Welcome to Chez Cliff!

My life is a real mess.

I’m curious: if you took inventory of the number of websites you visit for checking your finances, I think you’d be stupified.  Between your banks, your money market accounts, your investment accounts – I bet it’s quite a few.  For me, I have four websites to check.

Then we move onto bills.  Credit cards, water bill, electric bills, car payment, wireless . . . of course each has their own website.  Even though I put all these on auto-pilot, I still check the balances to make sure the accounts are getting paid.  For me, I have six websites to check.

Onto the fun websites.  Things like Netflix, MySpace, Amazon.com, eBay, American Airlines and the include GMail and my MobileMe account . . . how many websites is that?  This fluctuates between five and seven each month, depending on if I’m selling something on eBay.

For me, that’s seventeen websites a month I check out.  How many do you have?

Now, I have one.

Don’t ask me how but I stumbled onto PageOnce.com yesterday.  This service, free of charge, organizes all of your data into one page.  And I mean all.  Of of my financial accounts, all my bill paying accounts, and all of my fun websites are all located in one place.  Once I log in, I can quickly scan over one page and get current with all my accounts on all those various websites.

Of course, they have an iPhone application.  I ran with that one.

When I’m across the pond, I usually put all my travel expenses on one or two credit cards.  I can now pull out my iPhone and check my card balances with one click on my iPhone.  I can also with one click check the status of my flight.  It would be a real shame if my flight were cancelled while returning.  Darn it all!

My life was a real mess.

PC World, WSJ, Washington Post, Forbes – all have something to say here.

The Big Idea has definitely had a positive impact on my life.

I never thought a time would ever come again where I would reserve time out of my schedule to watch a television show.  But this show just gets me.

Donny and guests are always focused on family first.  The number of people who appeared on the show and have sacrificed their family is astounding.  They always want to know what they need to do to get to that next level.  Donny’s response is always “Get your personal affairs in order.”

I dig that.

Last night was to be the first in a series of people who were devastated by Hurricane Ike.  We all know the Federal Government moves as slow as molasses with regards to helping businesses recover.  Donny hooked the people up with a local representative from the SBA (small business association) and within a week they’ll have the money to rebuild their family business.

A lady appears on the show, trying to start her clothing business.  Her daughter had a liver transplant when she was still a baby and now at the age of 15 she has tumors on her kidneys and needs a transplant.  They spent 15 minutes, talking about how they can get a kidney for the daughter. 

I’m really glad the subject of family, of personal health overrides any talk about running businesses.  I think everyone would agree that making sure your head is in order is most important before venturing out someplace new.  If you can’t run from your problems, you definitely can build a business on top of them.

I guess my brain just thinks differently.

Finally, some feedback from a potential buyer.  He and his son spent about an hour with my property.  Forty minutes were spent looking around, twenty were spent sitting in their parked car.  Their topic of discussion: should we go for this house?

In the end, they decided no.

They decided to let their offer go through on a place north of my area, about 1/3 of the size and in crappy condition.  So what’s the difference between this income producing property and the cardboard box they are buying?

It’s the garage.  Or lack of.  People do enjoy the house, think it’s absolutely great.  But they are looking for a garage.  I confirmed this with the real estate agent, who fields the questions from other agents.  Their first question is about the garage.  Or lack of.  To his credit, he does convince them to come out and at least look at the property.  But that’s as far as it goes.

Even if I had the capital to get a 2 car garage built, I don’t think it would be worth it.  I couldn’t ask for $25,000 more on the price just because it has a garage.  Properties just aren’t selling for that high in my area.  And with the market flooded with bank repos, most with garages, it’s hard to compete.

But it’s nice to get some sort of feedback.

Incidentally it’s the same question that potential tenants would ask about when calling on the phone.

Maybe on the next purchase, I’m going to have to consider the garage aspect of a property.  I would have never thought that having an enclosed parking space would be that important but apparently it is.

I’m happy with this Guru.com experience.  This is a clever idea.

My little project is moving along faster than I anticipated.  Good for me!  October 15th still seems to be a feasible launch date.

Quite the eclectic bunch has joined Team Cliff.  A lady from Mississippi; some dude from Canada; an indeterminate from Romania; a team of Russians and now a Ukrainian is being interviewed.  Yes the Romanian is “indeterminate” because I can’t tell from the first name if it’s a guy or a girl.  And the idea of asking seemed very weird and creepy to me.  Personally I don’t care; he/she did a fantastic job.

Fortunately the hard work was done up front by yours truly.  Everyone I hired to date has just been there to refine and improve my work.  WIth the exception of the Russians.  They are building software from scratch.

In a way, it’s a good thing I spent all those years learning about web programming.  It has helped form the basis by which I hire people into my little team.  Dozens apply to do my projects and nearly 1/3 of them are rejected.  Why?  Because they force me to ask myself this simple question:  Do they think I’m stupid?

We all know a hamburger costs around $5.  That’s a given.  If someone were to try and charge you $100 for a hamburger, you’d tell them to go pound sand.  Yes, they could claim the hamburger is of the highest quality, hand-crafted by 3-star chefs . . . but a hamburger is still a hamburger.

Ditto with my applications.  I know how much the application should cost and about how much time it should take.  Someone could claim (and has claimed) “We have a team of top notch people who will work around the clock for three days!”

Huh?

I don’t care how many people worked on building me my hamburger.  It’s still only $5 and only takes a few minutes to make.  My project is awarded to the person who agrees with me.

Misrepresentation is the most insulting action one can do to another.  It happens daily and this type of activity knows no boundaries.

Thanks everyone who chipped in their two cents on Thursday with regards to the poll.  The “3D” book option won.  Normally I don’t give a hoot about what other people think about me but in this case it’s different.

After reading the comments, I realized even if I wanted to have the “traditional” book image it would be mis-representing what the product is.  Shaun said it best “It just screams eBook” which is in fact part of my model.

I think when I have a physical book, I’ll switch over to the traditional graphic.  I’m just afraid if I put the traditional graphic up to begin with, people will assume they can get a physical book.  Even if I wrote the word “eBook” all over the place, the traditional graphic still says “physical book”.

The last thing I want to do is to give the wrong impression.  Even if someone decided to keep the book, after finding out it’s just an eBook, their overall experience starts off tainted.  Which I want to avoid at all costs.

By the by – for those of you who left comments as of last Friday, explaining why you choose what you chose – I was serious about Bonus Points.  That’ll come a little later on.