Today was filled with mop-up work, and two noticable improvements on Stronico, namely Life Status, i.e. living or deceased, in-business or out, and Marital status. Lots and lots of other small things happening, but on the whole sort of dull. I am now a member of StartUpToDo.com, which is a very nice thing.

Labels: biz, StartUpToDo

I wound up getting bogged down writing a download manager, which had several different variations from how I thought it should work today. The past week has been much the same. I continue to examine the private beta of StartUpToDo.com.

Labels: misc

I recently read the Web Startup Success Guide by Bob Walsh and liked it. It was chock full of useful information and helpful tips about how to go from a programmer to an actual Owner. In the words of Michael Gerber, it helps you work on your business, and not in it.

Brief Thoughts

• The Venture capital chapter was quite informative, and reinforced my thought of "Are you sure you need this" regarding VC funding.
• The Social Media marketing chapter was excellent, and I have sent the link to the book to many of my friends in the advertising and marketing biz to help them get a handle on how to handle FaceBook, Twitter, and the rest
• For the most part the interviews were useful and informative, particularly Joel Spolsky's interview. For my purposes, a couple of them could have been removed with no damage doen to the book, but I imagine they applied to someone.
• The interview with David Allen was informative as well. Conversations about the GTD methodology tend to resemble Ayn Rand discussions on philosophy too much, but this interview worked for it's purposes

I recommend this book to everyone starting an ISV (like me!), or thinking about starting one. My only quibble is that there was no central guide to the links mentioned in the book, either as an appendix to the book or online. There were numerous mentions of useful websites, but it is easy to lose them as they are spread out all over the book. This is a minor quibble though. If you're reading this, and this applies to you, go ahead and buy it. You'll be glad you did.

Cross posted at the Stronico blog.

Labels: biz, books

It has been several days since I did the last one of these things, so I suppose it's time. The last few days have been frustrating work-wise, particularly today. I spent most of the day chasing small problems and tasks, and have spent the past six hours trying to get Silverlight Validation working in conjunction with web services. Short version - no luck yet. Follow the situation on Stack Overflow.

Beyond that, nothing much, I did spend quite a bit of time doing bookkeeping and was disappointed with Microsoft Office Accounting for the first time. I did get a coupon for $100 in Google Ad-Words today, which is nice.

~Steve

Labels: biz, stronico

It seems that I haven't done the daily logging I've intended to - happily there hasn't been that much of interest the past few days. One thing I did learn yesterday was how to do an asp.net file upload in an update panel (thanks to this page). Essentially all you do is add an asp:PostBackTrigger to the update panel which overrides the asynchronous nature of the form. Good information to know. Beyond that, just working on the add-on project.

Labels: Ajax, asp, Log

Inspired by Vickery's, I'm trying to maintain a daily log of my computer and business related activity, with hopefully some learning moments thrown in.

My day was spent mostly trying to sort out login and functionality problems on a client site, with a bit of hosting business thrown in. I did have one significant Dale Carnegie moment, to wit, if at fault, admit it immediately. Not much really learned today, and no Stronico at all.

Labels: biz, Carnegie, Log

I just checked my Google Analytics stats, and discovered that 56.85% of my web visitors are on Safari/Mac. compared to only 22.29% on Firefox/Windows, and only 13% on IE/Windows. Not what I was expecting at all.

Maybe I should be nicer to my Mac using friends...

Labels: Google, Mac