- Jim says:
Well, my take is that there are many businesses who aren’t willing to use Open Source software for business-critical things. Yes, it’s free to buy, but the cost of adopting software isn’t all in the buying, it’s also in the support costs. And while Open Office is pretty good, there isn’t the same commitment to updating it that’s present in a commercial venture like Ability Plus’. That makes a difference in some people’s eyes. [jim]I’m confused. Dave linked to this story about Ability Plus Software yesterday. Why would anyone using Windows pay for Office Suite software when Open Office is free? For that matter, it’s available for many different platforms.
- Have you seen the versions of Pac-Man and Space Invaders that are implemented in Excel? Sick. I like it! [vowe]
- My new weapon of choice. Heh! Gotta get me some of those. [instapundit]
- Karaoke Porn…what more can I say? [some gal]
- Atomic Telephony is an excellent story by Laura Fermi (Enrico’s wife) about how telephones and the first atomic test interacted. [some guy]
- Here’s a spiffy Dialect map of American English that explains the different dialects in the US. I wasn’t consciously aware that the San Francisco dialect is a lot like the midwest, but it makes sense.
- Kim du Toit’s got a long essay on The Pussification Of The Western Male. It’s a good read, I think.
- I’m meeting a friend tonight for dinner. He’s looking to start his own business and wants to pick my brain a bit. This morning, which putting together the day’s entry, I started to think about Monday. I’d been working along and making pretty darned good progress, thinking I was going to have some new code ready for a client for the regularly-scheduled Tuesday morning release of the software. In mid-afternoon, I received word that the release had been pushed up to about an hour before I got the email (I wasn’t checking email for a couple hours). And right there, my enthusiasm plummeted. No longer was there an achievable goal in front of me, and I knocked off for the day, rather than working into the evening. Yesterday was lost to meetings, looking at a house that I could either afford to buy or to fix up, but not both, and then some mindless TV watching and web-surfing. Today I’m trying to recapture the ideas I had Monday afternoon, and I’m wondering if I’ll even have the things I was planning on wrapping up Monday evening done by Friday. I’m not sure of a concise way to put it, but one of the biggest problems I face anymore in running my own business is finding a way to get through gumption traps like the one that hit me on Monday. They’re devastating enough when you get clobbered by something you’ve done to yourself, but when they come from outside, it’s particularly rough — in addition to the loss of gumption, you get a feeling of helplessness to boot. Anyway. Time to get to work.