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Happy Valentines Day everyone!

Today is sort of a bad day for Valentines.  It’s a Monday and raining, not very romantic.

Still, we’ll make the best of it!  This morning I awoke to a surprise delivery from my girlfriend.  She left a gift bag with a cool t-shirt and some chocolates (yummy!).  Then she surprised me again by bringing me lunch at work.  How sweet is that!

In a bit we’ll be going out to dinner.  Nothing fancy but still a nice treat.  Then we’ll come back to my place and watch a movie and cuddle the night away.

I wish the rest of you out there a good V-Day as well.

Well it sure takes a lot to start a business properly.  Since the last post we’ve made some good progress.

In general planning we’ve worked on creating a mission statement.  It may sound silly but it’s important to create a mission statement.  The point of a mission statement is to define what your business is all about.  It’s usually just a sentence or two that tries to incorporate three major points.  Those being:

- What do you plan to do?
- Who do you plan to do it for?
- What will you do to succeed?

We answered the three questions but haven’t put it together in an official statement yet.  We should be able to get that done tonight.  Along with the mission statement we created four goals to have for the company.  The idea of having company goals is to give tasks to make the business a success.  Just throwing up a website to sell something will not make you a success.  You need tasks to focus on and work to improve the company.  Goals like actively promoting your business in order to get featured in a fashion magazine.

Finally, we just glanced over starting to write the business plan.  A business plan is basically a big document that includes everything you need to know to run your business.  Products you sell, industry overlook, marketing strategy, business operations, competition, finances, etc should all be there.  The average business plan runs anywhere from 20 to 50 pages in length.  This is going to be a major undertaking!

On the technical front I’ve managed to find the right shopping cart system for us.  After some major time spent playing with demos, reading feature lists and reviews I picked Zen Cart.  Zen Cart is free open-source shopping cart system with a nice feature list.  It supports plenty of different payment systems which is what was probably the most important feature.

We’ll be going with just Paypal out of the door.  Paypal recently changed their system so you could accept credit card payments without having to have people create Paypal accounts.  In the past everyone had to make a Paypal account before they could pay you.  There was enough demand from businesses that they finally changed it.

So, the plan is just to use Paypal for payments as long as it works out.  Should Paypal become a problem to deal with then we can easily switch to a standard merchant account/payment gateway without having to switch shopping carts.  It’s as easy as changing the backend payment options.

I’ll be working on page design and layout this weekend and hopefully this next week it’ll be finished and I’ll get the page content finalized as well.  Then it’s just a matter of getting the new website setup and configured and upload all the pages, shopping cart, etc.  When we’re ready then we can just switch DNS to point to the new website and watch as it goes live. 

Man I can’t wait!

Today is Fat Tuesday or better known as Mardi Gras Day.  It’s the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of the 40 day period before Easter known to Christians as Lent.

Lent is supposed to be a time of fasting and repentance. 

It used to be way back when that you would fast during the entire 40 days but someplace along the line they changed it to just you couldn’t eat until after noon.  It was changed again in like the 1960s to that you just fast (eat fish) on Ash Wednesday and Fridays during Lent.

The standard practice now days besides only eating fish on Fridays is to give up something you like during the period.  People give up chocolate, coffee, TV… basically whatever they want.  It’s supposed to be something substantial so a thing like a kid that doesn’t like vegetables saying he won’t have veggies doesn’t count.

The basic summation of the Easter time is this:
Feb 8th - Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras Day (Celebration of last day before lent and a change to be naughty)
Feb 9th - Ash Wednesday (Start of lent and you are marked with ash on your forehead)
* Lent for 40 days (with only fish on Fridays and giving up something you like)
Mar 20th - Palm Sunday (Celebration of Jesus entering Jerusalem)
Mar 25th - Good Friday (Ironically, not a good day for Jesus who is crucified on this day)
Mar 27th - Easter (The celebration on the 3rd day when Jesus is resurrected)

So let’s see, I need to find something to give up for Lent.  I’ll have to think about it today and come up with something good.

Anyhoo, have a nice Fat Tuesday everyone!

quote:

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On February 8, 2005, the Microsoft Security Response Center is planning to release:

• 9 Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for these security updates is Critical. Some of these updates will require a restart.
• 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft SharePoint Services and Office. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Moderate. These updates may or may not require a restart.
• 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft .NET Framework. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Important. This update will require a restart.
• 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Office. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Critical. These updates will require a restart.
• 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Windows, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for these security updates is Critical. These updates will require a restart.

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Oh goody!  Looks like I’ll be downloading updates all day tomorrow for the XP boxes here at home.  Yesh!

Now everyone out there better update your Windows machines too!  If you don’t there will probabbly be viruses and trojan horses out there within a few days that will be taking advantage of these security holes.  So do your part and keep the net safe!

That is all!

My girlfriend for a while has been making hand-made tote bags and selling them.  She became rather famous too!  She was featured in Elle Girl magazine, the local newspaper did a big article on her and one of the local TV stations Saturday morning shows interviewed her.

Unfortunately, all the press had a downfall.  She became overwhelmed with orders and dealing with flaky customers.  It ended up such a hassle and she ended up basically throwing in the towel.

Well fast forward to now.  With the need for some extra cash flow and something to do fashion related it’s time for small business take two!

This time however things are going to be different.  There were many problems with how the business was run last time.  The lessons of what not to do are now known and we’ll be trying to make a go of it doing it proper like.

Notice that I said we.  The biggest change this time is I’m here and going to help her out.  Now, I’m no expert at running my own biz but I do have a certain area of knowledge that I can help her out with.  That’s technology!  Technology alone cannot make your business a success but it can make it easier to manage and operate when done properly.

This was one of the major downfalls of her previous attempt.  All her sales were through her website but she did the entire product listing by hand and used email for sales.  There were too many instances of customers saying they want to buy one of her one-of-a-kind custom bags but would never go through it.  They’d say they’ll mail her a check or money order but then a week or two would pass and no money shows up.  All the while others want to buy the bag too but she can’t because she believes someone is going to pay.  Then a month later the person finally contacts her and says they changed their mind or they couldn’t get the money, etc, etc.

This time the major change is we’re going to run a true e-commerce site.  It’ll be a paypal/credit card driven click to buy site.  Customers will have to pay up front immediately.

So, last night she came over and we sat down and started brainstorming.  We didn’t do anything to structured.  It was mostly just bouncing ideas off each other, looking back at the previous attempt and finding out what went wrong and what we would do different.

I’m going to try to keep a running play by play of everything we do here because honestly this is pretty interesting stuff.  I’m sure my GF will make posts from time to time about our activities too so feel free to stop by her blog Critics Darling as well.

This is a goody for anyone doing web applications.  It’s just a short article called “The 80/20 Rule for Web Application Security” about some easy to do steps that can help make your web applications more secure.

If you’re a web app developer most of this stuff should be in the “well duh!” category but just incase take a minute or two and read the article and follow the advice.

The one thing that I didn’t know and I’m looking into is the Apache Module mod_security.  It seems like a very promising tool for helping to lock down your entire webserver and not just a web app.