Neither worked. Lots of excuses, but basically, a few weeks in, my part time gig turned into a full time job. What few concentration skills I had got diverted elsewhere, and pow – a bunch of people sitting around doing SFA in the Philippines. No new contracts, no new customers, unmotivated employees, disaster. We laid off the new employees, and as of 2 weeks ago, fired our last customer.

Time to regroup, eh?

Smarter people would probably just give up, but I have a plan. I have a particular type of gaping hole which needs filling, so fill it I shall.

Lots to try out here… Its a bit too heavy to type in landscape but if I rest it on a desk in portrait its ok  .

I won’t be doing a lot of typing on this but for $150 its hard to complain.

More updates as I learn more. The angry birds woody sound is cute

What’s a framework? Something that is supposed to make your life easier. Keyword: supposed to. As a non-programmer (or should I be kind to myself and call myself a beginning programmer?), this thing is FRUSTRATING. Like a hot bitchy French girl, getting Symfony to do what I wanted to was impossible. But, I saw that a new version was coming, and like that hot bitchy French girl, she was going to come back and do everything differently. Great. Maybe the second time would be better. Shelve Symfony until version 2 was ready.

Symfony2 is in public beta now, so I’ve downloaded Beta 3, and started hacking around. Yes, things have changed from Sf1 to Sf2. A lot. But some things actually make a bit more sense now. Here’s hoping.

I’ve also been looking around the web for examples of how to get things done. Some people have started to rewrite the old Sf1 docs for Sf2 – a great example being the Jobeet on Symfony2 project over at sftuts.com. If it gets finished, it will be a masterpiece.

One BIG gotcha I’ve found by attempting to cut and paste the work of others… a few months back, the Symfony developers, in their traditional mocking “I will fuck with you you stupid English speaking Capitalist Pigdog” way, made a simple change in the way you write code. Simple, small, but holy crap – it will fuck you up hard until you figure it out. They replaced a : with a \. As in ABC:def became ABC\def.

Please, everybody who has written “helpful” tutorials on Symfony – update the posts so : becomes \

Back to the trenches… let’s see what I can come up with.

Edit: Oh crap… Beta 4 is now out – wonder what they’ve completely changed this time?

They say buying quality is never a bad idea, and in this case – buying the $1500 laptop instead of the $300 Netbook – has proved to be true to the saying. Folks, if you have a good but old laptop, just upgrade it. Find the slow part of the system and attack it. How? This is possibly the first and only time I’ve ever paid attention to the Windows Experience Index. Before? The hard drive and ram were limitations. Now, my graphics subsystem is the slow part. But as I don’t play games on the laptop (that’s what the other ignored electronics at home are for!), the system is in my mind fully optimized.

I still haven’t replaced the battery, but that has to be done soon – on my latest trip to the Philippines, the low battery yellow blinky light started coming on all the time. I get about 10 minutes of battery time before it gives up. Woops – think it’s now 100% ready for the upgrade

The IBM X61 was an expensive laptop in the day – I think I paid somewhere near $1500 for it. So many laptops are available for $500-$800 these days that I was dreading the “upgrade”. Yes, the new one would be heavier, slightly faster, have a wide-screen display instead of the good old 4:3

Sometimes all you need is a refurb.

For under $300, I’ve got my old laptop back again, likely faster than most new “bargain” laptops. $200 for a 120GB SSD. $70 for 4GB RAM (anyone want my 2x1gb sticks?), and $15 for an external USB drive enclosure (to move files). A family member was nice enough to buy the battery for me as a birthday present, and I had a remaining copy of Windows 7 from a family pack upgrade done earlier.

I’m a gear slut like most guys – always drooling about the latest and greatest. But my laptop is perfect for me, and for under $300, I’m going to get another few years out of it. At least, I hope so – anything more than 10 months (based on current costs to keep this laptop running) and I’m ahead.

Lessons learned:

• selling outsourcing on a small scale, a-la 4 Hour Workweek, is not as easy as it sounds. Unless they’ve fully invested themselves in the mantra, learning to let go is a very hard thing for a small business owner to do. It takes a while to develop a sense of trust.
• using SigePo as a captive outsourcing company might be a better model. I’ll remain flexible, and (with a few exceptions) all clients are good clients, but since I’ve taken the plunge, I’ve found I can generate more income by tasking my assistants directly than by selling assistant services.

The power of geographic arbitrage cannot be denied. I’ll remain flexible and see what happens.

1. Install Pronamic Google Maps plugin and activate
2. On the page where you want the map, override the default multimedia box by checking “access the multimedia box hook, thesis_hook_multimedia_box, on this post”
3. Put this in the custom_functions.php file (Under Custom File Editor):

add_action('thesis_hook_multimedia_box','google_map');
function google_map() {
pronamic_google_maps(array('width' => 425 ,'height' => 300));
}

Voila. Map. Of course, you’ll want to put your location in, I used itouchmap to figure out my location.

Note: in our case, we are behind a hardware firewall so firewall is disabled. YMMV, and more steps may be necessary to get everything talking. Also, I have a discovery process on the Zabbix server running for our local network once an hour.

1. install EPEL repo:
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

2. install agent with yum:
yum --enablerepo=epel-testing install zabbix-agent

3. edit the Zabbix agentd config file
/etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf
(change ip of server to match your zabbix server, change hostname to something appropriate and unique)

4. start the agent
/etc/init.d/zabbix-agent start

5. put it in startup
chkconfig zabbix-agent on

Now, wasn’t that way simpler? Linux doesn’t have to be hard (any more).

Rob's portfolio performance, year to date.

Being a financial advisor, to be honest, sucked. Trying to convince people to give their life savings to someone they didn’t know was basically impossible for me. So now, I just run my own money, and get to take advantage of everything I learned.

Cya in Canada, eh!