NoBSWebDesign

Very respectfully, you strike me as the kind of person who is easily discouraged.

Let me tell you a story about discouragement (or the absence of). When I was in high school my parents told me the didn't have anything saved for me and I'd have to pay for college. I spent my entire junior and senior years applying for scholarships. There was one really big $20k scholarship in particular though that I thought I was a shoe-in for.

Well, the notification date passed and I hadn't heard anything. So I called and called, trying to find out what was going on. The obvious answer was someone else had won all of the 5 scholarships they awarded. But I wouldn't stop until I knew for sure. Finally, I found out that they had all been given out, but that 3 students had declined (they were school-specific). These 3 were going to go back into the budget for next year. I pleaded my case with one of the administrators, and within 24 hours, one of those awards was mine. $20k just like that. And there were 2 more just sitting there if anyone else would have done as I had.

When a magazine ignores your article, it's up to you to make it impossible to ignore.

Anyway, back to your question... ask your partners to hand over the company. If that doesn't work, buy them out. How much? Well, how long would it take you to start over, and how much is your time worth? (i.e. (time to recreate) * (value of your time) * (their ownership of the company) = buyout at this point, because you don't have any realistic valuation criteria beyond that)

It might be a good idea to start something new. And don't let things happen to you, make them happen.

Would be much more effective with a name (and even a picture). My first impression was that you made that quote up. Here's a good tutorial on using testimonials: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conver...

I always assume that people set their resolutions such that they can read normal-sized (12-14pt) text. If that's too small for their eyes, they would have set their screens to a lower resolution. As someone who likes to see a lot at once, this would probably irritate me.

We record in a studio which uses Logic Pro.

I can appreciate your enthusiasm for community and the web, but I think your passion may be better served elsewhere.

edit Then again, maybe I'm just not your target user/owner.

So, I started doing something else. I now own two companies and in the 6 months since quitting my engineering job, I've doubled my income. No regrets, just decisions and action.

I wouldn't be here had I not went to school and gotten my degrees. Sure, I could probably be somewhere else equally exciting, but this is what I've done, and I enjoyed all of it greatly. When I realized I wasn't enjoying my path at any point, I figured out why and turned.

My one piece of advice is this: don't turn until you've figured out exactly why you're not happy.

I have two suggestions for it:

1. Make it an embeddable javascript widget instead of an iframe. I think it would be more universally acceptable, and anyone could then simply use CSS to stylize the poll however they please.

2. I don't know if you do this already or not, but maybe track IP addresses of those who vote and geocode them onto a map or something. Comments usually have names to go along with them, it would be nice to have some sort of vague automatic identification to go along with the votes.

Anyway, I would suggest staying in high school and enjoying it. I ended up only going to school for half the day my senior year along with a buddy who was in a similar situation. Then a few days a week, we'd attend a college class in town. The other days, we'd go to the beach, or really anywhere and just relax. Those are days we'll never get back, but it's ok, because I think we spent them properly the first time around :-)

College will still be there in a year.

A better analogy would be like saying that a king has a right to abolish his monarchy.

Also, it is only self-defeating if the original goal was only to amass the wealth.

To continue the analogy to this point, a king abolishing his monarchy would only be self-defeating if his only goal was to be a king. However, if his goal as king was to make life better for his country, then abolishing his monarchy in favor of a democracy would be a very good move and not self-defeating at all.

Likewise, if the person's original goal was to produce and then dispose of the rewards as he wished, then doing so is not self-defeating. It's only self-defeating if his original goal was to simply have wealth.

<edit> The other part of Rand's argument is that the individual has the right to dispose of their wealth however they please, because they produced it and they own it. A democracy would only have a right to dispose of itself provided it was the democracy that created itself in the first place. </edit>

If you put all of this together, you end up with the person of achievement not caring where others started (or what they inherited) in relation to themselves. Fairness only holds value when the person getting shafted cares enough to give it value.

Besides, Rand's argument is that over the long run, it really doesn't matter, as the person who is capable of producing great wealth will do so, with or without an inheritance. The person who is not will quickly squander it all and end up right back where they started. Her point is simply that an inheritance does not change one's ability to produce.

Also, I'm an entrepreneur in Ann Arbor, MI, which could be an option for a closer stop if you want to do a trial one close to home first. We have an extra couch you could crash on.

As she argues, money is a means of trading human production and value. To be equal to your money is to provide production and value to society equal to the value of your money. According to Rand, if one who is barely capable of ever making more than $30k per year were to inherit $5m, it would not end well. And actually lottery statistics support this pretty consistently.

And, yes, that is exactly why it doesn't do HTML emails. I've personally never liked them and always applauded Facebook for its text-only emails.

Not sure why my email isn't showing up though, it should be there and it shows up when I go to edit my profile.

1. Have a strong portfolio (or build one if you don't have one already).

2. Meet people. Go to networking business events in your area. Volunteer to speak/present at events and expert panels on marketing and web design.

3. It's a numbers game. The more people you send your resume/portfolio to, the better your chances of finding something worthwhile. Subscribe to RSS feeds for industry-specific job boards, read your local papers for potential opportunities with new companies, etc. You may even finding yourself developing software that automates this entire process to allow you to spend your time working instead of lining up new work. That's what I did anyway ;-)

As far as cold-calling goes, it really isn't worth it in this industry. The low conversion combined with the insanely long sales cycles just isn't right for a cold-call approach. That said, we've modified the cold-call approach by setting up Google Alerts for phrases which indicate a university that is ripe with need for our product, and then send them direct product information tailored to their specific needs.

We've also developed some internal software that helps automate this process. It has worked very well for us so far.

I would be very interested in talking with you further, as it seems we share a common market with common obstacles. Please feel free to shoot me an email.

Beyond that, we use Google Alerts to RSS feed + LeadNuke for a continuous stream of new client leads. (disclosure: I developed LeadNuke expressly for this purpose)

I'd also like to see a munin package install (with Rails-specific plugins). Does this use Passenger for Rails installation?

I also just recently launched a new service that spawned from an internal RateMyStudentRental system I had developed, after a few people who incendentally saw me using it just "had to have it." And that one is called http://www.leadnuke.com.

I'm also trying to finish getting our band's first album mastered (just finished recording and producing), so we can post it on our site for downloading (http://www.moirocks.net).

And my new goal I just set for the next six months is to transition from running in typical cross-trainers to being able to run barefoot :-)