion of “standby” time is a bit misleading, since when the phone is doing background data tasks, it’s really not “in standby” as its actively using the radio.

Another huge problem is the fact that GPS on the Captivate appears to be totally broken. The TeleNav GPS navigation application is pretty much unusable, with it not being able to track your location properly, which causes it to constantly reroute as it tries to figure out where you are. Supposedly there’s a workaround, where you can manually reconfigure the phone to use Google’s Location Server, which I’ll try soon, but again, this is just poor out-of-the-box experience and “fixing it yourself” isn’t really a satisfactory solution for a non-technical consumer.

On one hand, I wonder if I should have bothered making the switch from BlackBerry to Android, yet. Despite my complaints with RIM and BlackBerry products, the few things they could do, they did reasonably well. But, I’m tired of waiting for RIM to catch up. Maybe the next generation of touch-plus-slider devices following the Torch 9800 could be an option, but for now, I’m going to stick it out with the Captivate, hoping that Android 2.2 brings some fixes, along with community-developed Android functionality closes the gap between “sucks badly” and “usable on a day-to-day basis.”

Filed Under: Geeking out, Piss and moan (Rants), Product placement 16 Comments

Erica Goldson, 2010’s epic valedictorian

August 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I love this time of year, with graduations and their corresponding speeches. This year, Erica Goldson of Coxsackie-Athens High School won my heart and mind with this stellar speech, originally posted on Sign of the Times.

Here I stand

There is a story of a young, but earnest Zen student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, “If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen? The Master thought about this, then replied, “Ten years . .” The student then said, “But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast — How long then?” Replied the Master, “Well, twenty years.” “But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?” asked the student. “Thirty years,” replied the Master. “But, I do not understand,” said the disappointed student. “At each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?” Replied the Master, “When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.”

Filed Under: Observations Leave a Comment
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