Not As Planned

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Sometimes things happen that throw our plans out the window.

I had one of those times after work yesterday. Driving home on the highway I heard a loud bang, and felt the steering wheel shake once.

Right away I knew. Blow out.

Sure enough. I pulled off to the side and the right front tire was completely flat.

When I got the tire off and put the dough-nut on I saw my tire had a pen sized hole in the tread, clean through the belt.

No way to fix that. I was due for a new tire anyway.

It was too late last night to get the tire fixed. So this morning first thing I went to our local tire shop to get it taken care of.

I’m in their computer.

My work takes me to lots of places that are hard on tires. Lots of sharp pointy metal has found its way into my tires.

We’ve got this complicated corporate procedure to follow before getting new tires when they wear out on our company cars. Get three estimates, send them off to corporate, blah, blah, blah.

I haven’t had to use it yet in 3 years and 2 cars. I keep getting holes punched in my treads before they wear out.

So anyway, now I’m getting on with my weekend plan. Finally. Nearly a day late.

Ah, life.

Success Principle #15 - Unintended Consequences

Everything choice we make has consequences. And the place we find ourselves in life is simply a direct result of all the choices we’ve made, large or small, added together.

Successful people realize this fact and strive to make their choices wisely.

Many other people instead choose to ignore the cause and effect relationship of their choices and look for something or someone that they can blame for the circumstances they find themselves in. Until they realize that all of us do in fact have choices and that they can start making different choices, their circumstances are unlikely to change.

Unintended Consequences

But here’s the thing. Not all of the consequences of our choices are what we might expect. There are times when unintended consequences might result from our choices.

None of the decisions we make happen in a vacuum. Every choice we make in some way, large or small, affects those around us. And it is quite possible that there might even be a ripple effect of those choices that end up affecting a whole lot of folks.

This principle of unintended consequences is especially evident when governments make policy decisions and change laws for very large groups of people. Read more

Mega List of Success Tools

You’ve got to check this out.

Char and Dawud (talk about two people with cool names - they might end up there with Sting and Bono one day!) have put together an incredible list of 164 Essential Tools for Online Success.

Take a look at just some of the categories of the tools they’ve found links for:

• Antivirus
• Blog Editors
• Browsers
• Browser Screenshots
• Communications
• Conference Calling
• Feeds & Feed Readers
• FireFox Extensions
• FTP Clients
• Graphics
• HTML/CSS
• PDF’s
• SEO Tools & Key Words
• Social Networking
• Web Statistics
• WordPress Plugins

I even found a new WordPress plugin that I’d been looking for thanks to this list - DigClick. Go check it out. Bookmark it on Del.icio.us. Tell all your friends.

This one is worth keeping in your back pocket.

CREEating Value - 27 June 2007

CREEating Value

It’s been a while but we’re getting back on track with this feature here at SuccessCREEations.

Periodically I go through my feed reader and pull out a few gems that bring value to you as a business blogger.

With over 80 million blogs out there finding a few that are worthy of making it to your feed reader can be a challenge. So I’m trying to make that a little easier by pointing out some great blogs that I have in my reader that you may or may not have seen yet.

So without further ado, here are this week’s juicy finds.

Enjoy!

Letting me be . . . random wondering and philosophy (feed) - Did you know Liz Strauss has other blogs besides Successful-Blog? She does. If you are looking for a little thoughtful reflection check out her blog over on Blogger with storytelling that brings back memories.

Google Public Policy Blog (feed) - As long as we are talking about blogs running on Blogger, you might want to check out the Google Public Policy Blog. Worried about Big Brother learning too much about your web habits? Here’s where you can find out what Big Brother himself has to say about all that. They recently had a good post explaining their position on Net Neutrality. Well worth the read.

Making Life Work For You (feed) - Let’s round out this edition with a brand new business blogger who is doing a fantastic job right out of the gate. April Groves is a local Realtor who is blogging to promote her business. But she gets the whole thing about providing value to her readers and she shares much more than just real estate information. (Did I mention she’s a good friend of Gorgeous?) She’s only been blogging a few short months, but she’s well on her way. I expect we’ll see great things from her.

There you have it. This week’s blogs that are CREEating Value. It’s hard to believe this feature has been resting since before SOBCon. I’m finally finding my old groove again. Glad to be back!

Success Principle #14 - Master Your Addictions

My Addiction

I like coffee.

I drink lots of it. Potfulls. Mass quantities.

These days the perfect cup is a nice mild blend with a little half and half and a teaspoon of raw sugar. Or, if I’m feeling especially healthy, perhaps a bit of Stevia instead of the sugar.

I like the smell. The taste is wonderful. And with my goofy work schedule the caffeine kick is an extra bonus.

I’m on day two of coffee withdrawal.

Another Addiction

You see our secretary smokes.

I don’t know exactly how much, but I’m guessing somewhere around a pack a day. Whenever I’ve asked her how much she smokes she usually says, “it’s not that much,” which really doesn’t narrow it down very well.

We’ve been going back and forth hassling each other about our addictions in a very civilized, kid your coworker sort of way for a few months now. She’s a master of diverting the topic of discussion, asking questions aimed at steering the conversation in another direction.

But I wasn’t falling for it.

Friday I finally got her to say out loud that there is no positive health consequences that result from smoking. She also acknowledged a bunch of other things about her smoking.

For example, she admitted that she believed she could quit if she really wanted to. And that the reason she didn’t was mostly because she thought it would be hard.

Oh, there were a lot of other excuses and juicy rationalizations thrown in there too. My favorite was her claim that smoking a cigarette was no less healthy for you than eating a hamburger. Did I mention she’s a vegetarian?

I don’t know if the hamburger thing is true or not. Who knows? It might be.

But just the same I don’t know too many folks who eat 20+ hamburgers a day. Every day.

I’m just saying. Read more

Check Other Browsers When You Change Your Theme

It’s been a long weekend, thanks in part to a silly mistake.

I had the luxury of an entire day on Saturday to work on the computer. It is rare these days that I have such a big block of time available. I had been scheduled to work on Saturday as second on call, which lately means lots of ship jobs. But the ships all moved away from the weekend (for once).

Since I had the unexpected time windfall, I decided to get something off my list that has been there for some time now. I went ahead and put together a new theme here at SuccessCREEations so that I could update to WordPress 2.2.

I was working on another domain I have to test it all out and hopefully get the bugs out. Got it the way I wanted, then brought it over here.

A couple of tweaks, mess with some plugins, and I was up and running.

Went to be Saturday night feeling good. Read more

Sunday Morning Goodness - 24 June 2007

Just poking around my feed reader this morning and there is so much great stuff out there you oughtta see. For example,

• First off, Seth Godin thinks you should be blogging, even in you only feel like you have one post in you.
• Steve Farber pulls up an old article of his about a Kit-Kat Tale that talks about stupid things we sometimes do while traveling. You’ll want to read all the way down to the end to get the most out of this one.
• Aaron Brazell is getting fed up with bogus Twitter marketing practices. And he’s right. When you use social media sites to promote your business, make sure you are building relationships with people first. And don’t just shove links at them!
• Finally, Mike Sigers shares with us a real world example of a simple way to turn a business that’s failing horribly into a huge success. Go check it out to find out how.

Grab yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy!

Business Blogging Success Story - Selling a Dog of a Movie to Hollywood

Gorgeous and I both like Sci-Fi. Our Tivo is set to record the Sci-Fi channel’s Friday night line up of Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica when they are in season.

Have been for years.

So when I got the usual monthly (or so) email from Twitter that had a blurb saying Dave Hewlett twitters, I went to check it out right away.

Who is Dave Hewlett?

He’s the actor who plays the geeky scientist Dr. Rodney McKay on Stargate Atlantis. If you are at all into sci-fi you’ll know the character type.

It’s sort of an “I know I’m a genius and this particular problem is way bigger than any mortal could reasonably expect to figure out if they had years to work on it but I know we’ve only got a few hours before we all die if I don’t get it worked out so I’ll do my best but don’t expect much and it’s been nice knowing you” kind of thing.

And he always gets it done. In his doom-and-gloom, negative, man this is really bad style.

He’s one of those characters I can relate to. Read more

Open Wikis - Great Idea that Doesn’t Really Work

43 Best Blogs is Dead.

At least it is for me. For now.

It was a great idea: Set up an open wiki to showcase the best blogs on the web. With it open, anyone can edit the list at anytime, adding in the blogs they think best, deleting those that they don’t feel measure up.

In theory by tapping into the wisdom of the masses the very best blogs would very quickly bubble up to the top of the list. In their own words,

How do we know that we have the right 43 blogs listed at any one time? Easy, you are the “we” at 43 Best. We’ are you. You spin me right round. Other lists depend on the work of one or two individuals. If you use this site please place the 43 Best badge on your site or at least blog about it - this gets more fun if more people know about it.

Add a blog, delete a blog. The answer to Web 2.0 is ‘43′, so please leave the site with the same Zen as you found it. FYI - just click on approve to approve the links.

Big Problems

There are two significant flaws with the wiki as it stands. Read more

WordPress 2.2 is Hard on Existing Themes

I like the latest and greatest. I’m all about shiny and new.

But the latests version of WordPress is just out of reach for me right now without some theme surgery.

I tried to update my personal blog to WordPress 2.2 a little while back and ran into a problem. Everything looked OK on the front side of the blog, but when I tried to to my control panel I got a white screen with a Fatal Error message.

Now like Forest Gump, Ah ahm noht a smahrt mahan, but I do know “Fatal Error” is computer-speak for “Very Bad”. It is akin to the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death. Not good.

My first thought was that I had an incompatible plugin running. I’ve had that problem before. But I went in and deleted them off my server one by one. None of them seemed to be causing the problem. Read more

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