So, I’ve decided to keep my blog on wordpress.com from now on! They’ve got really cool features over there that I like better than here. So if you want to continue following my blogs, be sure to click the link below!

http://tabbymarie.wordpress.com/

So, two months pass by and already there’s way too much information to put down on this one little entry. As each sentence passes by, so does the amount of items I’d like to report on here.  I start out my entries with thousands of inspirational bits to write about and find that they slowly evaporate when it comes time to get past any sort of introduction. Perhaps “evaporate” isn’t the correct word here, because my mind never truly loses “thought-mass” as I like to call it. Perhaps “become replaced” is a better term, replaced with a less formed thought.

So that’s exactly why I’m trying to stick to two items on this entry! In the infamous words of Ralph Wiggam, “I’m learnding!” As the title suggests, there’s some changes going on here in my life, my world, my sphere… if you will. I started this blog out with the intention to blog about my journey as an entreapreuner; to talk about the joys and trials of starting a business on no budget. I haven’t kept up with it in that fasion, and it now appears that more will change as time goes on, as I’ve decided to sideline the business for now and try again later. This ties into the second topic for the entry, which is all about dissapointment, but more on that later!

About Prestige’s fate. It’s a lovely business and has a lot of great potential with a very open market. Because of those facts, I’m going to let it simmer for a while since I have a few clients that I’d like to continue to work with. That being said, I’m going to do something bold and fun! I’m going to move to a new country! I’ll be working with Girls by Design during the development and deployment of their website. I’m just waiting on my passport in order to initiate the work permit papers for Canada and we’ll be good to go. It’s very exciting. Exclamation Point.

So, in light of these changes, it got me thinking about dissapointment a bit. I was discussing that word with someone else a couple of weeks ago, and I have come to realize that the phrase “to dissapoint” or any sort of offshoot of that phrase is one of the more manipulating parts in our entire human language! Any time anyone uses that phrase or subset of phrases and words, it is almost always applied in a way that’s manipulating or controlling one party or another. When you make decisions so that you don’t dissapoint someone else, you’re really saying that their interactions are controlling you. When you are afraid of dissapointing yourself, that’s a form of self-control, in the bad sense. What is dissapointment? It seems to me that dissaopintment is another word that people try to use when describing someone else’s  negative reaction, such as “sad”,”mad” or maybe even a combination, with a consequence if that person has does have one of those reactions. So the queston really is… why does it matter? Why can’t someone be sad or mad or whatever and it not have any real impact on you and who you are and what you do? I vote for the removal of the word “dissapointment” from everyday vocabulary and just focus on you and what you have to do!

Pulling that all around, that’s exactly what I’m doing. What I have to do. No disappointments! Let’s do it, yo!

I have this condition. It’s rather serious and somewhat life-altering at times. Although the condition often rears its head, I don’t struggle from it often, really. Sometimes I feel pain, but most of the time I live my life as most normal people do, as I have adjusted to the condition to my heart.

The condition is called “ilovepeopleitis”. Yes, that’s what its called. I love people. It’s true.  I have a lot of hope in mankind, and trust that people are good and will do good things and make good things and say good things and drink mead and be merry.

I walk down the street and catch the eye of a little child, playing, oblivious to the larger world surrounding him and I feel a sense of warmth and happiness. It’s almost as if I draw energy from the sight.

I sit at an aiport, eavesdropping on a group of elderly people discussing the changing times and the future of air travel, and I smile, and hug myself. I draw a bit more energy from their rapid tennis game of conversation.

I pass by a mother, towing her child, shopping for wonderful treats and having a hard time saying no to the less healthy of the selections and I chuckle and shake my head. Another parent suckered by their one true love; Another boost.

All day long I think about people. I think about how our world wouldn’t exist in the same way without them. I think about how we wouldn’t progress without them. And I remind myself that that is what my cause is… to help continue the progression of people; to keep the world in balance of its natural order. I remind myself that I am part of that collective noun called “people” and I am part of the progression and play a part in the way the world exists.

My condition overtakes me at times. It guides me and leads nearly every aspect of my life. It is within me and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

“Whatever you do, you should do right, even if it’s something wrong.” ~Hank Hill, King of the Hill.

I’m now in the middle of my fourth week as an entrepreneur! What an amazing experience it’s been so far! I can’t imagine ever having a boss again! That’s not really the point of my blog post though! I’ve been working on so many wonderful projects and I just thought I’d share it with my one reader!

Previously, in a podcast with kryptonfansite.com, I mentioned the creation of several sites like fandomlove.com and moderndayfeminist.com. I’ve also mentioned a few projects I’m working on with the lovely Allison Mack, but there’s been other projects that I’ve been working on as well! So here’s a status update on many of my projects.

FandomLove.com: This project is designed to provide merchandise and tshirts to those “crazy” fans who like to expess their love for shows or movies or all things geek in more ways than website participation. This project is currently on the back-burner. We’re in need of volunteers to manage the stores in exchange for products.

ModernDayFeminist.com: All you ever wanted to know about feminism starts here. Complete history and inclusive points of view on the movement and the waves within it. Interviews from well known people are a spotlight. This project is currently on the back-burner. We are awaiting the opportunity to get funding.

AllisonMack.com: This site is always growing! Allison’s had some amazing ideas to put out on this site and it’s always growing! Allison just launched a new “MackEvents” section which features opportunities for her and her visitors to interact with each other in a fun and creative way. New events are posted between every 10 days and every two weeks. In addition to “Mack Events,” we’re also starting “Birthday Box” which will enable people to sign up to get personalized birthday emails from Allison. Soon she’s going to be announcing two fantastic projects she’s involved with. These should come in the next few days.

GirlsbyDesign.com: This is my latest project and it has been such a joy to work on it! This site is currently closed to the public and only open to invited guests. Kendra Voth, unit Publicist and Producer’s assistant for the television show “Smallville,” and Kristin Kreuk, the actress who plays “Lana Lang” on Smallville are the hosts. They’ve been so wonderful to work with and have such a creative and amazing sense of web presence. To quote the girls by design mission: “This site is the first step towards our vision of creating a place where young women can come together from around the world to explore, express, create and realize their potential together.” Soon we’re going to have a newsletter sign-up for the general visitor, so keep checking back for that!

Mark-Hildreth.com: What an amazing soul Mark Hildreth is! We relaunched his old site with a blog in the forefront. He writes once a week now and has fun polls. We’ll be having a LOT more additions to his site coming up soon, including video blogs and a full scale gallery. “Love is a complex state of attachment” is a quote from Dalai Lama that Mark often quotes. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve learned from working with him. I can’t wait until you all can get to know him a bit better.

Geektress: This site is almost ready for the public. I write reviews and do podcast appearances on this site and explore my inner geektress!

Additionally there’s some fun new projects I’ll be picking up! MyFastNotes, a site to jot down stuff quickly and access it from anywhere, is in the queue, as is “List This,” a site where you can have fun lists for anything you want! “Top 10 Favorite Seinfeld Episodes,” “Tuesday’s Grocery List,” “Worst Hairstyles in 2007,” anything! This is almost ready for beta so I’ll announce that here. Comment if you want to be on the beta list!

Busy! Busy! Busy! As you can see, I’m happily busy! I’m never too busy, however, for more sites to work on, so drop by Prestige Interactive for a personalized quote for your project!

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play. “ ~Arnold Toynbee

Ahh, it’s 1:45 in the morning, and I have just finished setting up the first computer in my new office network. I spent several minutes trying to think of the most important element to any office… the computer naming scheme, and I have come up with what I think is pretty clever and can easily expand as the business grows; a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” theme. I’m giving all of the servers and computers names from characters or places from the tvshow. We have “Willow” for my macbook, and I’ll wait to name my other computer until Heather picks a name for hers tomorrow.

Note to Heather: VERY IMPORTANT TASK!

Aside from the office network, it’s now 1:49 in the morning, and I’m listening to the bittersweet lyrics of Vienna Teng. I’ve decided to write my own WordPress plugin to accomplish a task one of my clients wants for her site. Why not? I need to contribute more to the online world, so this will be a great start for me. This plugin will be very useful for teachers or professors wanting to work with students, allowing them to pass different things to each other using the blog. I’m very excited and am hoping to get version .01 done this weekend.

I’m still swimming in business plans and financing information, but I know I’ll have more time next week to finalize everything. So far, the transition is going smoothly, save the impending removal of the regular salary. I’ve got a lot of support from everyone around me, so I have no doubt I’ll succeed… Even if it means some long long hours and many meetings.

I don’t think I have very many readers on this blog yet, but for those that are keeping track, I have a question for you to think about. Much of my journey to this point has been a lot of observance with regards to what is “good” business practice and what is “bad” business practice. I’ve got a lot of ideas, but I always welcome more. I figured I’d open this entry up to discussion with regards to “good” and “bad” practices. Try to think of things that happened in your company that you wish could have gone differently, or that would have made things so much more efficient. Think of those times where you may have perceived some malevolence in a co-worker or in upper management, and how that could have been dealt with differently.

I know one of my biggest weaknesses is attributing malevolent intentions to people, which is very strange because I believe that ultimately all my projections are a sign of something within myself… and I don’t really see myself as a particularly malevolent person. I’ll have to explore that a bit.

It’s now exactly 2:00am, and my favorite Zero 7 song of ALL TIME is on, so that’s a good sign that I should try to switch my brain off and get some Zzzs. I want to be nice and happy and fresh for my last day of being an employee!

Love you peoples!

PS. Read up on Tornybee. One of the things I like about him is that he thought just slightly outside the box, and I can relate to that! What can I say? It’s one of my strengths, depending on who’s point of view we’re looking through!

“You don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”

~Homer Simpson

It’s been months and months and perhaps even half a year since I last posted in this thing! I can explain that! WORK!! Having a full-time job while running a business has been one of my greatest challenges in my entire adult life. It’s been a difficult journey between keeping clients happy while not violating ethics at work and coding there. Occasionally, I am allowed the freedom to do something on an emergency basis, but any substantial pieces of code would have technically belonged to my full-time job rather than my clients, and I wanted to avoid that as much as possible.

I am now in week two of my last two weeks as a employee– hopefully forever! Yup! In my months of silence on this blog, I’ve figured out how to do quite a bit of the tasks I was looking for and should be getting my LLC papers in the mail today or tomorrow. I now am CEO of Prestige Interactive Network, LLC. We also have a CFO as well; my partner, Heather Shirk, has stepped up to the plate. All these fancy titles, and I honestly don’t really even know what they mean. I’ll just continue to do what I normally do, except all of the paperwork and money issues, which now Heather will take care of.

So, the last two weeks of working at any job is always either going to be SUPER busy, or not at all. It seems the last two weeks at my current job has been the latter. I can’t start any major projects since all of them will likely take a week or two. So, I’m just given light tasks. It’s driving my overly-active mind crazy because I’m the type of person that usually has to be doing 12 things at once. I think I am one impairment away from being ADHD– my mind needs to be THAT active.

So, starting Tuesday, November 21st, I will be full time into Prestige. I’ve got so many fun projects coming up to work on that I can’t wait for that date to come to be able to just dedicate myself to those projects. I’ve got SO much left to learn about running a business with the legalities and taxes, etc. But it’ll come!

And so, thus starts out my regular weekly (or so) blog about running a business. I’ve decided that this is just going to be where I’ll talk about either business concepts that I’m learning, projects I’m working on and releases, coding issues I’m trying to overcome or have found a fix for, and sometimes there might be a bit of business philosophy mixed into the bag as well.

I still like to think of Prestige as one of the more unique and beneficial companies. We’re objective-based, rather than time-based, meaning there are no set hours to work, just set objectives to meet. Many employees can’t deal with that at first. I know I couldn’t. But once you get used to it, it’s fantastic.

Well! Time to get to my full-time; another five business days left there!

In my “ample” days of “modern employement”, as I like to call it, I’ve been able to glean a few ideas about running a business. I call it the “when I’m a parent” method of learning. It’s very difficult to really peg what you don’t know, but very easy and efficient to analyze what you do know. I’ve experienced just as much as any 28 year old woman has in the workplace, especially given my chosen career in the primarily male-dominant industry of Computer Science, and one of the biggest faults that seem to plague several of my positions is the feeling of insecurity.One of the fastest ways to generate slower productivity rates in an employee is to make them feel as if they could mess up at any moment, and if they did, they could be easily replaced. The truth is that everyone knows their replacement status anyway… we have colleagues and coworkers to remind us of this truth on a constant basis. Employees don’t need to be reminded of something they already know. Creating an insecure feeling amongst your team degenerates the processes to a point where many employees can no longer function on their task and getting it done, but rather who sees what and how they’re interpreting it.

This is a serious situation in many companies, and a sad predicament, to be sure. Why run a company if your primary goal is to keep people feeling insecure and down? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to run a company where all of your employees feel like they WANT to reach their maximum potential on the job?

For me, personally, I’ve found that I work best given rules, guidelines, and goals. I work least given micromanagement and over-reporting. It’s draining and a grand interruption in the flow of my work day to be constantly stopped for a status report.

In putting that “when I’m a parent” method into practice, knowing what I know about how I am most productive, I tend to want to treat those who work for me in the same manner. I feel I have been very successful thus far, and hope to continue to have the same respect I wish from others for those that I employ.

It’s a simple concept. Treat your employee like you want them and appreciate their hard work, and they’ll respond like-wise.

“I’ll keep it short and sweet — Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.”

~Mr. Burns

For three years now, one of my personal mottos is “It doesn’t have to be a dog-eat-dog world.” In my short post-BA stint between the gown and now, I’ve seen a lot of negative reactions to success; primarily other people reacting to someone else’s success, and it always greatly concerned me. I’ve always firmly believed that one should gain success and prestige through one’s own merits, and through support from others if it’s available to them. What does it gain a person if their goal in getting to the top of the life-latter is by dumping everyone off of it and removing the bottom run each time. It doesn’t make the success any greater, it just makes the latter shorter. Or at least, that’s how I view it.

Ebenezer Scrooge learned that very lesson in business after he was frightened into it by some ghosts and hauntings of how his behavior effected everyone else around him in most horrific ways. I tend to believe that every well person, no matter how “business-like” he or she comes across, has some kind of compassion inside of them for something, be it children, or flowers, or death, or poverty, or employees, or… there’s always something that makes a hard heart go goo. That’s really my point. It’s always better to focus and be compassionate about life than to lose focus of your goals and forget what makes you goo.

I’ve had four full time jobs post-baccalaureate, each had a completely different lesson learned from it, and I’m still continually learning from the fourth one. In two of those jobs, I’ve been able to glean great and successful ways in how I want to run my business, once it gets fully up and running. The other two jobs have taught me more about what I don’t want to do, and has helped me distinguish what I feel is so important in running a successful business; compassion for those involved.
I know all of these ideas that I’ve picked up along the years, such as “That’s something I’m (not) going to do when I have my own business” is the same vague prediction as a 12 year old girl’s already-planned wedding, but I hope that I’m able to fully exercise what I’ve learned in order to make the best experience possible for my business, my employees, and my consumers.

It doesn’t have to be a dog-eat-dog world, whether in the world or in the workplace. If you’ve got your stuff together, and you get support and focus on your own business, there’s plenty to work on there without having to bust anyone else down.
There’s too much building up to worry about tearing down, and quite frankly, I think there’s more success to be had in the building up feature. It gets you closer to the goal, and keeps you happier. Really, it’s a win-win.

“Do you have a business women special? You know, like, some places have a lunch special, for like, business women?” ~Romy

I moved to Los Angeles, CA just over two and a half years ago, with hopes and dreams that I’d be a star. The glitter and gold and shiny things, and the hair dressers and the makeup artists and the fabulous fashion… I couldn’t get enough of it in my small college town in southern Idaho; the market was dead up there unless you wanted to do commercials for insurance companies. I knew I had to break away from my comfortable life in the small city and move to the coast; the land of the stars.

Just kidding! Honestly, if there’s a spectrum of skills from “I’m VERY good at that one!” to “wow, okay let’s not do that again” acting is very much in the latter end of that scale.

Why did I make this trek, you might still be asking. Or perhaps you might not be asking since not many people even know who I am unless I’ve sent you to this blog. It’s simple. I’m in the field of Computer Science. Like acting, the market is in a higher demand here in Los Angeles. Unlike acting, I’ve never had a hard time getting work, which is why I’m here writing.

For many years now, including those long years in college, I have been running a freelance lifestyle on the side of my fulltime jobs. In LA, I’ve taken the “must find low paying jobs at all cost” route, which included a job change with a rather hefty paycut and the tagline “I believe in the product I’m creating, I believe it’ll sell and payoff.”

I’m still in sell mode with that one, but in the mean time I’m finding that my freelance lifestyle is attempting to bleed over into my full time jobs, and that never goes over well with bosses. So my grand scheme to solve this problem is to turn it into a business now, and enhance later, after “my ship comes in”. Problem is, I know next to nothing about business. On top of that, aside from being well associated with technology, I have somehow fallen behind in the skill of “THE GOOGLE SEARCH” and somehow it never gives me the information I’m looking for. So, it’s really an intresting experience, trying to get a small business started with no idea of what I’m doing, no real money to hire a CPA at the moment, and no CLUE where to find a reasonably priced lawyer to take care of those pesky business needs… like changing from a sole proprietorship to a S-Corp.

So, I figured I’d start a little blog, and write about my journey as an unexperienced business entrepreneur, an experienced software engineer, and a woman.