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I got a call earlier this week that the coat that I dropped off at the retail outlet to get fixed was back.  I had only dropped it off a couple of weeks ago, and was told that it could take up to 6 weeks for it be get back.  That didn’t even occur to me when I got to the call on Monday afternoon, or this morning when I was heading out there.  I have a hard time keeping track of time at teh best of times, and when I am busy it gets much worse.

This was not me today

So, I get out there, it is a pain in the ass to get to the outlet in the first place since it is located in one of those parking lot jungles on the out skirts of town.  You know what I am talking about, those places that people like to call “business parks” which don’t have the necessary infracstruce to handle the loads, or lack of loads, of people in cars that all try to cram into them.

When I get to the store I wanted to get some gloves, so I go and pick them up, I am a guy so that took me all of 5 minutes.  Then I stand in line, and wait, and wait.

This is the point where I am getting annoyed, there are 4 tills, 2 people manning them and 3 floor people wandering around annoying customers that don’t want there help.  I stood in line for 15 minutes, and there were only 3 people ahead of me.  When I get to the front I explain that i am there to pick up my coat.  They search and search and then come to realize that I was called by mistake.

Opps, but then the lady that took my coat in the first place tries to tell me that there would be no reasonable way that my coat should be there, see they send it out only once a week and it takes………

No kidding, but then why was I called, and why is it my responsibility to quesiton when I am called.

The saving grace of the entire experience was that the one that was serving me at the time gave me her card and told me if anyone called to say that my coat was in, I can call her and she will courier my coat to me at no charge.

All in all, it was a 4 hour ordeal that made a waste of my day and all that I got out of it was a pair of gloves.

It is just about time to start getting ready for the week ahead.  Today I made some great progress with my business plans and starting to put into motion plans that I developed over the last couple of months.

I have re-read the 4HWW, and have developed a list of goals that I am striving for, and bringing the 20/80 to fruitration.  From these thoughts I have started yet another project, yeah I know it almost seems like I am diluting and creating more work, but I think that this project will turn out to be the “one”

For those that don’t know I am an Electrical Engineer by training.  Well, almost I still haven’t finished the paper work to get my P.Eng designation, but I still have a month before my self-imposed deadline.  I am going to start a training course for a very specific field in the electrical industry.  With this course I hope to both help myself by selling packages with it, and also bring more work into my employers coffers by recommending them for the studies.  This is a consulting task that I will end up doing, but I am not ready for the liabilty that this would entail.

Training Courses are the new Black

I have begun the task of the training course by writing a spec for preliminary research, the type of research that should allow me to discover what people are looking to know, and what types of questions they are asking.  This is a very important first step, as I don’t want to spend too many hours answering a question that only I have the interest in.

I have sent this spec to a few of the contacts that I have used in the past and depending on the response and costs I will either engage one of them or open it up to bidding on a freelance site.

From there I plan to start the research, again I will be out sourcing this.  At least at the beginning.  When I feel I have enough of the information I need I will write and format the course.  I will outsource the actual editing and final formatting.  I plan on having a book, presentation, a few tools and an exam to test the “students” knowledge.

I haven’t set a time line for this project yet, that I will do when I have the initial research data.  I will be sure to keep everyone up-to-date on this.

And that first picture? It is a Milk Shed, actually it is THE milk shed of my Grandmother in CB where I was on a weekend not too long ago.

I either have to go in ot out of the tunnel.

I give up, and now I need to find an alternative.

I just spent all of this evening and most of my free time yesterday trying to fix one of my sites.  I still didn’t really fix it, the site only works when there is now www. in the url.  If there is, well 403 everywhere.

Does anyone out there have “people” that do the routine maintenance for their sites?  Ensure that the plugins are up-to-date, and fix any bugs that come up?

I would like to move to hosted solutions, however that limits what I can do with the themes, plugins etc.

Ideally I would like to pay someone in batches to update all of my sites and then fix any bugs for me.  Is this something that anyone out there has tried outsourceing on Enlance or the other alternatives?  If you have any experience with this type of outsourcing please let me know about your experiences.  I would especially like to know how you went about writing the description of work.

I have a couple of old websites that I keep up and that take in some passive revenue from.  That said they can be a pain in the ass when you don’t keep up with the script maintenance.

I am facing the music now.  One of my favorite sites that I use as a general soap box that has both a front end blog and a back end forum, is on the fritz.  I got an email from my hosting service to tell me that there was a complaint that my site was hosting some malicious script.

It turns out that one of the scripts or addons that were installed on the site was out of date, and now there is a bunch of stuff simply not working.  However I think that I am going to take this time and restructure the entire site.  I am not taking entire advantage of some newer addons out there that may enable me to tie the different functionality of the site tighter together.

That is enough rambling for today, I have to get to bed and be up early tomorrow for meetings.

And the pic is just there to remind me to relax and just get the shit done, sometimes you just need to breathe.

It is starting to get to the point again where I need to re-focus both my life, my work and my business.  It really seems that I am doing this pretty often lately, but I am still young so shoot me.  I have been reading the Empress and I feel for her.  I have set some easy goals for myself and I still think that they are something that I am going to get to.

However, there are some things that I am really getting behind on, my day job just didn’t allow me the time.  One of the biggest things was to complete the Black Ink 2 training.  I started the seesions, I started building a site, I even started gathering some great content.  The niche that I was planning on entering was the Online Conference/Meeting space.  This is a space that I see getting bigger, and especially in the turblent economic times.  When money is tight people start to look for cost effective means of sharing information.  Why fly when you can sit there and hold the meeting face to virtual face.

One of my goals to get to before the end of the calendar year is to start having a positive cash flow on InnovativeMeetings.  I have already invested time and money into the site and I don’t think that I can simply flip it and expect to get much out of it as it stands now.  My other goals are not involved in my online business space.  They are to get my LEED AP Certification and P.Eng.  These are two things that will really help my engineering career, and will help me earn the seed money for my online business ideas.

The only way that I am going to be able to reach these goals is to learn how to write specs for out sourcing and learning how to manage that with minimal time commitments.  I have worked on this before and have had some cautious success with it.