I am the customer. I have chosen you as my preffered supplier or partner so now you owe me, you owe me big. It is your job to give me what I need and keep me coming back for more.
You now have the  responsibility to provide me with the best possible solution in the fastest possible time at the best possible price. You now owe me this commitment and if you are, as you claim to be, the best provider of this service, you will pay me what you owe me. I will owe you after you satisfy my need. I will pay you when I owe you.
I do not care for your internal problems, your miscommunications or your personal intrigues, your little competition. I do not care.

I do not want to be told about what cannot be done. Everything is possible given enough time and money. Take more time and you’ll get less money.
Satisfy me. Now.

Got hit yet again. I can’t be bothered with windows anymore. Thankfully my data and projects folders are held in multiple copies on another internal drive and an external drive so nothing important is getting killed.

I’m switching to Ubuntu Linux for my home PC. So far it’s working great. The only things I’ll miss are my podcasts via Itunes and my home VB development but I’ll do these through a virtual windows machine via VMWare so all will not be  lost.

Too often, we see people who are living life in a spin with no direction whatsoever. This affects almost everything they do and almost everyone around them. Sometimes I myself get in a spin and lose all sense of what is right and wrong. A roadmap for life would be a cool idea but with so many variables to consider it is an impossible task. Impossible is nothing they say, so there must be a way to define at least a general course for things we do or things that matter to us :

Whatever we do, like professional and personal goal setting, we all need a mission statement for our respective professional and personal lives. These should encompass our objectives, our core values and ethics and should be the lighthouse or beacon for everything we do. Doing this helps us define what is important and also gives us a picture of what we define as success.

Do you have a mission statement in either your personal or professional life?

A couple of weeks ago I had an airconditioner failure in the server room. The consequences could have been catastrophic had I not realised in time. This got me thinking that I should really have a system installed that could give me a warning when the temperature or humidity was not right in there. A quick search on the web brought up quite a few really good products for few hundred dollars at a time. This should be a worthy investment. Then, for a brief moment, I put my hardware hacker hat on and thought that it can’t be that difficult to build something that would provide a similar result for a fraction of the cost. Another search brought up a neat little sensor, the Sensirion SHT11 Humidity/Temperature sensor. This coupled with a Parallax Basic Stamp2 Microcontroller would definitely do the trick. I should even be able to hook it up to a cellphone to SMS me whenever it gets hot or humid in there, or I can even hook it up to MSN and it can IM me. The Sensiron people were kind enough to send me a sample sensor and tonight I put it all together and it works a like treat. Here’s a screenshot of a little VB app I put together that reports temperature and humidity at regular intervals. Geeky !!

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HT11 Sensor (enlarged 5x)