Leslie,
God could not have provided a finer human being to be my life long friend, christian sister, and wife. We have much to overcome but with Jesus, the impossible becomes possible. We have stived these many years, and we can count our anniversary a joy in any circumstances.
I love you Leslie,
Your Husband, Paul
See: Anniversary Post: http://noblevine.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/happy-9th-or-12th-anniversary-honey/
The link is:
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Ever since the city took away the free 2hour parking around my store with no warning, the store at 337 S. Greene St. has proven too expensive. One of the main problems was the mirrored window with Landlord David Spangler’s information. David being very attached to the window never allowed a cost effective option for making signage clear to my customers. With signage as is everybody would expect he was downstairs, thus meaning I must be upstairs, and if I was upstairs, then how could I possibly be a post office. Of course I actually was downtstairs but it is not apparent from the outside of the building.
So today I have a truck parked outside the building and I am moving all the big stuff tonight into storage. After a little while I will get my lease deposit back and if all goes well take an office in the heart of downtown on Elm St. We should continue to operate, except no longer as a retail store.
Customers in the downtown area can call for a package pickup and we can provide packing services which the major carriers do not provide. Also customer’s visiting downtown can call me to arrange a shipping appointment at the office where I will meet them. Either way a phone call will be necessary as I will be the Courier and Office Manager, for the foreseeable short term at least.
Anyhow, it has been a great time on Greene Street, to bad that the city doesn’t really support small businesses downtown, unless of course they are based around alcohol!
I am also expanding into publishing see www.sparechangenews.com to see the blog associated with our new publications Spare Change News and its free sidekick Exclamation Point.
What I want in a computer (off the top my head)
Small Form Factor – 2 lbs or less.
Nice look/ color (white “fakintosh” is my current preferrence but willing to sacrifice color)
Tablet Computer Style
Touch Screen
Touch Type Keyboard (smallest usable)
Dual Boot Windows XP (pre-loaded)/Linux (could be my own installation)
800MHz+ 32 bit chip with 533+ fsb with 1-2 Mb Cache
1-2 GB of RAM memory (If I’m doing upgrade myself model should be easy access to memory)
4 GB internal flash drive or 40+ GB HD
8 – 20 GB additional flash or usb memory
802.11 a/b/g
BlueTooth 2.0
RJ-45 LAN
exteneral VGA
external usb 2.0
headphone jack
microphone jack
decent battery life (5000+ mHa 3+ hours battery life)
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Additional Preferences
802.11 n (not currently available in this for factor)
CF Slot
Memory Stick Slot
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ADD ONS
external backup drive
(could be large usb or flash drive?)
must be usable with other socket busy.
optical drive
gps
fm transmitter
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wish list (not realisticly available on a budget or in this form factor)
integrated optical drive (available high cost)
Triple Boot with Mac OS Leopard or whatever? is the current preferred Mac install (feasible)
firewire Port
7200rpm 10000rpm SATA HD (perhaps simple modification)
integrated 3G cell phone (?avail usb or SD factor)
dual core 64 bit chip (Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD 64 X2)
(not yet available in this form factor at a budget – but probably feasible)
————————
what we prefer in computer vendor:
– well known successful company
(available by telephone know physical location of sales division)
– affordable reliable additional warranty and service protection if needed
– reasonable price (not to much higher than cheapest)
– instant rebates good. mail in or email rebate not preferred (argh!!!)
– free shipping and/or accessories are always appreciated
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Usually a seperate purchase:
MS Office with Access
Adobe CS3
Its 4:42 pm and I need to be heading to the country.
I’m catching up my financials.
I already got a new mouse and some DVD +RWs for backing up my systems and some binder clips.
Also I loaded up on grapefruit for the week and whole milk for cereal, also coffee and creamer for the store.
Then I got some lunch stuff for while I was shopping and eat it. Also some dinner stuff for when I’m done.
I did my most basic errands of getting my SSI Checks etc. I’ve counted my cash and my most current receipts have been regurgetated up to the desk.
I pulled my Piedmont Natural Gas envelope out of the briefcase and I’m about to bang out all that is relevant for the moment, including map printouts from here to loew’s and then the country house.
Then I will install the roof.
If that doesn’t get me tired then I don’t know what will.
I’ve been studying the purchase of a small laptop or a mini-computer. I’ve learned so much about this genre which is re-emerging because of the popularity of the Asus Eee, now I’m thinking about re-selling these things. I’ve done a quick pencil sketch of the business plan and reviewed it with my Dad and maybe we are on to something.
My SunCom phone is not some mega-beast smartphone like y’all richer-than-me whippersnappers have. Its some beat up old candybar Motorola, sans blue-tooth, and over 16 months old, an eon in cellphones.
Nonetheless I was kicking back in a chair with no desire to get on a PC or to talk to anyone, I already enjoyed enough rest and quiet, so I logged on to the internet via the phone. SunCom on my phone and in my area is on an OpenWave platform. This is what it says on the splash screen when you are waiting to connect anyhows (sic). Honestly I have no idea what that really means anyway, but I assume its the protocol needed for the cellphone to do internet.
When I point the url at postalheaven.wordpress.com it displays the heading of my blog, but then when you start to scroll down the page it says the phone has insufficient memory. Somehow though if you just keep pressing down the warning goes away and you can read my most currrent posts.
It was sort of fun because at that exact moment some of my most recent posts were sort of short, but seemed just perfect for a cell phone sized browser.
Although for me the annual report, tax deadlines, and accounts payable are keeping me back on the computer (tonight at my parents apartment, at the Greensboro Lofts), outside here in Downtown Greensboro Anthaneum is playing right between the railroad tracks and Natty Greene’s. A band with Mattie Sheets, Gael, and Don from the Green Bean are playing there at the Coffee Shop.
I stepped out for just a moment to get a latte before it was too late.
I watched from right behind Gael on his string bass. His arms were all pumped and the way he controls a note are particularly exceptional. The young guitar player up front carried a frentic groove while Mattie and the others put in the melody and vocals. Everyone in the band really sounded like they were working together. I don’t know what Mattie was singing about but when I listened I became a bit emotional.
Things really suffer in my family life when I have to work so long and hard, but I haven’t achieved a result which allows us the quality of life that we need. Not doing paperwork has negative consequences which are not fun to enumerate.
My grandmother-in-law, Dot Barnwell will be 93-years old this week. She has lived a very productive and active life and is a role model. She is currently writting a short story that is currently titled, A Nanogenarian Looks Back. She is a three time novelist with recognition in Young Adult Fiction and wrote her last book, Years from Home at the age of 88, and she did it by using a computer with Microsoft Word. She tries to complete the crossword puzzle everyday.
Being that its my first year of operation and I am only beginning to put my numbers in and integrate QuickBooks, I am up to the last minute with my LLC’s Annual report and my Federal and State Business Taxes. Nor am I ready to go yet on my personal taxes.
I hope to be better prepared next year and get my paperwork in on January instead.
I’m currently interviewing Derek Dunham a newcomber to NC. He has an interest in bike collectives, social change, and helping people. I’m glad I met him. Perhaps we will restart the courier business.
Seriously, I am running Ad-Aware spyware remover, AVG anti-virus, Disk Defragmenter, Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 with 6 different images up on its desk, a Word Document, a Notepad Document, and the ScribeFire Add-on to FireFox with 2 Tabs open, and writing onto my blog inside my browser is just fine, no hangs or perceptible delays.
Can you believe I am only running XP on a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with only 1GB of memory!
Microsoft Update has been giving me
problems. It was stalled all day on a
percentage of the download and even a
restart or shutdown seems to diminish its
menacing mediocrity. I keep my computer
clean with anti-spyware, anti-spyware,
anti-malware, and defrag and check disk
on very regular basis. I am careful to
stay on legitimate channels and am
cautious for infringement and attacks.
Then my clients have to suffer at the
hand of my slow computer for long
stretches at a time because of a faulty
microsoft update system? So then I went
once again to the microsoft update site
but forgot that it doesn’t work with
mozilla firefox, so now I am doing it
with IE. Again the same high priority
update is detected as needed. And now
the update icon that had become
non-functional after I instructed it to
download the update has finally
disappeared. I decide to use the install
trigger from the web page though since its
not clear that it has downloaded. This
time it is loading at a normal pace and I
get this update was not installed type
window with the name of the same high
priority update WTF? Close. Then that
window won’t respond by closing. Finally
a solid restart from the start bar (no
Ctrl-Alt-Del/Logoff needed, yipee), and
the system has no update icon present
upon startup. Still I wonder if I have
the update.
Right now we are entering our second year of operation at Postal Heaven and suddenly everything has to happen at once. I must prepare for taxes with both the business and personal, then there is an annual report due, also my lease is up in just eleven days and my landlord and I haven’t yet ventured to talk about renewal.
So in order to help me in my accounting shortcomings, both Andy (our management intern) and myself have been learning Quickbooks using an adult education online.
Up till now I’ve been putting my finances in .txt files using notepad.exe. Basically I’m on the electronic version of pen and paper notebook without an actual ledger format.
I work on three different computers which are not exactly seamlessly networked. Two at the store and one at my wife’s grandmother’s house.
I started trying to get in the habit of gathering up the important files I might use at Grandma’s and put them together in a folder for transport using a zip format and then attaching the zip file to an email. I also have tried for a seperate project using the Documents section of a Google Group. Both are somewhat tedious processes to me.
Lately I have been taking the data that I want to keep working with and copying it directly into a private blog where I can edit it at the blog website or using a text editor add-on for bloggers called ScribeFire which works inside of the Mozilla Firefox Browser.
Since I’m already a bit familiar with wordpress (I don’t host my own, I use the simpler free version that they host commonly known as wordpress.com) , I decided to use the also much commented on, Blogger.
Both WordPress and Blogger worked easily enough with ScribeFire although I haven’t had time to truly scrutinize any functional idiosyncrasies between the two as far as ScribeFire functionality.
Interestingly enough in comparison, I could not get ScribeFire to work as of yet with yahoo’s 360, livejournal, or windows live spaces, although I have been able to at least sign in to Live Spaces and see the existing posts, I haven’t been able to successfully post, even after trying to use the e-post workaround provided at Google Code in a bug and fixes forum about ScribeFire.
So anyhow, Blogger doesn’t at initial configuration do blog stats. WordPress Templates seem to have a degree of seriousness that Blogger’s doesn’t. All around, it seems that WordPress is the pro tool for blogs which are going to be seen.
However the Blogger is perfect for me as a network storage device and workspace in conjunction with ScribeFire. I can Tag the posts much as you can Tag emails in gmail. This is a very effective folder like function and then I wind up with a menu of posts that can really help me get to what I need fast and start working, then leave it behind where I can find it again. Also they have a plain templete which really works well for my generic internal documents.
Writing tedious numerical information with small changes and frequent saves during the time of handling does not seem to be efficient in my new found ScribeFire / Firefox / Blogger environment, but that’s when I cut and paste into the trusty notepad.exe and then copy it back into Blogger using ScribeFire when I’m done. So now my playing around with these up front files is going through a process using Notepad / ScribeFire / Firefox / and Blogger.
When I print these documents out they have a degree of formality that I can’t get out of Notepad but without the inefficiency of a Word Processor. Meaning nice headings, dates, and url (file location) on each page.
These tools seems to help, but because of all the changes stemming from all the learning about blogs, blog services, browser ad-ons for blogs, this business’s first tax season seems to be awfully intense to the noggin
I have installed Firefox with ScribeFire on both my back office computer and my wife’s laptop which I occasionally use on weekends at night. I have been adapting to the use of scribefire text editior in conjunction with a private blog as a type of intranet storage device for non-critical information. So if I post something there (in the private blog using scribefire) then I can see it from wherever I am.
This new adaptation seems to be advancing the way I can process business information from throughout my environments.
The prospect of using this powerful little tool (ScribeFire a text-editor for blogging that works within the Firefox browser) has again switched me from IE to FireFox. The last time I switched was because on a previous Firefox install on my front desk computer, it encouraged me to put on a lot of add-ons. The result was that by the time the install was done, the browser looked too busy for me to understand what was going on and the environment was distracting.
So since I had taken a lot of time during the Firefox install to choose those Firefox Add-ons, and as a result I wanted to check them out before dumping them, when I got too busy to learn the Add-Ons, I simply skipped the task altogether and just ignored the whole Firefox environment in favor of Internet Explorer.
So now when I set at the front desk computer and want to use Scribefire with Firefox I am again confronted with this particularly Add-on intensive install of Firefox. So I’ve taken a bit of time to poke around in these Add-Ons that I’ve been carrying all these months and see if I can get a basic grasp on any of them.
One was a utilty called Scrapbook which was a supposed aid to saving webpages and seemed to be able to save the page in a modified state. I dumped this Add-On for now.
Yourminis seems to be similar to yahoo widgets and or vista’s dashboard except for inside the firefox browser and a bit different in immediate presentation.
Greasemonkey seems to be a way to trigger a sequence of actions inside the browser as a script, but I’m not sure.
Gspace is a utility to use your email space as a data storage device.
Foxmarks is to save all your bookmarks where they can be found on the internet.
There are many other Add-Ons but I’ll pick up on that topic later
For the last few weeks Andy, our management intern, and myself have been studying Quickbooks.
I realized that two of my greatest weaknesses have been turn around times
for accounts payable and accounts receivable. Well no wonder, it turns
out that between business and personal I keep track of approximately 100
transactions a day total, and I’m not yet busy enough. So I need to
improve both qualitatively and quantitatively. Quickbooks aught to help.
It does not let you save the files inside your hard drive file structure as far as I can tell. The question that comes up is that if I were to use this regularly then to not make myself work I would have to consider using blogs albeit perhaps private ones as a way of storing non-sensitive data in order to save myself the conversion process to .txt and .doc
My homework today is to finish downloading any needed files for my Quickbooks and Dreamweaver Adult ed classes before I get locked out of the classroom environment and also catch up on my study of Quickbooks.
I was just accepted to be allowed into the GoogleCode area for creating Google Mashups.
I haven’t yet thought up an application but this seems like a fun way of trying out some coding and making it available to use by others.
I wrote in my personal journal yesterday that I felt like I was at peace. There are always things which can improve, but nonetheless I was able to write, that I felt like I was at peace. There are many things I could let ruffle my feathers, but right now I am choosing to be at peace.
Sometimes all of what we do is not enough. What can we do? We can pray and hope.
Although it is windy, it is sunny about and about 55 degrees. I wish I could be out walking or biking or something. However today is my day to attend the store all day.
I have an interesting packing job from Barbara Campbell Thomas of the UNCG Art Department for return ship of her artwork from the Nabit Art Center at The University of The South in the town of Sewanee Tennessee.
Everything else is just humming along trying to take care of things as I should. The problems that I am encountering in business are becoming somewhat more crystallized and well defined which is encouraging because it is easier to try and overcome a limited number of problems rather than a plethora.
Just kidding. I think the last two times I posted was the first time I’ve every posted something and it didn’t get read at all for days. In fact as far as I can tell, I posted it last Thursday night which makes something on the order of four full days. Ironically in the weeks just previous to this, I hadn’t posted for months and still got a read here and there, every other day. Then I post twice and flat line. What? So I’ll put up a stupid headline.
So what I really wanted to write about is Why do we work?
Or rather why do I work?
For me at this moment, the answer is easy.
Probably because I am to the left of my wife Leslie. Leslie is to my right. I love her.
She is beautiful. She cares for her 92 year old grandma around the clock. She is an accomplished non profit professional. She stands up in public for those who have no voice.
I know that Leslie doesn’t need me to support her, but I do want to earn her respect and help her sense of security.
There are many other reasons why I go to work, but I just wanted to mention that particular reason tonight.
I came for the famous half price latte special but saw a new device on the countertop that has an receipt printer. “New receipt printer?”, I ask Kemp.
“No. New Wireless system.”, he says.
“You charging for Wi-fi now?”
“No just trying to control it.”
Apparently after two hours you need another password, thus putting pressure on you to either buy something or stop cybersquatting by putting you in need for the human at the counter.
I stopped blogging during the middle of last year’s political season because I had too much work at the store to entertain this new hobby. This continued on through the holidays and the first couple weeks of January and then its been cleaning up after the mess the resulted after our first busy season. There is so much that needs special attention and reform in my business life and personal life I couldn’t quickly list all of it.
However I did make some specific decisions and followed through on them somewhat.
I decided I need better accounting especially accounts payable and accounts receivable and that I need better marketing. I can’t afford an accountant or expensive marketing and advertising so this left me only one clear cut strategy to solving that problem. I enrolled to on-line adult education through my community college to learn Quickbooks and for Dreamweaver.
Andy, our management intern, is learning both the accounting software and the web-page software at the same time as me. Also my wife, Leslie is learning Dreamweaver at a real life course at GTCC.
Now that things have been getting caught up, and new strategies and learnings are about to be implemented , it feels like I have time to blog (and other leisurely activities that allow me to reflect and grow).
Really, we started doing large standard pre-sort jobs at the beginning of the month after Zack Matheny of the District 3 race brought over his campaign mail. We sent out 2252 packages or pieces of mail on Oct. 4th; I had to hire four of my friends that day.
Also, I am training my new morning person, Charles”Andy” Erickson – a real live decendant of Leif Erickson (sic?). He’s here on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.
Then, my Mother moved from Lawrenceville, NJ to the Greensboro Lofts downtown so she can help me out.
Furthermore, on Thursday, if all goes well we are starting Downtown Greensboro’s only Bicycle Courier Business. More on all this later.
Of course there is no keeping up with Leslie Gydos, my wife, read about her adventures around town and also trying out for a reality show in New York at http://www.yourblocks.com
Setting up a Mail and Parcel Service Bureau 