Spencer
Wolfe

Here are the 16 rules I try to live by:

1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe that not much happens of any significance when we're in our comfort zone. I hear people say, "But I'm concerned about security." My response to that is simple: "Security is for cadavers."

2. Never give up. Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working, doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn't have an opportunity.

3. When you're ready to quit, you're closer than you think. There's an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: "The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed."

4. With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be. Very seldom will the worst consequence be anywhere near as bad as a cloud of "undefined consequences." My father would tell me early on, when I was struggling and losing my shirt trying to get Parsons Technology going, "Well, Robert, if it doesn't work, they can't eat you."

5. Focus on what you want to have happen. Remember that old saying, "As you think, so shall you be."

6. Take things a day at a time. No matter how difficult your situation is, you can get through it if you don't look too far into the future, and focus on the present moment. You can get through anything one day at a time.

7. Always be moving forward. Never stop investing. Never stop improving. Never stop doing something new. The moment you stop improving your organization, it starts to die. Make it your goal to be better each and every day, in some small way. Remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Small daily improvements eventually result in huge advantages.

8. Be quick to decide. Remember what the Union Civil War general, Tecumseh Sherman said: "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow."

9. Measure everything of significance. I swear this is true. Anything that is measured and watched, improves.

10. Anything that is not managed will deteriorate. If you want to uncover problems you don't know about, take a few moments and look closely at the areas you haven't examined for a while. I guarantee you problems will be there.

11. Pay attention to your competitors, but pay more attention to what you're doing. When you look at your competitors, remember that everything looks perfect at a distance. Even the planet Earth, if you get far enough into space, looks like a peaceful place.

12. Never let anybody push you around. In our society, with our laws and even playing field, you have just as much right to what you're doing as anyone else, provided that what you're doing is legal.

13. Never expect life to be fair. Life isn't fair. You make your own breaks. You'll be doing good if the only meaning fair has to you, is something that you pay when you get on a bus (i.e., fare).

14. Solve your own problems. You'll find that by coming up with your own solutions, you'll develop a competitive edge. Masura Ibuka, the co-founder of SONY, said it best: "You never succeed in technology, business, or anything by following the others." There's also an old Asian saying that I remind myself of frequently. It goes like this: "A wise man keeps his own counsel."

15. Don't take yourself too seriously. Lighten up. Often, at least half of what we accomplish is due to luck. None of us are in control as much as we like to think we are.

16. There's always a reason to smile. Find it. After all, you're really lucky just to be alive. Life is short. More and more, I agree with my little brother. He always reminds me: "We're not here for a long time; we're here for a good time.

Original should be here.

"Indecision may or may not be my problem." Jimmy Buffett 

Interesting point of view from Charlie Reese-

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations.  The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congresspersons, one president and nine Supreme Court justices - 545 human beings out of the 300 million - are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress.

In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered but private central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.  They have no legal authority.

They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton-picking thing.

I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.  The politician has the power to accept or reject it.  No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall.

No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.

The president can only propose a budget.

He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes.

Who is the speaker of the House?

She is the leader of the majority party.

She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want.

If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts – of incompetence and irresponsibility.

I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red. 

If the Marines are in IRAQ, it's because they want them in IRAQ.

There are no unsolvable government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like 'the economy,' 'inflation' or 'politics' that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses - provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Last Monday, (February 25, 2008) at 435 JST, someone at Bluehost decided to migrate our account to a new server with a different server and with a different configuration. Normally, as a service provider, you would notify your client that you plan to migrate their data and make them aware of the new system. (Matt Heaton,Owner Pictured Left)

In this case, Bluehost did nothing of the sort. They just started migrating a site. At that point, they broke our CMS application which is the backbone of our website. Calling customer support we could get no clear response from Bluehost as to what happened. Just guesses as to what they thought was happening.

Our developer immediately checked the website and the CMS files were all intact. Our system engineer discovered Bluehost had changed the IP address for our server. Our main dot com DNS was pointed at the original IP address. Bluehost's call center person said that we should just wait for the DNS to update. We waited and waited but the site was broken 24 hours. The next AM, we contacted our local ISP and also asked them to update their DNS. Our dot com was still broken.

Bluehost was saying there was something wrong with our local ISP. We got the local ISP on a conference call with them. Step by step, Bluehost admitted it was not our ISP's problem. We let the ISP off the call. The website was still broken. (Please keep in mind that every hour that someone works on the site or our engineers are involved costs us money).

On Tuesday night, we called in the original developer (about midnight) as our site was still down. He got on it and fixed it that night. We were without a website for 31 hours. His summary was the following

-----Original Message-----
From: L S[mailto:name@design.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 9:18 AM
Subject: Site problems resolved

Hi there,

I had another look last night after some digging around and was able

to add back in index.php to the URL's so the site (and sub pages)

were working again as of last night. I spent a couple of hours

digging around some more this morning and discovered that Bluehost

had apparently upgraded their Apache installation and changed the way

a certain function in PHP is handled. That in turn affected how URL's

were working on the company, which is why you would get the

front page but none of the others. They appeared to try and add a

server rule to fix this, but that completely broke how the files were

being served. Anyway, I commented that out, and found a fix for the

URL's problem so they should be acting normally now and you should be

able to browse around the sites as normal. Pretty amazing they would

change something like that and either not notify you, or notify their

techs that it might be an issue, but there you go!

So after all that it looks like it wasn't a DNS issue after all (at

least as far as I could see, though it might have been a problem

earlier) - I assumed the domain wasn't resolving at all, so when I

saw the domain was resolving to the correct location (and was

receiving traffic), I assumed it was fine. But like you mention the

requests for sub pages weren't working, hence the need for the

solution above for the company site.

I'll invoice you for the extra hours support if that's

cool.

Cheers!

LS

______________

After figuring out what happened (nobody at Bluehost seemed to know, or want to tell), I tallied our loses. $2155 of loses that we could count, not sure how much traffic (usually 50-100 visitors per day).

We sent an email on 2/28 at 1215am to Matt Heaton, the Bluehost President, explaining the situation. It is one thing for us to take our site down, it is much worse for the company you've entrusted your site to, to take it down for you and not be able to fix it or at least cover the costs they have generated for you.

I have really come to admire what Matt is doing at Bluehost and enjoy reading his blog. However, in my almost two years of experience, I think Bluehost is lacking in two areas

1) They are a bit disorganized and should notify customers of changes. (Ie. an additional paid spam filtering service vanished overnight and we had to call to get our money back).

2) If you fail in serving your customers, you should do something to show them you care.

In this case, you should help pay the costs that were incurred by the customer. If you couldn't cover all the costs, the least you could do for example is cover X years (or whatever years) hosting (if they are going to stay with you) as that would cost you nothing as you've already got 800 users crammed onto those servers. Matt's blog talks about his trouble with Google and his frustration with Google's customer service. After resending the email to him on 1 March, I am feeling his "Google" frustration. In this case, it is about him and his team in Utah.

Overall, I have enjoyed my experience with Bluehost. I've even written about it. If we are going to raise the level of customer service in the market, then everyone in management needs to do it in our own companies first. If we all do that we would have a better world one company at a time.

It is great to be a part of the work at AINEO. We work very hard and do a great job for the smart firms that select AINEO to do their IT.The year 2007 was a great year for us. We delivered product or services in every major city in Japan, and a lot of minor ones to boot. Our weakness has always been that we are an engineering company... our strength is that we are an engineering company.AINEO client satisfaction levels are the highest of our history in 2007. Of course, we are Asia Pacific's best IT firm. We also continue to be the best Nortel reseller (distributor) in Japan. The number of NEC, Avaya, and Cisco PBX (or IP PBX in many cases), continues to increase.Due to the increase in hardware and software business, we have become the top buyer of HP, Dell, Microsoft, Canon, Polycom, Panduit, Lenel Systems, Rittal, and just about anything IT. With our business volume, we have been able to become the IT purchasing department for many Japanese and Multinational firms. We can get great prices for our clients. We are in the 10 ten shops for business volume in Tokyo now.Probably the most exciting area is a new service we will be launching in April. This product is designed specifically for out customers. We have named it AINEO Secure. Very excited about this as we have many people waiting for its introduction.Many thanks to the great AINEO team, and the AINEO partners. Without are partners and their faith in us in outsourcing their IT departments, entrusting their moves and other projects, and enlisting AINEO consultants to clean up their IT departments, we would not have the success that we have.

Many thanks to everyone involved with AINEO!

Have you heard the latest office gossip? Every office, corporation or workplace has it. A steady flow of juicy gossip filled with rumor, conjecture and wild speculation. But if you want to be happy on the job, you need avoid this kind of talk.

Participating in office gossip is tempting but very destructive. The Bible is filled with warnings to avoid it. James 4:11 says, "Speak not evil of one another." And Proverbs 17:9 says, "He who covers over an offense promotes love, but whoever repeats a matter separates close friends."

Refuse to participate in gossip in the workplace and you'll earn the respect and trust of everyone around you.

-Hammond

If you want some food for thought on technology, service providers, and where technology is going in general check out this commentary by Oliver Reichtenstein.

"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."
- Josh Billings