I was rather surprised today to get an email inviting me to a meeting with the co-President and co-Founder of Wainwright Bank, Robert Glassman. Apparently Wainwright, as a socially progressive bank, is reaching out to the local progressive blogging community and I was one of the small group of people they sent the initial invitation to. I’d like to think that this is indicative of my status as a high profile blogger, but I imagine it has more to do with the fact that I’ve written about Wainwright on several occasions.

I suppose, when you think about it, I may not actually be that bad of a choice. I may not have the most popular blog around, but it definitely has a readership, and that readership is continually growing. I’ve also got some first hand experience on the value of blogs as marketing tools, and I have more direct experience with internet marketing through my position at Triworks which, while not a marketing company per se, certainly requires me to think about internet marketing and the issues related to it.

At any rate, they also asked me to spread the love and forward the invitation on to other progressive bloggers in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area. I’ll be sending it along to those bloggers whom I already know of course, but there are certainly others out there that have slipped my mind. So if you fit into that category, feel free to contact me and I’ll forward the invitation to you (I’m not about to publish the cell phone number I was given to RSVP to…). It’s just too bad that Bruce isn’t around any more…

Today I had a very important phone call. It was a call from a new client, but not just any new client. This new client found me by being referred by another client rather than through and ad or by meeting me in some other context. As I see it, referral business is the most important business you can get. It not only means that you’re getting business in the first place, but it means that you’re doing your job well enough for people to recommend you to others. Plus, it allows your business to grow much faster than it otherwise would. If my current clients refer new clients and those clients refer even more new clients, before you know it I’ll be working with Kevin Bacon! I like to think of it as the first sign that my business is becoming self-sustaining; in other words, that it will grow at a greater rate than my personal investment into it. Eventually this is the trend that will allow (and require) me to hire employees to spread out the work load, and eventually to move myself into a purely management role.

In other news, I’ve just learned of a new company in the renewable energy space. As Jessi and I are now homeowners, the issue of utilities and utility bills are much more important than they once were. I’ve written previously about cogeneration and how it can have a major impact on your energy bills and consumption. In that post, I also said that I thought it would be great if you combined it with photovoltaics. The problem with such a system is that there’s a huge initial investment which means that it doesn’t actually save you any money for quite a while (5-7 years in the case of Climate Energy’s cogeneration system). But now I’ve discovered Citizenrē. Citizenrē offers what is essentially a free photovoltaic system. For a pretty small security deposit ($100/kW, with a 5 kW minimum) they’ll install a photovoltaic system on your house for free. Instead of paying for the system up front and then waiting for the energy savings to cover that cost, you pay nothing up front and cover the costs of equipment and installation by paying per kilowatt as you normally do. They also let you lock in a per-kilowatt rate that will never go up and will be lower than what you’re currently paying your electric company, so you’re still saving money. Presumably, if you’re generating more than you’re using and some of it is going back into the grid you’ll be getting money back on that as well. I haven’t looked into it as thoroughly as I need to before making any sort of commitment, but from what I’ve seen it seems like a sound idea. Some people are claiming that it’s a scam, but it seems to me like it has potential. I’ll definitely be looking into it more and, if I end up being convinced, may get some solar panels put up on our roof.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have noticed that jobs/projects never seem to come one at a time. They’re like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park: when you stumble upon one out in the jungle somewhere, you can be sure there’s more of them flanking you in the bushes just waiting to jump out and disembowel you. Only less bloody. Unless you’re a hit man or mercenary or something I suppose… Anyway, my point is that it seems to be a Law of Business that you can never be only doing one thing at a time.

This law even seems to apply to freelancing. Having finished off some projects and being left with a little free time, the leads on new work were coming in slowly recently. Then, all of a sudden, a nice juicy lead pops up out of nowhere in the wilds of Craigslist. Had I thought of my dinosaur simile earlier, I wouldn’t have been so surprised when, within a day, two more had surfaced. And this at a time when some of my side projects are starting to ramp up as well. Fortunately, unlike a velociraptor attack, this is good news. I was lucky enough to have a nice quiet period in terms of work while Jessi and I were moving into our new condo, and now that we’re mostly finished with that I’ve got what’s starting to look as though it may be a glut of work to help us start saving for the remodeled kitchen in our future. It’s a good thing it didn’t work out the other way around or I’d probably be pretty miserable right now.

So anyway, it looks like I’ve got some choice new projects coming up. There are, as usual, a few web things to do, but the biggest thing of note is that I may be taking steps towards pushing my consulting business in a new and exciting direction: IT strategy consulting. At my previous job in San Francisco I was used to filling pretty much every rung in the IT ladder. I did everything from helping people format their Word docs to designing the IT infrastructure for a new office and spending tens of thousands of dollars to contract for its implementation. So though I’ve been focusing more on the support and implementation roles in the work I’ve done so far, I definitely have some experience in doing more. I’ve now got a chance to do just that and hopefully establish myself a little further up that ladder. This has always been part of my plan, though I expected it to take a little longer to actually find an opportunity to try and move into that space.

Hopefully this will also provide the opportunity (and income) to take another step that’s been part of my plan—and of which inklings of impending reality have lately been appearing—hiring employees. I’ve actually been approached in the past about hiring someone on, but never at a time when I could realistically think about doing it. If things go well in the next few weeks/months, I may be able to (need to, even) start thinking about actually doing that. This, of course, would be a huge step in many ways.

And, as I always knew to be the case, the most useful tool in getting to this point has been networking. Advertising will always bring in some work, but if you want to be proactive about it, there’s no better way to go about it than to just get out there and meet people. Of course to do that you need to know where to go to meet the the sort of people that are actually likely to buy what you’re selling. Fortunately, I just the other day met Mark Doerschlag who runs MarksGuide.com, a site dedicated to networking and networking events in Boston. He’s pointed me towards a couple different events that I’ll be checking out in the near future, including the web innovators group of Boston (which is, in name at least, quite reminiscent of the SFWIN events I often attended while I was in San Francisco (doesn’t look like they’re actually related though). So with luck this will help accelerate things even further.

In other news, this weekend marks my favorite event in the sporting year: the opening matches of the RBS 6 Nations rugby tournament. Making it an even better thing, now that I’m in Boston instead of San Francisco the first match of the day starts at 8:30 am instead of 5:30 am, so there’s a change I might even wake up and drag myself down to the Phoenix Landing to watch it live (something I haven’t been able to do since 2004 when I spent a week and a half in London)! So five of the next eight weekends should find me at the Phoenix, hopefully not surrounded by rabid Ireland fans who won’t much appreciate my (much needed, but sadly not very effective) cheering of Scotland. At least Scotland are playing England on Saturday, so the Ireland fans will be on my side for that match…

All in all, it appears that good things are ahead (as behind).

Though it involved no gunpowder, treason, or plot, this Guy Fawkes Night (Which is also one of my favorite holidays, even though I’m not British and don’t celebrate it. There’s just something about a holiday during which you burn people in effigy…), it was certainly still a night to remember. Tonight, Jessi and I made an offer on a townhouse/condo. I think this means that we’re officially Big Kids. It also means that, barring unforeseen problems, we’ll soon no longer be residents of Cambridge, but of Somerville, the second move this year for both of us. The process of home-buying has been, so far, pretty painless. I’ll write about it in more detail, but I’ll wait until we finish the process first.

In other news, I went to my first Carleton College alumni event the other night. I don’t know why, but I never really bothered to get involved with any of that stuff in San Francisco. I suppose it probably had to do with already knowing lots of people in the area and having a regular office job that brought with it some really great friends, whereas here I know fewer people, and don’t get to meet as many new friends through work. Anyway, the event was actually a lot of fun. It was largely ‘05ers and ‘06ers, then myself and one of two others from the class of ‘04, and a couple from ‘02 and ‘03. Amazingly enough, I actually ran into someone that I played rugby with freshman year. I also met a guy who’s currently a corporate lawyer working with biotech firms. He pointed me towards some Mac users he knows in the industry, so hopefully I’ll even get some business out of the event which, I suppose, just goes to show that a little networking is always worthwhile.

Oh yeah, I’m also in need of a haircut. I haven’t had to do that yet here, so I have no idea where to go. Any and all recommendations are welcome. Preferably somewhere that’s likely to be able to squeeze me in before tuesday night when I’ll be attending Christy Mihos’ election night party.

Just got back from the aforementioned Celebration of political bloggers. It was very cool, much cooler than I expected actually. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, though I was hoping there would be some big names there. I got more than I expected and met: Steve Garfield, David Kravitz, David Weinberger, Shai Sachs, and others. Sadly, I’m horribly bad at names and have forgotten a few good ones. Also sadly, and more on this in a bit, I had no business cards on me to give to the several people who asked me for them. One thing they should definitely do, which I suppose they still could and if they don’t I might offer to start doing it for the future meetings which I attend (and I intend to start attending their regular Thursday meetings with some regularity), is, after the meeting, send an email to everyone who attended listing the names and blogs of everyone who was there. I think that for those people who don’t have cards and those that have poor memories for names it would really increase the value of the meetings. The meetings normally take place on Thursdays at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School: link. I recommend it for anyone who’s into blogging. Jessi also really enjoyed it, expect a good post from her about it in the near future.

I’m really excited about having met Steve Garfield. He’s a big name, and doing some very cool stuff. Plus, there’s an immediate business connection: he shot this video on his cell phone. I don’t know what it is, but something about that piqued my curiosity as Editor in Chief of cellphonetechnews.com. If I can just put my finger on what it is, maybe I’ll write a story about it…

Now back to Kinko’s and my lack of business cards. In preparation for this event specifically I wanted to make sure I had some business cards to hand out. I knew it would be a stretch, but I called Kinko’s this morning and asked them if it would be possible for me to have some cards printed up by 5pm if I brought them right in (it’s a 10 minute walk from my apartment). They said sure, just come by with a PDF, no problem. So I did. They said they’d have it ready by 5, and I figured I was good to go. Three o’clock rolls around and I figure that they, as they often do, might have finished the job early. So I gave them a call. The guy who answered the phone says to me ‘oh, well I left you a message’… no, actually you didn’t … ‘you need to re-create the PDF because the way it is now we can’t do it’. Um, great. And you couldn’t tell me this when I brought it in and we looked at the PDF together and you told me it wouldn’t be a problem? I wasn’t planning on using Kinko’s for my business cards anyway, they’re just convenient and fast, but now I’ll definitely be getting them printed up elsewhere. My dad actually recommended a place a while ago that he used for his cards, but I can’t remember the name of it and for some reason Spotlight has been completely useless lately. Oh well, he’ll probably see this and remind me of it. (Hi dad!) The plus side is that I’ve recently come up with what I think is a much better design for the business cards anyway, so now I won’t have to print any up with the old design.

On Monday (Oct. 30) there will be an event at Harvard’s Berkman Center there will be an event entitled ‘Blogging the Vote in 2006: A Celebration of Political Bloggers‘.

The event is ‘to honor all those who have been blogging the vote’, because apparently we ’should be celebrated for [our] role in making public the discussion about who should be the next Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’.

I’ll be there, and I’m bringing Jessi with me, Matt of Hub Politics will be there, and hopefully many others. I’m really looking forward to the chance to meet some of my fellow Boston bloggers, especially with such an interesting topic as Mass Guber ‘06 to talk about. Plus there’s free food and drinks.

Hope to see you there. More details available here.

I’ve posted about Zooomr before, but I feel the need to mention it again. I’ve recently discovered, not in small part due to the inspiration of my friend Ari, that I rather enjoy photography. So I’ve been carrying Jessi’s camera (a Kodak EasyShare C340) and been snapping away at just about everything I see. The better shots I have, of course, been uploading to Zooomr since they were nice enough to give me a free pro account and all (here are some of my favorites: Bottle, subwaylamp, emptycar, and my first ‘decent’ picture Pigpen in the window).

I’d like to think that my pictures are getting better, especially since I’ve graduated from my camera phone to an actual camera, though I still would hardly consider myself an artist. So imagine my surprise when I get a notification that someone had commented on one of my photos. Of course, I was even more surprised to discover that the comment was a compliment from John Keyes, a New England photographer who takes some truly excellent pictures. Now I’m all the more motivated to keep at this and see if maybe I could actually be a decent photographer.

Now that I’ve had some more experience with it, I’ve got a much more well-formed opinion of Zooomr as a service. For the most part, I’m highly impressed. It works very well, has an excellent geotagging feature using the Google maps API, a decent social networking feature, and RSS feeds of your favorite people’s pictures. There are two things that I think they could improve, however. First, it would be really great if it had a way to ‘favorite’ pictures. So, for example, if I were to find a picture that I absolutely love I could mark it as a favorite and it would then be viewable, or at least linked to, from the favorites section of my Zooomr page (would also integrate well with blogs). The other thing that I would improve is a better feedback mechanism. I’ve been looking all over for a email link or feedback form so that I can request this feature, but I just can’t find it. So I’m requesting it here. And just to make sure they see this, I’ll link to Thomas Hawk a member of the Zooomr team and another excellent photographer out of San Francisco. Oh, and maybe the Zooomr blog too just for good measure.

Today Seán Patrick O’Malley, the Cardinal of Boston, posted his first second post in his blog. I’m about as far from being Catholic as possible (in fact, I’ll be going to a Rosh Hashanah dinner tonight…), but I’ve still subscribed to his RSS feed and am looking forward to reading what he writes. I’m not sure if it’s been done before, but I think this is really cool. A Cardinal, the Archbishop of Boston, is writing a blog. Regardless of whether your Catholic or not, or even if you can’t stand organized religion, I think this will prove some really interesting insight into the inner workings of Boston, Catholicism, and maybe even the Holy See. At the very least we’ll learn something about the Cardinal himself. And, you have to admit, it would be pretty sweet if the Pope himself were to start a blog; a place for him to pontificate if you will …or not.

I do have one slight reservation about this blog, and I’ll share it with you: I have many fond memories of those days in the early 1960’s. I will share with you, believe it or not, that I and everyone else were wearing lederhosen in those days…but, do not try to find those pictures because I assure you that the negatives have been destroyed….LOL!. I’ll leave you to take from that what you will.

In other news, I just read an ad on Craigslist in which someone is trying to organize a networking group for technology consultants. I, of course, immediately responded letting him know that I’d definitely be interested and offering whatever help I might be able to give. I think this is a great idea, and a great way to meet other people doing similar things to what I’m doing. Sure they are, in some way, the competition, but that’s no reason that we can’t get together and learn from each other, share resources, and help each other out. There’s more than enough business out there to go around, and we all have our own unique specialties. Hopefully this will actually happen, because I think those of us who attend will really be able to help each other out and learn from each other.

[edit: I was wrong, this was actually his second post. His first was here]

cornercop Hosted on Zooomr

Or so I am lead to believe by the voices wafting up through my window. I assume it was the cop who’s currently stationed at the corner of the street who said this, and he seemed to be saying it to some random person across the street. Unfortunately I missed whatever altercation it was that let up to this revelation. It’s nice to know, I suppose, that the best use for his time while standing on our corner is giving out parking violations. Perhaps the incredibly loud and irritating ‘take back the neighborhood’ party they held in the park next door yesterday that drove Jessi and I from our home for the majority of Saturday actually had some effect other than waking us up with a very loud man on a loudspeaker singing the Mr. Rogers theme.

In more relevant news, Craigslist has started really rising to the occasion in terms of yielding potential work, both directly and indirectly. On Thursday I responded to an ad looking for someone to help test out a web page. I went in on Friday and did exactly that: helped them evaluate a new design for their site. It’s not really the kind of work I’m looking for and didn’t bring in much in the way of business, but it may have ended up being much more productive than I could have hoped when I first saw the ad. While chatting with the guy I was working with while there I learned two very important things: 1) his company is having trouble finding qualified AJAX coders, and 2) he happens to know of at least two biotech companies in the area that are Mac based and might be looking to hire consultants. Talk about a big score in terms of new business leads! If I could get work with just one of the smaller biotech companies in the are (and there is just a tad more than one of them here) it would pave the way for me to position myself as a Mac consultant specializing in the biotech industry, something that would likely be huge in terms of establishing myself. I already emailed him about both opportunities, and although it sounds like I probably won’t be going for any AJAX work with his company (they’re only interested in full-time employees) he’s digging up some details on the biotech companies that he knows about for me. I think this could be the first step towards setting up the kind of business I’ve been picturing in my head this whole time.

I’ve also, thanks to Craigslist again, found some other promising leads. As usual it’s mostly web development stuff, but there’s also a PC consultant in the area who’s looking for a local Mac person to refer Mac business to. It sounds like he gets at least a couple people looking for Mac help a month and wants someone reliable that he can refer them to. The perfect way to start spreading my name among the home users and from them, hopefully, to their friends, coworkers, and companies.

The BMAC meeting last night turned out to be pretty fun and worthwhile. The presenter for the night was Rich Siegel the guy who wrote BBEdit (pretty much the text editor for coders working on Macs) and started Bare Bones Software. He talked about the changes in the latest major update (8.5) of BBEdit as well as their relatively new product, Yojimbo.

Being a long-time Mac user, BBEdit has pretty much always been on the radar. Although, to be honest, I’ve never really used it (I generally use SubEthaEdit for my coding when I’m not using Emacs). But after his talk about it, I’m seriously considering it. Two of the features in particular (folding and clippings) really caught my attention. I’m definitely going to give a try on my next project to test it out and see if it’s worth the somewhat hefty price tag of $125.

I’m also giving Yojimbo a try. I looked at it when they first released it about 6 months ago and didn’t really see the point. Since then, however, I’ve often wished I had a good program to use as a repository for all that random information you tend to accumulate like serial numbers and passwords. There are a number of solutions out there such as SOHO Notes (which I can get for free, but don’t really like), but after last night I obviously have Yojimbo in mind and so am giving it a shot. Fortunately it’s much cheaper ($39), so if I decide I like it there won’t be much reason not to get it.

In other news, I just got my copy of OS X Server in the mail thanks to the highly discounted prices offered by the Apple Consultants Network. I’m planning on installing it on my PowerMac G5 to use as a home server (as well as a testbed for various other things), but first I want to make some hardware upgrades to the machine to better suit it’s new role. In particular, I want to move the two 160 GB hard drives currently in it into an external enclosure (probably this one with an eSATA PCI-X card) and configure them into some sort of RAID (haven’t decided yet) as a backup store, then put some bigger drives into the internal bays (possibly two 500s, maybe two 250s). Should be a fun project, and will definitely make it easier for me to keep on top of my OS X server skills. I’ve also got a few ideas for hosted services that I could offer with a setup like this, although I’d want faster, more reliable internet and some hefty UPSs first.

Also, for those of you who may care, there’s a new episode of Vermis. As of right now it’s not showing up on the site, but it should be soon. An interesting note on this episode is that I got a writing credit (I can do creative stuff too!).