Nov 20th 09
Posted by Arnold in Family
I’m Arnold, your friendly neighborhood web guy. I love technology, I love the internet. And I love to sell — online.
Not off line. Not my thing. But hey, I love my wife and I support her passion and endeavors. ;-)
So, here it goes:
GAP jeans for kids and toddlers, straight from the factory. Up to 70% off the store price. Great way to give out inexpensive but branded gifts this season. If you’re at Makati/Mandaluyong/San Juan/Pasig area, give Joyce a private message (on Twitter of Facebook) for details on how to see the items.
Ayos?!
Oct 30th 09
Posted by Arnold in Techie
As I reported last week, we’re moving our entire online business to Rackspace Cloud after managing a VPS for almost 5 years.
The transfer has been running smoothly until I had a not so good experience with one of their support staff. I’m not going to say what it is — I don’t want to bad-mouth a company where my business will revolve around — but I just would like to say that maybe, their fanatical support being “fanatical” as advertised online and on their websites is a bit overrated.
Still, I think they are an awesome hosting company offering an innovative hosting solution. And while I was tempted to respond to offers given by other cloud hosting companies after I posted those couple of twits, I will stick with them and continue with my plan to have my web applications revolve around their cloud hosting.
Update: I did mention that I’m sticking with Rackspace Cloud and that even with the glitch, I still believe that they are an awesome hosting company.
This proves me right. The head of operations contacted me and insisted on working it out with me. Long story short, we came up with a middle road to take. While it may not be “all that I wanted”, I’m still happy for several reasons, two to name a few:
1) This proves that even how little a client is, Rackspace cares. I may just be one of their thousands of clients, but that didn’t matter to them. What matters, as I felt during our conversations, is that they sincerely want everyone satisfied with their service.
2) This attitude towards customer service and doing business as a whole inspires me. I mean, I’m a small technopreneur. I live (and die) for a satisfied client. I have to admit that my attitude towards some of my clients aren’t always positive. But with this experience with Rackspace, I learned that even the most irritating client needs to feel important. LOVE your clients, THE BUSINESS follows. Huge principle to live by.
Sep 16th 09
Posted by Arnold in All in a days work
I installed IntenseDebate today on this blog. IntenseDebate is a blog commenting plug in that integrates almost anything that you need for your commenting system. It allows the visitors to log in via Facebook, Twitter or OpenID accounts — and of course, the traditional way is included.
Let’s see if this intensifies the debate. Election time is coming and we expect people to be actively involved in the discussion. And of course, take note of those controversial posts against cults and their leaders. My “Iglesia ni Cristo” post has been the most popular post in the past few weeks. I’ve got to post most on this type for extra visitor juices, eh!
Why don’t you try the plug in by posting a “Hi, this is cool!” post below?
Sep 15th 09
Posted by Arnold in All in a days work
In a world full of distractions, one word stands out: Focus.
In family, if you want to be fruitful as a parent or a spouse, focus. There’s a lot of things that needs to be done. But learn how to give importance to what’s important and learn how to disregard the less important.
In business, I’m a firm believer of focus. While some may say that diversification is the way to go, I’d say focus on your core business and everything else follows. I know of a client that invested a lot in a project, only to abandon it because he got distracted by his other businesses.
And hey, I’m in a web application software business — notice the trend? We’re seeing simple, focused software over-powering the Microsoft-ish, “full featured” ones.
Here’s the principle: Do more by doing less. Focus on what’s important and useful. Applicable to all aspects of life, eh!?
Jun 8th 09
Posted by Arnold in Day today
I just have to repost this from this blog. Great insight. Works well for our lives — at work, family or ministry.
* * *
The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an A.
Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
* * *
One famous leader once said, “Comitting a mistake is wisdom. Not learning from it is stupidity”. Are you hiding and trying to perfect something before you go out in the open? Or are you in the open committing mistakes and learning from it?
