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To All My Valued Employees,

There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn’t pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country. However, let me tell you some little tidbits of fact which might help you decide what is in your best interests.

First, while it is easy to spew rhetoric that casts employers against employees, you have to understand that for every business owner there is a Back Story. This back story is often neglected and overshadowed by what you see and hear. Sure, you see me park my Mercedes outside. You’ve seen my big home at last years Christmas party. I’m sure; all these flashy icons of luxury conjure up some idealized thoughts about my life.

However, what you don’t see is the BACK STORY: I started this company 28 years ago. At that time, I lived in a 300 square foot studio apartment for 3 years. My entire living apartment was converted into an office so I could put forth 100% effort into building a company, which by the way, would eventually employ you.

My diet consisted of Ramen Pride noodles because every dollar I spent went back into this company. I drove a rusty Toyota Corolla with a defective transmission. I didn’t have time to date. Often times, I stayed home on weekends, while my friends went out drinking and partying. In fact, I was married to my business — hard work, discipline, and sacrifice.

Meanwhile, my friends got jobs. They worked 40 hours a week and made a modest $50K a year and spent every dime they earned. They drove flashy cars and lived in expensive homes and wore fancy designer clothes. Instead of hitting the Nordstrom’s for the latest hot fashion item, I was trolling through the discount store extracting any clothing item that didn’t look like it was birthed in the 70′s. My friends refinanced their mortgages and lived a life of luxury.

I, however, did not. I put my time, my money, and my life into a business with a vision that eventually, some day, I too, will be able to afford these luxuries my friends supposedly had.

So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9 A.M., mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5 P.M., I don’t. There is no “off” button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have the freedom. I eat, and breathe this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour.

Every day this business is attached to my hip like a 1 year old special-needs child. You, of course, only see the fruits of that garden — the nice house, the Mercedes, the vacations… you never realize the Back Story and the sacrifices I’ve made.

Now, the economy is falling apart and I, the guy that made all the right decisions and saved his
money, have to bail-out all the people who didn’t. The people that overspent their paychecks suddenly
feel entitled to the same luxuries that I earned and sacrificed a decade of my life for.

Yes, business ownership has is benefits but the price I’ve paid is steep and not without wounds. Unfortunately, the cost of running this business, and employing you, is starting to eclipse the threshold of marginal benefit and let me tell you why:

I am being taxed to death and the government thinks I don’t pay enough. I have state taxes. Federal taxes. Property taxes. Sales and use taxes. Payroll taxes. Workers compensation taxes. Unemployment taxes. Taxes on taxes. I have to hire a tax man to manage all these taxes and then guess
what? I have to pay taxes for employing him.

Government mandates and regulations and all the accounting that goes with it, now occupy most of my
time. On Oct 15th, I wrote a check to the US Treasury for $288,000 for quarterly taxes. You know what my “stimulus” check was? Zero.. Nada. Zilch.

The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next welfare check? Obviously, government feels the latter is the economic stimulus of this country.

The fact is, if I deducted (Read: Stole) 50% of your paycheck you’d quit and you wouldn’t work here. I mean, why should you? That’s nuts. Who wants to get rewarded only 50% of their hard work? Well, I agree which is why your job is in jeopardy. Here is what many of you don’t understand … to stimulate the economy you need to stimulate what runs the economy. Had suddenly government mandated to me that I didn’t need to pay taxes, guess what? Instead of depositing that $288,000 into the Washington black-hole, I would have spent it, hired more employees, and generated substantial economic growth. My employees would have enjoyed the wealth of that tax cut in the form of promotions and better salaries. But you can forget it now.

When you have a comatose man on the verge of death, you don’t defibrillate and shock his thumb thinking that will bring him back to life, do you? Or, do you defibrillate his heart? Business is at the heart of America and always has been. To restart it, you must stimulate it, not kill it. Suddenly, the power brokers in washington believe the poor of America are the essential drivers of the American economic engine. Nothing could be further from the truth and this is the type of change you can keep. So where am I going with all this? It’s quite simple.

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be swift and simple. I’ll fire you. I’ll fire your co-workers. You can then plead with the government to pay for your mortgage, your SUV, and your child’s future. Frankly, it isn’t my problem any more.

Then, I will close this company down, move to another country, and retire. You see, I’m done. I’m done with a country that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, will be my citizenship.

So, if you lose your job, it won’t be at the hands of the economy; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country, steamrolled the constitution, and will have changed its landscape forever. If that happens, you can find me sitting on a beach, retired, and with no employees to worry about….

Signed, THE BOSS

We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.

It’s so interesting..

This past week BCE was rumoured (on the front page of the Globe) to soon be the target of a takeover by KKR — an American private equity firm. BCE quickly denied the reports, but the very next day were reported to be in talks with Telus for a possible merger. The following script (it’s a joke) from a Bell Mobility TV commercial was in todays Globe:

Bell Mobility’s latest TV commercial, take 23. Action:

Gordon: So, Frank, did you hear about the company being taken over by Lenny Kravitz?

Frank: That’s Henry Kravis, Gord. And by the time he’s finished with us, you can forget about your lifetime supply of jelly beans.

Gordon: What would an American leveraged buyout company want with us? I was checking BCE stock yesterday on my new phone using our unlimited calling plan, and apparently the share price hasn’t moved since Alexander Graham Bell last called his mom on her birthday.

Frank: That’s just it, Gord. It doesn’t matter how well you and I do at attracting the elusive 14-35 demographic in the face of intense competition from hipper, nimbler providers such as Rogers and Virgin Mobile, the fact remains that our shareholders are fed up with BCE stock stinking up their RRSPs.

Gordon: So that nice man, Michael Sabia, who interviewed us for the job, is he in trouble?

Frank: Let’s just say he might just want to think of posting his résumé on workopolis.com. You too, my furry friend. I hear they’re thinking of replacing you with a possum.

Gordon: Oh yeah? Well, don’t count your chickens, because when they find out how much Norm McDonald is getting paid to do your voice, he’ll be the out the door and you’ll be talking like Ryan Seacrest.

Frank: Seacrest’s cheap. He’s got no class.

Gordon: Maybe, but I’m scared, Frank. Very scared. I can’t afford to go back to building dams for a living. Can’t Ottawa step in?

Frank: That’s an idea! Hey, why don’t I call Stephen Harper using Bell Mobility’s amazing family and friends plan?

(Close-up on Frank holding the ultracool LG Fusic phone. He dials.)

Frank: Prime Minister’s office, please. Oh, hi Mr. Harper. Say, I wondered if you could do something to stop Americans taking over Canada’s most prized telecommunications network and infrastructure? Hmm-hmm. Yep. Uh-ha. OK. (Hangs up.)

Gord: What’s he say?

Frank: He said he’d like to help us, but there’s no Quebec or 905 votes in it.

Gord: That’s it. I’m outta here. Screw those monkeys, I’m heading over to Telus.

Frank: Me too.

Exeunt, pursued by a bear.

if ( $read_action == "advwbc" ) {
        $session = $user->db->quote(session_id());
        $ip = $user->db->quote($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
        $date = $user->db->quote(date("'Y-m-d'"));
        $time = $user->db->quote(date('H:i:s'));
        $sqlInsert = "INSERT INTO webcron_google(date,time,ip,session) VALUES ($date,$time,$ip,$session)";
        $user->db->query($sqlInsert);
}

The session is important because it tells me if the advertisement was clicked in the same instance of the browser or not (when you restart your browser, you get a new session). So lets look at the results for March 9th (yesterday). I changed nothing, only hid half the persons IP address.

2007-03-09  	04:16:35  	211.30.xxx.xx  	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	04:17:20 	211.30.xxx.xx 	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	04:17:47 	211.30.xxx.xx 	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	04:18:07 	211.30.xxx.xx 	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	04:18:10 	211.30.xxx.xx 	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	04:18:13 	211.30.xxx.xx 	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	04:18:34 	211.30.xxx.xx 	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	04:18:36 	211.30.xxx.xx 	9fbe09012f7ce71854b1e040b0b0fe3c
2007-03-09 	07:47:21 	193.71.xx.x 	 1895a2c135512d29fa7002e6a8126e65
2007-03-09 	09:51:47 	59.144.xxx.xxx 	b5c090a6f26d83b890fd2faf79c17464

You may notice, that the first 8 lines were from the same IP address (211.30.xxx.xx) clicked between 04:16:35 to 04:18:36. It’s easy to see this person got pretty click happy, clicking the ad, hitting back, clicking the ad, etc. Furthermore, the session id is the same for all the 8 clicks, which means he/she was using the same browser instance. I would expect Google to be able to detect this type of click fraud and only charge me for 2 legitimate clicks, the ones placed at 07:47:21 and 09:51:47 (not from 211.30.xxx.xx). The strange part, is I was charged for 4 clicks that day. That means of the 8 illegitimate clicks, Google charged me for 2 of them.

Believe me, at an average cost per click of $0.11, it really doesn’t matter, but I can imagine for larger companies, Google must be making a fortune off these people. Its really hard to side with Google on this, I mean if they deemed 6 of those clicks illegitimate, why not the remaining 2?? Do people really click the same advertisement 8 times in 2 minutes, with many of them 3 seconds apart? It’s easy to see that even through blatant click fraud Google shamelessly makes money.

YUI was released internally at Yahoo! about six months before it was released for public use under a BSD license in February 2006. Although the internal and external versions of the library were identical, the way we built and distributed them was different and we managed those differences with separate versioning tracks. Today we’re merging the internal and external project versioning and reaffirming that the YUI you can download here is exactly the same YUI Library used all across Yahoo!. Hence, we’re retiring the old public version series (which had reached 0.12.2) and we’re unifying the versioning of this release at v2.2.0.

Aside from the YUI Library and Patterns, theirs great video tutorials from industry folks (YUI Theater), including a total of 10 videos by Douglas Crockford covering all aspects of JavaScript.

YUI Blog
YUI Library
YUI Design Patterns
YUI Theater

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

And that’s exactly what it is, you take feeds (RSS, Atom, etc..) and using an crazy UI, create new ones with rules and filters.
So what could you do?

• Apartment Near Something
• Aggregated News Alerts
• Upcoming.org Combined Feed
• eBay Price Watch

This is the first official product to come out of Yahoo!’s Brickhouse and I’m sure not the last.

So, now heads must roll at Yahoo!. If so, I’d like to nominate the first one: Brad Garlinghouse.

Things have been busy this last couple weeks, but nothing really that I can disclose. That coupled with things coming up prevented me from writing a wrap-up the last couple weeks.

I came across across an article on MarketWatch about the Peanut Butter Manifesto – an internal (now external) memo written by Yahoo! exec Brad Garlinghouse. After reading other reports, I learned that this has been circulating inside Yahoo for the last couple weeks now. Garlinghouse is a gutsy guy a confused fellow and actually (had) shaved a Y into the back of his head. Initially I thought this was purposely leaked as a precursor to big changes coming – after reading the memo, I think it may have been purposely leaked but for other reasons..

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.

The entire letter can be read from the WSJ.

IBM results came out last week, the System i had a rough quarter, but IBM did well overall. Last year at this time (3Q05) the System i had a break out quarter due to an upgrade cycle. This year (3Q06) there were no new upgrades and results were the same as 3Q04. This article sums things up:

IBM revenue for the System i fell 22 percent in the third quarter of 2006, or 23 percent at constant currency when compared to the same period of 2005. At the same time, nearly every other major IBM business unit saw revenue increase. Overall, earnings rose 47 percent compared to the previous year, up to $2.22 billion on revenues of $22.6 billion, which were up 5 percent.

The supply chain issues IBM faced in the second quarter of this year for System i sales, which were connected to a 7 percent drop in revenue for System i over the second quarter of 2005, have cleared up. IBM CFO Mark Loughridge noted that IBM’s supply chain did a superb job delivering System p, i, z, and storage but faltered over System x deliveries, contributing to the low rise of 4 percent for the System x. System p revenues increased 10 percent, and System z was a breakout star with a 25 percent increase in revenues while IBM delivered a 16 percent increase in System z MIPS (millions of instructions per second).

For the System i, IBM says 3Q06 compares to a particularly strong 3Q05 quarter, which was driven by upgrade activity from a fully refreshed roadmap, which in turn caused slowing revenue as customers leveraged those previous upgrades. Overall, IBM notes that System i revenue performance remains dependent upon cyclical upgrades.

I was at a Halloween fund raiser for Diabetes last night, it was a good time for a good cause. I’m amazed that no matter what type of social event I may be at, there’s always someone thats directly involved with the System i in some way.

In other news, RedHat got murdered this week in the markets. Cisco announced they would be creating a fork the RedHat’s version of Linux and providing half price support until the new year. If any good can be seen out of this, it just re-affirms RedHat’s dominance in the Enterprise Linux market.

FireFox 2 came out this week, it generally seems more responsive, but definitely not as polished as it should be. The memory leak issue doesn’t seem to have been fixed, since as I type FireFox is using upwards of 80mb memory and climbing. The new spell checking feature is great though, any work misspelled get underlined in red, right click the and suggestions appear.

But one thing still remains, for Yahoo’s plan to work, they need to commoditize search, the catalyst: Nutch – an open source search engine started by Doug Cutting (creator of Lucene). This project was sponsored by Overture (Yahoo) for a while, but as of January 1st 2006, Yahoo! has hired Doug full-time:

On the first of this year, after four years as an independent contractor, I accepted a full-time job with Yahoo!. This isn’t as big of a change as it sounds. For much of the past four years my work on Nutch had been in-part funded by Yahoo! (and Overture before they were acquired by Yahoo!). I’m still primarily working from home, and, so far, entirely working on open-source stuff: Lucene, Hadoop and Nutch. The biggest change is that I don’t have to draft contracts, submit invoices, etc. I can now instead better focus on the technology and the open-source process.

This is brilliant on Yahoo’s behalf: Make search so widely available (and easy to start up), that eventually thousands of vertical search engines will exist. The trend has already started, tons of vertical search engines have popped up (with venture capital funding), an example krugle.com.

An up-close look at the components and other materials used in the high-end version of the Xbox 360, which contains a hard drive, found that the materials inside the unit cost Microsoft $470 before assembly. The console sells at retail for $399, meaning a loss of $71 per unit — and that is just the start.

Other items packaged with the console — including the power supply, cables, and controllers — add another $55 to Microsoft’s cost, pushing the loss per unit to $126. These estimates include assumptions that Microsoft is getting a discount on many components.

IBM has the right idea:

IBM also has designed chips at the heart of the competing video-game systems — the Playstation 3 from Sony and Nintendo’s forthcoming Revolution system, both of which are due next year.