Bush Mackel

Me and the wife were lucky enough to get into a small townhouse about two years ago now. Even though price-wise it wasn’t the BEST time to move, it certainly wasn’t the worst and in regards to our burgeoning family, we certainly needed the space. All in all, I think we are pretty content with our decision to buy.

Fast forward to today and while we like our little house, there are a lot of things we don’t like about it including how energy inefficient it seems to be. Add to that our complete disdain for our current windows and we were all about hearing what Power Windows and Siding had to say.

Power Windows and Siding Came a Knockin
It all started when somebody came to the house knocking on our door saying that their company was giving out free estimates on windows and that they would put the estimate in writing and would be honored for a year. I’m pretty sure we had gotten one of these guys at the house before and shirked them off, but for some reason we decided to give them a try this time. (I think it was because he said the estimate would only take 10 minutes). So we scheduled the appointment for that Saturday, didn’t think too much more of it and said goodbye to that guy.

A Very Good Presentation
That Saturday at 2pm, the representative from Power Windows and Siding came to our house to do the estimate. I won’t divulge the guy’s name but he was a really nice decent looking dude who went on to do probably an hour or two just straight presentation on the windows… And the presentation was good! He brought out lots of cross sections of the windows to show how they were made, real estimates from local competitors on the windows, he brought out the windows themselves, did a heat demonstration, discussed the company.. Again, it seemed really thorough and after the presentation alone it was hard to not want to buy the windows esp as how we can barely move the windows we have installed now.

Into Hour 3 or 4…
At about the hour 3 or 4 mark, we finally started talking about price. I think for 12 windows we were quoted a price of a little over $10K but don’t hold me to that. Now that price also came with a FANTASTIC double lifetime guarantee that covered the windows from ANYTHING. All acts of god, the kids, even if I locked myself out and broke a window to get back in. Being assured that we would never have to spend another dime on our windows and that we’d be saving some money on our energy bill was looking really attractive. BUT, we’re not millionaires and we concluded that $10,000 was just too far out of comfort zone. It was at that point that negotiations REALLY started as this guy would not take “no” for an answer.

The Estimate – 5 Hours of My Life Gone
It should also be pointed out that when we scheduled this appointment at 2 so that we could talk to this guy while the kids were down for their naps. Since then, the kids went down for their nap, got up from their nap, and we were all trying to just get some food. I had played a game of basketball before this and I was DYING. Every time the rep offered us a new lower price, he gave us some privacy to let us think about it but it was never “Here’s my phone number, think about it for a day”. At one point he even said, “Oh no problem! You two think about it – I can hang around.”

Now if this guy wasn’t absolutely charming and nice to talk to, I would’ve wanted to kill myself and that line wouldn’t've have flown. But don’t think I didn’t know what was going on either – It was quickly apparent that these Power Windows and Siding reps were trained to NOT LEAVE THE HOUSE hence him being at my house 5 hours after the presentation started. Adding to the pressure of everything is that all his reduction in prices were only available “that day”. But whatever… Sales guys are sales guys and I was pretty sure they’d find it in their heart to honor these one day prices two months down the road.

But after more talks, we finally got the guy down to roughly $9000 and with tax credits and their stuff I think it came down to $7500 which WAS in our wheelhouse. So after 5 hours of presentations, negotiations, famine, and dealing with the kids – We finally signed the papers and he was on his way. Again, we felt ok with the purchase because we had a couple days to cancel and we did get the price down to something we liked.

Of Course the Wife Cancels
I sat through a 5 hour presentation, hunger and headaches for these windows. I hate the ones we have now and was definitely looking forward to replacing them. My wife on the other hand had apparently made a secret unilateral decision that she wanted a minivan and she thus decided to cancel the windows. And it was funny that in all the things that we read, all the fine lines that we went over – We didn’t read the fine print on canceling which could only be done with TELEGRAM or HAND DELIVERING THE LETTER to their Power Windows and Siding HQ in PA. I mean, who the hell even knows how to send a telegram?

If you haven’t been able to tell already, this was par for the course with Power Windows and Siding… making it VERY difficult for them NOT to close the deal. Undeterred however the wife discovered you could also send a letter with delivery confirmation or something and so we did. It was at this point that they said that we had to have a followup meeting (you guessed it) IN OUR HOUSE to fill out some “internal” paperwork to really terminate the transaction! And my wife is telling me this as if that’s just the way it was! I on the other hand said, “Enough is Enough!”

I called them up regarding this appointment and it was clear to me that they were on full scramble mode trying to keep this appointment to make one final stab at us. I was transferred from one CSR to the next until I finally spoke to someone who seemed able to end the insanity. She tried to give me some line about “Since this is such a big order, we need you to file some internal paperwork with us…” but I just had to cut her off, “LOOK, your internal paperwork doesn’t have anything to do with us and there is NO reason to send someone to our house again. We are done.” to which she quickly said “Thank you” and hung up.

Power Windows and Siding Conclusion
When I researching this company and seeing other people’s reviews and complaints, almost everyone complained about the process that I went through. And while they are definitely pushy as hell, I don’t think I’ve seen or heard any complaints from those who actually got their windows. Honestly, I wish I had been one of them.

Not too long ago, I was in LA at a Direct Sales Conference for Women. It was the first time I had gone to a conference for my web design business and it was also the first time I had gotten a chance to meet my designers (since they live in Hawaii).

It was a pretty cool affair (despite me coming down with both a sinus and ear infection) and I met some very talented, passionate individuals out there including a very peppy and enthusiastic Stephanie Nivinskus. She’s one of those people that just gives off a good energy when she’s near ya know? So we talked a bit amongst the blaring music and all the commotion of the conference and we said that we’d definitely think about the other for various opportunities that would come down the line.

So fast forward to a week or two ago and Stephanie dropped me a line asking me for some technical help on her website, ImpressionsOnCall.com. Thankfully I was able to help, and that weekend we chatted on the phone where I tried to give her some tips on the finer points of website editing and the like. Well, we ended up having a great conversation (not only about her website) but also her marketing business as well as how our businesses could help each other. And let me tell you – Having the chance to partner with people who are passionate about what they do really gets me going. (And bubbly personalities don’t hurt either)!

So then get this – A couple of days ago I got an e-mail from the aforementioned marketing professional where she asked if I had “received the chocolate yet”? I’m like, “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?” So after I finished accosting the wife on the subject, I turned my attention to the UPS man and eagerly awaited the delivery. A day later I got this awesome package complete with an fantastic feel good card and 4 delicious (and I mean DELICIOUS) brownies!

And let me tell you, nothing makes me feel greater than getting compliments about what I try to do – Not the applications I make or the websites I put together, but the effort I try to put forth for everyone I work with.

So thank you Stephanie for brightening up my day and here’s to a great many projects together!
Everyone else, make sure to check out Impressions Marketing for all of our marketing needs!

These days, a lot of the websites I create are using WordPress on the backend. It’s a breeze to install, fairly light weight, and the developer community around it is fantastic.

The only complaint that I ever have with it is that its framework is being updated ALL THE FREAKING TIME. And it probably wouldn’t bother me as much as it does, but having it say “There’s a new WordPress version” every time you login is kind of annoying. And its even MORE annoying when it happens on CLIENT sites because they expect you to constantly update it for every little change in version. Usually I just say “No thanks”, but despite this I still try and update it for the big releases.

And ladies and gentlemen, I believe that WordPress 3.0 is such a release.

Multisite Functionality Built In
If you’ve been a user of WordPress for any period of time, you may want to check out all the cool additions that are now in 3.0. For me, the biggest feature has GOT TO BE Multisite Functionality or WordPress Mu integration. If you’re not familiar with WordPress Mu, it allows you to run multiple sites off of one WordPress installation. But because it was always treated as a bit of a seperate product, there was an evident lack of consistency between the two products from a usability and functionality point of view. Now to be fair, I don’t know for sure that that has changed, but everything I’ve seen so far leads me to believe it has.

Why I Need WordPress Mu or WordPress Multi-Site
If you don’t know why this is so cool, you probably have not tried to use WordPress Mu and/or have never had a collection of sites powered on WordPress. In my case, I have done both. I had one site that is no longer up called Learn Stuff Online which was basically an About.com before About.com was what it is now. It was supposed to generate tons of AdSense revenue but it was a lot harder to manage than I thought it would be. I had multiple “subjects” on multiple subdomains (hometheater.lso.com, internet.lso.com, etc) and always updating html files to update content on the site became old quick. So one day I had an epiphony to try this whole WordPress Mu thing and I got it KIND OF working. To be honest, it took a lot of work and never felt all the way there as I had to do a lot of fudging on the functionality side to get things working the way I thought they ought to.

Fast forward a couple years, and now I have a collection of my own MFA sites that are powered by WordPress. And more to the point, they are all powered by their own separate WordPress installations. So when I need to create a new site, update the WordPress base or update the slew of plugins on these sites – It’s a huge pain. Now to be honest I don’t think that’s why I hardly update content on those sites, but I think it definitely has kept me at arms reach from doing anything really impactfull with them.

Multisite in WordPress 3.0 is Awesome
But now with WordPress 3.0, I can run all of these sites from a single WordPress installation. That’s right, I’m not just talking about subdomains or directories on a single domain (which you can do too), I’m talking about powering multiple TLDs with a single WordPress 3.0 installation. It took me a lot of figuring out to do it, but with a bit of research and a LOT of work, I did it – And I’ll show you how to do the same. Oh, and before we begin let me say that I host with LunarPages and I have a dedicated server. I’ll show you exactly what I’ve done and I think if you’re in a similar (or even not) a similar situation you should be able to do the same.

Steps to Install WordPress 3.0 Multisite

1. Download and Install WordPress 3.0.
2. Download and MANUALLY install the Trunk Version of the Domain Mapping Tool.
3. Create new WordPress site.
4. Map TLD to new WordPress site.
5. Test new WordPress site.

Download and Install WordPress 3.0
So first, go to WordPress.org, download version 3.0 and install it on a domain on your server. Once you’re done and you can ensure that it’s working – go to the next step.

Download and MANUALLY Install the Trunk Version of the Domain Mapping Tool
This part of the tutorial is what I really gleamed from Otto’s post sited below and linked here: http://ottopress.com/2010/wordpress-3-0-multisite-domain-mapping-tutorial/. The domain mapping tool is what’s going to make sure that when someone hits one of your TLDs, that it goes to the appropriate place for your single WordPress installation to serve its particular content. To get the files, download them from here: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/trunk/, and then follow steps 1-3 on Otto’s site to MANUALLY INSTALL the Domain Mapping Tool.

Create New WordPress Site
At this point, you should have the Domain Mapping Tool rockin’ and rollin so in your Dashboard go to “Super Admin->Sites” and fill out the bottom blanks under “Add Site”. So for instance, you can enter “test” for Site Address, “Test” for Site Title and an appropriate e-mail for Admin Email. Once you’re editing this new site, change the “Domain” blank to the exact address of your TLD (i.e, example.com). For “Path”, enter “/”. Under Site options, make sure Siteurl is the domain name “http://example.com”, under Home enter “http://example.com” and for Fileupload Url enter “http://example.com/files”. Then scroll all the way down and click the “Update Options” button.

Map new TLD to WordPress Site
Now at this point, your WordPress install should be setup to serve files and content for your new site. And even though we’ve pointed everything correctly in the Domain Mapping Tool, we haven’t actually setup your TLD to point to this WordPress location. For me, this was hands down the hardest part of the install as I couldn’t figure out how to get the server part of this whole thing working. What started me on the good path was Matt Dunlap’s post on the subject here: http://mattdunlap.org/website-development/wordpress/how-to-create-a-network-of-top-level-domains-with-wordpress-3-0.html where he directs you to editing your httpd.conf file. I did this and I believe I got it to work, but I really didn’t like editing my conf file directly. So instead, I went into my WHM and parked my new TLD on top of the domain I installed WordPress on. After that I was IN baby!

Test Final WordPress Site and Tweak if Necessary
So at this point if you’ve setup everything correctly and you’re money like me, you should be able to see your new site when visiting your new TLD. If not, you obviously need to find out what’s wrong. For me, it’s usually in the individual site settings under “Super Admin->Sites”. There’s a little checkbox labeled “Update siteurl and home as well”. This whole section just doesn’t update as I thought it would so I ended up going back in and editing this information again.

NOTE : This was a REALLY long post and I will probably come back and edit it when I get the chance to make it much more helpful.

Also, it wouldn’t be nice of me to not credit the various pages I found that helped me out installing WordPress Multisite on my own server:

• http://ottopress.com/2010/wordpress-3-0-multisite-domain-mapping-tutorial/
• http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2010/06/02/wordpress-3-multisite/
• http://mattdunlap.org/website-development/wordpress/how-to-create-a-network-of-top-level-domains-with-wordpress-3-0.html

Very recently I bought my wife a Hauppauge TV Tuner for mother’s day. I think we had talked about getting one before so we could downgrade our cable boxes from Verizon FIOS’ HD DVRs to their regular HD boxes, but admittedly when we got the tuner we didn’t even have cable.

That didn’t stop us from using it however and we installed it in a Windows 7 box using just a regular OTA antennae. And even though we didn’t end up recording too much with it (what’s their to record on regular TV anyway), we were blown away about how cool Windows Media Center is when it has a tuner to play with.

If you’re a home theater buff like myself, you will really marvel at how sleek, elegant and functional Windows Media Center is… Especially if it’s your first TV Tuner/Media solution.

Return of the Cable
So fast forward a couple months and cable has once again returned to our house along with its huge bill for renting their cable boxes. And if have cable and don’t think it’s a racket – YOU IZ CRAZY. I mean, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but a Verizon FIOS HD DVR is probably something like $13/mo and a regular box has to be about $7 so every month I’m spending $20 extra to “rent” their equipment which I absolutely need to watch their programming! Again, it’s a racket.

And because of this I started looking for CableCard tuners. I heard about them a while ago through the AVS Forum but now doing some serious research, I was amazed to find that as much as these were lauded over, basically only 1 really exists in the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner and you can’t find them anywhere except on eBay and then only if you’re lucky. I swear you can’t even buy them from ATI’s website! (And let’s not forget they usually sell for north of $200 too).

Enter the Ceton InfiniTV 4 Multi-Tuner CableCard
So if you haven’t heard, some company called Ceton has made a new card that looks like it’ll blow the ATI one out of the water. The Ceton InfiniTV 4 accepts one CableCard, allows you to view or record 4 channels at once, and view these programs all around your house! Do you realize how cool that is? So instead of me paying the $20 a month I am now, I can just do the Verizon FIOS CableCard rental of of a few bucks PLUS I can watch the programming on more TVs without having to pay any more to the man!

Now admittedly the card has a “high” price tag of $399 but I figure I’d make that up quick if I’m distributing the programming to 3 TVs like I’m going to. The only real problem now for me is that Ceton has delayed shipping the card (I think I heard because of a parts shortage) meaning that I’m going to have to hang in here with my high cable bill for a little while longer. But in any event I’m still way excited about it. Anything that helps me bring media into the house and reduce my monthly bill gets two thumbs up in my book.

Here’s to all those that have served and are currently serving. You’re braver souls than I.

I knew it would happen eventually.

I knew at one point in my life, one of my kids would break, tear or otherwise destroy one of the possessions near and dear to my heart. And honestly I thought it was going to be one of my comic books, one of my 360 games, my Wii sensor bar… Something like that.

I even strategically built my home theater enclosure to minimize the risk that they would get this stuff putting my CD like media up at the top, the receiver below it (so they couldn’t change inputs while I played), and cable boxes below it.

But it appears it was all for naught because in one instant – They got hold of one of my wife’s hand weights, threw it, and completely broke my *sob* *sob* Phillips Prestigo 10 Remote!

“How do I… Get through one more night without you?”
If you happen to recall, I absolutely loved the Prestigo. It was what I had dreamed about for longer than I even knew. One remote to control everything… A beautiful color LCD screen… Big attractive buttons… And the price was just soooo good.

I put in the time too… I programmed all my devices including my cable box, projector, receiver, and blu-ray player. I had the macros set up so that I could push a button and turn everything off, or go quickly from watching TV to playing XBox. Now those days are far behind me and I’m left with a flickering, broken reminder of what my life used to be.

Picking Myself Up and Moving Forward
Fast forward a couple weeks later and I think I’ve finally started to get through the grieving process. THAT means that I’m ready to get a new remote. Only problem is, I don’t know which one to get. I COULD go with the replacement for my old hotness or I could kick it up and try something new. Problem is, I don’t really know what else is out there that’s not going to cost me a freakin’ arm and a leg. I mean… I’m not rich YET. (#);)

So anyone out there have any good suggestions?

While it might sound silly (with me being a business owner), I don’t think that I’m a numbers guy. So when it comes to filing our taxes and figuring out which number goes on what line – I’m pretty useless. And since this past filing was really the first time where my main business made any money, I was even more useless than normal and my wonderful wife had her work cut out for herself.

So at the advice of my mom, (who herself is more or less self-employed as a Real Estate agent), I visited her CPA who gave me the skinny on what I should be doing financially with my business, how I should be tracking my money, and what deductions I was probably missing.

Why I Need to Change
After an hour or two of talking with this guy and frantically scribbling down notes, I knew that it would really be to my company’s benefit to start taking my financials more seriously. Plus I knew it would take a lot of pressure off my wife too. I mean, even though I’ve never been one to make people do things for me and the business is for the family and not just me… I really don’t feel good about having the wife do all that work every year since I know others could do it faster and easier. Additionally, (and this is honestly new to me but would’ve made sense if I had stopped to think about it), apparently when you apply for loans and such from banks, you generally provide your financial records which at this point I’d be unable to do because they’re in such disarray.

I’ve Started with Quickbooks!
And yes, it was what my CPA suggested. Basically I can track all of the monies of my business in the program, and at the end of the year (or quarterly or whatever), I can submit a file to my guy that he can use to easily do my taxes. Now, I’m not sure how easy I thought it was going to be to jump into the program but there is def a learning curve to it. For me, it took me about a day, the help of a “Learn Quickbooks” DVD and searching through the Intuit forums to really get going. And by “going”, I mean halfway through getting my records up to date for the year.

You see, I started Quickbooks what… Yesterday?, some 5 months into my company’s fiscal year. And if you’re as new to this whole thing as I am, know that Quickbooks wants to account for EVERY SINGLE penny coming and going from your business. “Of course it does, what’d you think it’d do?” Well what this means in practicality is that every transaction from Jan 1st 2010 to now has to be entered, and correctly, so that your balance from Dec 31st 2009 goes up and down to the correct balance on your statements now… For me, that’s a lot of statements to enter!

But It’s Worth It
At this point I’ve setup all of my clients and their current contracts into the system (which again took me the better part of a day) and I’m sure it’s gonna take me another full one to get all my year’s transactions into the system. But already I can see that this will be great for my peace of mind and organization. It has tons of reports you can run, invoicing, and a bunch of other stuff that I could go into. For me, I’m just very excited to be able to (at a glance) figure out how much money is still coming to me by way of contracts. Of course I could set this up in Excel or something but setting up all those relationships so that sending invoices, receiving invoices, reporting and everything else plays nicely together would take QUITE a long time so again – I’m glad someone did the work for me.

Running your own business is a funny thing.

I’m trying to remember how long I’ve been in business but at the time that I write this, (like every other time I can recount for the last couple months), my mind is so… BUSY, that it’s hard to recall the small stuff.

But i will say that at least on the financial front, I’m finally breathing a bit easier. There have been so many highs and lows since I left my job… So many times where I’m just trying to move enough money around that I can make the minimum payment on my business credit card that it feels like a great accomplishment to FINALLY have a small amount of funds in the account.

And don’t read it any different – It’s a small amount of funds. But it’s enough to keep the family afloat for a month should a check not go through (or come) and we have not had that small amount of security for a long time.

Assessing My Current Situation
So today when I finally took a breath and found myself in a “good place” – My mind immediately began to race towards all the things I could buy now that I couldn’t before. In my younger days before I had these kids and a wife, I would probably have gone out and bought an LCD, new computer or SOMETHING! Presently however, I’m very content to just not have to worry for a little while and to have the chance to future proof my business!

*whew!* Everything is coming up Millhouse.

I know you probably thought you’d never see me on here again (and sorry to disappoint) but here I am!

Apologies ONCE AGAIN for the lack of posts, but I’ve just been so busy with a million and one projects relating to my web design business. In fact, I had thought that at this point I would’ve been done with my HUGE client project but because of multiple ppl letting me down, that’s not the case. Thankfully my client is fine with it, but having such a big project hanging over your head is NOT a good feeling, believe me.

I even went to LA to attend their conference and try and get some more business (which turned out to be a success) but working so hard and not sleeping caught up to me and I wound up with a wicked sinus and ear infection. Happily, my wife nursed me back to health and even though I’m still a bit rundown, I do feel like I’m getting back into the normal swing of things here.

And since I saw a little light at the end of the tunnel (of this work madness), I went out and picked up Super Street Fighter IV yesterday. Now early impressions are positive but the 360 controller still sucks. I’m hoping that at $39.99 I won’t regret the purchase (like I did the original) so we’ll see. Yeah, I really haven’t played anything new lately (because I don’t want to get sucked into a game right now) but instead when I have a minute I just go back to old games that I’m trying to “finish” like Ace Combat 5 and such.

Ok – Time to get back to the grind!

There are a number of posts in the queue that I’m really ready to crank out, but I’ve been far too busy to polish them up for your reading pleasure.

Currently, my time has really been split between a certain client site that I had hoped to have done in December, the fantastic goodness that is Borderlands and of course – My kids. It looks like the client site in question is nearing an end which I couldn’t be happier about. It really is a project that has dragged on beyond dragging on. Part of that has been my fault admittedly, but in fairness I know that I’m dealing with one of those clients where you have to gently nudge them at certain times. But I love’em so it’s all good. (#):) (All this time with the site not being done however is hosting money lost so it WOULD be in my best interest to wrap this one up before March).

Kids are doing well and I think I’ve been doing a better job of getting away from the keyboard during the day and giving them some quality dad time. Of course you always worry that it’s not enough but I’m doing what I can and I think it IS an improvement relative to what they were used to. I’ll say though that I think all of us are ready for this cruel Maryland winter to be over so we can go outside and play again. Going on walks and stuff is as good for me as it is for them no doubt.

And finally there is the GEM that is Borderlands. I really didn’t think I’d enjoy the game as much as I have but even on my second playthrough I can’t get enough of the game. I think it’s very possible too that I’ll be downloading all the DLC too! …Which on that note may mean that I won’t be posting again for a long time ha ha!