Anyone who uses Skype is probably experiencing connectivity issues and has been for the past few days. At first I had thought this was an issue with my internal network, but that is not the case (thanks to Wired for reporting this).

This is bad news for anyone using Skype for business purposes (as I am) and makes me question my decision of using Skype for VoIP. While my call volume is fairly low since I use e-mail for most of my communication, I know that at least two clients have tried to get in touch over the past two days, and that is bad for business.

I do have a Gizmo number as well, but I wouldn’t say that is a silver bullet either as it has its own issues too. (Go figure, right?)

While my land line does cost a lot more and doesn’t offer “go anywhere” capabilities (useful when you take your “office” mobile), it is stable for the most part. But I’m not ready to switch back just yet. At least not until this is a consistent issue. I’ll ride this one out for a bit and see how everything unfolds. Skype is aware of the issue and they are working on it. Hopefully this will be resolved by Monday and we’ll be back to normal. Until then, e-mail me.

* For anyone wondering what the phrasing is all about, that’s a jab at a comment made by eBay (who owns Skype) a little over a year ago. [1] [2]

No, I’m not talking basketball…but the best of luck to Butler in the Sweet Sixteen next weekend. I’m talking about business.

A heartfelt THANK YOU goes out to everyone who has given Watershed Studio their business, referred business to Watershed Studio and who has just plain supported me in this endeavour. Getting a business off the ground is a much harder task that one might think (especially on less than a shoe-string budget) and earning the referrals of others does take time.

So, with that said, I am quite ecstatic to say that business has escalated over the past few months and my mind is beginning to be set at ease *a little*. While entrepreneurship is in my blood, there are days when I begin to wonder if I’m insane to pursue something that is truly volatile no matter how much control I think that I have over it. I begin to fantasize that “life in the cube” is easier and more secure than what I’m attempting to pull off, and in some cases I may be right, but then I snap back into the reality that I’ve been laid off from three (yes three) different jobs by the time I was twenty-eight years old…and that the job market around here is much worse than the government would have you believe (regardless of the field). Then I quickly remember why it is that I’m pursing this crazy dream of mine.

While I’m still applying for jobs and going on interviews as opportunities present themselves, I’m going to continue to ride down this road to see where it leads. I would just hate to arrive at old age and to regret not exploring the possibilities when I was younger.

As tradition my brother-in-law and I got up early this morning (4:15am for me), left the ladies at home in bed and headed out for our annual early morning “Black Friday” ruckus. (I can’t recall the exact number of years, but it’s probably a good 5 years running now.) We’ve been trying to break the stereotype of guys only being dragged along with their wives, to no avail thus far. But we’re still there with the crowd, which is something for me since I *hate* crowds and lines of any sort. But we stand there and shake our heads at the crowds every year, and that’s well worth it because there’s just something about it that’s addicting…it’s like watching a good sociology/psychology experiment each and every year and that just seems amusing for some reason.

Anyway, we had our usual hit list of places to go just in case they had something we were interested in, and this year all four places we went had what we wanted…and that’s a first.

Stop 1 was Office Max at 5am. I picked up a memory card for my camera and a few small items. Small crowd of people, which was good since the sale item were not marked and for some reason checkout was a bit slow.

Stop 2 was Best Buy around 5:15am. As always, I have no idea why we go there, but we usually do and it is always your best bet for a crowd since the guys and the ladies love the place. We picked up a few DVDs and stood in the checkout line for about an hour, which was better than the hour and a half or so that we stood in line last year, but my guess is that a lot of people didn’t realize that they opened at 5am this year instead of the usual 6am in previous years.

Stop 3 was Target around 6:30am. A little busy, but not bad at all and they had the few things that we wanted. There were maybe three people in front of us in line. This was much better than previous years.

Stop 4 was Radio Shack around 6:50am. I picked up a headset to use with Skype
and a new pair of headphones for the podcast since my old ones shorted out on me. Pretty empty and no line at all.

We were on the road and headed home around 7am, just in time to beat the sun up.

The only usual stop that we didn’t make this year was Menards, but they didn’t have much of interest and there’s never much of a crowd there.

Now I need to get the kids down for a nap sometime this morning so I can get a short nap in myself. I’m so tired that I spaced the need of a coffee filter to brew a pot of coffee and had to clean that mess up and start over. And we’ve got a long night of Karnie Christmas II planning and writing in store, so the sleep will be much needed.

For those of you who either have money to spend on Christmas presents and want to score some “deals” or are like me and just like to get up early on Black Friday to get in other peoples’ way (it’s a fun early morning tradition of mine), here are a few places to check out before the ads are out on Thursday.

• Black Friday @ GottaDeal.com
• Black Friday 2006 — The folks are using the Watershed Studio WordPress Email Notification Plugin
• Black Friday Ads — [PDFs]

If you want to see the PDFs I’d suggest getting them now since some stores are demanding that they be removed (like Best Buy). Ah, the joys of Christmastime are lingering in the air…

Something just occurred to me.

Why are there major daily newspapers that either:

1. Only post an article for free for “x” amount of days (usually between 7 and 30)
2. Require a user account to view stories

My point is this. In continual review of server logs I’m always noticing hits via search engines to posts which are well beyond a month old. And with those hits web site traffic increases, which in turn boosts the “popularity” and could result in increased advertising revenue (if you were doing that). And both of the above practices make it difficult to quickly dig up information, which would in turn decrease traffic.

My hunch is that this decision has to be money based in some form since bandwidth and disc space are so cheap today. True, it would take some effort to organize the content and advertising, but the potential revenue would seem to justify the cost to me. But then again, I have no concept of what goes into running a website of that magnitude since the largest sites that I’ve dealt with are a few thousand pages over the course of a few years and they probably do that in an average week. So I can see that it might very well come down to a personnel issue. But regardless, it would be nice to see these practices go away. But don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be able to view them at all.