We build affordable web sites and blogs that get results.

I have a goal for this web site. It’s an important goal, but I’m very much in the beginning phases of implementing it. The goal for this web site is to be about something.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

It used to be this site was about software, and it was a good place to try out new web development techniques. So I’d rewrite it endlessly. In the same way, neolithic web developers would use the same wall on the same cave in France, and whenever they wanted to paint a new buffalo they’d just paint over the old buffalo. That’s why if you actually start clicking around here you’ll find the remnants of past mental civilizations, old articles on Assembly Language, even.

Buffalos.

Today the site might be described charitably as an eclectic brew of intellectual musings, or uncharitably as drive by victim of its author’s mid life crisis. But I don’t want to leave it at that. I want this site to be about something.

For one thing, I hate to give up this site’s modest but established traffic. There are links here, and page rank. It’s the postunmodern equivalent of having one paleolithic dummy saying to one another, “Hey Og, I know where there’s a bunch of pictures of buffaloes. Want to see it?”

And as we all know, Og famously replied: “What’s a picture?”

But what if the artist, Og Monet as it were, gets tired of painting buffaloes? Then you’ve got this neatly trampled dirt leading to the buffalo gallery, and some dispirited former artist scribbling to-do lists where the deer and the antelope played.

While I’m waiting for this site to be about something, I’ll link to some more Buddhist pals, and maybe it’ll end up being about that.

When it’s more earnestly about something, you’ll be the first to know.

“It’s been my policy to view the Internet not as an ‘information highway,’ but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.” -Mike Royko, as quoted on Instructional Resources for Chemistry Educators.

So if you’re reading this, whether you consider yourself Napoleon or Jesus, I welcome you.

I know you’re not really either. I know everything, because I’m god.

No, I’m not. Had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?

Anyway, bad jokes or not, sometimes I really do feel like this asylum atomosphere has a depressive influence. I think that the ethernet packets are leaking, and some unhealthy miasms are getting me.

Stupid miasms.

Today I was working on the business plan for John Lockwood Associates, and thinking through how I would set up my IDX Broker site. I’ve used IHomefinder for years for real estate agent sites and like them a lot, but I didn’t think their broker sites would do what I wanted.

Along the way, I put a call in to the folks at IDXBroker.com and spoke to Chad, and Chad explained what his company does, which is some excellent integration work and design around IHomefinder sites — the sort of thing ParticleWave would be doing if we were in that business, more than likely. But what stood out from the conversation was how helpful Chad was and how much he enjoyed talking to folks about this technology. In my case, he even turned me back on to IHomefinder.

Clearly, Chad’s one of those great guys who puts his client’s needs first, so I wanted to just put up that quick link above and let people know. If you’re a real estate agent or broker in need of an IDX web site, you owe it to yourself to give Chad a call and see what he can do for you!

Not.

Today I was reading this fellow, Steve Pavlina, who’s of interest to me because he claims to make great money off Google Adsense. I’m happy for him in a general way, but I do like to see folks following ideas that make sense to me, and a lot of new age stuff just doesn’t.

Anyway, what I happened across of Steve’s was his Million Dollar Experiment, which is an expriement in the Voodoo-like power of intention. This is something that Napoleon Hill would have understood quite well. Napoeleon Hill, you’ll recall, is the author of “Think and Grow Rich”.

Here’s a fairly consistent formula for success: tell people that acquiring wealth is easy, and they will pay you handsomely.

In a nutshell, the idea behind intention is, you make a decision with full faith and confidence, and this somehow causes the wonderful thing you decided on to happen in your life: in this case, a million bucks. As Napoleon Hill put it more concisely: “Think and grow rich.”

Let’s look at the results of Steve’s experiement. As of today Steve boasts the proud headline:

Total Manifested = $1,780,008.97
2725 Public Participants

Wow, $1.7 million, pretty impressive, right?

The first thing I wanted to know is: OK, how successful have these 2725 public participants been in attracting a million bucks into their lives? Let’s try some fourth grade math to see if we can solve this awesome intellectual riddle of our day: dividing, we learn that each participant has made$653.21 so far. Wow, that’s pretty good. Most people wouldn’t mind if you handed them a check for that amount. Of course, for a some professionals that’s a days work or less, and even if you’re unlucky enough to be working minimum wage, you should be able to make that much in about three weeks.

Now let’s see how that stacks up to the intention people had, which was to have a million dollars. Again with the fourth grade math: 653.21 / 1,000,000 equals .00065321. OK, maybe we need to get to seventh or ninth grade in our mathematics to know that we have to shift the decimal point two places to express that as a percentage, but let’s do that to see how successful people have been with this program, where 100% successful means everyone got a million bucks, and 0% successful means everyone got nothing. OK, the answer is:

Steve Pavlina’s program for attracting wealth into your life is 0.065321% successful. Isn’t that amazing? Be sure to contribute something to his web site. If you should happen to find yourself unlucky enough in life to trip and fall from a high place, you might try intending to fly. But I hope you’ll just watch your step.

Today I was thinking about The Words of My Perfect Teacher, the Patrul Rinpoche book I’ve been reading. It’s such a fun book, so attractive and bright. Yet at the same time, it’s one of the most “relgious” Buddhist books I’ve ever read.

Make no mistake, Buddhism is a religion. (Duh). But I come to it from an ex-Catholic, and (most recently) an atheist background.

So when I say that Patrul Rinpoche’s book is religious, yes, I suppose that is a criticism. There’s hellfire and brimstone there. Indeed, there are some of the best hellfire and brimstone descriptions that one is likely to read outside of perhaps Dante. And there’s plenty of emphasis on obedience and faith. Yet the book doesn’t put me off much. The whole religion doesn’t put me off much, which is a fine thing for an (ex?-) atheist to say.

It seems to me that Buddhism is a much better religiion for an atheist than some of the others that are kicking around, because its practical emphasis on the effects of karmic action doesn’t necessarily need multiple lifetimes to make sense. Buddhism stresses the natural wish of all beings to be happy, and the natural good effects that flow from compassion, kindness, and other forms of “right action”.

To be sure, the same good and evil problem crops up as elsewhere, and at that point you need some sleight of hand to explain how an evil guy can become rich, for example, or how a good person can lose a child: and by sleight of hand read “multiple lifetimes.” But if you take Buddhism and cut away the parts an atheist wouldn’t like, you’re still left with some tasty bits: an entire secular recipe for happiness.

I’m pleased to report that ParticleWave today became fully Internets 2.0 compliant. Flickr has more about this.

I thought this would also be a good time to do my post-mortem on my first three-week iteration of LeadReply, which you might call iterations 1.0, given our naming convention. Actually in looking over the Software Requirements Specification (SRS), it looks as though iteration 1.0 is not quite mortem yet, since there’s one feature missing — Realtor® notification. That should probably be what I tackle today and tomorrow, even though by rights it’s OK since Eudora’s handling it for now.

The main thing is that in iteration one, we combined an autoresponder with an automatic data entry system into a system that can grow into a full fledged contact manager or drip marketing system. The SQL Server database design is pretty complete — what gets tricky now is that we’re actually entering clients and leads into production, so modifications to the schema become a bit more involved from here on out. Fortunately most of the changes we need now are additional stored procedures, so dropping all / creating all should still work fine in that realm.

Iteration one was a good brush up / learning vehicle for more SQL and SQL Server stored procedures than we’d done in many a month, so from the project portfolio aspect it was a good success. I also got to bang out some good ADO.NET code in C Sharp — not rocket science, to be sure, but some HR guy is bound to expect that it is, so now I can say, “sure, I’ve done that”, since he’ll never be able to figure out that I could based on how similar it is to everything else in the universe.

It might be worth getting with IHomefinder or Moineau Designs or the like at this point to see if there’s any demand for an IDX lead parser and autoresponder, since that’s what we’ve got at the end of iteration 1.

All in all I think being where I am at this stage is pretty good given some of the distractions that came up this week such as some existing web site work and a bit of direct client work as well. The web site, LeadReply.com, is almost utterly nowhere yet — but that’s exactly where it’s supposed to be at this point, with most of the work on the lead parser and database.

Built into the SRS was that each iteration should have a go / no go decision about the next iteration. I’m leaning toward “go” at the moment but will formalize that into the SRS. If we go ahead, some priorities are:

• Write and test the campaign scheduler for sending out emails after the first “one-off” welcome email.
• Write a parameterizable opt-in form that can be included on third party sites (e.g. MY third Internets 2.0 enabled third party sites ).
• Write the corresponding one-click opt-out form, where the default result is “opted out”, but in case the user made a mistake, let them opt back in.

That’s a bit different focus than the first version of the SRS, so I should get this merged into that and do a bit more planning.

As always, what should the business be doing is the harder question than what should the software be doing.