Just a List

For those of you who are curious what I’ve been up to lately, let me see if I can fill in some details.  That’s some, not all.  You guys get bored when I give you all of the details.

1. Some of you know this, some of you don’t, but Chad’s scheduled to make a visit to Charlotte for a couple days March 10-12.  This is the first time I’ve seen him since……well, I’m not exactly sure when the last time was.  I think it might have been just after Thanksgiving 2004 when I made my last trip to Michigan.  If anyone remembers differently, please let me know.


2. St. John is throwing a retirement dinner for Mom on June 4th, so yes, I will be making a trip up for that.  I know Mom’s looking forward to the end of the year when she will no longer need to get up at 5 am nearly every day.  So if any of my faithful readers either had Mom for a teacher, or possibly are the parent of one of her current or former students, feel free to use the comments to post any well wishes and congratulations.  Inappropriate comments (judged solely on my opinion) will be removed.


3. Since Mom’s event is in early June, I’ve made the decision not to attend the CM IT Solutions convention which kicks off on June 14th.  Since I figure I’ll be up in MI for a couple days before the event, and possibly a couple days after, I can’t quite justify not working for that long.


4. Not much happened this week.  Of course, I made my weekly visit to Target & Harris Teeter this morning, though this one included one additional stop:  Home Depot.  It seems the toilet in my bathroom has been running a fair amount, and I’d like to stop that, so I had to go out and buy a flapper for it.  I’ll be putting that in later today.  Dad helped me replace the one in the spare bathroom last summer while he & Mom were visiting (had to keep the big guy busy), so we’ll see whether I can pull this one off myself or not.


5. Later today, I’ll be changing the bed, doing a little vacuuming, filing, and watching a fair amount of basketball.  Dinner will be steak, french fries, and applesauce.


6. How is it that politicians become such crummy people?  I get the impression that when most of them run for office for the first time, they’ve got good intentions.  Then, somewhere along the way, a large percentage of them seem to forget the meaning of “ethics”, “code of conduct”, and “honest”.  Yes, that includes you Jim Black.


7. Can someone please remind George Bush that he was elected President, not Pope?  And by extension, that means he’s not infallible.


8. Don’t you think that at some point in the last couple weeks, Dick Chaney thought to himself, “You know, I never would have shot anyone if they’d let me stay in my undisclosed bunker location.  But, NOOOOOO, people want me to appear in public.  See what happens?”


9. Speaking of Chaney, if someone offered a hunting trip with Dick on Ebay, would the price include medical expenses incurred?


10. I’m guessing they’re going to make the announcement in church Sunday, but the person that was called to be the Family Life Director (or something like that) has accepted the call.

That should do it for today.  Feel free to leave comments or questions.  I’m starting to run low on topics, so if there’s any other suggestions for this forum, throw ‘em out.

Update on CM IT Solutions of South Charlotte (My Business)

A couple weeks back, I promised to give a bit of an update as to how the business is going.  The short answer is better.

I have to admit, this has been tougher than I thought it would be.  It’s taken longer to get things up and running than I ever imagined, and things tend to run in streaks.  August and September of last year went well, but then the rest of the year pretty much sucked.  January things started to pick up, and February’s been pretty good so far.  Hiring a full-time salesperson certainly has helped matters in terms of having meetings and more opportunities.

That said, I’m very glad I made the jump.  When you start your own business, people who’ve done it before will tell you that you’ll have days when you feel great about doing it, and other days when you wonder why God would ever let you even CONSIDER the possibility of doing such an insane thing as leaving a regular paycheck.  They couldn’t be more right.  I also had people warn me that you want to figure out how much you think you’ll need to get everything going, and then double or triple it.  That was great advice that would have been more useful had I listened to it.  It’s amazing the expenses that seem to creep in that you hadn’t necessarily planned on.

The advantages I’ve found so far:  

1. I’m definitely more relaxed.


2. I don’t have to feel guilty if I want to take an hour during the day to do something, particularly when I know I’ll be working later that evening.


3. More flexible schedule.


4. It’s forced me to interact with a wider range of people.

The disadvantages:

1. It can get VERY time consuming


2. Feeling like you can’t take a day off.


3. Right now, the lack of income.

In case you haven’t stopped to look at what I do, I invite you to the website:  www.cmitsolutions.com/southclt.  It’s got links to our backup solution, Remote Data Backups, which is great for home or business use, as well as Intuit products such as Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax.  We’ve also got a pretty cool program for doing pay-per-click advertising on a local basis, so if you know of someone who’d like to promote their business online, this is a great tool that also allows you to keep to a budget.  Sorry, had to get my plugs in.  Yes, I do get commissions on these, and more than the $.10 the Google ads get me.  Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions.

So that’s the update.  If you have any specific questions, put ‘em up (and click on the ads), and I’ll try to answer them (or at least the ones that don’t reveal too much info).

All-Time High

Thanks, Gang! Saturday set a record for me. $1.83 in ad revenue!!! Keep it up, and maybe I can hire an entourage. Rob's been campaigning for a spot there for a while, but I'm sure I'll eventually have a few other openings.

Don't Forget the Other One

By the way, I don't know how many of you check it, but I'm posting on my sports blog as well. I'll have something up there shortly as well. I was a little surprised I didn't get any comments from the one a couple weeks ago, but maybe I overestimated the quality of my work there. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, click here: Derek's Sports Views.

Plus it even has DIFFERENT ads!!!

Aaron is Dead. Long Live Aaron

Well, I’m a couple days late on updating y’all on this, but my first pet, Aaron, died.  He made it to 73 before he become no more and ceased to be.  Yes, that was a Monte Python reference, as the whole idea of an electronic pet seems borderline absurd.

But yet, Aaron remains.  It seems (and I know this is going to be a shock to most of you) that Aaron really liked me.  How do I know this?  The screen said so.  So much so, in fact, that he was willing to be reincarnated in my next pet.  So I took him up on the offer.  I now have a yellow dat named Aaron II who likes running around and crapping a lot.  He’s eating less than Aaron, but then again, he didn’t eat as much at the beginning either.  What scares me is the fact that II seems to have a lot going through his bowels.  I’m really glad all I have to do is touch the screen to clear the crap.

In other news, you can bet on the Enron trials.  Have you seen this?  Heard about this?  (Fans of Jimmy from South Park recognize that reference).  I might have to have our resident oddsmaker Casey look into this for us, but you might want to check out this article from Yahoo news:  “On Friday, when court was not in session, the trading at Intrade showed a more than 60 percent chance that Lay would be convicted of at least four of the seven counts of fraud and conspiracy against him. For Skilling, trading showed about a 75 percent chance he would be convicted on more than half the 31 counts of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors pending against him.”

That’s not even the funny part.  Read this paragraph and the quotes from the attorneys for Lay & Skilling:  

Lawyers for the two men criticized such speculation on the future of their clients, who would face decades in prison if convicted. ‘I think it's abhorrent, betting on people's lives,’ Skilling lawyer Daniel Petrocelli said. Added Michael Ramsey, Lay's lawyer: "It should probably be illegal. That's an invitation to tamper with the case."

Hey, Petrocelli.  Is this any more abhorrent than your client creating false financial statements which effectively cost THOUSANDS of people their jobs (Enron employees as well as some good people at Arthur Andersen who didn’t have anything to do with Enron),  and costing other corporations MILLIONS (maybe BILLIONS) in compliance costs related to Sarbannes-Oxley, which was brought up due to your client’s actions?  No offense, but this isn’t as bad as most dead pools, which you probably took part in about 5-10 years ago.  I may just have to send this to Stephen Colbert.  You’re already dead to me, but you may soon be dead to Colbert as well.  For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, watch the show.

So that’s this week’s update.  I’m going to try to post updates every Friday at a minimum, but no promises.  I still have to address Ann’s request for a business update, and that will hopefully be my next post here.  I just couldn’t let the Enron thing go, and I’m sure EVERYONE was curious how Aaron was (past tense intended) doing.  If you’re reading this over the weekend, I hope you’re having a good one.  If you’re reading this on a Monday (or some other weekday), I hope you had a good weekend.  Now get back to work, but only after you click on an ad or two above.  I’ve already made just over $4.  Thanks gang!