9 more days

Today I loaded up the truck and drove to Indy.
Tomorrow I install a system at Adidas, they print every sports T shirt in the country here!
This is my last big scheduled "work" before our holiday.
Once it is done, it is going to be very hard to stay focused on work.

while I'm on the road, I need to find new wiper blades for "the bus"
Not much luck so far.
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Colorado anyone?

It's finally time to go see Colorado!! Hopefully that link will hook us up with my wife's official colorado blog, and I'll ass my 2 cents here in my own special(ed) way.

Anyway, I think she said we leave in 10 days. Come on along with us!
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Saturday again??

Sorry for my , uh... 3 or 4 fans... been a whole week. Maybe you should just read me on facebook or firstgens.com?

So Thursday I had a road trip to indianapolis, and somehow I brought home a PUPPY!!
Riley is a Norwegian Elkhound, and he is 8 weeks old. Here's some pictures:

So far so good, puppy is housetraining quickly. Elkhounds are very very smart, friendly, and mostly well behaved dogs. Maybe someday they will get the recognition and popularity they deserve.

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is it gonna rain?

Happy weekend everyone and welcome to Saturday! Wonder what I'm gonna do today? It's looking kinda cloudy and soggy outside, but it's 47 degrees so it not all bad.

Guess what? We brought the bus home last night. Hopefully I'll get started on some spring maintenance as camping season is approaching. For some odd reason, the backup camera display won't powerup, so that will be on my list. Service the gennerator. I wanna get some liquid roof to recoat the rubber roof, it looks like crap. oil changes and stuff, and I want to sound deaden around the engine better, maybe the genny compartment too. Carol's gonna be working all day, so I can get into all the trouble I want to!

I think Mark and Sandra are home from Disney, I'll have to bug them for some pictures.
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Spring has SPRUNG!!!

Got to 65 degrees on the ole thermometer today! Bright and sunny, too. Spring is in the air no doubt.

So, I dodged out of work early again, did a lil more yardwork, and fired up the Camaro and went to get Brian after school. she was a lil rough after her long winters sleep, but smoothed right out after a bit of a warmup and a brief 2 gear blast.

We had burgers on the grille, and tonight I'm typing this from my back porch. Life is good.
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Another week half over, almost.

Good morning and happy wednesday to all!!!

I've officially declared it springtime in Chicagoland!!
It's been warming up gradually, near 60 yesterday, 47 right now.
It's been raining, almost every day, washing that icky salt down the drain, cleaning winters crud off my world.
Pretty soon, I'll be able to take my Camaro out to play!

But until then, I've been d riving my Corvette, just cause I can.

Carol's been busy at work this week, so I've been getting Brian from school and being home at 3pm. Used the opportunity to get started on the spring yardwork, getting the flower beds raked out, and spreading some weed preventer and fertilizer. with the warmer weather and rain, things are just popping up all over.

Working on the "nuts and bolts" of making my new website a business too. Going to incorporate as an LLC in Montana, they have no taxes and no residnecy requirement. Just shopping for a Montana Resident to be our "registered Agent" and I'll file the paperwork. Then I need to talk to a bank, need a checking account and a credit card.

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Filets r us!!!

Gotta give Shannon credit for the idea at least. Yesterday at Lynn's Big FIFTY party, Shannon invited her familty over so I could grille filet mignon for them!
Well, they didn't show, but the filet's did. Bought 4 steaks at Jewel, a pound and a half of meat, two inches thick, tender and juicy even before we cooked em!

We tried something different today, and I gotta say we did good. First, I lovingly rubbed our beef with olive oil. Once the beef was thoroughly coated, I sprinkled it liberally with Montreol Steak seasoning, and rubbed that in too.

Meanwhile, Carol was heating some oil in a fry pan. When ready, she seared all sides of those steaks to lock in the flavor and juices. Lots of sides, at 2 inches thick, they were almost mini-roasts. Brian calls out from upstairs "what smells so good in here?"

Then I put em out on a hot BBQ, and cooked em fast, just a few minutes per side.

We had baked pototoes, and baked asparagus. We do the asparagus by putting it in a ziplock bag and tossing it with some olive to coat, then spread it in a cookie sheet and sprinkle with sea salt. 10 minutes in a 400 oven for the best asparagus you've ever had.

So, Shannon, Sarah, and Kayla, along with those fmaily members who don't facebook, you missed quite a meal, but thanks for the idea!
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recovering, or sumptin.

I'm still trying to get over 2100 miles in the silverado, not to mention several days worth of "bitchin Betty pot luck mexican food"

That's when you ask the gps (bitchin betty) for the nearest mexican resurant, and eat there.
End result, so far... vast quantities of noxious fumes. Still.
And I woke up with a tummy ache last night, paced the floor for half an hour around 4 am...

And then this morning my back gave out! Hasn't done that in years. So tonight I'm heavily medicated and on my second margarita, and not feeling too bad.

I think it's time for a new truck.

I did talk to the head of IT at the New Orleans newspaper today, we hit it off pretty well, and I'm hoping to swing by the big easy after concluding my vacation... cough cough... business in p-cola!

Adidas in cedar rapids sent in a 5k po today, and I talked to the guy in charge in their Indy plant, both a direct result of my road trip.
Also talking to papers in columbia SC, and longview, WA. Seems the answer is to expand my horizons!
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long road trip!

And I'm back. 4 days 3 nights. 2090 miles.
visited 6 customers. Cemented 3 regular accounts.
one good cop story.

Enjoyed "bitchin Betty's mexican food roulette"
That's when you ask your gps to find ya some mexican, and go where it tells ya.
Tonights was pretty good. Last nights was not.
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Road Trip!!!

Gearing up for a working road trip. Wish I could bring the camaro, but need to haul stuff. Wish I could use the motorhome, but my first 2 clients are picking up the hotel rooms. Oh well, it's not quite camaro or motorhome season in north freeking dakota anyway.


So I leave tomorrow morning for a 12 hours drive to jamestown north dakota.

Monday morning working at the daily newspaper there recalibrating systems to use my film, then on to Dickinson, where I'll do the same routine Tuesday morning.

"Business" in Fargo Tuesday evening if time permits, and then heading back east. "On the way home" I have a stop in Onalaska, WI and Plateville, WI both to buy some surpluss equipment I need, and then a real stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to set up my film at the Adidas Tee Shirt factory.

And then finally home. I'm thinking I'll run out of time, and will end up spending the night somewhere near cedar rapids, and not get home till late thursday.

The changes in my business due to this economy are weird. Where I used to do a lot of service, including highly profitable service contracts, along with a lot of reconditioned equipment sales, nobody is buying anything, and a lot of maintenance is being "deferred" and of course practically nobody is buying service contracts!

So, I'm selling service contracts to newspapers, who pretty much have to have them, and going further and wider to do this. Heck, I'm currently quoting service to newspapers in south carolina, new orleans, and washingtom state!!!

And the other growth area is consumables. Lots of growth there, but the margins are only 10-15%. you gotta sell a LOT of consumables to make any money...

Oh well, lucky to still have a decent gig these days.
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Hacked by Dr Bl@ckdeath!!!!

What a day from hell!


I loggged into firstgens.com this morning to be greeted by a black screen, a skull and crossbones, and the message "you've been hacked by Dr. bl@ckdeath!!"

Damn... So I spent an hour this morning fixing rogue index.html files and figured, ok, that wasn't so bad...

Then my BIL Ron called from the office. "Jim, all our websites are down, hacked by Dr Bl@ckjack"
Oh shit, this isn't good.
About the time I got to work, our service providers site was down too.

So Ron get's to work sorting out all our business sites the same way I fixed firstgens, and I go on about my workday. Get back in the office about 2, and find all the sites are going to hell again, and I got an email response from the service provider saying "the server is toast, we gotta reformat and reload it." All of the sites on that server were down, not just us.

So, about the time it's taken me to type this ago, our site finally came back from the death.
Thanks to Marty and anyone else at TLC Web Enterpises for your hard work recovering from this catastrophe.
BOOO to the same guys for lackluster security and not having redundant servers.

I'll be looking for a new hosting situation, 16 hours of downtime in not acceptable.
But we're back up.
All we've lost is anything posted between maybe 2 am and 7 am, central us time.
And of course all of February 26, 2010.

Welcome back, i'm goin to bed.
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last few days?

Saturday night pizza night with the firstgens.com south side gang was big fun. Good pizza, good margaritas, good company. Carol had a good time too.

Sunday I was in computer hell with forum stuff. I installed the jsubsilver template that we must use with joomla, and then got to putting our current mods into it. That all worked, then I started working on a mod to resize image attachments. This one was a biggie, but I finally got it working on our standard theme. Jsubsiler though, was and still is "blown up."

And then I find my new mod resizes pics when they are viewed, not when they are uploaded! What on earth is the point of that?

So sometime this week, I need to fix jsubsiler, and try a different picture resize mod that I found.

Yesterday was just your basic Monday. Went into the city trying to close  a deal with these guys I been talking to since November, and the best I could get was "we'll have a decision for you in 2 weeks. Shit. Third time I've driven down there, almost no longer worth doing. I did visit a couple regulars, so that's always good.

So now it's Tuesday, and about time to go up and exercise.

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