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When other people are excited about something you tend to check it out. It’s called word-of-mouth. It’s the most effective form of advertising for companies; it costs nothing and is more effective than a super-bowl ad. So, two things that are supremely popular right now and receive tons of word-of-mouth advertising are Twitter and Dancing with the Stars and I just don’t get either of them.

Twitter – I genuinely don’t get the point of sending countless mundane updates to friends and family. Who cares if the pizza you had for lunch was good, or if Tonya’s Uncle’s dog died, or you just had a good bowel movement.  What’s the point? Who is reading these? Is Twitter the end of stringing together multiple sentences into coherent paragraphs?

Dancing with the Stars - Watching ”stars” dance with professionals? Really? That’s the whole premise of the show? Now granted I’m in the heterosexual male 29-40 demographic which doesn’t exactly make me their target audience, but good God, does this show suck! I just don’t get why anyone would want to watch it. Last night, I was flipping through channels and came across this show and had to stab my eyes out with a shishkabob skewer. True story.

I found this cool tutorial on setting up your own server in the cloud using Amazon’s EC2 cloud service. So, in a little under 30 minutes I had setup my account with Amazon and built my own Windows server complete with IIS & SQL Server. The cost; $0.125 per hour.

One of the things that is so cool about the internet paradigm is that small teams can take their idea from sketch to fruition with a ton of hard work and a small amount of capital. With “the cloud” the server infrastructure part of the startup process is now even cheaper and easier. The real beauty of this service comes later… when you’ve released version 1.0 of your new greatest app and now you need to add capacity. The cloud allows you to “scale” painlessly by increasing the power of your “instance” (read virtual server), or by adding more instances (more virtual servers).

So what’s the downside? A) It will be a PIA to switch cloud service providers once you’re successful so you’re essentially locked in, meaning later on, Amazon can charge you whatever they want. B) Downtime. While the track record of Amazon has been good, there is not a 100% uptime guarantee. There have been several high-profile outages of the Amazon service which in turn took out several high-profile customers. There is nothing more frustrating as a web business owner than having your website be down, and knowing there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

All that being said, the uptime and reliability is only going to get better, and companies that learn to effectively utilitize the cloud will be at a competitive advantage. So, go do it. Go setup your own server in the cloud. Linux, Windows, MySQL, SQL Server, Apache, IIS. Who cares. The exercise is an eye-opening and mind-filling experience.

Everyone’s blaming AIG for distributing $165 million in bonuses. That’s like blaming a meth-head for grinding his teeth. They can’t help it. The U.S. government has built this monster over the last 25 years, starting with Reagan but including all the presidents since then… not to mention the countless senators, representatives, and other culpable politicians that contributed.

I’m a big proponent of free market principals and capitalism. As such, I’m all for deregulation so long as it’s sensible. Unfortunately many of the deregulations that have occurred since the 80′s are the direct result of politicians being in the pockets of corporate big-wigs. These deregulations have served no other purpose than to fatten the elites’ wallets while robbing the everyday person of their personal wealth… meager as it may be.

I once read that a true democracy is doomed to failure. I believe that and so did the founding fathers. That’s why the U.S. is a Republic. But I’m starting to wonder if a Republic is doomed to failure too. With all the back-room shenanigans and wink-wink bills getting passed that serve no other purpose than to enrichen the wealthy at the expense of the public, are we not going to implode from the greed of the “elite”?

When I first installed Office 2007  I hated the new ribbons that replaced the old toolbars and drop-down menus. I doubly hated the new ribbons in Excel. Determined to not be one of “those” users, I figured I would get used to the new layout. I endured the lost productivity of having to find where my commonly used functions were moved to. I figured once I conquered the learning curve I would be just as efficient as I used to be. Well, 18 months later I still can’t find anything without searching, and searching, and searching and I’ve finally given up. Office 2007 ribbons SUCK! I’m a power-user, and if after 18 months my productivity is still hurting because of Microsoft’s asinine decision to not include “classic” menus, then it’s not my fault. Microsoft really dropped the ball. Whoever decided that the ribbons were an improvement needs to be taken out back and shot. I friggin’ HATE the ribbons. HATE. HATE. HATE. So, I found an add-on tool that restores my old drop down menus and toolbars. If you’re ready to end your misery click here.

So smattered all over the headlines after the Virginia Tech massacre are little insightful articles with prosaic titles like “Cho’s Actions Fit Pattern”. How effing insightful. Crazy either fits the stereotype or it doesn’t. That’s like the weatherman predicting a 50 percent chance of rain – way to go out on a limb there. The part that aggravates me however, is the constant chatter about preventive measures for the future. As though we could round up all the socially disfunctional loners like Cho into some McCarthyistic concentration camp for the FCPA (Future Crazy People of America). Here’s a thought: we can’t prevent the next one, we can’t exact a preemptive ware on the aforementioned FCPA, there isn’t anything we can do about it. So the next time you’re living in a dorm with fifty other people, or sharing office space with a co-worker, or dissecting a pig fetus with your assigned lab partner remember this: invite the crazy fuck out for a beer every now and then. A little kindness goes a long way.

My condolences sincerely go out to all those affected by this tragedy.

Today I flew cross-country with my instructor to Zephyrhills. You may have heard of their water. They are also kind of famous for skydiving. On my list of things to do before I die, skydiving is 12th; which, according to my life insurance policy, is exactly when my list will end. Oh yeah, I want to go hanggliding too, but Florida isn’t exactly a hanggliding mecca. Anyway, if you want to check out skydiving in Zephyrhills visit Skydivecity.com .

Today I flew a solo ad-hoc cross country (sort of) in my trusty (rented) Cessna 152 trainer. “Ad-hoc” because I didn’t have a route in mind. “Sort of” because it technically didn’t fufill my cross country solo requirement. I just picked a heading on a whim and when I got bored I changed course… then repeat. I landed a couple of times in Williston, which was fun because I’ve never landed there before, and then came back home to Ocala’s Jim Taylor Field. If you hadn’t guessed it by now I’m in the process of getting my private pilot’s license and old N46140 is feeding the fever. Every day when I get home from work I ask my wife, “Can I have a plane?”, to which she always answers, “Can I have a new house?”. She doesn’t agree with my logic that we already have a house and we need an airplane. Women.