The shoemaker has new shoes

I've finally made time to upgrade the blog look and feel. It really didn't look or feel anything unique and perhaps I wasn't sure how long I would keep up with this blogging fad so just as it is easy to choose vanilla at the ice cream parlour, I went with one of the blogger defaults. Well after 40+ blogs since December, maybe it has become an addiction. After learning all about CSS and browser incompatibilities in the last 6 weeks, it was time to put all the knowledge to personal use. Armed with GIMP, notepad 2 and a little help from the CSS garden, I breathed a little zen into the site. Hope you like it. I did want to have the blogs to scroll horizontally instead of vertically but that would require a little more experimentation...this will suffice for now.

Today I found myself sounding like my son. My investor friend asked me whether the system was ready to which I replied, 'pretty much' which wasn't what he wanted to hear because it was hardly a definitive answer. 'Is it? or isn't it?'...well, metaphorically, the car is built, been on a test run but I wouldn't put my mother in it just yet...maybe that would have been a better answer...Reality is we're facing the 80/20 rule. It was pretty quick to get the first 80% which was encouraging but the 20% of minor details seem to drag like chasing the elusive bug or dissecting someone else's code and looking for appropriate disclaimer agreements.

I often forget to come up for air and the fierce focus when developing software is my strength and my weakness. Strength because the bulldog mentality will always get the job done, the weakness is it leaves me little time to play the optics game with investors and shareholders. Yes, I know there is a business model, and I have to go do sales calls and build a sales pipeline but my integrity is like a brick wall because I can't or won't sell vapourware. So there. Hopefully they don't see that as a sign of incompetance. Tom Peters in his earlier books talks about those who hack in the jungle to beat a path to the mountain while others must climb above the tree tops to figure out where the mountain is. Pretty hard to weld a machete and a pair of binoculars at the same time. Sooner or later I know I must give up one or the other...

I do wonder with a visually new website (btw, it's really neat with the fixed images in Firefox), whether the message will be delivered better or is it just a case of the emperor's new clothes....