Posted on December 31st, 2008%
Ah, the final day of the year. While many of you are partying the night away, I’m sitting at the computer, pondering what happened in 2008, thinking about what’s going to happen in 2009… and, as is often fitting of an evening after the house is finally quiet, enjoying the greatest invention of the modern era: the Guinness Draught bottle.
Back to reality. What were my personal highlights—and lowlights—of 2008? In no particular order…
Leaving a full-time job to go back to work for myself — for the third time in ten years.
Granted, the actual change happened in early December 2007, when I left a job with the New York Yankees to go back to being an independent consultant. Most people are amazed that someone would do such a thing, but I’ve made a bit of a history being just that person. Alas, my indy career didn’t last…
Getting . . .
→ Read More: 2008: A personal retrospective
Posted on November 26th, 2008%
I just stumbled upon this announcement from the Baseball Mogul Online forums:
This page is to notify all Baseball Mogul Online users that we will be discontinuing the service as of December 1, 2008.
Why?
There are three main reasons:
#1 -The system is not profitable to operate for us. Even when it was at its peak of usership, it did not bring in enough money to support further growth and improvements.
#2 – We no longer have the staff needed to operate the system.
#3 – The machines and bandwidth that the system runs on were designed for a much larger load than we currently use. To economize, we will be switching services and bandwidth, and the new equipment will not support Mogul Online.
Sincerely,
Dee and Clay Dreslough
Sports Mogul Inc.
Well how about that. I’m as sorry as anyone to see a solid game go away, but there’s good news to all Baseball Mogul Online fans — there’s an alternative that is not going away, and . . .
→ Read More: Baseball Mogul Online is shutting down — but CSFBL isn’t, so why not check it out?
Posted on November 7th, 2008%
Today, a friend of mine relayed this quote from his company leader.
EVERYONE better outperform their expectations.
I wonder… How can you outperform expectations if your boss is expecting you to outperform your expectations? Doesn’t that create a never-ending cycle of failure?
Kind of reminds me the quote from the leader of a business I once worked at.
Come to work every day expecting to be fired.
Neither of these two folks can be considered effective motivational speakers.
. . .
→ Read More: Can you outperform expectations if outperforming is expected?
Posted on October 4th, 2008%
Over the past few weeks, I started doing some experimentation with a different approach to changing the rendering of default ASP.Net controls. For a few years, I (and many others) have used the CSSFriendly project for this. That project does some nice things, but has many shortcomings.
I hemmed and hawed about this a bit (see Rewriting the ASP.Net CSS Friendly Adapters – does anyone care?), but in the end some fundamental interest — and the underlying popularity of the CSSFriendly project (consistently in the top-20 downloads on CodePlex) made me decide to go ahead with it.
So, I am proud to announce a new open source project: the ASP.Net Control Adapters! . . . → Read More: Announcing the ASP.Net Control Adapters, a new open source project
Posted on September 16th, 2008%
Those who know me know that I am not a fan of Time Warner Cable, so when Verizon started offering FiOS TV in my area, I quickly signed up.
This may sound odd, especially considering I’ve blogged quite a bit about Verizon in the past, and didn’t always have flattering things to say. Still, Verizon is orders of magnitude better than Time Warner, and over the past few years their customer service has typically been very good.
So, how has my experience been so far? Quite good!
. . . → Read More: A few days with FiOS TV
