Sunday, August 12, 2001

Taking the plunge

I first became involved with computers when I was 16 years old. That was 20 years ago. While I am very technically proficient and understand a great deal of technical concepts, I have never really sat down and learned how to program something. I used to claim it was because I didn't have the patience to understand and remember conceptually what I was doing. Poppycock! Certainly I have learned the basics of things like html, batch files, a little basic here and there and even some perl customizations. Problem has always been that I have not ever learned enough to get the ideas that are in my head out as creations. That is changing starting this week. A little recent history will clarify why this is changing now... In May I ended a tumultuos relationship with a company where I was serving as CEO. Loved the job and had great success after building a solid team and then fell victim to a founder's ego. Much more on that when the legal dust settles. Anyway, I have spent the last few months scrambling to generate revenue and have found that for about the 20th time in my technical career, I am waiting for developers that have missed weeks of deadline and cannot produce anything close to what I seek. So, I am learning PHP .  As well, I have for about the 15th time this year alone just reinstalled Windows ME.  I know that it will eventually begtin crashing again and want to have all my data elsewhere and am therefor going to use as many browser based resources as possible, which should slow down the Windows degrading process and give me more to write about here.

 

Tuesday, May 1, 2001

PayPal and PayPal Shops

PayPal is truly innovating the payment process for consumers and small businesses.  They started as a bank and a pay system and have now evolved into just a pay system. The new PayPal shops system allows anyone to accept payments online without a credit merchant account. Well done interface.  Powerful features to link you to your bank account.

 

Sunday, April 29, 2001

eHow.com

While it does not cover every imaginable type of project or task, eHow does a pretty good job of covering alot of ground.  This site tells you how to do just about anything from How to Prevent Birds From Eating Young Plants (which we desperately needed) to How to Advertise on A Billboard.  There are numerous categories, including tips for small businesses, entertaining and food, and more. While comprehensive, they do not have a search tool, which is a real hassle. Sometimes the steps outlined are not as comprehensive as they could be. I will say we learned how to buy tiles and hire a contractor there though.