CityBlogz Design Studio / Blog

Besides my current stream of projects, for the past couple weeks, I’ve been asked to complete a web redesign for a local Rochester Minnesota psychic who prefers to be called Debbie. I finally completed the work yesterday, and I must admit that it was an interesting experience.

The first time I met Debbie, I had my doubts about her abilities, but after my wife spent some time with her, I have to admit that she is fairly accurate in her readings. She wasn’t 100% correct but she got about 80% of the things right, which is quite extraordinary. I’ve also just added the site to my online portfolio.

UPDATE: Due to non-payment, I had to remove the psychic-insight.com website from the public view.  It is still available in a privately accessible site.

Here’s a very interesting essay derived from the author’s book “Hackers & Painters” that describes how to start a startup company the right way. The author Paul Graham describes some very common mistakes that many startup companies do, and tells the readers how to avoid those pitfalls.

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

My last day at work was March 3rd, 2005. I’ve been having a mini-vacation since then. It has been quite interesting seeing how many employers have been knocking at my door. I’ve had to say no to some already. I guess I can afford to be a little picky.

As far as keeping busy during that time, I’ve been picking up skills in PHP and the whole L.A.M.P. open source development architecture. Even IBM seems interested in supporting it by partnering with Zend (the PHP optimization company). On February 25, 2005, IBM announced an agreement with Zend Technologies to develop the industry’s first integrated solution designed to help developers build and deploy applications and services based on the popular PHP Web language. You may be curious why I chose to learn PHP and MySQL. I do have a special project under tight wraps that I am hoping to release in the next couple months (all using L.A.M.P). I will be partnering with my close colleague Jason Bagorio and his company BizwareTech to release a special version of his current website PlaceAdz.com. Anyway, I can’t really say too much, so look for it in the upcoming months.

My friend Jason Bagorio has finally made his commercial website public. It has been in the works for many months now. Please take a look and see what Bagorio Enterprise has to offer.