Let’s end this economy

Ok this has been an interesting few weeks since my last post. A lot of things moving and to be honest I'm just not sure yet which way they are moving.


I guess I should start with the sad news and get that out of the way first. Our neighbors whose 5 year old boy is best friends with our 5 year old son Joshua, the father has been battling cancer (in the brain) for most of the year and has lost a large percentage of his vision, and apparently is also loosing the battle. Last week as an ambulance was carrying him to the hospital we learned that the husband (36) is dieing and has only been given about 30 days or so to live. I don't even know what to say to that. Normally I'm pretty composed, but this almost brought me to tears, their son has been over at our house almost every weekend over of the past 2 years and is like a second son to me. And now the thought of this child being without a father is gut wrenching to say the least. Every time I look out the back window I hope to see the boy playing. After my wife's fight with cancer 3 years ago the subject is very personal to be.


BuDuRu: A few weeks ago I updated everyone about my first encounter with Todd who was visiting Portland for “VAN Summit 2009”, well I demoed BuDuRu for him which he absolutely loved and appears to be pushing for me to demo it again (after a few bug patches ;) ) but this time to a few of his partners. The cool thing is when Todd (being the visionary type also) and I start to brain storm, some really cool things come out and one of them will potentially change how the internet works. Only time will tell. As far as a product update goes, we are patching our butts off to try and bring this product to market. The good news is that our mail server has been setup and now I'm just waiting on the MX information to take affect.


Economy: Ok I'm tired of watching my friends and business associates loose their jobs and their homes because of this economy. As a consultant, I'm always out of work and hunting for the next gig. So just like the past 200 other times I've been without a job, I take a few hours to gather my thoughts and then get on the phone and start creating my own economy by dialing for dollars. However, this time I don't need the job, my friends do. And in a strange twist of fate two business associates (Reha and Michale) both lost their jobs within one day of each other. Reha and Michale are what we in the industry call professional head hunters and both are really good at their jobs.


So in light of this strange twist I offered to let Reha and Michale utilize my company EDI Associates, my network and computer system to start making placements. Here's the deal, most major placement company's such as Oxford, Oracle, SAP, etc generally have a 70% – 100% markup or more on their consulting services. Sterling Commerce once paid me $60 per hour on a contract I later learned was billed at $220 per hour. Our goal is simply, just get people working again. If our markup is only 1% then so be it, the larger picture of getting people back to work and keeping a roof over their heads is much more important than the bottom line at this point. So with that in mind I hit a few of the larger users groups on Yahoo today and started asking for resumes for all things technical (EDI, SAP, Oracle, i2, developers, analysts, etc), basically everyone under the sun and so far it's 10:30pm on a Friday night and just about 6 hours after I started all this and so far I have received about 15 resumes. Not a bad start; however, considering the doom and gloom the TV keeps broadcasting I was actually expecting to see worse. I will see what happens over the weekend.


Texas: Monday I'm off to Texas to sit in on an SAP upgrade planning meeting to be held on Tuesday morning. I'm already pretty certain I have the contract for the EDI segment of the project, which based on the scope, should employ 2 or 3 people for about 3 months. Basically I've been working with this company for many years and I'm really hoping to be able to secure an additional requirement or two in the hopes of getting another professional off the bench and out on a project.