Migration

 I've migrated.  Current address is lostinthecstoremarket.wordpress.com

Come visit me over there.  Drop by.  Say hi.  

Ubuntu changes

 I ran an Ubuntu 12 box for a long time.  It was running off some old, cast off hardware.  It was great to mess around with.  For a while, I ran all my accounting through that.  Which had its own problems once my bank no longer allowed a Quicken style exports.  They just allowed pure export into Quicken.  But that's a different story.

Eventually, the computer died.  It was old, and running off cast-off hardware as I mentioned.  So I found some new cast-off hardware, and rebuilt the system.  Except I decided to put in Ubuntu 20.  I'm not sure I like it, but it's here.  There were some interesting download that I found through the Ubuntu store(?) or whatever it was called.  

I realize it's been a while, but the things I liked aren't there anymore.  I guess I spent too much time when I should have been hurrying.  But I digress.  I think it's time to actually spend some time on this.  It's the problem of having too many ideas running through your brain and not enough time to work on all of those projects.  Maybe I need less sleep.  Sometime that works, but only for a short while.

Back to the new Ubuntu store thingy.  It doesn't work as well as it should.  It runs through an icon-based format.  That was something I remember from before.  But this time, the setup doesn't work as well.  Especially when you get to the bottom of the page.  Maybe some updates will help.  I doubt it.  

Anyone know what those bottom two icons are?  I don't.  And I can't read them.  Nor is there a scroll bar to look at them correctly.  And it's not just the entertainment section that has this problem.  All of them have the same design flaw.  I'm guessing whoever tested this didn't spend enough time testing. So let's hope they fix this on a patch.  I've got an update running in the background so we'll see.  

Moving from 12 to 20 is quite a bit of a jump.  I ran 14 and 15 for a bit, but those were all work environments where I was doing specific things and couldn't just play around.  It was all Graylog if you want to look back and examine those posts.  

Let's see what happens when I play more.  

 

We're all in marketing now

 So we're all in marketing now.  I don't know how to take that.  For the longest time, I spent my efforts trying to stay out and away from marketing.  But that doesn't seem to be something I can proceed with.  I'd rather delegate that task to someone else.  I love building a team and surrounding myself with people who are considerably better at jobs than I am.  Build the team around your weaknesses and what not. 

What I don't really like doing is side tracking all my current studying to go work on something I've only vaguely been interested in before.  But that's what I need to do.  Because we're all in marketing now. 

In my side time, I run a small non-profit.  It's a branch of a national organization based on teaching kids.  It gives me the opportunity to try out teaching theories and ramble for hours on end with impressionable youths.  I get to fill their heads with succesful thoughts and build them into something that can go somewhere.  Instead of whatever junk is being taught.  But that's another story.  

Because I'm in charge of the organization, that means I'm also in charge of the recruiting and retention.  And the big thing I need to do is up my marketing game so I can take my group of 10 kids and turn it into 30.  And hopefully grow my parents support basis as well.  And try to fund the entire thing on shoe-string donation budgets.  But I digress.

Getting support is easier when you've got a considerable number of children to show you are working with.  10 kids out of a city of 200,000 just isn't that many.  It's less than 5 families.  

So now I'm in marketing.  And I have to figure out how to market the program to increase enrollment so we've got more kids coming in, which makes more kids want to come in.  More people, more people, more people. 

More problems, but I've got to get the marketing going first. So I have to educate myself.

I drug a couple of books out of my bookshelf that I haven't read before.  I'm going to work on those first.  Successful Marketing for Small Business by Cohen and Reddick is the first.  I've made it into the first chapter, and it seems like it might work.  But it's also from 1981.  

The other is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate them at your own risk! by Ries and Trout.  Looks like 1993 on that one.  Another book that predates the modern internet.  But the concepts still maintain.  

I'm not going to drop the $500 or so on the Breakthrough Advertising by Schwartz yet.  But it might be worth it in the long run.  There's a ways to go before I get there.  

I remember a little bit of marketing from college.  I think I took one course.  In the end, I wrote a marketing concept for the group project based on the idea that no one knew who we were.  It was about an oilfield additive company that was trying to sell their product to get more production out of their wells.  I don't remember what the product was.  I just remember I never had to give the presentation.  

Out of all the group projects I did, I think I liked that one the best.  There were a few interesting people to work with, and they seemed to have their own ideas.  A few with a greater entrepreneurial edge than me.  And I've been toeing the water on that one for a good decade.  But I never could find something I was interested enough in selling.  

But now we're all in marketing.  If you have any good ideas on books to read, let me know.  I'll throw it on the list. 

The Idea Machine

 What is the idea machine?  And where does it come from?  

It starts as an inkling in the back of your head, of ideas half thought and concepts not taught.  Perhaps it's a combination of a dozen different things.  Maybe it's something you keep saying over and over again.  And often it's just a creation that came through your brain.  

When the idea machine starts working, it's best to keep track of what it is saying.  Take notes.  Do not ignore the idea machine.  I can't remember the author, but the gist is thus: what you focus on grows.  If you focus on failure, you get more failure.  If you focus on ideas, you get more ideas.  

99% of them are going to be terrible.  But that doesn't matter.  I think it was Richard Branson who said "Opportunity is like the bus.  Another one comes along all the time."  Or something like that.  It's a good point, though.  Keep developing ideas.  Keep thinking.  

How long will it take?  Longer.

That's a pretty indecisive answer.  Some of the ideas in my head have been running around since 1992.  And I still haven't brought them to fruition.  Some of the ideas just require the correct set of inputs.  So I guess the best option is to keep putting in more inputs.  

I've been listening to the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin on audio book.  It's a good book that I got from Librivox.  It's the single author version.  Though his focus was primarily on the printing business, some of his ideas are pretty good.  The focus on creating value and frugality are definitely before their time.  

But I'm pretty sure his idea for the dollar bill was not "In God we trust" it was "Mind your business".  Which for him meant a large collection of different things, and fit in his category of what he wanted to pay attention to and focus on.  

Can I be any more broad and evasive than this?  Yes, yes I can.  Because my idea machine has merged into a half formed idea.  Now it's time to start producing the content.  Because the idea is worth very little.  It's in taking the idea to execution that it becomes valuable.  And that is the long slow, dull process.  But it's going to be a process that needs to be followed.  

The idea is one thing.  And that's great.  But executing the idea and bringing it to something that exists in the physical world?  That's the wonder.

That is where the real fun is.  

But now?  Slowly off the cliff into the oblivion of creation, and towards the valley of the unknown.  Somewhere in there, there's a Seth Godin quote.  

Is it working?

Is whatever you are doing working? 

That seems like an easy question, but it's a lot harder than is usually assumed.  It can be a problem of undefined success criteria.  When you set out to define your whats-it did you clearly define the success criteria?  If I'm guessing correctly you probably didn't.  

So why don't you sit back and define your success criteria.  Is this one of those full fledged plans, or just some concoction running through the back of your mind.  Because executing those is a pain in the ass. Turning that twisted hunk of an amorphous idea into reality is the stuff dreams are made of.  But with the plans you got going right now, it might as well be a pipe dream.  

Cue another drug reference.  Pipe dream: something that a person ingesting large amounts of drugs would imagine as the drugs run through their system.  Assumed to be something magical and fanciful.  

Might as well be a pipe dream with the level of pre-planning that went into this thing.  But you say "I know what I'm doing.  I've been thinking this out for years." And that's the problem.  You've been thinking about doing this thing, and not actually executing.  You've been listening to the collection of people that tell you it's more important to dream big dreams.  Sure, those are great.  But until they are executed they are worthless.  

Dreams without execution are worthless.  I'd almost say they are worse than worthless.  They are the half-thought ideas that are dragging you down when you should be going up.  You know what makes you feel better?  Executing some of those dreams.  Better to write a book that sells one copy than never finish the book.  Because it could sell a million copies.  But you will never know until you get the idea out of your head.  

Now that we've got that bit in order... How do we tell if this thing we want is actually succeeding?  Go back to the idea you created.  Go back to your original document.  Your original document should contain a few intervening steps that show where you are going, and how to guess that you are on target.  Did you complete goal one?  Are you talking to the people about your project?  Are you marketing it well?  Or at all.  I hope you are marketing it.  Are you making it a little bit closer to the finish line?  

Or are you stuck in a nebulous la-la land where you do things that don't really matter?  Because that's the way to tell if you are going the right direction.  Are you going somewhere and getting some sort of result.  Are there more words written?  More subscribers?  More content produced?  An income?  More income?  More hits to the website?  More comments?  

And which of those things is actually worth measuring?

The hard question about hard questions is that they are hard.  Which sounds like the stupidest sentence in the world.  Let me ask the question in a different manner:

Does it matter if you wake up at 5 am?

There's a lot of posts about that.  Lots of rise and grind people in the world who declare 5 am is the magic hour.  I do it.  I have been doing it for years.  But is that really the secret?

What about the midnight people?  Work until 1 or 2 in the morning after the hustle and bustle of the day is over.  That's the real ticket.  Or is it?  

I'll give you a real big hint: the time of day doesn't matter ONE BIT.  5 AM.  3 AM.  4 AM.  11 PM.  12 AM.  The specific time doesn't matter at all.  

Now let the hate mail flow...

What does matter?  That you have some time in every single day scheduled out to work on whatever it is you want to work on, free from distractions and free from the interruption of the rest of the world.  Freedom to work on what needs to be worked on without having to answer the beck and call of the world.  

That is what matters.  The time does not. Regularity matters.  Isolation matters.  Working on the important thing matters.  

All the rest is junk.

So how do you measure whether this thing is working or not? 

If I knew that...  well.  I wouldn't be here, trying to figure out the same thing.  

That's not how you get there

 I've been reading through Bold by Peter Diamandis.  It's an interesting book, with a lot of interesting ideas.  In the same period, I was listening to the audio book of The Traveler's Gift by Andy Andrews.  Despite both books being really good, I find them interesting in different ways.

There's only one big problem: both hit periods where you just need to power through to make it to what you really want to hear.  In the Traveler's Gift, it's the beginning.  If you can power through the first two to three chapters and get beyond how bad life sucks, then you are in for a treat.  The rest of the book is really interesting and well worth the time spent. 

Bold doesn't work that way.  Bold has a tendency to go from very good to slog in numerous places.  Some parts are brilliant, and leave me thinking about places I could go and ways to apply the things listed.  And then you have to slog through a good chunk of stuff to make it back into more interesting stuff.  That's just the way the book is written.  

The big problem I have with Bold is me.  I know I dislike working in large groups, forming companies, and solving the day to day people problems.  I'd rather spend my time working on my things and hope it all goes and works out well.  Or if it doesn't, I sit back at the drawing board and try to rewrite and revise.  Those rewrites and revisions solve lots of problems.  

But it's hard to make it work that way for complex processes and procedures.  It's not the complexity that's the problem.  It's the scope.  Some of the things I envision doing are the work of entire teams, done by one person.  And the pace I have to create these complex machinations just doesn't fit on scale.  Maybe if I had two to three hours a day just to work on my own ideas it might.  But I don't have those.  I have too many other problems to solve, and often it's other people's problems that need resolved.  Or a way to monitor something so a person who's not me can get the information necessary to make the right choice.

If they actually follow the flow chart I created, which is unlikely.

There's always resistance.  No matter how good the idea, there is always resistance.  And trying to get the most resistant person to follow the procedure is the hardest.  Because they don't know what the data means, and won't follow the procedure.  Even if it will lead them directly to what they need to act on. Because they don't understand it, and they won't focus on the material you have told them to focus on.

Simple questions become complex.  Go to this website.  Look at this specific thing.  What does it say?  Does it say X?  Then there is a problem.  If it doesn't say X, then there is no problem.

"What about this thing four lines down the page?"

"Ignore it." 

"But I can't.  It says alsdfhasdlfkhjalgedfj and I need to know what that means."

"It is not relevant to the problem at hand." 

"But I need this information."

And this is how the conversation goes.  From people who won't take the effort to learn LAN switching, router behavior, or any other complex technology.  

I know I need to learn more about cell signal strength and signal to noise ratio, but I don't have time to do that right now.  So I have to accept that when I look at that piece of data, it doesn't mean anything to me.  But the square box that tells me the router is on cell backup?  Yes, that is the important bit.

Essential Worker fun

 So... the last 2 years or so Covid.   Short answer: I can't tell the difference.  Nothing changed.   People wore masks.  Then they didn't.  People didn't go to work.  Then then did.  

Two years later?  Nothing has changed.  Some people still work from home.  Others don't.  

The behaviors that were caused by the global pandemic that was pretty pathetic in its death toll have all fallen back into the same behaviors that existed before.  For all the lessons learned, the only one really learned is that buildings are expensive, and having people work from home works just as well.

What budding capitalist doesn't want to get rid of ridiculous capital expenditures and blur the lines between home and work?  Because that's really what happens.  The business no longer has to pay for that giant building any more because all the employees are working from home.  And those work from home employees are fighting to keep job away from home.  It's a losing battle from most people.  Most of us just aren't that rude. 

What's going to be interesting in all this is the collection of leadership lessons in managing a remote work force.  And finding out how many of those managers are a simple waste of time.  But that's a discussion for another day.