Office Max!

Well, silly as this may sound, I celebrate two clock strike moments every New Years Eve. At 7pm for New Year in GMT and then five hours later in my native EST. So very soon - Happy New Year Scotland! and London too. In the meantime I’m finishing off some better navigation for the Business services section of the site. In about an hour the whiskey will be flowing. Happy New Year all!

I’m not feeling well disposed toward the house felines at the moment. When they’re not diving onto my chair because of the new cushion every time I stand up, or throwing up on the back of the (reasonably) new couch, they’re destroying expensive and valuable pieces of office equipment. Well that’s only Coco, the oldest and most senile who has in the last year destroyed my wonderful HP All in One printer/scanner/fax thing by insisting on laying on top of all the control buttons at the same time. I mean - this cat weighs like two twigs or something. How in the world does she manage to spread that weight over eight different function keys at once??

You solve the problem of illegal immigration by attacking the real problem, which is the demand that makes it worthwhile to take the risk of entering the US illegally. When I was hired by my last employer, I had to provide information to them that allowed them to check my immigration status. It was one more cost to a small business that the Feds had imposed, but necessary to prevent them from hiring an illegal and fueling corporate demand for labor.

I just realized yesterday that the guy who plays Darnell on NBC’s My Name Is Earl is the Rubberband Man from the Office Max commercials. I saw one of those Office Max commercials, and I was like- crab man! The character’s name is Darnell and they call him crab man because he works at the crab shack.

I say Bravo OfficeMax because they apparently have some principles, as indicated by the indignation over at JihadWatch. For those who care not to go there, and who can blame you, they apparently refused to print some business cards that advertised the type of hate sites we’re talking about here, including JihadWatch.

If you use a reputable retailer for your home/office supplies they should have a clear policy in place not only about faulty toners but what happens if a cartridge has somehow caused damage to your machine (this would be very unusual by the way). Under these circumstances this policy should give you a full warranty to have the equipment repaired ASAP at no cost to you.

Chris apparently unplugged the cordless phone while taking the printer/fax machine to the restaurant this morning. DOH! I am such a moron.

I had an interview this morning and stopped by the local Pearl art supply store looking for resume paper. I like Southworth’s “Round Corner Paper” but I haven’t been able to find any more at the local Staples or Office Depot. I didn’t find any at Pearl (last night, I reluctantly bought a pack of “Exceptional Resume Paper” since that’s all I could find anywhere), but while walking around, I found some stationary and journal stuff with this black and white, 13 year old goth girl on the cover. Emily the Strange.

What does one red paper clip and a positive attitude get ya? Ask Kyle MacDonald (no relation). At this point in time he's made a series of trades and now he owns a snowmobile. His end goal - a house!

In preparation for data entry into the expense ledger, I pull out each month of receipts and sort them by date. On most receipts I highlight the items I’m going to be entering, so the data entry will go faster. Then I paper clip each month together and place them in a stack for data entry. After I complete entering each month of receipts, I place them back in the folder they came out of. By prepping first you avoid errors, such as a receipt filed in the wrong month, and it makes the entire process go much faster. From start to finish, I can get it all entered in a few days, only spending a couple of hours each day. I typically spend the first day getting everything ready for data entry, and the next two days getting it all entered.

Since then I’ve been preparing for finals. I have three this week (today is Environmental Law, tomorrow is Conflicts of Law, and Thursdsay is Capital Punishment). Next week I have a final in Secured Transactions and have a take-home final due in Comparative Law. Along with that stuff, I also am wrapping up my bankruptcy directed research paper (I now have my 45 required pages, but still have lots of editing and rewriting to do) and need to get the final documentation in on my externship.

Reality: You are playing Tetris.

Appearance: You are tapping away on calculator keys, helping out the accounting department.

Another example. I bought some hard drives at Staples on Black Friday for $30 each. I stood in the cold for an hour, fought through a horde, and captured my prizes. I absolutely had no intention of using them, and instead was going to sell them on Ebay. The retail price of them regularly was $120, FYI. On Ebay, they were going for (and went for) about $70 each. Which, FYI, is enough profit to pay for my hotel in Vegas, our share of gasoline, and snacks on the trip there and back. And the way I see it, there are a lot of people out there who don’t have access to a Staples, or didn’t choose to get up at 5AM to stand in the cold, and those people still saved $50 per hard drive by buying it from us on Ebay. They win, we win. Life is good. Yay capitalism.

In the book The Fifth Discipline, staple of business school bookshelves everywhere, the author describes a concept of personal growth that consists of patent awareness of reality versus goal states. The two situations (reality and goals) then stand connected as with a rubber band, so that the individual has two options: either change the reality to meet the goals, or refashion the goals to meet the reality. The preference usually lies with the former option.

We recently had a visitor to our office trying to sell us office supplies and stuff. She asked us who our preferred provider was already. Was it Staples? OfficeMax, OfficeDepot?

It’s a dangerous game that a small business owner(SBO) plays when he/she delegates responsibility for managing the companies financials solely to the company Office Manager, Bookeeper or Accountant. Some SBO’s don’t even run their business’s with a set of books. Instead they prefer the “checkbook methodology - if there’s money in the checkbook we are doing ok”. Understanding your companies financial position daily is key to high powered growth and long term sustainability of your business. Having an employee use Quickbooks, Peachtree, Solomon or any other of the accounting packages marketed for the Small to Medium sized business without utilizing the capabilities of the software yourself - is indeed a dangerous game.

It is time to apply the knowledge you have obtained thus far and put it to real use. A very common application of PHP is to have an HTML form gather information from a website’s visitor and then use PHP to do process that information. In this lesson we will simulate a small business’s website that is implementing a very simple order form.

A quick round-up of the best in open-source software for business owners:

It's true. One of the reasons I love Christmas despite the many reasons I hate Christmas is that everything turns minty. M&M's issue mint M&M's, everyone has billions of Ande's candies, Thin Mints of every variety and brand are in every office space and living room I go to (or at least in my fantasy world they would be). I cannot get enough mint at this time of the year. Candy canes, chocolate and mint, tree bark - you know the flat chocolate with pieces of candy canes in it. Give it all to me and let me eat it! Maybe that is one of the reasons why one of my favorite things is a Christmas stocking. Most of it is candy, at least in my family, and nearly all of it is minty or peanut buttery.

Office Space, which ranks among the best movie comedies of all time, did something which no movie, to my knowledge, has ever done before. It brazenly stole its central plot line from another movie and loudly proclaimed doing so.

Caller: "On page 1, section 5, of the user guide it clearly states that I need to unplug the fax machine from the AC wall socket and telephone Jack before cleaning. Now, can you give me the number for Jack?"

Anyway, I was writing cover letters last night and I came upon a dilemma: I don’t think I can really put my main activities at the Evil Empire as consisting of sleeping under my desk and getting sexually harassed by my boss.