Neufeld Computer Services

For those who may be even slower than I am, let me link to the solutions. Basically, upgrade your Pidgin to 2.5.7.

Here is an explanation of the problem, and for those who use Ubuntu, as I do, the easy solution is to add the Pidgin repository here, do an update, and restart Pidgin. Mine reconnected to Yahoo Messenger immediately.

Having reached the 2,000 follower barrier on Twitter, I needed to bring my follower list down closer to my followed list. There are some services that will simply unfollow those who don’t follow you, but since I follow–and read–some tech gurus, news services, and such, that don’t follow me, I didn’t want to do that.

Twitter Karma solves the problem, providing lists of each group and allowing you to bulk unfollow and follow. I chose unfollow first, which cut nearly 200 out. I had to read and review them, so eliminate those I had followed intentionally. Then just to cover errors, I bulk followed all those followers that I don’t follow.

I think that will fix my twitter list. Twitter Karma definitely provides a useful service for those who are interested in numbers of followers, but are not only interested in the numbers.

There are a number of things I like about the Obama administration, largely in foreign policy and to a lesser extent in terms of civil liberties. But there is one area where I disapprove totally. I think a company that fails should be permitted to fail. The only cushion provided should be the bankruptcy laws, and even big companies should have to negotiate that path on their own. Unfortunately, I believe neither party, if in power, would have had the guts to follow that path.

So I enjoyed reading this article on MSNBC about how Ford is nonetheless benefiting from the current situation and the fact that they are surviving without bankruptcy or the type of federal intervention that is happening with Chrysler and GM.

I sincerely hope this will continue. Companies fail for a reason, and it’s not just the economic downturn. Note that there are surviving companies, including Ford and some foreign-owned manufacturers building in the United States. The downturn was and is survivable, and those companies that can survive should.

I don’t say this because I don’t care about employment or economic displacement. I firmly believe that if failure is rewarded, more failure will result. If that is the case, all we have done by avoiding some pain now is to store up more pain for the future. I have no faith that the government can “direct” these companies in such a way as to make them viable in the long term.

So my congratulations go to Ford. Stay out of the government’s pocket, and my next car (I currently drive a GM product) is almost certain to come from you!

McKain, Scott. The Collapse of Distinction. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009.

I am not generally a fan of motivational books, and that is what I expected that this book would be when I picked it up–a lot of cheerleading and motivational speaking without that much practical advice. I already know I need a good attitude to succeed. I don’t particularly need a good attitude toward people who tell me about a good attitude and then charge me for it.

In this case, I was pleasantly surprised.  While there is some motivation in this book, and there is some repetition, there is also much good information, and a basic idea that is very important–you have to stand out from the competition to succeed.

Now that may sound pretty obvious, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were trying to attain that distinction from your competition in many of the ways that McKain describes.  Then he explains why our normal process of creating distinction doesn’t work.

The first four chapters get things set up with stories and examples.  The real meat starts in chapter five with the four cornerstones of distinction:  Clarify, Creativity, Communication, and Customer Experience Focus.  Again, each of those things sounds like ideas we have all heard, but what you need to do is get the complete picture.  How do you make these things happen?

McKain lays it out pretty clearly.  I have operated this business, Neufeld Computer Services, since 1997, and I’m now emphasizing Energion Publications and no longer expading the computer business.  This book both explained to me the success of my computer services business, and also helped me bring some additional focus to my publishing business.

For a number of years I wondered why I had a high degree of customer loyalty and good personal referrals for new business when I was working part time, lacked the sophisticated shop and equipment that major companies take for granted, and as one person often had to make one client wait while I finished work at another.

On reading this book I put customer comments together with the ideas presented and realized that my distinction was simply taking responsibility.  While I do often have to refer customers to a software provider or an equipment vendor, I always followed through.  I never said “this isn’t my fault” and then left the customer hanging.  I’d follow through and make sure that the person to whom I referred them followed through.

If I wanted to expand this business, I would use that in my marketing.  As it is, that information has led me to start working on a new marketing approach as well as new services and ways of providing those services for my publications.

I strongly recommend this book to any entrepreneur who is either starting a new business, or hopes to expand one.

ISBN:  978-1-5955-5185-6, Hardcover, 250 pages including front and back matter.

I noticed a great deal of discussion on this while I was setting up a new site (The Jesus Paradigm), and since it seems that everyone who has written about it is doing something a bit more complicated than I wanted to do or than some folks on the forum wanted, I thought I’d write a short and obvious post.  (There’s a good one here if you want more.)

OK, you want to use word press with a static page as the landing page for new visitors, but still have a normal looking posts page that can be reached through a link.  All of it is simple; none of it was obvious.

1.  Create a blank page and name it whatever you want to name the page with your posts

2.  Create your landing page.  (Both steps one and two are done with the Pages editor.)

3.  Go to Settings->Reading.

4.  Choose the “A static page” radio button

5.  Set the “Front Page” drop down box to the title of your landing page.

6.  Set the “Posts Page” drop down box to the title of the blank page your created in step 1.

7.  You are done.

This isn’t particularly complicated.  My initial problem was that I expected it to be more complicated than it was and spent some effort trying to make it so!

It’s a mite non-intuitive to me to set all this under Settings->Reading, but I’m not sure anything else would be that much more obvious.

I was thinking about faxes yesterday because someone asked me for my fax number.  Now the fact is that I removed my fax line around nine months ago, and that it had been used for nothing but receiving junk faxes for a couple of years before that.  All my vendors and customers take purchase orders, invoices, and everything else via e-mail.

So I haven’t missed the fax until I was asked for a number I no longer have.  I can get faxes sent to a friend’s business, but that’s annoying.

Then today I found an article titled Faxing it In on Culture11.com, which pretty much expressed my feelings.  Why use faxes at all?  The article explores why faxes still hold on when it’s so easy to scan and e-mail.

On the other hand, I must note that I still like to get snail-mail copies of contracts signed in actual ink, so in some ways I’m so last century.  We each have our hangups!

Since I recommend Firefox all the time, I thought I’d put a note about this.  There are solutions in this Ubuntu forum thread, but for those who might not get there because they’re thinking of the problem as one with opening a new tab, let me note the solution that worked for me, which is in the post of March 16, 2009 by user lkoniecki.

1.  Unmaximize your Firefox.  (I usually work with Firefox maximized.)

2.  Size the window until it fits fully on the panel.  In order to get to where I could resize the window, I had to disable all my toolbars.

3.  Close Firefox so it saves the window size.

4.  Reopen and enjoy.  Or so it worked for me.  There were several other solutions listed, but I tried this one first and it worked.  If it didn’t, keep looking!

With the exception of a few additions, this is a transcript of my podcast today on the Energion.com Podcast.

Around a year ago I started to re-evaluate my business.  I have been in business now for over 10 years, but the business has never run as I felt it should.  My wife and I sat down to discuss the way our business should go.  As we started, we both agreed that everything should be on the table, including the possibility of closing the business.  Every activity of our lives, her work, our business and our non-business activities would be on the table.

Why?  For a simple reason.  If you think you have a problem you need to put everything to the test.  If you exempt part of your activities from examination, it’s quite likely you’ll find that your problem is going to be there.  In fact, if you think about it long enough, you may come to realize that the reason you want to exclude one thing from consideration is that deep down you know it’s part of the problem and you don’t want to lose it.

So we examined everything, and amongst the changes we made we eliminated a non-profit organization I had helped found and had nurtured for years.  I didn’t want to give up on that organization.  It wasn’t part of the financial picture in any case–it was all volunteer.  But two facts stood out.  1)  It was taking up a lot of my time and 2) It was not accomplishing its mission.  So it went.  With me stepping aside, that organization died, and I suspect it will not be missed.  That’s hard to admit, but it’s a fact!

Now what does this have to do with accountability?  We conduct such re-examinations of our lives because we are pushed into it by circumstances.  We don’t do it because it’s fun.  In business, we do it because things haven’t been going well as they were, and we know we need to change.

We even have a way to do this kind of thing in business when one is truly forced to.  It’s called bankruptcy.  In bankruptcy, a business is forced to reevaluate everything, with a judge looking on to make sure everything is done properly.  Bad decisions can be undone.  It’s a painful process, but it works.  Creditors know of the possibility when they loan money, and they have the opportunity to work the probability of business failure into their calculations.  Bankruptcy is painful enough that one is motivated not to go there, but at the same time it can minimize the damage done along the way.

We are currently seeing outrage run through the country over $165 million in bonuses being paid out to employees of AIG, all after the federal government has bailed them out to the tune of billions.  Rick Santelli, who made himself famous with a rant about the mortgage bailout has spoken on this one too, and seems to think the major problem is the numbers.  We’re outraged about 165 million when billions and trillions are being wasted elsewhere.

I think he misses the point.  I think the outraged multitude, from the President on down miss the point.  We may be outraged, but we have no right to be surprised at AIG’s behavior.

When AIG and other companies were in deep trouble, we, the people, speaking through our representatives, decided they needed to be bailed out.  Don’t bother telling me you didn’t agree.  I didn’t either, but in the end, we the people sent many of the same people back to congress right after they did it.  They did it right before an election.  If we didn’t like it, we could have voted them out.

Without telling these companies that they had to reform or change their practices, we just started handing them money in order to keep everything afloat, or so we were told.  Then when some of them spent money on odd things, we started to complain.  But we honestly had and have no right to do so.

Why?  Because we rewarded them for the same behavior.  They did stupid things and their businesses were failing.  So we gave them more cash.

Consider your children and their allowances.   If you give them a certain amount of money for the week,  you tell them they should be careful how they spend it, so they still have a little bit at the end of the week.  If one child spends his money on the first day, and then wants some more on the second day, what do you do?  Well, if you’re a good parent, you let the child learn a lesson.  On the other hand, if you give him another allowance on the second day, you have no right to be surprised if he spends it all and then asks for more.  And more, and more.

The outrageous thing is that the government has given these companies large amounts of money with little to no accountability.  It has given this money to companies that were not performing well and were not behaving in ways we would regard as responsible.  It left the people who had gotten into that trouble in charge, for the most part.

A capitalist economy has a penalty for their type of behavior.  It’s called business failure.  One of the ways out of business failure is bankruptcy, which is an unpleasant business, but exacts consequences for the bad behavior.  One of those consequences is that the executives of the company who failed to do their job get examined.  At a minimum they will get a judge who will appoint someone to look over their shoulders.  They are very likely to lose their jobs.

The outrage is not in the amounts of money involved.  The outrageous thing is that people are being rewarded for behaving badly.  They are not being held accountable.  The amount is not the issue, though large amounts being used in unaccountable ways is more dangerous than small ones.

This is why I have opposed the bailouts starting with the financial system and including the auto industry.  There is a process in place for failed businesses, and it should be used.  If there is a need to protect the financial system, there might be modifications for special cases, but those modifications need to be aimed at preserving depositors, owners of vehicles, and the general system, and not at preserving the companies.

Would this mean hardship?  Absolutely.  But if we keep rewarding failure, we will inevitably arrive at that time of hardship, and the more we play around before we do what we need to do, the harder things will be when the crash time comes.

I’m told that on an earthquake fault, as plates move in different directions at different paces, pressure builds up.  If you have lots of small earthquakes, it relieves pressure.  The longer you wait, the more pressure, and the bigger the quake.  I don’t know enough geology to confirm precisely how all that works, but in a business I can tell you that it does work.  The longer you wait before you deal with basic problems, the worse things get, and the nastier the consequences will be.

This is why I’m less concerned (note that I didn’t say unconcerned) with the stimulus bill.  It’s the one thing the government can do to stimulate the economy that isn’t a reward for bad behavior is to accelerate projects that make good economic sense in the first place.  Unfortunately, not all projects are all that good, but at least they are not simply direct handouts given to people whose behavior needs modification, not encouragement.

I do enough devotional thoughts that I can’t help bringing this around to our spiritual lives as well.  No matter what the problem, the longer you keep doing the same thing, the harder it will be to change course.  Accountability is important–so important that you ought to seek it out if someone else doesn’t provide it.

I can only urge the government, through my representatives, to hold people accountable, and to be accountable.  In my own life, however, I can simply choose to be accountable, and to be honest with myself and others.

Many people think that the Christian belief in the afterlife is about the comfort of believing that loved ones are in heaven.  But Biblically and historically, there was no such absolute assurance.  In the 21st century, we like to think only about the nice aspects of the next life.

The afterlife is very much about accountability.  As Paul says in Romans 14:12 – “Every one of us will give account of himself to God.”

So many things are … a matter of accountability.

For those who may come here from Twitter, you can get more information on the book at PreservingDemocracy.com, and more information on the free advance copy program from the Energion Publications Blog.

In general, if you are a political leader, a writer, a blogger, or a twitterer, and might talk about the book, you are likely eligible for a free copy. Energion Publications is also my company, and I can tell you there will be limitations based on numbers, but I’m not pushing the limits, so most are going to get a copy.

Either e-mail pubs@energion.com, or send request to @energion.

Note: I find I never posted this, but it still looks relevant, so here goes!

I’ve been trying to make Twitter work for me (Follow Me), and by “work for me” I don’t merely mean as a way of increasing hits on my web sites or sales of my products–directly, that is.

I’ve been following quite a number of marketers and watching what they do and say. Thus far, while I have found a few good ideas in the actual tweets from each of them, I have found most of my best information via links that they post. I note that some people seem to think constantly posting links is bad Twitter karma, but I guess I haven’t quite gotten with the 140 character program. I like a link in there in case I want more of whatever was in the Tweet.

For those who might be interested, out of all the marketers I follow, I have gotten my best ideas from on person I follow–Zappos CEO. Several of his tweets last summer, followed by looking at his web site and what he does, caused me to rethink everything from business slogan to business plan. I rewrote both, along with a new company mission statement. I have only implemented a fraction of the ideas I picked up, but plan to have done so by next October. Note that he sells shoes and the business I’m developing is a publisher as I continue this little one person computer support business.

In any case, in keeping with my appreciation for good links, here’s what I really intended to post about. Jason Hiner has a post at Tech Republic, Techies: The top ten people you should follow on Twitter. He also has 20 also-rans, and a number of them are interesting as well.

Now if I could just get my incoming Twitter info better organized. Groups within TweetDeck help, but I think my grouping logic isn’t quite working yet.