Scott's Journal

Crazy Week!

scott@scottapplefeld.com — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:00:00 GMT

This coming week looks like it's going to be crazy. Somehow, that always happens as we get into the late fall and winter months. Everyone wants work. It's a good thing, given how slow we've been, but still it can get a bit rough sometimes.

My week looks like this:

Monday - Single day trip to a client in upper NJ. 3 hour drive each way, and a full day onsite.
Tuesday - Single day trip to a potential business partner in Columbus, OH. Head out for flight at 5:00 AM, get back from flight around 8:00 PM, spend a full day onsite with them. (Yay for direct flights!)
Wednesday - Single day trip to a client in lower NJ. 1.5 hour drive each way, and a full day onsite.
Thursday - HOME! Just conference calls today, no travel.
Friday - Single day trip to a client in lower NJ. 1.5 hour drive each way, and a full day onsite.

Needless to say, I think I'm going to be a bit tired come Wednesday night. Still, it's good to be going in so many directions, and feeling like we're accomplishing things.

Now if I can just manage to sleep at some point through it all...

Change Ahead?

scott@scottapplefeld.com — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Sarah and I have been watching the news coverage for the election for the past few hours. As I'm sure almost everyone knows, at this point all the major networks have called it for Obama. This doesn't surprise me much, based on the news coverage over the past few weeks I would have been shocked to see Obama lose, it seemed like he was in for a sweeping victory (which it looks like he has, based on the latest reports).

What I'm more interested in, however, is the Senate race. If the Democrats are going to have the ability to implement sweeping reforms legally, they'll need to pick up 60 seats to completely prevent the Republicans from filibustering. If they have less than that, while they still have majority, there is much more that Republicans (when united) can do to prevent certain changes from going in. At this point, it's not looking like they'll pull it off, as the contested seats aren't all leaning to the Democratic side. I find that disappointing, even through it was a long shot in the first place.

The best part though, in my opinion, is the huge upswing around the world from the announcement of Obama's victory. I think that in the current, extraordinarily global marketplace, world opinion matters more than ever before. And quite frankly, after the debacle of the past eight years, I don't think it's ever been lower. I've already read early new articles outlining the celebration and commendation around the world for the Obama victory, and I'm hoping that it can finally start the process of restoring our standing in the world, and moving not only the nation, but the world, forward.

Anyways, I don't like to get too far into Politics. After being so interested in 2000 and 2004, I lost a lot of faith for people to be able to see past the media propaganda and actually look at the candidates. This caused me to be far less involved in this election, though I'm hoping that with some positive changes it will garner my interest again. I suppose time will tell, but for now I'm going to put it all on the back burner and wait to see.

As for other news, I've been tremendously frustrated by my server lately. To save money for the house, we dropped to a lower server plan, using a small-end VPS to host the websites. This seemed fine for a while, but recently it has been having ENORMOUS memory problems, causing the sites to requently crash and stop functioning. I've been tweaking the memory settings almost non-stop to try to find the restored balance, but they are still crashing perodically. I'm getting quite tired of it, but I don't know what to do except keep trying to find the right combination to keep them online.

Moving Up...?

scott@scottapplefeld.com — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Well, it's been a long few months, and there's a lot to post about. I suppose the biggest change deals with our house. Sarah and I decided that with the market coming down, and the equity we gained in our townhome, it would be worth looking at a new place. We searched for a little while, and found a small community that was being wrapped up by a fairly well known builder. It was very close to our townhome, so it was perfect as far as location, neighborhood, and even schools!

We went into a contract with them, to get the home built, and that's when the problems started. See, apparentely their approval process works differently when you're self-employed. Therefore while it wouldn't have been a problem to get approved if I had a normal, salaried job; they wouldn't approve me with the same income when I was self-employed. Thus began a lengthy process of fighting to get approval within a market that was becoming less and less willing to lend.

We're still in the process of sorting it all out, but it doesn look like we'll end up in the house after all. We didn't want to wait to sell our home though, because with the market declining, I wanted to get everthing we could for it. Thus, we put it up, and luckily for us it sold RIGHT away. Literally. As in, over the weekend we had put it up, it was sold. This was great, and we got what we needed to get, so I'm happy that that part went smoothly.

Unfortunately, that now meant we needed to move into an apartment while we continued sorting out the new house stuff, and waited for it to be built. We looked around for a while, and found short-term leases with a nice complex in Bel Air. We arranged the move-in, and the transition went very smoothly. I was looking forward to spending a few months in an apartment. I remembered apartment living to be awesome from when I was in college. No yard to take care of, easier space to clean, move convenient location... except for one small thing.

You see, unfortunately, I forgot about having neighbors. While I think our neighbors are fairly nice people, some of their quirks REALLY get to me. The person above us has three small children who run around ALL THE TIME, and the pounding has gotten to the point where it actually wakes us up at night, or makes it almost impossible to listen to the TV in the evenings. The person above them is very talkative. Nice guy, but if you see him in the hallway, you'll spend 30-45 minutes talking to him while you try to get on to whatever you walked outside for. Then there are somewhat sketchy people coming and going from the building at odd hours. I'm not sure who're they're visiting, but it doesn't look like the most legitimate group of friends.

Ah well, hopefully it'll all be worth it. In a few years, I'll probably look back at all of this and just laugh. At least the cats are adjusting, they are actually spending a little more time playing and aren't quite as scared of the noises by this point.

As for the work front, we're picking back up again slowly. The economy hasn't been very nice to us, but the business is getting by, which is more than I can say for a lot of small businesses at the moment. As long as we can bear out the storm, I think we'll do just fine. We have a few very nice prospects on the table, and once we finish them up I have big dreams for the result. Hopefully it'll live up to them.

Birthday Fun!

scott@scottapplefeld.com — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Yesterday was Sarah's Birthday! Huzzah! I had a good time, getting to see her for a little while during the middle of the day, which ended up being timed perfectly because the gifts I had ordered came at exactly that time, so I could watch her open them. It was also a nice little break in the middle of the day, so I enjoyed that as well.

She did yell at me a bit though, because I bought her things when she said not to buy her things. I'm convinced this is a trick though. I learned my lesson long ago, there is no such thing as "Don't get me anything". Plus, to be honest, I like getting presents, although I'm not very good at it.

We do have the party tomorrow. I'm a bit nervous. I don't want Sarah to have to do everything, but she's already done almost all of it while I'm at work, so I feel like I haven't contributed anything, but I don't know how else to help. I guess I'll just have to get up and get my errands out of the way early, and keep an ear open for what I can do. Hopefully that will be enough.

Hope to see everyone there!

Feeling Overwhelmed

scott@scottapplefeld.com — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:00:00 GMT

It's funny, I've noticed that I seem to go through phases. Sometimes I feel incredibly energized, and will tear through projects at an incredible pace, and end up feeling very production when I'm finished. The flip side of the coin though, is when I start to feel completely overburdened, and like I've lost hope on keeping up. It's during those times that I feel completely NON-Productive, and just want to hide and shirk my work responsibilities.

The tough part is, I haven't yet figured out what flips me between the two. My best guess is deadlines. Whenever a deadline begins to loom, I kick into high-gear, and turn our products to meet the deadline. This isn't always the case though.

I wish I could figure it out and control it. I think I'd be way more productive if I could.

Grrr...