Personal

I came across a post from Seth Godin about loading your blog up with a bunch of traffic.  After blogging for over a year now, I've struggled with trying to write posts that chase traffic versus writing about things I truly care about.  The problem is that I measure the success of my blog with traffic, and I'm addicted to watching my traffic.   read more »

If you haven't heard of Ze Frank, check out his wikipedia entry.  He generally puts humorous movies and clips on his website enabling you to waste hours and hours laughing at his general hilarity. Last month he launched his newest project, "The Show".  I've been watching for about a week now and I'd like to explain why I find it one of the best web based news shows around at the moment. First, Ze keeps it short.  I'm not sure exactly how long some of the clips are, but they land right around the 2 to 3 minute range.  This keeps me interested. Second, it's hilarious.  Ze comes up with some great comedy and I dig that.  Think of "The Show" as a shortened version of "The Daily Show" without the interviews. Third, he takes heavy topics such as the Iran nuclear crisis and gives you the lowdown in a funny way.  Way to go Ze.  You've created a great piece of viral content here and I hope your datacenter will be able to handle it. Ze Frank's - The Show

It's official, the Denver Drupal Users Group is meeting again!  Greg Knaddison and I are heading it up and I'll be giving a presentation on how to install Drupal and then install several modules.

You can find out more information at the Denver Drupal Group's website.

Technorati Tags: drupal

Happy Birthday!Today my blog is one year old.  Amazing to think I've actually held this thing together for a year now.  I haven't blogged much, but I'm working on that.  Rather than doing a nice recap of what's happened, I like to focus on the future.  Here's a list of where I'm headed.  This is more for me because I want to have a public record of my goals to hold me accountable.

• More "Mountain Top" picturesI've got 3 to put up from last summer.  My goal this summer is to summit five 14,000 foot peaks this summer, so that will be 5 more pictures.
• Updated layoutI really like the layout I've got now.  However, I'd like to update it to be a bit wider and take care of a few css nasties I've found while blogging.
• Portfolio SectionI really need a nicer place to put some of the projects I'm doing onto the web.  Look for this soon.

Thanks for reading by the way.  I am not much of a writer originally, but I have enjoyed posting my thoughts on this blog. 

I'm not going to apologize for not posting.  However, I thought I'd at least post a quick "What's going on?".

Exciting things have been happening over in my neck of the woods lately.  First off, my wife and I are buying our first house.  I'm really excited about this.  We've put an offer on a condominium up in the mountains and found it was in foreclosure!  We're moving forward on that, but it's a big old hairy mess.

Next off, Greg Knaddison and I have partnered to start a simple little business that will be targetted towards the Drupal Open Source project.  I don't want to give it away yet, as we're still laying plans, but it should be pretty exciting.  read more »

I've been watching several feeds I set up on the web about relationships.  I started with ICERocket and Newsvine feeds and the topics that have come across the wire are hilarious.  Everything from "How to make a Sex Tape" to "Consolidate Loans" has come through.  I'm convinced I'm missing something here. I think the missing piece is that the word "Relationship" is too broad.  With Google returning 732 million results, the enormity of this topic is definitely confirmed.  In fact, it's very interesting that the top 15 results for relationship are about romantic relationships.  It's not until the 16th result that business relationships come into the picture with a link to Salesforce.com.  In starting to blog about relationships, I now realize that I was assuming that relationships were 99% non-romantic.  If the Google results are any indication, this shows a HUGE deficit in knowledge about non-romantic relationships. So, I am going to officially define what I think of as a romantic and non-romantic relationship.  I am guessing that there are further types of non-romantic relationships, but we'll start here first. Romantic relationships are obviously with someone you are romantically involved with.  I best understand this as a relationship that includes a sexual component.  I know that sounds rather clinical, but there you go.  Normally, I'd assume only one person can fill this role at a single time.  What makes a romantic relationship interesting is that it gets the lions share of attention in our lives.  I probably spend at least 40 to 50% of my relationship effort on my wife.  I consider that time very well spent, but the fact that the minority receives a large portion of my attention is definitely interesting. Non-Romantic relationships are relationships that lack a sexual component.  Friends, co-workers, family all fall into this category.  I would say that I spend the other 50 to 60% of my relationship effort with this group.  I'm not sure I know the exact size of this group either.  My outlook contact list is about 130 individuals.  However, this includes a variety of distant family members that I may talk to only once or twice a year.  A better estimate might be around 80 to 90 individuals I connect with on a normal basis. What surprises me here is the imbalence of relationship effort to the type of relationship.  Now, if I broke down my non-romantic relationships even further, different types emerge here as well.  I would classify some friends as "Close Friends".  Of course "Family" would be a group here as well.  However, a certain effort level is applied to each of these groups as well.  As I move down the line, I spend much less effort on keeping up with distant family members rather than close family members.  Thus, I think it's safe to say that not all non-romantic relationships are equal either.  In fact, there is even an order to the amount of relationship effort spent on non-romantic relationships. Wow, my brain is spinning with this.  I'm a visual thinker, so here's a chart of how I'm visualizing this: If you apply all the long tail hype of late to this graph, some interesting things stand out.  First off, this completely validates the MonkeySphere(link 1, link 2) principle.   read more »

Do slimy salespeople turn you off?  If they do, that slimy salesperson forgot to read about how selling is all about relationships.  Tom Peters released a ChangeThis manifesto addressed directly at all those sleazy salespeople.  It's titled "111 Ridiculously Obvious Thoughts on Selling". Tom keeps the bar for ChangeThis manifesto's high with many excellent thoughts on sales and relationships.  Here's a few of my favorites: 7. The best relationships are often (usually?) not “top to top”! (Often the best: hungry divisionGMs eager to make a mark.) 8. IT’S RELATIONSHIPS, STUPID—DEEP AND FROM MULTIPLE FUNCTIONS. 10. Relationships from within our firm are as important—often more important—as those from outside—again broad is as important as deep. Allies—avid supporters!—within and from non-obvious places may be more important than relationships at the Client organization. Goal: an “insanely unfair ‘market share’” of insiders’ time devoted to your projects! 17. WOMEN ARE SIMPLY BETTER AT RELATIONSHIPS—don’t get hung up—particularlyin tech firms—on what industries-countries “women can’t do.” (Or some such bullshit.) 57. Never forget the “Law of Cousins!” In developing nations in particular, power brokers at all levels are at least cousins! Consideration for a second cousin can pay off big time. 60. REPEAT: HE/SHE WHO HAS THE MOST-BEST RELATIONSHIPS WINS.RELATIONSHIPS ARE THE ESSENCE OF THE WORK OF THE SALESPERSON. THEHARD ... AND LONG ... WORK OF THE SALESPERSON. 66. Be hyper-organized about relationship management—you are in the anthropology business. Study the great pols! Brilliant NRM (network relationship management) is not accidental! It is not catch-as-catch can. (Football analogies are cute—but deep political understanding pays the private-school tuition.) 67. Think/obsess on ROIR (Return On Investment In Relationships). 73. Listen up: “It was much later that I realized Dad’s secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a college president. He was seriously interestedin who you were and what you had to say.”—Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect.(I.e., Respect is Cool.) 82. Shit happens. That’s what they pay you for. 86. GOAL #1: MAKE YOUR CLIENT A HERO—YOU ARE NOT THERE TO GET CREDIT.(“Taking credit” is for ego-maniacs. And losers.) 97. It takes time to get to know people. (DUH.) 105. Become a student! Yes, you can study Relationship Building. So, study … Technorati Tags: changethis, relationships, sales, selling, tom peters    read more »

I am going to start blogging on a new topic I've been interested in for a long time, relationships.  I am interested in this topic for a number of reasons.  Based upon general observation and reading the book Never Eat Alone, I have become convinced that relationships are one of those key things in life.  Being married, I have learned this.  Through my friends I have learned this.  In work I have learned this.  This subject is like the elephant standing in the corner of the room, everyone knows it's there but people often fail to recognize it. So, I want to study it and post my thoughts on this blog.  The goal for me is to learn more about the subject and to help others learn more about it as well.  I hope that I will be able to use some of the techniques I learn in my life, but if I don't that is ok.  I'm going to set up a new category so you can track my posts on relationships if you are so inclined.  This is one of those subjects for me that has some pretty deep meaning, so I'm really writing this for myself.  I invite you to follow along.  Please feel free to post feedback and comments; I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on relationships as well. Relationships are weird.  I am not sure I really know what that word means, relationship.  I've looked it up in the dictionary, but that didn't help very much.  Answers.com had more detailed information, but still left me confused.  Wikipedia just had a simple definition and some of the root words.  Looking up the root word "relation" I finally hit some pay dirt. Relation comes from the Latin word "relatio".  I have no idea what "relatio" means or where it came from and Google didn't turn up anything good.  A few things struck me about the Wikipedia page for relation though.  First, the word relation is considered to be one of the 1000 basic English words.  It sort of makes me think that it is a more important word.  Looking at other words in that category, it seems to be in pretty good company.  The second thing that struck me is that the definitions of the word are sort of spread out.  It covers topics in mathematics, story telling and family.  Makes me think I am biting off something pretty big here. I did some more searching on the history of the word relation and found the Online Etymological Dictionary.  Here's the entry on the word relation:  read more »

I started using 30Boxes today was very impressed.  Everything I had read about it was true, it is an amazing service. That's not what I'm writing about today though.  Today I figured out how to export the 30Boxes iCal Calendar data into Outlook 2003.  Apparently this has been a difficult nut to crack because of the sucky iCal support in Outlook. Thankfully, open source came to the rescue and I found the Remote Calendar project over at Sourceforge.  Installation of this sweet little utility was a snap and when I restarted Outlook, I had imported my 30Boxes calendar within about 20 seconds.   Hooray for interoperability!!!  UPDATE:  Been using this for about a month now, here's my update. 

When you think about the 4th of July, what comes to mind? Fireworks? Bar-B-Que's? How about the flag? Personally, I think about the flag. To me, the flag stands as a symbol for everything that this country stands for. This 4th of July is rather bitter sweet because of the events that happened in Afghanistan last week. If you haven't heard, a chopper crashed in the mountains of Afghanistan killing all on board. As I sat in the stands at Invesco field watching fireworks and listening to Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American", I was overcome with a sense of pride and loss simultaneously. Those men gave their lives so I could sit in that seat watching fireworks with my wife and friends. They died so I could do that. Such a large sacrifice for the freedoms we enjoy. I have tremendous respect for those men. They are doing a job I could not do. They do their job so I can live in a land of freedom. That's a debt I can never repay. All I can do is honor their memory in my own way. Froggy Ruminations is a blog covering most of the news on this story. Froggy also has several links on how to lend your support to organizations that support the families of the fallen. You can find him at http://froggyruminations.blogspot.com/.