The Accidental Millionaire – by Gary Fong

October 4, 2011 in Book Notes with 0 Comments

Maybe you haven’t heard of Gary Fong. Even though I’m interested in photography, I hadn’t heard of him until a photographer buddy clued me in. He is known as an innovative wedding photographer, entrepreneur and writer.

In The Accidental Millionaire, Fong tells us his life story so far, giving the details of the personal philosophy that has worked so well for him. This is not the same recycled self-help crap everybody else writes. In contrast to vision, goals, tasks and actions, Fong’s more Zen-flavored philosophy comes down to exploring things that interest him, creating space for insights to happen and then working his ass off. He admits he acts on hunches, sometimes decides by flipping a coin and understands the role luck has in success.

This book will be appealing even if you aren’t a photographer.

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Jack White on Restiction and Creativity

September 13, 2011 in Creativity with 0 Comments

Get Rich Quick Hucksters? Just Giving People What They Want

September 4, 2011 in Business with 0 Comments

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth. — Steve Jobs

I often get frustrated when I see how much information about running an online business is of the over-hyped get-rich-quick variety. Then I remember the quote above.

Tips, Tricks and Hints for Using SSIS from A-Z

September 2, 2011 in Technology with 0 Comments

A while back I started keeping a list of all the things I learned to make working with SSIS less painful and I thought I’d share. These are small things: tips, tricks and hints. Just stuff I wish I had known when I first started working with SSIS.
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Why Build an Online Business with no Business Model?

July 25, 2011 in Business with 0 Comments

Recently a friend asked me for some advice about building an online business. Essentially, he has invested some time building contacts in a particular field and has developed some unique content. He is looking to find a way to build a business based on what he currently has. There is already one website out there that is similar to what he is thinking of building although he would not be using the same business model. One thing he wanted to know was how much it might cost to build something similar.

To give him a ballpark figure is not hard. But at this point I think it’s the wrong question to ask.

He is struggling to identify how he will make money. He has a family and little free time. He wants to make sure he is investing in something that has a good chance of making money.

Reading books on business doesn’t make me any more of a businessman than reading books on surgery would make me a surgeon. Still, I have a little experience when it comes to online business so I felt comfortable sharing my thoughts. We had a few discussions and then I wrote him this email: Continue Reading…

SSIS Output to Multiple Files

June 22, 2011 in Technology with 1 Comment

Let’s say a user asks you to create a flat file output from a database query. Piece of cake. Open SSMS, write the query, run it and copy the results (with headers using SSMS 2008) into a text file. Send the user the file and and you’re done with time left over for a siesta.

But oh wait—they want to be able to open it in an older version of Excel, which will only display ~ 65k rows per sheet. This file has 190k rows. So they ask you to write the output to multiple files, limiting the total rows per file to 60k.

Now what?

You could simply open the raw flat file, go to line 60,001 and cut-paste lines 60,001–120,000 into another file and repeat as necessary. That’s ok for a one-off task but not a good strategy if you are going to be doing this several times. It can be cumbersome and error prone to manually create several files this way.

No—the better approach is to make SSIS do the heavy lifting. I had to do this recently and thought I’d share my solution. Continue Reading…

Notes on Marketing and Promotion

June 17, 2011 in Business with 2 Comments

I made these notes during last night’s HYPE event: Entrepreneur Roundtable – Marketing & Promotion. The speakers were Caitlin Thayer of Barefoot Media
and Andrew Wood of Mintz & Hoke Communications Group. Caitlin and Andrew discussed brand, marketing, social media and small business success. These notes aren’t their words verbatim so if anything sounds wrong, the blame is mine. Continue Reading…

People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn’t rocket science—we’ve chosen one of the world’s most simple professions.

—Jack Welch

link

The Paradoxes of Freedom

April 17, 2011 in Book Notes with 0 Comments

I’ve been reading Guy Murchie’s The Seven Mysteries of Life, An Exploration of Science and Philosophy and it is amazing. The scope of the book is immense but somehow it is packed with details. You can read it online but the material is so dense I recommend buying the book. I feel like I could read this book 100 times and still have barely scratched the surface.

One topic in particular stuck in my mind: The Paradoxes of Freedom. I’ve excerpted the text of that part of the book and added some comments and questions below. Continue Reading…

Journey vs. Destination

December 1, 2010 in Everything Else with 0 Comments

Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing. – Shakespeare

The other day I was watching a premium cable television series on DVD. At the beginning of each episode, a voice announces “Previously on…” and then we see a string of clips that recap all the important plot points in the past few episodes.

If I just watched those clips at the start of each episode and skipped the episodes, I could still get the whole story arc and save a heap of time. Continue Reading…

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