My daughter will have her tonsils removed tomorrow along with her adnoids.  I'm a bit nervous for her as it is a surgery after all, even though its somewhat common.

I am also not looking forward to the next few days of recovery that she will have to experience.

Anyway, we are as stocked up as we can be with jello, popcicles, ice cream and soup.

I'll be offline most of the day tomorrow and hope she does well. 

My grandmother has also been in the hospital since the day after Thanksgiving as well, and I hope that her test results come in tomorrow so that we can determine what is ailing her so that we can help her proceed down a path of recovery.

So last summer I entered a photo contest.  I'm no photographer but the photo continues to generate lots of email for me.

The original contest gave me a couple of awards (awards are cheap on the internet).

Now the contest is cranked up again, and collecting votes.

Before it was an editors choice award, now they are taking votes on my picture from anyone.

So if you get a chance click over and vote for my photo.  There's no buying or sign ups or oathes of fealty or group sessions where you sit down and listen to a speech about time shares or Pigeon Forge cabins or anything like that, just click on a rating and hit the submit button and you are done.

note the prizes are no longer millions of dollars but ipods ;(

I hope everyone had a good holiday weekend.  My family and I drove up to upstate New York for Thanksgiving.  It was a long drive up, and a short drive back.  Both times we drove at night, and I did most of the driving since I tend to stay up most of the night.

While I was there, I did a lot of work catching up on things and a little bit of studying learning how to graphically design websites with Photoshop, cut them in Fireworks and move on from there to Dreamweaver where I am very comfortable.  Next up I have to find the CSS step in that equation.

While I was in upstate New York, my Verizon phone about had a melt down.  Those goofy Verizon network guys apparently have not made it to upstate New York because the connection there was TERRIBLE!

My phone (a palm treo 700) was continually attempting to connect and then giving a mournful beep of dispair when it lost a connection after clinging to it for a second or two.  This happened so often that it kept draining my battery within a couple hours and drove everyone nuts with the beeping sounds of cellular death and agony that my phone kept emitting.

So long story short, I didn't do a lot of video blogging over the holidays and that is the reason for the break in connection.  I did have a good dsl connection, but lately I have gotten so used to mobile blogging that I am sort of out of the habit here about actually writing something from a computer!

If you are a Twitter user, then you have to take a moment to visit Viral Grape Vine and squeeze these twipples.

I do not even recall why, but the other day I turned Yahoo Messenger back on.  I had un-installed it a few months back when it took a crap on me and never put it back on, relying on Skype.

I've had it up for a week or two now and I get lots and lots of spammers pinging me left and right.  So I've decided to follow some advice (completely out of context) from a friend of mine that I met in Vegas.

His advice is to 'smack them on the ass and send them on their way.'

Now, I'm not the type of person that would do that with a real person, but with a spammer on the internet, it seems like the perfect tactic.

So when I get pinged, I just drop them a reply with a crazy article from Viral Grape Vine.  Who knows maybe they'll even steal my content or something and circulate it around the internet for me . . .

I'm not really the photo a day type.  Just not that good of a photographer and my camera is in its declining years as well.

But I picked up these shots tonight and liked them well enough.

I used to get sick a lot more often than I am today.  A decade a go, I could bring my A Game to work when I was sick.  I was used to it, I could almost thrive on it, and I was not only good when I was sick, sometimes I was better.

Not today.  For the last 7-10 years, I have been going through a very healthy stage of my life.  I have been much more productive overall since I have been more healthy.  However, I have not been able to practice, play or be sick as much and my sick game is dwindling.

Some old Michael Jordan fans might remember MJ, playing against Utah with a nasty flu and playing great. That was me years ago, I could play great sick.  Going to work dosed up on Actifed or Sudafed was almost the norm.  I'd get in the zone and just plow through tasks, assignments, projects and missions.

Today, I might get sick a couple times a year.  Now, I'm doing good to keep myself awake when I'm sick.  I do not think it has anything to do with the colds being worse, I think its just lack of practice.

You have to go to work with the body you have, healthy or sick.  To perform well, you need practice with the body that you have and not the one you would like to have.

This week has started off for me with work being performed by my sick self.  I was on my game last week as I came down with this cold, but once it hit with force on Sunday, I have been hard pressed to do anything more than flutter my eyes open.

Each paragraph I write here, requires a 30 second break in between.  Each sentence makes me want to stop writing, kick back, close my eyes and sleep off this cold.  I've slept more in the last 3 days than I have in the previous 7 days.  If someone were to write a 360 degree evaluation on myself, I would write, "Strategic, Incisive, good speaker, brings the highest level of effort, except when sick. Needs to practice work when sick to make up for this deficiency."

So the bar that used to be next to the fountain is now Circo, so instead lets meet at Caramel in the Bellagio (Possible back up at the Fixx in the Belagio.)

Time:  Start accumulating for drinks around 6:30 on Friday of blogworld

Picture time: Say around 7:30

Here's a couple images of the bars banners.  Caramel is in through the Bellagio main intrance and then hook a right in the lobby (maybe 25 meters in).  Head down about 100 meters and its on the left.  Fix is further down and to the right a bit.  (Caramel is usually easier to deal with.)

call or email me if you need directions

If you need to identify me, watch some of the videos in the older posts below.  I don't look much like a real estate agent imho.

I'm heading out to BlogWorld in Las Vegas in about 8 hours and getting into Vegas later tomorrow afternoon.  For anyone heading to the show, other bloggers, companies, advertisers, writers, video folks, podcasters, whatever.  I'm looking forward to catching up with you and having a great time.  This is going to be a fun show and there are a lot of dinners and parties planned so I'm looking forward to putting a lot of faces to names that I have met over the last couple years working in this crazy upstart industry!

In the meantime, hope every one has a safe trip.  My own term life insurance is paid and up todate.  ;)

See you soon!

Today, I had the unfortunate experience of discovering a personal limitation that I was not previously aware of.  I feel that it is important to understand your limits and welcome these types of discoveries.  Unfortunately, these discoveries typically come paired up with failure.

That was the case today.  A project I was working on earlier this month failed.  I work with several different businesses, customers and websites.  This failure directly impacted one of my customers and that made the failure much more painful for my customer and myself.  It is one thing to make a mistake or fail when it only impacts yourself, and quite another to impact your customer or partners.

I always work to test things for myself where the risk of failure is minimized, fine tune the process and test again many times before I roll it out to someone else.  This time I had tested the process and the product and everything was fine there, but I had not accepted this type of order from a customer before.  There was a good deal of custom work involved and as this custom work began interfaced with my tested process a number of process problems and more importantly delays ensued.

This was compounded a small imperfect storm of blogosphere related fires that happened as planned (by Murphy the writer of Murhpy's Law).  The blogosphere storms were directly related as this project was to take place on the blogosphere.  So I could not dismiss the fires and focus on the bigger priority.  I had to deal with the small issues before I could proceed with the bigger custom project and that ultimately resulted in gridlock and a major slow down.

Lessons Learned

I always attempt to take away lessons from these experiences and apply them directly.  Here are some of the things that I learned:

• Keep Custom Work Simple
• Continue to speed up and improve existing processes to enable more time or slack to deal with Murphy's law fires
• Put in place more sensors so that I can keep my customer in touch with the ongoing status of a project so that any slack, backlog or slippage of milestones can be telegraphed and where possible mitigated by the customer
• Don't Prepare to Fail, but be Prepared to help customers as a result of failures that I am responsible for

That last point is probably the newest and most difficult lesson for me.  I do not prepare to fail.  I do not expect to fail.  I do mitigate risk both in plan as well as in practice.  In this case, however I had nothing in my bag of tricks to deal with actual failure.

I offered the customer a refund, paid the refund and offered to do the work anyway paying for it out of my own pocket (even thought the work would come in late).  That is definitely not enough, but it is the best I could think of at the time.

Picking Up the Pieces

So as I head into the weekend, I need to pick up the pieces.  I'm doing this in part by going back to basics and getting back to some of my writing.  I am not leaving any of my business ventures, just getting back in touch with my inner voice.  I have fallen behind on my writing and that in part tends to leave me feeling a little out of balance.

I have a large backlog of writing material to cover from the Presidential election to some unique perspectives on the scandal around ticket prices for the Hannah Montana tour to some great satire, movie reviews, book reviews and fiction too.

What has been your experience for dealing with Failure?

If you have had experience with failure and specifically how to deal with that failure, plan for it, avoid it, heal from it, or help others impacted by it, please consider dropping me a line or a link to your perspectives.

I received an interesting inquiry this week from a firm looking for a social media manager in Charlotte North Carolina.  An internet finance company was looking for a social media manager.  The social media aspect of the position was right up my ally, but the finance aspect covered areas that I have moved out of, actually moved out of about 6-7 years ago.

I think the position is interesting however, and so as I venture to BlogWorld next week, I intend to keep my eyes, ears, comments and email open for people that might be interested in a local job in Charlotte.  I have a feeling that there may not be too many people specifically fitting the bill for this particular job in Charlotte itself yet, as Social Media marketing is relatively a new field.  However, for people that have some of the capabilities or requirements, there might still be an opportunity if the company in question decides to possibly contract out elements of the work, and bring in an overall jack of all trades super blogger, software developer, sales person and finance expert later on down the road.

Not trying to toot my own horn, but I am most of those things.  I don't know too many others like that, however, I doubt that I am completely unique, so if you have those skills or even some combination of them let me know and we can look at getting you in contact with the right people for this salaried position or possibly some of the sub contract work that might come out of it later.

Stranger things happen, my mother once tried to find nursing jobs through a local hospital and ended up working as a librarian for a hospital.  Sometimes interesting opportunities come in packages that you do not exactly expect to find.

Seriously about the Contact Info

You can reach me via a comment, or if you prefer something a little more private drop me a line through Softduit or reach out to me via LinkedIn.  I'm pretty easy to contact for a reason!

Yesterday (Halloween) was my 14th wedding anniversary.  My wife and I were married on Halloween in Savannah, Georgia.  Halloween is a high holiday in Savannah beneath St Patrick's day, but above Christmas.  Getting married on Halloween was one of the smartest things I ever did because it is virtually impossible for me to ever forget our anniversary!

These days my wife and I refer to it as our standing yearly date, and we of course spend it taking the kids trick or treating.

The kids had a great time of course.  We went to a Halloween party, they were in a costume contest, and then we walked them from house to house for a couple hours and let them go to bed late.

Somewhere in there, we ate dinner, and the kids went on a hay bail ride too. 

For those of you curious about what I dressed up as for Halloween . . .

The answer is I'm weird enough to go as myself, but I have known that for a long time.  In fact it only surprises other people that I am already aware of this.  The kids on the other hand dressed up as a ghoul, a fairy princess and a lady bug.