First the story, then the lessons…

A friend that I follow on twitter is a writer of erotic short stories. Late one night a couple of days ago, I saw her post something on twitter, and because I hadn’t talked with her in a while, I asked how she was doing. Turns out, not good. She had a blog that was part of a larger site that was owned by someone else. A few days ago she tried to get on to the site, only to find the site was gone and so was all her work, including three stories she considered her best work to date. The pain of the loss was apparent and I felt I could do something to help her out. I told her that nothing truly goes away on the Internet, and that I would do what I can to recover them.

The first thing I did was to go to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org. This is a great site for finding older versions of other sites; it states that it has 150 billion archived web pages. There are many ways to use WayBack machine, but I just wanted to see if it had crawled her site sometime in the past.

It had not; her pages were not there..

The next thing I did was enter the site in Google search. What I got back was a list of pages for her site, which of course, when you clicked on them, got you to the default page of the web host.

But that’s not what I was after. What I was hoping for, and indeed what I did see was that Google had cached the pages. I clicked on the “Cached” link and immediately the text version of the main page of her blog came up. Success! I DM’d her and explained to her how to pull the rest of her pages from the cache. She was happy, and so was I that I could help her out. I logged off and went to bed.

The next day I DM’d her in the afternoon and asked her if she was able to get all her work back. She told me that she got everything except those three stories that she wanted the most. I went back in and was able to find one of the missing stories, but the other two where nowhere to be found. I told her to try posting to her Twitter followers to see if anyone of them had downloaded the stories while the site was up. In the meantime, I would try to find the missing stories by other means.

I honestly tried everything I could think of, other search engines, deep web searches, other relate blog sites, everything I knew to try. No luck.

So then I thought, why not just ask the web host if they keep archives? Duh!

I got on the host’s site at around 9 in the evening and opened up a support ticket explaining the situation, and asked if they keep archives. I sent the ticket, closed everything down and shut off my computer. I figured I would not get anything back from them until the morning. Later on, I went to sleep hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.

The next morning I checked my email. Chris, a support tech from ATCIHosting (the hosting company) responded to my email an hour after I sent it, the night before.

He wrote:

That account is set to be removed tomorrow.
It is currently suspended due to non-payment.
I can enable the site for a short time before deleting the data.
I suppose if you can find the blog posts then you can try and copy and paste the posts.

I read the last two sentences twice…I was floored.

I also freaked because the email was written the night before and the site was scheduled to be removed TODAY! I fired off a quick response thanking them profusely and asking if I was still able to access the site today. He responded:

The account has been enabled.
It will probably be up for 6 hours or so before being removed for good.
Please let us know if you area able to find the posts within the next 6 hours.

Freaking Awesome! I immediately entered the site address and sure enough, I was able to see it, and the missing stories. I immediately DM’d my friend and told her the good news. I also pulled the pages from the site just in case she was not able to access it herself for some reason. It turned out not to be a problem because Chris emailed me later telling me they were running behind and the site would probably be up overnight. It was a good thing because my friend was offline most of the day, but came online later in the evening and was still able to get her stories. She was, to say the least, ecstatic.

This story illustrates the following four important lessons:

Lesson #1: There is always a way…

No matter what it is you are trying to accomplish, I assure you that 99.99% of the time there is a way to do it. It may not always be pretty, it may not always be easy, and it may not always be obvious, but I assure you, there is always a way to do it, just be patient, and persistent, and it will come to you.

Lesson #2: Ask…

I have blogged about this before because this lesson has server me so well in the past; If you need something, ask for it. What is the very worst that can happen, the person says “no”. Knowing this in advance and understanding that this may happen, what’s stopping you from asking? Pride? Fear? Get over it. If I let that get in my way I wouldn’t have asked the bank to accept the short sale that eventually got me a very nice rental property, or my wife of 21 years for her hand in marriage.

Ask…

Lesson #3: If It’s Important…Back it up….

This goes without saying, but I assure you, many of you reading this don’t have backups of your important information. There are a lot of excellent free programs for every computer platform out there. There is no excuse not to have backups of your important files.

Lesson #4: Be Kind…

I have saved the best for last. I have told my daughters countless of times, if you learn just one thing from me, learn this…”Be Kind”. Kindness is the grease that lubricates the gears of human interaction. (…you may quote me on this… )

Picture yourself in Chris’ shoes. Some guy, who is not even a customer, sends him an email and tells him that a friend who was technically also not a customer, lost all her work when the true owner didn’t pay their bill and oh by the way is it possible to recover said work?

He could easily have said no, sorry, the data is lost, you are out of luck and my friend and I would have been truly out of luck

But he didn’t.

He kindly offered to bring the site back up so that the lost work could be retrieved before the site was permanently removed. (My eyes are welling up as I type this) (and now also as I proof this). He has truly earned any and all good karma that comes his way. I sincerely hope that if your are reading this, and if you are in need of a hosting service, that you give ATCI Hosting a look. Customer service like this is truly hard to find. It was this one act of kindness that prompted me to write this post.

So there you have it, Four Lessons that should help you through life. I welcome any comments, and any important Life Lessons you have learned.

Please forgive the detour I took on my blog with this post.

Those of you who follow me regularly on Twitter may have noticed my absence for the last few days. The picture above explains it quite nicely (Not a great one of me, but the wife and kids look fantastic).

The last couple of weeks leading up to my daughters graduation from High School have been hectic to say the least (didn’t even have time for a desperately needed haircut as you can see above ) ). The day after her graduation we held an open house for friends and family. I am only now recovering.

Out of 533 students in her graduating class, Samantha was ranked at 19; she graduated Summa Cum Laude. To say we are proud of her would be an understatement. She is a smart, witty, and well rounded young woman (okay…this is her father saying this, so yes I am slightly biased, but others have told us this time after time). I blogged about her a couple of years ago in my post “Reflection” when I was teaching her how to drive (It seemed like only yesterday). Very soon, she’ll be leaving us for college; the tether, fully cut…

We were over at our next door neighbors house last night. They have an only son, Lewis, who also graduated, and who basically grew up with our daughter. They considered Sam the daughter they never had and we have always said Lewis was the son we never had. Lewis’ father, Rick, showed us a video he made which was a compilation of video footage and pictures of their son growing up. There was a section in the video of Sam and Lewis; watching them grow up together in the span of minutes, it took a lot for me to hold it together; my wife, of course, lost it – it was a good thing they had a box of tissues nearby.

This is a tough time for a parent. All the late nights, the sacrifices, the joys, the tears, and now your child is about to be launched into the world, in a kind of second birth, a rebirth. All we can do is sit back and watch it happen, and be there if she ever needs us.

Something happened to me recently that caused me to reflect on this; I encountered a tradition that I believe actually enhances productivity, and I wanted to share this with you.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I was silent  most of Sunday and all of Monday.  My eldest daughter was recently accepted to the University of Georgia, and she was invited to their “Out and About” open house. For the open house, Samantha shadowed a student as the student attended her classes for that day while my wife, youngest daughter, and I went on a tour of the campus.

It was a nice day, a little cold, but the sun and the walk kept us from freezing. Our tour guide was a  very entertaining senior named “Barrett”. After walking  a little on our tour, we stopped in front of the school’s Chapel. Barrett explained a little about the history of the Chapel, and then he took us around to the back of the building;  there we found the Bell Tower. As you can see from the presentation in the link, the Bell Tower is huge; the 173 year old bell weighs over 800 pounds. The bell has a long rope that (though you can’t really see it in the presentation)  extends all the way to the ground. Usually, when Georgia wins a major sporting event,  students flock to ring the bell in celebration.

Here is the really cool part…anyone can ring the bell at any time to celebrate any major achievement or accomplishment; get an “A” on that really hard paper on “The Use of Metaphor in Hamlet”, ring the bell; ace your Chemistry Final, ring the bell; overcome your shyness and ask that cute girl out, ring the bell (and then tell her why, that should put a smile on her face).  Barrett said that he lived close to campus, and he can hear the bell being rung periodically at all hours of the night.  How amazing is that! Of course, you can run out of your dorm and scream at the top of your lungs “I DID IT!”, but this, to me, is a fantastic tradition that promotes achievement. I actually found myself thinking that in the near future,  I would have accomplished something so “Bell Worthy” that when I visit my daughter, I will run to the tower and ring the bell myself.

So now I ask you…What would it take to make you “Ring the Bell”?  What way will you celebrate your major accomplishment? What tradition(s) will you start or do you follow that enhances your productivity and promotes achievement? Let me know…

Turns out the answer is a resounding YES! If you have expertise in any subject, chances are very likely that there is a need for that expertise. The Internet allows you to reach a broad audience who would be willing to pay you for your knowledge.

For example, let’s stay on the theme of languages; there is a site called VerbalPlanet who’s sole purpose is to help you learn a foreign language. If you are fluent in a particular language, you can sign up to be a tutor. Payments can be handled via PayPal. You have the freedom to set your own hours, and price.

There are also sites for general subject matter experts. For example, Ether, allows you to set up a phone number that you can publish and market. People then call you based on the hours you set and pay you for your knowledge. Two other sites that operate in a similar fashion are BitWine and SkypePrime. I also found a site called Jyve, but they seem to be down for the time being.

As you can see, your specialized knowledge could be your path to a second income, or perhaps a location independent lifestyle.

Why, you may ask, am I mentioning this now?

Because today I completed my first 10K, and here is how I did it.

1) Doctor Doctor, tell me the news…

This was a no brainer, but I talked with my doctor first. I have hypertension and high cholesterol, and I wanted to make sure that I was good to go as far as diet. He pestered me about exercise, but I wanted to lose weight first.

2) Sugar = Bad!

This one started out hard, but got easier as I progressed. I started cutting out carbs (I sort of followed the South Beach Diet in the beginning). All I knew was, if it was white, I kept away from it. My diet evolved to the following on week days:

• Breakfast – 2 eggs and turkey sausage/kielbasa; I drank coffee sweetened by Splenda (my new friend)
• Lunch – A Publix (local supermarket) Turkey Cobb Salad with a low carb dressing & 2 Hard Boiled Eggs
• Dinner – Whatever my wife or I cooked, but a reduced portion, and lots of salad.

I drank diet green tea throughout the day, and snacked on pecans or walnuts. On weekends I ate eggs/sausage in the morning, a simple lunch and dinner. I always seemed full. If I craved chocolate (my one weakness), I would eat sugar free Russell Stover chocolates…Oh, and I would never eat after 9:00 pm – ever.

3) “If it can be measured, it can be managed…”

I am paraphrasing Management Guru Peter Drucker here, but it is absolutely true. I created a spreadsheet listing the date, my morning weigh-in on that day, how much I lost/gained from my prior weigh-in, and pounds to drop to get to my target. If I lost weight, I was elated; if I gained weight, I didn’t freak out. Rather, I tweaked my eating habits until I found what worked better. I kept track of everything that I did. On another worksheet, I graphed the results. There is no better motivation then looking at a graph steadily heading lower as the days pass.

4) Run, Forest, Run!

The pounds stated to come off pretty quickly, until I hit a wall. That is when I realized I needed to start exercising…duh! So I went to a local high school track and started running…for about half the length of the track before the pain got too bad; so I walked the other half, then ran a half, then walked a half…and so on. I did this for the next week. Slowly, I was able to run a full lap, walk a lap, then run two laps, walk a lap, then run a mile, and so on… I would get up at 5:45 am, run/walk as far as I could until 7:00 am, come home and get my daughter up. I’d have breakfast, then drive my daughter to school and head off to work.

And that is basically it.

Today, I only had one goal – Finish the race…and I did.

The comment that the poster made (in part) was this “I’m risk averse, so quitting my job to do something harebrained is not an option for me.”

In response I said that “I am still at my job, but I am laying a foundation for my transition. By leveraging technology, it is easy to test the waters with minimal investment of time and money.”

But let me take this a step further…I ask you (the reader), in general, what is the absolute worst that can happen to you if things ever go wrong…seriously?

I have given this a lot of thought and I have come up with two core worst case scenarios:

Scenario #1: You are somehow incapacitated (medical issue, injury, accident, etc…) and cannot physically do anything.

Scenario #2: You are reasonably healthy, but BAD happens to you. I mean Job Bad, Country Song Bad (lose the wife, the kids, the trailer, the pickup, and yes, the dog).

In Scenario 1, this can happen to you regardless of income level, social status, or career aspirations. It sucks, but it happens every day and there is little you can do to prevent it. The fickle finger of fate is giving you the bird…But on the plus side, they have this handy little thing called insurance. I have mitigated this risk to the best of my ability by investing in short and long term disability insurance.

In Scenario 2, in the extreme form, I am homeless, penniless, alone.

But I am breathing, and I have a functional brain and two relatively strong hands. I will do what anyone does in a survival situation. I will take stock of my assets – physical and mental, and I will put them to work in best way I can to survive. Yes, it will be hard; yes it will be very painful. I will shake my fist at God and say “Why Me?”, but I will endure; just as humanity has done for thousands of years; just as people now are now surviving day to day. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

I approach Scenario 2 as the ultimate do-over, with the added benefit of life experience. In my younger days, I have waited tables, washed dishes, stocked inventory in a department store, and tutored in math and computer science. I have torn down both of our bathrooms (one literally down to the subfloor) and restored them nice and pretty. You cannot tell me that a person does not have at least one skill (other than their current occupation) that they can rely on if the s**t ever hit the fan.

Do this now, go to Google, and enter the following “+Skype +English” without the quotes (or Spanish, or Italian, or whatever your native language is).  There are people who will teach a language, or translate over the Internet full time or in their spare time, all you need is a computer (If you are reading this, I assume that you have one), Skype (free), an email address (free), and a paypal account (free). Opportunity is all around us if we open our eyes to it.

In addition to skills, what about a social network? What about friends, immediate family, church groups, charities? Yes, they exist in this day and age, but few people are truly hermits.

In my heart, I believe that at our core, we are a self reliant people. It is in our DNA. Not to wax on patriotic, but it is a lot of what makes us the envy of other countries. We seem to be at our best, when things are at their very worst.

So all that is left is the fear of risk, but let me ask you, what in life that is worthwhile has not come without risk (and overcoming the fear of it)? How did you feel when you proposed to your spouse (or when they proposed to you?) How did you feel when you sat down at the closing table to basically sign away your life to the bank to get your house? How did you feel in the job interview? Ok, so maybe you are reading this single, renting and jobless, but you get my point.

Ok this has gone way longer than I intended, and I am sure I am going to get a lot of comments, pro and con to my point of view (which I welcome!). The point of my post is this, once you see that it truly takes a lot to totally mess up your life, and if you shed that fear, it is a truly liberating experience.

I am not saying if you are unhappy at your job, jump ship immediately without a Plan B. What I am saying is that there is always a Plan B, and a Plan C, and a Plan D ad infinitum, and there always will be.

But I will let you in on the real secret of my success and it is so simple to implement; yet I talk with other engineers on my team, and in fact other engineers I know, and they don’t do it at all.

After every customer interaction, whether I was on site or on the phone, I send an email to my customer that does the following:

1) Tell them it was a pleasure to work with them and that I was glad I was able to help them out.

2) Solicit feedback on the interaction.

#2 is the key. I tell them flat out that after every customer interaction, I send this email so that I can get valuable feedback – good and bad – on how the interaction went and what I can do to improve the way I support my customers in future interactions, and I thank them for their candid opinion.

It’s really that simple, yet so few people ever do it.

That feedback has been pure gold, and I have learned a lot from it.

I was happy to see that someone has cleverly applied patterns to productivity. Check out this site, I haven’t gone through all of them yet, but I like the patterns I have read so far, and I wanted to share this site. (Make sure you follow the links to each pattern at the top of the page).

Yesterday, I posted a link to Catherine Lawson’s excellent collection of resources for entrepreneurs. She saw it and came to my blog and read my Escape! posting from last week. This prompted her to make the following comment:

“I know that motivating yourself because you want to leave your job seems like a good idea at the time, but it’s a good idea to set yourself a list of goals and motivate yourself towards them. It’s a lot easier that way and you’ll be concentrating on something positive instead of something negative.”

She is, of course, right.

My job has been grinding away at me, eroding my moral, and all I could think of was pain avoidance. I have seen this happen to my coworkers, where they basically can’t take it anymore, jump ship and take the first available job offer that comes along. This inevitably ends up in something similar to a “rebound relationship” that most every one experiences at least once in their lifetime, after breaking up with a significant other. It rarely works out in the end for either party…

I have been focusing on the obstacle, instead of what lies beyond it. I do have a list of goals, but I have not looked at it in a while. Between my day job and getting the house in shape, I have been too preoccupied. So I am setting aside some time tonight to go back over my goals and get myself back on track.

Thanks Catherine…

Now, I have two daughters, 13 & 17, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, my eldest now has a driver’s license. To make my life easier, it sure would be nice for the older one to chauffeur the younger one back from her after school activities, and in fact, to drive herself to and from school and her own activities. This way, I don’t have to leave work early or get in late. (By the way, props to my wife for making the whole scheduling thing seem effortless, because I’m stressing…)

The only problem is this, my daughter got her driver’s license well into the school year so she never got a parking pass. Now I could buy a parking pass, but it costs $50 a semester, and of course, the semester is ending in a couple of weeks. Oh, and they don’t prorate. So me, being the cheap SOB that I am, dropped my eldest at school this morning and went to the school office to see if they can issue me some sort of temporary pass until Wednesday, when my wife gets back.

Of course, the front office was closed…Great.

Now, I could have turned around and headed for home to get my other daughter ready for school. However, I saw a Sheriff hanging out by one of the doors at the other end of the hallway, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll ask him about the temporary passes.

I walked up to him and asked him where the staff was, and when would they be back; he told me they were in some sort of conference and they’d be back in another 45 minutes…Great.

I then asked him if he knew if they issued temporary parking passes, and if so, how can I get one? He asked me why. I explained the situation with my wife and my scheduling nightmare. He asked me for the license number of the car my daughter drives. I gave it to him, he wrote it down, and he said…no problem…just like that. Apparently he is also the one who patrols the parking area looking for violators. I thanked him profusely, and left.

Here’s the moral kids…If you want and/or need something…ask for it! Overcome any initial fear and do it.

This is such a basic lesson, but few people ever learn it; admittedly, I still have reservations sometimes…but 8-9 times out of 10, I usually get what I need. This is especially true when you are negotiating prices. Always ask, “Is this the best you can do?”, usually they will come down from their initial position. Then ask again, “Is this the best you can do?” Again, they may come down even further…or not, but you never know unless you ask.

What is the absolute worst that can happen when you ask for something…you get a “No” for an answer. Cool…at least you tried.

When I get home from work tonight, I will recount this experience to my kids, and make sure this lesson sticks.