Advice & More...

Advice...
The small business has been very busy.  All of the more conservative candidates talk about small business being the backbone and the dream of America.  The more liberal candidates seem to be focused on equalizing pay and benefits and since most people work for small businesses that hits home.

We have three people, two are owners, on the payroll.  The small business has it's moments of fun and enjoyment but there are more moments of frustrations; equipment breaking, unforeseen costs, employees who don't show up or care, customers who don't show up and perpetual road construction that impedes traffic.  I'm momentarily missing the 'backbone and dream of America' part of this.

One of our neon signs quit working.  Of course it was made in China.  We have no room for things that don't work.  The first inclination was for it to go in the dumpster but I took it home and stuck it in the garage which is also sort of a dumpster.  Today I called the company regarding repair.  The customer service rep asked what sort of noise it made.  I said it was a neon sign and it made no light and no noise.  He wanted a part number so I said I'd call back and headed out to the garage/dumpster where the sign stood alongside the original packaging which had been there since 2011.  For whatever reason I decided to plug it in and confirm it's failure.  Of course it worked fine.

Advice

Signage is important in our small business.  We've concluded that our outside sign needs replacement.  That's takes discussion and thought.  While considering my points of argument I came across a legacy sign from our 18 years of doing farmer's markets.  This was a prototype, poorly constructed.  It's odd enough that it actually has attracted people.  Some of them think we actually do give advice but of course they don't want to pay.  I tell them to go to China for advice.



Trump...

Donald Trump

Normally I'm listening to some sort of music podcast while writing blog posts (farvorite: TBMYHNH.  In my real job listening to music was frowned upon so everyone used one-sided phone headsets.  Since I don't even have a dumb job I now get to listen in a much more audio-satisfying manner.  Unfortunately I'm listening to the Donald Trump interview.  We have a local radio station that features a couple of guys talking about sports and how everything in the world other than sports is more or less stupid.  I believe the name is 'garage logic.'  Mr. Trump talks like those guys.  He just said that the best information he gets is from watching television.  My television viewing ended five or six years ago.  I'm way behind Donald Trump in knowledge about running the country.

Caffeine...

During the 27-year gig I managed to find the right caffeine balance probably due to having to show up at a designated time, being awake all day and having an endless supply of caffeine options.  Without a job sleeping patterns change, demands change, sleeping for a few minutes in the middle of the day, etc., are all OK.  I was just reminded that as a soldier you learned how to sleep for brief moments, alert with your eyes closed, your ears attentive and running at about 50% cognitive.  

Each time I query an opportunity three things come up in my mind: 1) having to wear respectable clothes 2) commuting 3) caffeine allocation.  On the first issue I've decided to adopt the Steve Jobs look should I return to the work force.  In the last gig I narrowed my wardrobe to all blue slacks, black cap-toe shoes and an endless variety of blue hue shirts.  That is too complex going forward.  Like Jobs and Zuckerberg I need a personal uniform.  Of course the body hugging t-shirt is not going to work.  I digress.  Standard caffeine options would be good.  Now I find myself stopping at convenience stores, digging in the backseat of the truck and examining the back of the fridge.

I probably need to go cold turkey.

Retro Tech...

For the past week I've been refreshing myself with tech info from the last gig, thinking about storage arrays, cloud/legacy infrastructure solutions, service level agreements (SLAs), envisioning trends and intermediate and long term strategies, blah, blah, blah.

I was so needy for some IT thought that I watched a couple of videos on configuring Linux systems including disk partitioning, logical volumes, etc.  This fractured photo reminded me to focus on the future, not the past or the present, the last two of which are disjointed.