Busy busy busy

Last few weeks have been crazy, and I've been trying to manage my time. Honestly, the blackberry has helped. I'm slowly training myself to constantly check my calendar and task list, and to take free time to check for hastily recorded voice notes to transcribe into tasks and calendar items.

So far I've been keeping up, and the new bed has improved my sleeping dramatically, but I'm still waiting for a call from the sleep study people telling me I don't have breathing problems when I sleep, but I'm not holding my breath (or am I?).

Before we got the new bed, I had three days in a row of nights that had a full 8 hours of sleep (with dreams!), where I woke up just as fatigued as when I went to bed. The last day was bad. It was worse than I remembered from when I had insomnia when I was younger.

The business is progressing nicely, we're doing our best to plan as much as we can to secure our position in that 5% that makes it, and with the resources we have, I feel quite confident. When I really sat and thought about it, I was surprised how many people I knew who could be of help in building our business. For future reference, try to burn as few bridges as possible, and tell EVERYONE you know that you're looking for people who you can talk to about starting a business. That 8 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing works for the rest of us. You'd be surprised how close you are to people who can help you (and which friends will get to to those people!).

I've had the entrepreneur bug for years, and always wondered what made you a capital "B" Businessman, and not just an employee. Since I'm right in the middle of it, I'm starting to notice it happen to me, and think I have some answer. It seems simple, but simply by surrounding yourself with the information, magazines, reference material, and like-minded people, you change the way you see things. You make different connections, and see different things. Little what-if business ideas that you kick around with your friends get a dose of reality as you figure potential profits, marketability, supply chain problems, operating expenses, insurance requirements, and on and on. It's strange to go to the same store/business/restaurant you've been going to for years, and find yourself noticing things about their operation or product you never even knew were at play previously. Like seeing things with new eyes.

I hope my blogging won't suffer, because I find value in it, but I feel certain it will. Well, maybe I just need to schedule time for it in my BlackBerry to make it happen. :) Actually, I've gotten a few posts out that I would have otherwise forgotten were it not for the ease with which I can record voice notes. Maybe I shouldn't be so negative. Maybe blogging will get better.

The wedding is fast approaching, and the degree of coordination required for even our small wedding is surprising. I can't even begin to imagine running a $100,000 affair.

The blackberry likes and dislikes continues. Likes: Using GPS and google maps to store my parking spot location in the maze of streets, people, and cars that is Downtown Huntington Beach on the Fourth of July. That was pretty sweet. The camera is 2 Megapixels, and enough to capture the entire whiteboard and keep text readable. The high res screen lets me read it without zooming in terribly close. Very useful. Dislikes: Youtube sucks on the blackberry bold. There are ways around it, downloaders you can get, but there is no app (AFAIK) that interfaced directly with youtube's stream that presents it well. I specifically made youtube NOT one of the requirements for my phone, so I can't complain officially, but it would be nice. The phone speaker volume does not change when you change sound profiles. So when I set the profile to loud, I had to turn the earpiece all the way up so I could hear over the noise around me. Later when I changed the sound profile back to normal, the earpiece volume was still turned all the way up. SURPRISE! Also, there does not appear to be different stored volumes for audio played when headphones are plugged in, and when they're not. So you might turn the volume down on the headphones to listen to music quietly, then unplug them, and miss your ringer because the volume is turned way down. Also, you can't turn on the wireless connections (phone/internet) when the battery is below 10%, even if you're plugged in. That seems weird. Small things; still a great phone, still convinced I made the right decision.

Had a bit of twitter fun last night and live-tweeted some hot meat-on-grill action. I only use twitter for random thoughts that come up (none of that, "I'm going to the store!" "I'm buying cheese!" "I'm driving home!" nonsense), but I think I like the idea of live-tweeting like that. Plus the tweetberry app on the blackberry makes it easier than burning yourself on my grill last night. You can check it out, and follow me HERE. Or you can not, and not. It's a free country.

Getting a queen sized mattress and box spring home on the roof of a Passat was a bit comical, but successful. While use of paracord, and proper knots kept things where they needed to be, and the experience was largely uneventful, I still think we could have made it better if we had played the Benny Hill Theme while prepping the car.

COD:WaW has been notably absent with the recent rush on my time, but the last few times I was playing, I noticed some form of synchronized xbox live-wide suck that was taking place. Suddenly, every game I played, barely made it above 400, and usually only had one person on each tame make it into double digits. I kept joining new games, and trying again later, but it persisted. Very strange. It's as if a million voices were awesome at COD; and were suddenly sucky.

I need to get to the range to sight in some rifles (including the Enfield I accidentally moved the front sight on), but my range time, and frankly, interest has been consumed with the business and the wedding. My CMP Garand is still on hold pending finalization of expenses.

My state tax refund is likely going to return to me as an IOU. I'm pretty sure some bank will honor the IOU, but I might just keep it for myself to get the maximum return on the money they took from me, and collected interest on for a year and a half. But it really depends on a couple of things, like the interest rate, and whether or not I think there's still going to be a California state government by the time the IOU comes due.

Guess that's it for now.

Who owns the octopus?