Spencer
Wolfe

Your attitude is either your greatest asset or your greatest liability. The familiar saying that "attitude determines altitude" is absolutely true.

John Maxwell has called attitude, "the eye of your soul. If your attitude is negative, then you see things negatively. If it's positive, then you see things positively." When I'm looking for someone I can put in a position of leadership, I'm looking for someone with a can-do attitude.

-Mac Hammond, John Maxwell

"Essentially there are two actions in life—performance and excuses."
-unknown CEO

Napoleon Hill

"The moment you commit and quit holding back, all sorts of unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance will rise up to help you. The simple act of commitment is a powerful magnet for help."

It may not be such a good idea to rely on outside services for your PBX. We always expected this would happen, but couldn't imagine building a business on this or any other hosted PBX service. Unless you've got the expertise and the engineering power like AINEO Networks. It is best to install your own system and get maintenance on it.

Skype Outage Continues For Some, Businesses Affected
Skype continues to work on a problem affecting millions of users worldwide, but says it has made progress.
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Friday, August 17, 2007 05:00 PM PDT
Almost 36 hours after a software problem caused widespread outages in eBay Inc.'s Skype service, engineers continue to work to fully restore this extremely popular Internet telephony and instant messaging service, while many business users deal with work disruptions.

Although steady progress was made throughout the day Friday, the problem, which has affected millions of Skype users, hasn't been fully fixed,

At midnight GMT Friday, an official provided the latest update on Skype's Heartbeat blog, saying that the sign-on problems have been resolved, but that the instant messaging presence and chat may take a few more hours to be fully operational for all.

"If you are one of the minority who may still be experiencing problems, please be patient. You do not need to adjust or restart your computer. Skype will start working for you very soon," wrote Villu Arak [cq]. "We will issue a further update when we know that Skype is functioning normally, or if there is further material news."

The widespread software problem, which centered on the system's ability to log users into the service, has particularly stung people who use Skype for business. Skype estimates that about 30 percent of its users employ Skype as a work-related communications tool.

"The outage has had quite a profound effect on my working day, and has meant spending time setting up other chat clients and networking with colleagues via alternative means," Michael Pick, a freelance blogger and social media consultant, wrote in an e-mail interview Friday.

Based in Japan, Pick works from home and has clients and colleagues all over the world, many of whom also work from their homes. "I guess that might make us a particularly dependent group on Skype," he wrote.

Skype is his virtual work communications hub for text chats, file sharing and voice calls. "In the average day there is very little time that Skype isn't on in the background, and I use it extensively to speak to clients and colleagues scattered all over the world," he wrote.

In addition to the basic, free Skype services, Pick also pays for additional Skype telephony services. He feels Skype could have handled this situation better from a support and communications perspective. "For a so-called Web 2.0 service, communication is key, and I can imagine that Skype may well have lost quite a few supporters in favor of some of the other VOIP services today," he wrote.

Thomas Vander Wal, a social Web advisor and consultant who runs a one-man company called InfoCloud Solutions Inc. in Bethesda, Maryland, uses Skype as his primary communication channel for about half of his customers.

"When customers buy a day of my time and I am not meeting face to face, Skype is often my primary means of communicating, as I can connect to a client with voice and/or video and leave it running for the day. It is like having a tunnel into their offices with them seeing or hearing me working on their issues," he wrote in an e-mail interview Friday.

Luckily for him, he hadn't scheduled any such engagement during the time of the outage. "I use Skype 2 or 3 days a week and it hit at a time where it didn't impact me," he wrote.

Much more stressed out about the outage is Stefan Topfer, CEO and chairman of Winweb International Ltd. in London, which offers Skype as part of a suite of services for small businesses.

Winweb has about 250,000 registered users, so the company's customer support lines have been ringing off the hook inquiring about Skype.

At the time of his phone interview with IDG News Service on Friday, over 8 hours had passed since Skype had last provided an official update about the situation, and Topfer was livid about this.

"That's a whole business day. That's quite unacceptable. I'm quite upset about it," Topfer said. He had been unsuccessfully trying to contact his company's main Skype contact since the beginning of the outage on Thursday.

Once the service is restored and Skype explains to him what happened, he'll decide whether to stick with Skype or seek other options.

"My masters are my clients and I have to provide them with a good service. This outage is going to impact my business, no question about it," Topfer said. "The most stunning thing of all is really the way this customer care has been handled."

For Pick, the situation has been a learning experience in several ways. For example, free of the real-time communication distractions from Skype, "I have managed to get a lot more done in terms of writing work," he wrote. And the situation has made it clear that it's never good to depend too much on a single service, company or tool, which, he now realizes, can be "a potentially hazardous career move."

Skype has about 220 million registered users worldwide. At peak times, it has an average of 9 million concurrent users on its network, a Skype spokeswoman said Friday. At press time -- 12:30 a.m. GMT Saturday -- the service indicated almost 4 million [m] concurrent users on the network.

1. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

2. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

3. Those that live by the sword get shot by those who don't.

4. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.

5. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.

6. If you lined up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try to pass them, five or six at a time, on a hill, in the fog.

7. The things that come to those who wait will be the scraggly junk left by those who got there first.

8. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture in a dark room.

9. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.

10. When you go into court, you are putting yourself into the hands of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

IF you been looking for a domain name recently you will find that anything.com is taken. I found a very interesting article on domain names and what to do with them here.

Domain Names and Anchor Text

May 21, 2004
Branding vs Naming

Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.

The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their domain name for more than just branding.
Superstar Websites

People take the branding idea one step further and rattle off some of the best technological leaders. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, etc. None of these sites say what they do in their site name.

Google is so powerful because it is the only Google. It was a wide open market. Yahoo! became Yahoo! because there was no great well marketed directory on the web. Ebay became Ebay because there was so much market friction in trading junk and they made it easier.
Business Facts

Most successful businesses or websites will not be like Google. Most will not be a runaway technological success. Most businesses become successful from soft innovations. Small focused consumer centric changes can help you craft a successful business model.

For every Yahoo! or Google on the market there are 1,000 Door Hangers.com or Cheese.com websites which are doing just fine "bringing in the cheese."
Anchor Text

Anchor text is extremely important to search engines. What a link says is as important as who is saying it. When I link to your site with the words "I eat cats" as the link text a search engine will evaluate that link and assume you eat cats.

You can't control all the links you get (meow), but you can help control some of them. People often link to you using the words in your domain name as the link text (also known as anchor text.) If your domain name has your primary keywords in it then you have an extremely powerful business advantage over your competitors.
Using Dashes in Domain Names

Most of the benefit of dashes in the domain name have eroded in the last year or two. Domain names themselves have been greatly devalued in search engine algorithms, and most links use the site name vice the domain name as the anchor text.

I am of the opinion that you usually can pick out a keyword rich domain name without needing dashes. It may take a bit of creativity and a bit of time, but it is possible. If you are aiming to sell products vice become a consultant you may be able to do well making a living from search engine traffic and not need as strong of a branded name behind your domain.
Brandable Generic Domain Names

Sometimes they do still exist!

I wanted to write an ebook about SEO. Less than a year ago the domain name SEObook.com was still available. It will not always be that easy to find a domain name, but if you think hard enough you should be able to find a brandable domain name which is also keyword rich.

High quality directories usually prefer to list sites by their name vice "insert keyword phrase here."

Having a domain name like mine makes it very easy for me to get inbound links with "SEO Book" or "Search Engine Optimization Book" as the link text. This allows me to rank better for those search phrases, and eventually it will allow me to rank good for "SEO" and "search engine optimization."
Creativity in Domain Naming

If the domain name with your keywords is already taken you still have many other options. If my domain name was taken odds are I could have still got a domain name like seo-ebook-book.biz, but that seems a bit too generic and lacks the creativity to keep it somewhat brandable while still making it keyword rich.

Usually you can add other words around the main words in your domain name to keep the keyword rich words in there without making it overly long. TheSEObook.com is one example of an alternate domain I could have used. I could also try synonyms. I just looked and SEOreport.com was gone. My next guess for a name was SEOsecrets.com, and it was still available. There are a ton of good domain names still on the market.
Domain Name Summary

* Search engines such as Google heavily weight link text in their relevancy algorithms.
* Soft innovations drive most successful businesses. It is highly unlikely that my business or your business is going to be the next Google.
* Often times keyword rich domain names are available which will give you a considerable competitive advantage over your competition.

- by Aaron Wall, owner of Search Marketing Info

Having just come back from the California, it is shocking to see things like this happen. This is very interesting political commentary from Chuck Colson. A scary thought to have the United States of America losing it freedom and open society.

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=== BreakPoint with Chuck Colson ===
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Shutting Down Free Speech
The Gay Agenda Triumphant

July 25, 2007

It doesn’t pay to take your constitutional right to free speech seriously anymore -- at least, not if you live in Oakland, California. There, a handful of African-American Christian women recently found out that their free speech rights had effectively been outlawed.

The women, who are Oakland government employees, had formed an organization called the Good News Employee Association. As their flyer put it, their group was, “A forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With Respect for the Natural Family, Marriage, and Family Values.”

As columnist George Will relates, the women posted their flyer after other employee groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their activities on the city’s email system and bulletin board. When Good News asked for equal opportunity, they were told to forget it. City officials destroyed their flyer. They accused the women of Good News of being “determined to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. If the women posted any more flyers, or sent their message via email, the city warned, they would be disciplined and perhaps terminated.

In effect, as Will notes, Oakland “has proscribed any speech that even one person might say questioned the gay rights agenda and therefore created what that person felt was a “hostile environment.” While homosexual rights groups used the city’s email system to advertise “Happy Coming Out Day,” the terms “natural family” and “marriage” and “family values” are considered intolerably inflammatory, he adds.

This is why so-called “hate crimes” laws, like the one being considered by the U.S. Congress, are so dangerous. They can be used as a weapon to censor peaceful political speech that someone doesn’t like. The goal of homosexual groups is not to stop violence, or truly hateful speech; it’s to silence anyone who says that homosexual behavior is a biological disorder or a moral wrong. Mere disagreement is redefined as hate.

The Good News group has gone to court over Oakland’s attack on their First Amendment rights, and the super-liberal Ninth Circuit Court, not surprisingly, has ruled against them. The group now hopes the Supreme Court will intervene.

You and I need to be aware of attempts to encroach on our right to speak out against moral evils. We must also understand that this is ultimately a spiritual battle.

The Bible and natural law teachings tell us that God’s law is written upon our hearts and are known to all. As Christian philosopher J. Budziszewski writes in his book, THE REVENGE OF CONSCIENCE, those who rationalize their sins find it to be so much work that they require other people to support them in it. Society itself must be transformed so that it no longer stands in awful judgment.

This is why gay activist groups want to change the law to suppress any speech that identifies homosexual behavior as either a biological disorder or a moral wrong.

You and I must pray for those who are caught up in homosexuality; their lives are tragic. But we must also remember that, as the Apostle Paul puts it, we must witness to the truth, no matter what human lawmakers say or do, because we owe our ultimate allegiance to the eternal lawgiver: God.

Get links to further information on today's topic (http://www.breakpoint.org/listingarticle.asp?ID=6787)

The Japanese, Sex And Family

With a topic like sex, I am sure we’ve got your attention. In Japan, sex is a youthful thing. There is really no Judeo-Christian standard of sex being something being saved for marriage. But it is definitely not something two young people do at home. A whole industry sprung up called ‘love hotels’. More appropriately, they should be called sex hotels as they are just designed to give people a room to do something that husbands and wives are usually doing at home.

What has happened a lot in the Japanese society is pre-marital sex has been rampant. Youth have gotten pregnant and gotten married (which is a heck of a lot better than killing the baby through having an abortion which does happen) to take account for their actions. There is some abortion of babies as abortion in Japan is the lazy form of ‘birth-control`.

Once married the young couple ends up raising their children. Traditionally the Japanese wife stays at home with the family while the husband goes to work. Usually, the wife controls the bank account and budgets for the family. Unlike other countries, Japan does not allow joint bank accounts.

As time passes, the parents are focused on their kids but not too much on their relationships with each other. Many times the relationship goes cold as love is something that needs to be cherished and developed. When the children leave the home, the parents don’t have that much to talk about. Divorce in general has been taboo, but with laws are changing where wives can get half of their husbands worth.

In Japan, there are many Japanese married to foreigners. Many Japanese men married to foreign women, and many Japanese women married to western men. In general, ladies from the Philippines are known for looking after their usually aging husbands better than Japanese women. At the same time, American men are known for treating Japanese women better as there is the cultural sense of chivalry that American tend to have. For example, opening the door, walking behind the lady, giving her attention that a Japanese guy would usually not give.

One interesting phenomenon we have seen with many Japanese women married to Westerners is related directly to sex. American couples usually have very active sex lives. However, after a few years of marriage Japanese women tend to start to withhold themselves from their husbands. We have even heard of Japanese wives telling their western husbands if they want to have sex so often then they should ‘get a girlfriend’. How pathetic!

Men have a very strong sex drive and withholding yourself from your husband is very harmful to a marriage and the family as a whole. Of course, if the drive is out of your marriage then you need to do something about it. What can a husband and wife do to make their marriage deeper?

More next entry…

What Are You Going To Do With That Website?

Well, there certainly have been a lot of changes since we built our first website. We started by using a company called Webcom.com out of Santa Cruz California. We were very pleased with their service until NTT’s Verio bought out their business and let the business go dormant in 1999. We switched to a company called Pair Networks out of Pennsylvania. We were pretty happy with their service but found them expensive, their control panel a bit hard to understand if you weren’t a Unix guy, and nickeling and diming you for various services (a dollar for a domain, $12 to set up, etc.).
About this time, the masses of hosting companies had come online. We were impressed with Hostmysite.com. They had 24 hour telephone support (you had to pay $24.95 a month with Pair just to get 8AM-5PM EST). They even helped us get Japanese webmail working. We were very impressed, until we decided to take our servers in internally. It took weeks to get a refund for the remaining months for the 2 years that they made us pay for to get the best monthly price. It seemed their president had to approve refunding money for services they would not provide. Their quick answering operators started blowing us off when it came time to return our account balance.

Bringing our servers into our own network (at our headquarters office) was brilliant. No more shared services with hundreds of other users. Mail popped into the inbox from engineers onsite and even from customers. We noticed major changes in performance.

For our non-profit organization (NPO) we continued to host our sites. We were disappointed with Hostmysite so we went back to Pair Networks. We concluded that Pair was better as inspite of their lack of telephone support, their team knew better how to service the customers. Hostmysite seem more intent on answering the phone, even if they didn’t know what to say after the initial ‘hello’.

In the process of running the NPO website into the upgrade stage, we discovered some great things. Commonly known as Web 2.0, websites had gone from the HTML, Dreamweaver (ouch!) editor type of work to content management systems (CMS). We no longer had to fiddle around with HTML tables, graphics going out of wack, and pain every time you wanted to upgrade the site. We discovered CMS was a software that runs on the web-server can help you focus more on content and less on coding webpages. Our first experience was with Expression Engine (EE). We had our site template built by a great designer in Australia, then we began to focus on filling in the details (events calendar, blog, audios, etc.).

Before we got the site live we had to decide on whether to keep using Pair or try another service. We took the leap and decided to use Bluehost with our designer. What a great decision! Rather than using a proprietary hosting service, we found that they used Cpanel and open source control panel for setting up databases, creating email accounts, and probably most convenient is the Fantatisco feature. Fantatisco is a feature in Control panel that allows you to install

Content management Systems
Web Logging (Blog) Software
Mailing List Software
Helpdesk Ticketing software
Online Guestbooks
Online Photo Albums

Many other open source applications are available. The keywords these days are MYSQL and PHP. They are musts for running the Web 2.0 software on your web server.

In a nutshell, we are really happy with Bluehost. Their interface is really more useful than any other hosts. They don’t really try to nickel and dime you as the other companies tend to do. Their control does seem a little bit stitched together, but it works very well. My only concern was to hear that they have 800 users on each server. But frankly, you don’t feel there is anyone else on that box.

It is amazing how you can just install WordPress or whatever application via the control panel. It is just a few clicks before you have your own blog, website, or online photo gallery.

If you are looking for a webhost, look for someone who has Cpanel, Fantasico and a lot of good standard web applications that will make your website more complimentary to your content.

We have heard that www.dreamhost.com and www.liquidweb.com are good but have no experience with them. Any recommendations on good web hosting companies? Please leave a comment if you like as a lot of people are looking reading up on hosting companies.

There are so many choices out there, so feedback on good hosts would be helpful.