Will Bridges

Sometimes I dream of leaving this country. My friend and I have talked about it at length in the past few days. I really would like to but I’m hesitant for all kinds of reasons. Either I haven’t saved up enough money, I know it would be difficult to get as good internet bandwidth and I have a young child and girlfriend that have to agree with my decision on where and when to move.

I’m not to the point where I’m so displeased with the country I want to leave but I’m close. My primary reason is that I love to explore by nature and I want my son to grow up with more of a world view. I know I’ve discussed this on my blog in the past. I just want to mix things up a bit. I love Nashville but I get tired of the same things all the time and I’ve never lived in a place in my adult life for more than a couple years. I’m coming up on year 3 in Nashville on October 10th. I have a wonderful business and decent local respect as well as a few friends. But, not as many friends as I would like. Many claimed to be my friend or good acquaintances but then never call me or email. This is a phenomenon I have found regularly in the south. Everybody likes to stay in their own little click and not bring in new people.

It makes me miss the the west coast at the very least, where I had very close friends very quickly and not only that, they made me feel like family. It also makes my mind wander for satisfy my sense of adventure and possibly leave the country. I’m not sure that the west coast will satisfy that need for adventure as I’ve lived there before. But I’m moving somewhere before next summer. No more than 3 1/2 years in Nashville. I love you Nashville but we have to part ways because you are making me tired and it’s lonely not feeling like part of the city because I didn’t grow up here.

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Yo, check out my son’s mohawk. He sat still for the most part but we had to give him a sucker so he wouldn’t squirm.

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It’s been difficult to keep up with my daily poetry. Sometimes I find myself missing 3 days and then sitting down the write 3 or 4 poems in one day and in one sitting. I guess it’s because I’m drained sometimes from work but regardless I have been able to stay up to date on my new website WillBridges.Name with a poem a day as I’ve planned.  So, I’m up to 38 poems… One for each day since I started. I feel by the end of this thing I’m doing I’ll have a full book of poetry which is organized on my blog. 

I’m pretty excited about it and even though I’ve only got a moderate level of feedback and just enough people reading my feed I still feel I’m getting better as time passes. It’s pushing me to explore new methods of writing and new forms of poetry. So, I look forward to keep pushing the limits of my abilities. I also look forward to growing my audience and getting more feedback.

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For a long time I looked for a parter to handle the main programming side of this business while I handled the business side of it. But, really, I don’t think it’s necessary any longer as I have learned how to balance both and I have found a couple team members that can take care of most of the intense labor of programming while I manage the business. So, rather, I’m building a team of developers with different skill sets and roles all across the world. Specifically, I’m working to cover each time zone within 6 hours of each other so it’s possible we could have people working 24 hours a day. 

I don’t think it’s impossible to get a partner but I’m skeptical about trusting one person to help me manage an empire that I’m building. Maybe the people I know are too fickle but I’ve put energy and faith in to people I thought would make good partners and I could have been using that energy to build a team of developers. Not only that but a partner wants half and a team member just wants to make a living and have a sustainable role. 

Also, the references I have gained have put a lot more work in my range. Over the past few months I’ve had a strategy of building good references which could be used to build better references. Relationships are key to maintaining a successful business as I believe I have said in the past. So far, my strategy is working pretty well. Another prong of my strategy has been to build content driven sites that will gain audience. That plan has started in it’s primary stages as I’ve been gaining money to invest in these sites for my business. 

The first site I am launching is The Nashville Review which is a site dedicated to doing video restaurant views. I got the site designed, the cards made and I’ve been training my girlfriend on how to edit video. I bought an extra mac for her to edit video on. We also bought a consumer high definition video camera (the Panasonic SD5) which has proven to be a good camera but I probably should have got something else. It’s missing a hotshoe (for an external light source) and an external mic input which is problematic. So, our first few videos may be a little poorer quality than I would like but it will still be good in my opinion. We have already shot video for two restaurants and will shoot video for two more before we launch. I expect our launch for this site to be in May.

I also launched a poetry website WillBridges.name where I will be writing one poem a day for the next year. That’s been a little challenging to keep content flowing but I’ve gained some readers pretty rapidly and expect the base to keep growing over the next year.

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It was not fun to migrate the Typo blog engine I had before to Wordpress. So, I want to save others some trouble. First of all, this is the site that describes the process:

http://blog.ifbydesign.com/2006/06/26/automatic-migration-from-typo-to-wordpress/

However, it’s ancient and the database no longer looks the same at all. You must dump the sql data from your typo database to your wordpress database from the following tables: articles_tags, tags, categorizations, categories and contents. Your wordpress installation should be fresh… DO NOT DO THIS TO A WORDPRESS BLOG THAT IS IN USE! You will lose your data if you do that. Backup your data regardless. I do not guarantee this to work but it worked great for me and I hope it will save someone a great deal of time trying to migrate from Typo to Wordpress. The below script was done with Wordpress 2.5 and Typo 4.1.1. The only thing I didn’t do was I didn’t migrate comments since I didn’t need to because most of my comments from my Typo blog were spam. I’m much happier with Wordpress, even though it’s in PHP )= So, here’s the sql script I modified to take place of the one that’s in this tutorial.

 
MySQL SQL Script For Migration

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Sorry it’s been so long. I’ve been working on moving over to a Wordpress blog. I had Typo before and the amount of spam I got was so tremendous so it made me just want to ignore the blog because I didn’t feel like sifting through the spam to see comments. But, now I’m back and I expect to be writing often.

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It’s time we showed them we aren’t going to take it any more. A couple hundred years ago Americans protested the British over a tax on tea. Our income tax and inflation is way out of control and it’s time we too protested and take back our country to once again make it free of those who would take our liberty. Call me crazy if you like but Give me liberty or give me death still holds true for me. Please watch the short and inspirational video below and go to Tea Party 07

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No longer am I a programmer. Wait, let me back up… I am a programmer but my task list is about 60/40 now. 60% of the time I’m doing non-programming tasks like project management, consulting, client interaction and planning. Oh shit, I woke up one day and became a CEO who actually spends most of his time being a CEO. Now, when my partner left I was doing mostly programming still because my partner couldn’t take on that many projects. But since figuring out the best source of labor and expanding my business network I have been able to delegate most of the programming to the programmers, manage the projects and plan for the budgets. Mostly, I’m a one man show. No employees except my receptionist and myself. All contractors besides that. I’m very satisfied with that arrangement. Contractors are more service minded than salaried employees in my opinion.

I’m actually talking to the owner of another company about helping run their company out of their current slump. It’s a web development firm here in Nashville that’s been around since the late 90’s. It’s just been run poorly for that long. I’m actually surprised they have the quality of the client base they currently have with the amount of problems they have but nonetheless it’s a great opportunity and I’d love to turn things around for them. So, I may be taking on that massive task.

Since I have gotten more busy I’ve learned that keeping weekly list of tasks is not enough. Marking off tasks one a day is too slow and just not motivational enough. So, now I keep a daily list of tasks as well as a weekly list of tasks. I mark off tasks as I get done with them and it helps motivate me to move quickly through the day. Then, if I have time at the end of the task list I may knock a couple off the next day’s list or take the rest of the day off. One of the cool tools I’ve been using for task management is a todo list at http://www.toodledo.com. It allows you to set long, medium and short term goals. It also allows you to organize tasks in a categorized fashion. It’s just a great tool. It integrates with google calendar as well.

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I’ve really got disgusted with a lot of music coming out of the mainstream but I love music with a deep passion. If I weren’t a programmer I would probably be a writer and one of the things I would love to write would be songs and poetry. I write some now of course, but it’s not my profession. Anyways, so I started a web development contract with a company that works a lot with musicians and they mentioned this website CDBaby.com which is where independent artists put out original music for sale.

So, on this site you can preview and browse all the music on the site. And they also allow the musicians to sell their music on itunes and other digital music platforms. So, I can browse music, comment on music, it tells me what each band/artist style is comparable to in the mainstream and then I can buy and download either through their site or through itunes on my iphone. It’s really cool and there’s a lot of good music out there that never sees the light of the music industry’s powerful pen. Totally worth a look.

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