Ben Roy

I have a regular meeting with a few local Internet entrepreneurs, every 4-6 weeks or so, usually for dinner and drinks. The last time we met was the second week of December.

For the previous two meetings we'd gotten together at Boston's, which if you don't know is a chain pizza place. Our meeting last Wednesday was the third time we'd been there in about four months.

Yesterday I had something of a flash of personal insight that should never have been that. Why not? Because it was something that I already knew, that I understood.

For one of my businesses, a social bookmarking service, I've been planning to outsource the bulk of the ongoing development and maintenance work by hiring a full time employee in a more modestly priced market than the US. In case that was a little too weasely, we wanted to hire some cheap overseas labor.

I didn't used to dig on New Year's resolutions, but a couple years ago I had a change of heart for reasons I don't recall or never knew. Either way, I'm now a fan and try to create achievable, challenging, and meaningful goals each year.

I wrote last year about creating SMART goals, or those that are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed. I've had success with setting goals that meet these criteria and am doing the same this year.

There's something about getting a project buttoned up and out the door that's just not easy. What is it they say? The last 10% of the work takes 90% of the effort? While the exact numbers might be off, the idea seems pretty sound.

There's a related idea when it comes to quality of software, or quality of the design of the software, which says that the last 10% of getting to perfect is much more work than the first 90%. In other words, just because you can get something built 'pretty well' on the cheap doesn't mean that you can get all the way there for just a bit more.

I love it when life comes along and illustrates something for you in a completely unexpected way. Take my shopping trip the other day at Costco.

We were browsing through the produce section and saw boxes of plums. These plums looked great - nice color, no real blemishes, very uniform. There was one problem though in that they were HUGE. They had to be double the size of what you normally think of when it comes to plums.

After a fairly minimal amount of research into an ideal first airplane, I ran off to the local hobby store and picked up the Super Cub LP. It's what they call a trainer, a plane designed for learning to fly. It's relatively slow (top speed of 30 mph), has forgiving flight characteristics, and takes a crash pretty well (supposedly). All that said, it wasn't the plane that I intended to purchase, but they recommended it over the one I'd been looking at. Plus it was in stock.

Ok, so it was originally 1909, but it seemed catchier to latch onto the whole "99" thing. I've been wanting to try out a diet that cut out all of the processed and artificial junk that is in most of our food, but I always get caught up in the details. What exactly do I mean by 'processed', what's in and what's out, etc.

My sites are slowly coming back online, one at a time. Every time another one pops up I get excited that maybe the rest of them are fixed too, but it's never the case. As they come online I'm running my own backups so I never find myself in this situation again.

For the short term, manually running backups manually is ok, but since I will now be keeping regular offline backups for all my sites I'm going to need an automated solution. There's some stuff off there, but I'm tempted to put something of my own together.

I'm in the middle of learning a very harsh lesson. Almost a week ago, all of my websites went offline. As of today, only a handful of them have come back up. My blog, obviously, is one of them.

The problem is that my host is being completely unresponsive. The 4 times I've contacted support, I've been told that they're working on it and will 'update me shortly'. Well, I've never gotten an update that wasn't a response to my inquiry.