11.22.07
Posted in News and Announcements, Small Business at 3:58 by lnxwalt
Determined To …
Determined To Build A Business
I have been home less than a month. In this time, I have not had a lot of time for anything. When I left, there were some things in progress, but opportunities and people rapidly move on when you tell them to wait for an indeterminite time period while you are preoccupied with X, whatever X may be. I returned to find some network and system administration issues had arisen in the household. And that the users had forgotten how to do things like upload the photos they use for their own writing.
In addition, I have been busily trying to get another job (preferably) or assignment. I prefer if it is fairly close to home this time, so I can come home after work and work toward starting our family’s business ventures.
If you are seeking to change major and important things in your life, you can expect some opposition. It can be as simple as the family member who wants to stay in the Victor Valley area [or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for that matter], even if it means that you will continue to struggle. It can be an overhang of debt from your lower-income college student days. It can be a household that has gotten used to your present income level and is not not willing to accept the necessary sacrifice for you to pursue your dreams. If you have no opposition, you must be a loner—family and friends do not want you to change, because it might change their situations or they might even have to change in response.
When you know you really want to accomplish something, you also know that you have to change what you are doing, or you will never get different results. If you live in an area like the Victor Valley and you are not independently wealthy, you have to work. If, as is the case here, the local politicians believe that attracting large chain retailers to build stores and create low-wage part-time jobs is what progress is all about, then you have a few choices:
- Shut your mouth and work for “Big Blue” or another retail or restaurant chain, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three of your co-workers so you can afford to live here.
- Buy lottery tickets. Ignore the fundamental unlikeliness that you are going to win a big prize. The odds are, if you buy enough tickets over a long enough time, you will win, even though your winnings will only be a portion of what you spent to get them.
- Commute fifty miles or more one way to obtain better-paying employment. Be sure you understand that you have to make enough to cover the costs of vehicle maintenance & repairs, fuel, and the additional hours out of your day that you will spend on the freeways.
- Find some miraculous burst of funds that enables you to start a business providing some kind of service to local residents who commute outside the area for work, since they haven’t the time to take care of things themselves.
- Get out of Dodge. Yes, that’s it—move away, to a place where you can live and work in the same area.
If a family member or so-called friend is standing in your way when you are trying to liberate yourself from financial bondage by moving out of the local area, you may need to just leave them. Cut them off like a gangrenous leg, and limp away to your future.
Determined To Build A Family
The family is actually more important than a business, at least in my eyes. When I’m gone, it isn’t a business that will be my legacy. It is the people whom I have touched that will best reflect who and what I am.
That may seem to conflict with the “gangrenous leg” comment above, but it does not. I used to have friends where all we ever did together was watch television. As television has become a smaller and smaller influence in my life, that is, as I recognized that there were other things I could be doing with all those hours that were being wasted, we began to grow apart.
Your family is the reason for starting a business. If you are starting a business simply for yourself or for strangers, it is time to “stop, turn around, and skate in the opposite skating direction.” The same applies if you are starting a ministry or other non-profit: If your family is not part of the reason you are doing it, then you’d better stop. Now.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 3:54 by lnxwalt
I have been pretty silent lately. It has been a busy time at work, and there has been little or no time for anything outside of work. I have not, however, been completely unproductive. (As if being at work was not productive in the first place.)
As I have pondered the fact that my present employment is becoming repetitive—I never would have imagined ten years ago that working with computers could bore me—and this job is also acting as a brake on my skills development and career advancement.
I’m currently positioned at a place 48 miles from my present residence. It is not a bad commute most days. If there was a longer-term opening in that general vicinity, I would most certainly look at it. With the long hours and limited time off, it is becoming a problem—I am fighting sleep during my nearly three hours a day commuting time—and yet, I am glad that I am not at another one of the local sites. But I think the overall solution is one that is harder: I have to relocate away from the often-beautiful Victor Valley to be closer to a location where there is opportunity for me. It is always hard to force this kind of change upon unwilling family members, no matter how much it will benefit them as well as yourself.
I am anticipating responses along the lines of “Go if you want to, but I am staying right here.” If you are the person who would say this, you should know that you are making a serious mistake, with long-range consequences for your entire family. Instead of looking only at the ideal, look at the actual conditions around you and consider those conditions in the choices you make.
As we watch the financial industry implode (primarily because they were able to put buyers into “fool’s loans” for several years without any action by regulatory agencies and now a large number of buyers are being pummelled by the effects of these unsavory loans, which is pulling greedy lenders down with them), we realize that it portends an era of financial danger for individuals and families.
To any buyers in that situation, I want you to know that it can be a very liberating experience to get rid of that weight. If you can find a way to get out from under the loan without losing money, such as finding a quick buyer that will pay enough cash to satisfy your lender, you may want to take it. The alternative is to go through foreclosure, with all of the attendant damage to your credit (and possibly your income also).
Do not deceive yourself. If you have a fool’s loan, such as an adjustable-rate mortgage or an interest-only loan with a balloon payment at the end, there is a real chance that you will lose your home no matter what you do.
In the meantime, if you still have a home to live in, give thanks to God. Thousands of homes reportedly burned in Southern California last month and early this month. A typhoon (hurricane) recently struck Bangladesh, killing thousands and devastating many villages. While you have a place to sleep and food and clothing, be thankful.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the United States.&160; Let it be more than just a time to overeat and listen to the same boring stories from your relatives. Return to our national roots—give thanks unto God for all the good things you have—remember that you very well could be one of the have-nots this time next year.
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11.16.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:34 by lnxwalt
Fire is destructive, at least it can become destructive when it gets out of control. Yet, it is a necessary part of the cycle of existence here on the earth.
When the fires erupted in Southern California, it wasn’t unexpected. We who live in the drier parts of SoCal are well aware of the potential for wildfires. You can see me in the Spring when I’m home, out with a hoe, chopping up vegetation growing near the house and fence.
I rarely even try to watch television, so I had no concept of just how large an area burned, or how many homes were affected by this event.
I’m starting to see some of the photos of the flames towering in the sky.
It brings to mind some of the lessons people learned in earlier natural and man-made disasters:
* Once an event reaches a certain scale, no amount of planning and pre-allocated resources will be enough to deal with the loss. In your network infrastructure, as in the rest of your life and business, you need to go for resiliency. When something happens, you may be able to mitigate the effects, but you may not. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back after the event and regain your balance, so you can begin the journey back to where you were.
* If you are safe, but your neighbors are not, you are not safe after all. Whatever the event: fire, flood, earthquake, or UFO invasion, your response must also help your neighbor. Likewise, your network infrastructure’s ability to render assistance to nearby families and businesses whose connectivity is lost may be key to your family’s and your business’s recovery later on.
* If your network is based upon one vendor’s proprietary products and protocols, and not amenable to carrying traffic or attaching devices and software that is not made by that same vendor, your network is insanely vulnerable. That’s why every network needs to be based around open standard file formats and protocols (and arguably, libre / open source implementations of those standard file formats and protocols). If you cannot drop in another vendor’s product and be almost fully functional within 24 to 72 hours, you are sunk.
* A disastrous event such as the fires affects a wide variety of people, communities, and businesses. After the event, recovery depends upon these same people, communities, and businesses pulling together to help one another recover and rebuild. Outside help can only get you so far. Likewise, local families’ and businesses’ networks may need to start out with piggy-backing applications (software) on one business’s machines, and / or moving their network traffic across one business’s network.
* The fires were devastating in patches across Southern California, much of which covered areas that were not inhabited. The after-effects, including flooding and mudslides, will likely affect more of the inhabited areas. Still, this is quite a bit different from having most of a major city buried under thirty feet of water. It won’t be long until the fires (and the following flooding and mud / land slides) here are forgotten. The storm that flooded New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, Katrina, will be remembered far longer. California’s recovery will be long over before Louisiana’s effort winds down.
* Insurance companies, upstanding citizens that they are, will deny or limit payouts for legitimate claims on policies upon which they were happy to collect premiums for so many years. A number of other policy-holders will find their policies canceled as the companies realize that continuing to collect premiums could put them on the hook in the next big disastrous event.
* At some point, the “no strings attached” aid from outside will go away, and whatever recovery efforts continue must be self-generated and self-funded.
As always, this is solely the opinion of the author, and in no way represents the ideas of any employer, company, or government agency.
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11.02.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:19 by lnxwalt
Here in Southern California, where we are starting to get a handle on the fires that forced up to half a million people to flee their homes, it is curious to see how the decisions that our politicians make (and the developers that pay for their campaigns carry out) affect our lives.
Many of these fires are believed to have been caused by downed power lines in areas that are prone to regular doses of fast-moving winds. You have to wonder why these wires are suspended in the air in such areas. Surely it is less than the cost of the 2003 and 2007 fires to bury the wires in the most dangerous areas, perhaps running them through non-conductive, moisture-resistant piping in order to minimize power losses due to contact with the ground. Likewise, it is foolhardy to ignore the need to put solar and wind generation capability right there in those areas, near the housing that necessitates their existence. (In fact, I’d say that each home should have the ability to generate at least half of its annual consumption from non-polluting sources.)
Just as surely, turning down some requests to build in "edge" areas most prone to fire and to unwanted wildlife interactions and requiring non-flamable building materialswhen permits are granted is just common sense.
California is reaping the consequences of the land-use choices of its local communities. Rather than deciding to integrate multiple types of housing and multiple employers and industries into common neighborhoods where there is less need to spend hours on the freeway each day, there are sometimes completely separate municipalities for industrial, commercial, and residential uses. For the residential cities, known as "bedroom communities", the way to increase the tax base is to build more housing, as newer and more expensive homes generate more taxes than older homes built when prices were lower.
I am currently about seventy miles from home, near the coordination center for the disaster-relief efforts. It took meover an hour to drive the twenty miles to work today. Over an hour! That is difficult to imagine, so let me put it into perspective. Most of us can ride a bicycle twenty miles per hour. Why does it take so long to travel such a short distance? Because local governmental leaders throughout Southern California are not willing to be honest with their constituents and tell us that we will have to sacrifice for a while in order to avoid a soon-coming hardship that could end our way of life.
I guess we get the leadership we deserve. If we required honest, forward-looking leadership, we would not be in this situation. Since we do not require it, we do not and will not get it.
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