Category Archives: Business

Lessons Learned or Not

I’ve just had a sudden realization. All those years in school looking at the other students thinking why can’t they be smarter and just get the math, science, or whatever – I was wrong. They weren’t the slow ones because they were learning exactly the lesson the curriculum was designed to teach them. I was slow. I missed the point. I did not learn my lessons properly.

Continue reading

Unfortunately for the music industry I’m a rat

Seth Godin wrote this ingenious analysis of market changes titled “It’s not the rats you need to worry about“. It got me to thinking about how I prefer CDs over downloaded music. Primarily I have this preference based on the quality of the content. I’d prefer not to have more physical media taking up space in my house, but until someone offers CD quality lossless downloads I feel like I’m stuck. However, I’m not the ideal customer. The last time I bought a CD was 6 months ago, the time before that was a year and a half. One CD a year is not going to sustain your industry.

Continue reading

Literacy in the Workplace

I had an interesting exchange with my manager yesterday. We had our very first team meeting under the guise of the new “Great Place to Work” initiative. We were informed that there is no budget for conferences this year so SOL on the professional development plans. There was also an open question about if we understood our performance goals. The exchange went something like this:

Management: Does everyone understand their performance goals?

Me: I’m a little confused. I’m told I need to make 4 contributions that fix an issue in production. What if there are not four issues in production in my product? (I’m thinking do I really need to break something in order to have done a good job this review cycle.)

Continue reading

My Business Website: Ready to Rock

The Prometheus Software, LLC website is now up. Products are available. By products I mean just the one screencast on creating a Hello World application in C#. This is the first time I’ve created a screencast of this quality, it took about 50 hours or so. I spent maybe one hour recording the raw footage and another 49 figuring out how to put everything together. I threw out several versions before I came up with the workflow that ended in this final product. Now I think I can use this same workflow to produce another episode in much less time, but we’ll see what happens. The file is available now for $1, which covers download costs and PayPal fees plus a little extra for my efforts.

My Business Website: Not ready for Prime-time

I guess I’ll make some notes here on the on going development of my business website. It’s available at prometheussoftwarellc.com. There isn’t really much up right now but I’m hoping I’ve used enough of the keywords I’d like to target that I can get a decent ranking on Google in a shorter period of time.

Basically for the past few weeks I’ve been looking into shopping cart software. I’ve tried osCommerce and Zen Cart on a test system. So far Zen Cart is way better, but not exactly what I want. Long term I’d like to write something nice in Rails, but right now it is too much additional effort. The name of the game is speed and that means using what is already built even though I don’t care for the design a great deal.

Basically what I’m really looking for is something like WordPress but with a shopping cart built in, and a forum. So if WordPress, Zen Cart, and phpbb mated but were rewritten in Rails I think I’d have the perfect solution. If anyone knows of where I can get this software please let me know.