The way that I see it, is that we don’t make enough stuff here. Manufacturing was sacrificed on the altar of “Shareholder Value” decades ago. Now, the only left that manufacturing has to sacrifice are it’s skeletal remains.
We chose to focus our cameras on Detroit out of a gut feeling that this city — often heralded as the birthplace of the middle class — may well be a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the country.
Whenever you start a project, you should have a plan for finishing it.
One outcome is to declare victory, to find that moment when you have satisfied your objectives and reached a goal.
The other outcome, which feels like a downer but is almost as good, is to declare failure, to realize that you've run out of useful string and it's time to move on. I think the intentional act of declaring becomes an essential moment of learning, a spot in time where you consider inputs and outputs and adjust your strategy for next time.
If you are unable to declare, then you're going to slog, and instead of starting new projects based on what you've learned, you'll merely end up trapped. I'm not suggesting that you flit. A project might last a decade or a generation, but if it is to be a project, it must have an end.
One of the challenges of an open-ended war or the Occupy movement is that they are projects where failure or victory wasn't understood at the beginning. While you may be tempted to be situational about this, to know it when you see it, to decide as you go, it's far more powerful and effective to define victory or failure in advance.
Declare one or the other, but declare.
We get really excited about the beginnings of a new project – tweaking a website, picking a theme, making it look well and have killer on-page SEO. But then the real work begins – the boring stuff. None of it is hard, but some of it is boring.
When will you know when you’re done? How will you get from today to there?
Firefox 7.0
It seems that I never did quite switch (back) to Safari on my Mac. There was too much invested, if you will, in Firefox, and quite honestly, I was just used to using it. Eliminating some of the plug-ins and upgrading to version 7.0 seemed to help some of the issues with performance.
The additions of Instapaper and Evernote on the Mac have pretty much eliminated the need to bookmark things in the browser. Saving or clipping things for later reading and reference allows me to read both on the Mac and iOS devices, without worry about the bookmarks not being synced between Firefox and Safari. For those things that do need to be bookmarked, importing them into Safari from Firefox is fairly simple, and they are updated on the iOS devices when they are synced. Firefox also released an iOS app to automatically sync the bookmarks. It is helpful, but requires an additional step outside of Safari.
So, I never did quit using Firefox on the Mac. Version 8 was just released, so I’ll see if that reinforces my decision.
“Switching (Back) to Safari” may be a bit of a misnomer. I have a hard time remembering if I ever used Safari for any appreciable length of time. Safari may have been the only browser of choice for OS X when I first switched to the Mac, but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t long before a stable version of Firefox was available.
Switching off of Firefox hasn’t really come to mind before. What I did remember of using Safari way back when, or during the infrequent times that I have used it on OS X, was that it was (is?) slow and there weren’t a lot of plugins or add-ons available. I had enough add-ons added to Firefox that made it quite comfortable to use. I looked at Google Chrome when it came out, but other than it seeming to be a bit faster than Firefox, there really wasn’t a compelling reason to switch.
Now, I have been giving some serious consideration to switching to Safari as my main browser on OS X. There reason? The iPhone and the iPad. Not that the Safari experience on either has convinced me to switch. Far from it. But it turns out that the best way to manage Safari on both, especially the bookmarks, is to use Safari on OS X and let iTunes sync the bookmarks. This is especially handy in setting up the bookmark toolbar to allow quick access to frequently visited sites.
This step probably wouldn’t be necessary if there were an easy way to sync bookmarks between Firefox and Safari, but there isn’t. So it looks like, for the time being, that I’ll be using Safari as my main browser on OS X.
Photo Credit: Randy Hage
Putting up a digital storefront is a lot like putting up a physical storefront. You need to acquire or rent the property, put a building up if one doesn’t exist or remodel the preexisting one. Once the building is ready, it needs to be decorated inside to make it attractive to customers. Then of course you need to decided what inventory to pick and acquire it. Once you get the product in house, you need to get it ready for sale and then display it. Finally, you need to get all of the systems in place to actually sell the product to someone and deliver it to them.
Most of this is taken for granted when you’re selling items on eBay and Amazon. Obviously you need to acquire and list the product, and then eventually get it to a buyer, but everything else is already in place.
It’s a bit of an eye opening experience when you go to build a digital storefront from the ground up. There is a lot of “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to do that…” moments.
The Best Buy nearest to us is currently being remodeled. Literally, you feel like you are shopping in a store that is under construction. The building that the store is in is still under construction, and the store itself is under construction. If you want to kind of get a feel for what that is like, you can take a look at the online storefront that I am putting together. It’s called Tentmakers By Trade Marketplace. The overall site, called Tentmakers By Trade, is still under construction, but I wanted to get the ball moving on the eCommerce site.
The corresponding eBay and Amazon storefronts are in a little bit better shape.
Effective Pre-Election Prayer
http://voiceofrevolution.askdrbrown.org/2010/09/10/effective-pre-election-prayer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+VoiceOfRevolution+%28Voice+of+Revolution%29
We are called to pray for the social and economic climate in which we find ourselves. We are called to pray for the structure of civil society to be amenable to the manifestation of the Kingdom of God through the church. To pray for the Kingdom’s purposes to advance in our nation we must identify with the King’s heart for those who govern. First, we must renounce wrath, rebellion and resentment.
The article goes through a number of keys how we, as Christians, should be praying for this and any election.
(via Instapaper)
Bruce & Rhonda Grow their eBay Business [The Kabbage Chronicles, Day 15] « The Kabbage Blog
http://blog.kabbage.com/2010/09/06/bruce-rhonda-grow-their-ebay-business-the-kabbage-chronicles-day-15/
Bruce and I sat down and had a business meeting. As wonderful as the returns are they are not meeting our financial needs. After much discussion and frustration over the list of bills and the household day to day needs going unmet. We came to the conclusion that we need to buy and resell bigger ticket items as well as the smaller.
(via Instapaper)
Could A Family Of Four Possibly Live On $50K These Days?
http://www.businessinsider.com/could-a-family-of-four-possibly-live-on-50k-these-days-2010-9?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29
So can a family of four survive on $50,000 in America today? The answer might surprise you. Twenty years ago a middle class American family of four would have been doing quite well on $50,000 per year. But things have changed.
(via Instapaper)
CNN ran a recently article titled “Are there dangers in being ‘spiritual but not religious’?”. You can read it here.
The interesting thing about the in the article is that, almost to a person, these people made up their own god. It seems that the act of being “spiritual” is more important than who or what they are being spiritual to. They all seemed to pick and choose from various religions what they wanted to believe. How does find truth in that?
Photo Credit: mcritz
Sometimes it’s nice just to throw a quick post or two out on some other social media sites to get a conversation going. If we haven’t connected yet on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, please click on one of the icons in the upper right to make a connection.
I like to use the three sites for somewhat different purposes:
Facebook – To me, this is more for social connections, family, friends and Church members. While I do have some business contacts on there, I primarily use it to keep updated on people that I know.
Twitter – I tend to read Twitter more than I post to it. It is actually an excellent way to keep up on news and events, as well as to get updates on acquaintances. The tweets that I post are either brief updates, or most likely a link to an article that I found interesting. Twitter automatically feeds my tweets to Facebook. If I think that the tweet may be of interest to my business network, I’ll add the #in hash tag so that it gets picked up by my LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn – This is primarily used for business contacts. Most are people that I’ve come to know over the years, and it mostly a online business contact list for me. I try to post some interesting articles from time to time, but use it mostly to keep up to date with business associates. I try to keep the communications on here strictly business, although I do have some non-business related contacts on LinkedIn.