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Welcome Dave! I can attest to his company's wonderful work.

My favorite thing about Dave is that he truly enjoys the work he does. If you asked him, he would probably tell you that a kitchen remodel is his favorite thing to do. I have seen him turn a dull space for cooking into the center of the house where everyone hangs out and enjoys.

There is a quantifiable difference between a dull kitchen and the place everyone wants to be. Dave knows how to do the later.

Recent benchmark tests show that Windows 7 is no faster than Vista. In fact, the benchmarking shows that Windows 7 is misleading you into thinking it is faster because of some clever technical wizardry. They accelerated the user interface so it feels faster but the actual results are a dead heat. This is an interesting development since Vista was found to be as much as 40% slower than Windows XP. Granted, Windows 7 is still in beta but how much "faster" can they make it?

Link 1 [infoworld.com]

Link 2 [infoworld.com]

There is a risk of losing the WordPress database if you upgrade. The database is driven by MySQL and can be backed up before proceeding by some nifty little add-ons for WordPress or you can rely on a professional to manage this. If your site does not have fantastico I would urge you to go with professional help.

If you are looking for help, let me know. My rates are very reasonable and I have tons of satisfied customers.

Unless your site can draw a huge amount if users building an online community is pointless and can be costly. Social Networking sites have this covered. However, upon the arrival of some sort of centralized profile repository standard that will allow your user profile to become portable from site to site this will start to make more sense for smaller sites. I would say wait and see what happens in the next 6 months.

Most of the web sites I build are either based in Wordpress or Joomla.

I typically recommend one of the cart systems for Joomla for e-commerce. When you have a site that is advanced enough to include a shopping cart it is also advanced enough to have a full blown Content Management System. While I know Word Press works for many of you as a primary site engine, it is just not quite flexible enough more me to recommend it for this purpose.

So my Joomla shopping carts recommendations include Virtuemart and ECJC. Virtuemart is the most widely used cart within Joomla, but ECJC is an entirely revamped version of OS Commerce written specifically for Joomla and it includes many add-ons and advanced features.

Aha, now I see your concept. Or at least I think I do. Unchained is a response to your years working in a chain restaurant trying to create repeatable and reliable experiences. The main problem with repeatable is that it can also be very unremarkable.

Unchained seems to be after the un-reapeatable and rather remarkable aspects of life whether they be a restaurant, a really great bed and breakfast or that little deserted island up in the San Juans that make a great afternoon of fun in the sun! I like it!

Interesting. It seems Stephen was going for a reaction with that post. It also seems that he got one. :)

Stephen, why don't you tell us a little more about your site and what you are trying to do. At this point I won't be visiting without a little more information.

Wow, IRC. Welcome back mid 90's! I don't think I have used IRC for anything productive, ever.

There are modules that could be incorporated into the site to provide live chat that could be but is not necessarily IRC. I don't necessarily think it is a feature I want on any site.

I do miss the good old IRC days when I had nothing to do except skip class. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Hilary!

Sarah is not only a great photographer but she is a very warm and caring person. She will take the time to get your picture perfect. Take advantage of this amazing woman's time before she has none left.

When I chose to shift my tech business away from support and towards web, Biznik was instrumental at getting me the exposure and more importantly the clients for me to make it a reality. The paid membership has greatly helped my business.

There has been a lot of movement in the security industry lately around hard drive encryption. There are pluses and minuses to using encryption on your hard drives.

There are free solutions to accomplish this feat. With a little more knowledge you can do it yourself using tools built into Windows.

TrueCrypt, an open source solution that works on Windows, Mac and Linux just came out with an update that allows you to encrypt the entire hard drive basically adding password protection to the boot-up process. Without the password, no boot or access to the hard drive in any way. However, this is good and bad. If you lose your password there is no recovering the data on that drive. This makes a data backup solution even more important that before. Before you might have had the chance of a data forensics expert recovering your crashed hard drive.

Yeah, what are you referring to specifically?

Joseph,

I don't know how VirtueMart would integrate with your marketing but I know it has rating extensions built for it. This is what we typically use.

I read this article earlier today as well. What I brought away from it was that I really needed to be razor focused on one task at a time. I try to do this now by making a task list and segmenting my day into chunks dedicated to single tasks or single projects at least. When I try to think about all of the things I have cooking right now it does indeed make me feel numb in the brain. However, I am up to some big stuff right now and I don't see much of a way around it.

Randall,

This is not unique to MAC. MySQL does not have very many intuitive GUI's across the board. However, it is very well documented and creating databases in cli (command line interface) is not all that hard once you know how.

It sounds like it is just a general MySQL learning curve.

MySQL has some nice add-ons you can use to create and edit tables as well as put together custom queries.

You can find them here.

There is an answer to your question but it is a little complex without having more information. If you are still looking for the answer send me a message offline and I'll see if I can help.

wfulton@thirdhatch.com

Bill

Welcome Beth!

Can you send me your portfolio?

My sales and closing techniques have evolved over the years. The biggest thing I rely on is the number of leads I am cultivating at any given time. Sometimes this can be a bad thing because they may all say yes at the same time, in which case I need help desperately. I say a bad thing but this is a good problem for a business to face.

Susan you are the best you that you can be. Nobody else can do you as well as you can. Keep that in mind and go sell your services like you are selling yourself because you are...

I think wisdom can be garnered from many sources. It seems to me that most of the first part of the torah is dedicated to measurements and laws that in modern society are already established. But the purpose was to establish society so these things were at one point necessary. Going back to what Justin's quote about there being a time and a purpose for everything...

I would not take much if anything from the new testament of the Christian Bible for business purposes.

I think part of the problem with most advice is that it is so trite that we downplay it's importance. Then we pretty much ignore it until it is too late. Of course I will gladly substitute the we with I in the previous statements. :)

Send me your stuff. I'll see what I can do.

The McLeod Residence is a cool and fun place to take in art and meet with friends. I am looking forward to another event there!

Just to be clear it is tomorrow night (Thursday), not tonight (Wednesday).

By the way, he completed the project with an awesome result! I cannot tell you how happy I am to have had Andrew working on my project.

Sterling,

I think we only ever met once in person but you will be missed. Of course, we will still see you online here at Biznik as you start to build out your Portland network of Biznik's right?

Bill

I would recommend Andrew Sengul from first hand experience. He is working on a project for me and doing an awesome job.