Lee Devlin's Weblog

In February, I wrote a book review about a book entitled "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" by Dan Pink. A few days after I wrote the review, my good friend Jeff Patton from NYC visited us for the weekend. Jeff and I met in 1987 when we were working at HP in Avondale, PA. During one of our discussions, he mentioned that a high school friend of his was married to someone who had written a best selling business book which had helped to propel his speaking career. I had asked him what the book was called, since I tend to pay attention to business books and thought maybe I had heard of it. Jeff struggled to remember the title, but couldn't recall it off the top of his head. The next day, I was quoting some fact I had learned from "A Whole New Mind", and Jeff stopped me mid-sentence and said, "That's IT! That's the book title I was trying to remember yesterday!". I could hardly believe it. I had just read the book, wrote up a review of it, and then my friend who I've known for 20 years turned out to know the author personally. It's one of those synchronicities that is hard to ignore. I also noticed that Dan Pink had written a best-seller previously entitled Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself. Since I had recently become a free agent myself, I decided to pick up a copy of it. The day after I started reading it, I was at a meeting and one of the presenters had asked if anyone had ever read 'Free Agent Nation'. Again, I couldn't ignore the obvious synchronicity. I've since finished it and wanted to highlight some of its points and also put in a recommendation for it as a very worthwhile book to read, especially if you're a free agent or considering becoming one. Before I do that, I want to provide a little of my background.

In my formative years, the conventional wisdom was that a person should stay in school, get good grades, go to college, and get a job for a respected and well-established company. I took this advice to heart and after graduating from Penn State, I went to work for Hewlett-Packard. I had considered HP to be at the very top of my list for years, ever since my father had brought home a calculator when I was a teenager and let me play around with it. You've no doubt heard one of the laws formulated by Arthur C. Clarke that stated that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Well, at age 13, getting to play around with that calculator and seeing how fast it would calculate factorials was magical. A factorial is the product of all integers from one to a given number. It's written as the number with an exclamation point. For example, 4 factorial, written 4! is equal to 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 = 24. The HP45 could evaluate up to 69 factorial before it overflowed the exponent capacity of the calculator. It did all these calculations in less than a second. It was astonishing.

I guess this event must have made a significant impression on me because it played a role in me landing a job at HP after college. I subsequently ended up staying for 24 years. Things changed significantly from the time I started at HP until I left but what I noticed as the biggest change was the way that people were hired and how long they stayed. When I started at HP in 1983, it wasn't unusual to find people there who had worked at HP for their entire careers. There just wasn't a better place to be, nor were there many good reasons to leave. When one project was done, it was a simple matter of moving on to another. The company would even help you to get assigned to the next project. But as time went on, I started to notice that if you were part of a division that wasn't performing well financially, then your career could end suddenly and you might find yourself out on the street. In essence, the lifetime employment path was no longer an option. Keeping one's job was sometimes a matter of being in a division that was financially healthy or having the keen sense of timing to switch divisions at the appropriate time to avoid a layoff. The effect of this change is that many of people who were intent on staying with a company are instead becoming free agents.

Today, pledging loyalty to an organization, a loyalty that can no longer be reciprocated, is no longer an option. Instead, people are becoming free agents and going to wherever there is a need for their services. In some cases, people are working on a part time basis for several employers at once. This provides a form of employement diversification that you can't get from working for a single employer.

So how did this situation come about? The first reason for the rise of free agency is that there can no longer be a long-term social contract between employees or employers. Things change too fast. Companies get bought, sold, merged, and go bust at a dizzying speed. It would be lunacy to pledge loyalty to a company when these conditions exist. Another change is that you can do productive work today without the need to acquire a lot of capital. For some professions, the only physical assets required are a computer, a phone, and access to the Internet to provide value. These assets no longer require the resources of a large company. We also have widespread abundance of the basic necessities for life. My observation is that people spend most of their income on things that weren't even available or necessary 100 years ago. One could argue that many of them aren't necessary today. The basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing can be provided for a smaller percentage of an income than was possible previously. This means that people are not living as much of a hand-to-mouth existence as was commonplace throughout human history. So having an unpredictable level of income is not as big an issue as it may have been at one time, provided you can reduce your expenses accordingly. People are also becoming more particular about how they earn a living and are not as willing to put up with soul crushing work as they may have been in the past when they needed to do it just to feed and clothe their families.

The ability to network with peers, find opportunities, and get support as a soloist is better today than it has ever been. With the Internet, there are people from all over the world who are able to seek out opportunities and provide services for each other, often without the need for physical proximity. Unlike conventional hierarchical structures, free agency is a meritocracy where one must follow the Golden Rule to maintain one's reputation. For many people, that's a welcome change.

Today, more business is also being done by way of virtual infrastructures. With the advent of ad hoc meeting places like Starbucks along with office superstores and service centers like Kinko's/FedEx, independent workers have easy access to services that were not available to them previously. You don't have to own a copy center or a mailroom, you can simply rent them.

Free agency allows for opportunities for workers to blend family and work together. A free agent who works from home gets to spend more time with family, which is more aligned with human needs and desires than what is required by an organization that needs standardized education that separates family members for most of their waking hours. In other words, you may have more opportunity to strike a favorable work/life balance as a free agent that you do with the more conventional employer/employee arrangement.

One of the eye openers I got from the book was the concept that group health insurance in the U.S. arose accidentally when the U.S. government, in an effort to freeze wages with the 1942 Stabilization Act, induced employers to start offering group health insurance plans as a way to attract employees. This benefit, for the most part, has since been exempt from both payroll and income tax. But group health insurance has a downside too. For example, if you or one of your family members is not in perfect health, it's difficult to get health care coverage unless you join a company so you can get access to a group plan. As medical costs have risen out of proportion to wages, this benefit can have the effect of trapping people in jobs they don't like. Health insurance can still be a challenge for some free agents unless all family members are in good health.

It wouldn't be right to talk about free agency without mentioning the free agents who are classified as 'temps', many of whom would prefer a full-time job with an employer but have to make due with a degraded status that denies them access to benefits like health care, vacation, and a pension plan. In some cases, these people are not free agents in a voluntary sense, but rather because it's the only alternative they can find. The worst situation is the 'permatemp', i.e., someone who does the same work as a permanent employee but at less pay and with no benefits. In some cases, these people are hoping to be hired full time and so the job is almost viewed as if it's an extended job interview. It would be best to understand an employer's expectations prior to taking a temp position because some employers may really be looking for temporary workers who they can dismiss at a moment's notice, and if that's the case, you should not take a job like that unless you're in agreement with that arrangement.

Retirement for a free agent may be a lot different than it is for an employee of a large company. For a free agent, there's really no need to retire completely. As long as you are able-bodied and have a desire to continue working, then there's no need to sit on a beach drinking Mai-Tai's or playing golf all day. You can still opt to participate in your chosen field if you are willing and able to do so. This may help to cushion the blow of the 'retirement boom' that is expected to happen over the next few decades as the baby boomers move into retirement age. There is a general fear about a large percentage of the U.S. population having to live off a much smaller percentage of the working population paying into the tax system. If fewer people opt to retire, but instead continue to to work, it can help alleviate this imbalance.

Education is likely to change as a result of free agency. High school and college education has been tuned over the years to produce cookie-cutter clones of The Organization Man. But now that model of employment is obsolete and so high school and college are likely to become more tailored to self-reliant forms of eduction that are better tuned to free agency. With one or more parents at home, home schooling will become a more attractive option. Also, since people will tend to need to keep their skills up-to-date to remain competitive, adult college education will continue to grow as more people become lifelong learners.

The book discusses many other important trends and makes other predictions regarding the future of home workspaces and the political influence of free agency. I found it to be a worthwhile and thought-provoking book and highly recommend it.

I've exchanged email with Dan Pink and he told me he's got another book called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need that has just been released also focused on the future of careers with the unusual premise of being written in a Japanese comic style known as Manga. To get an idea of that book's genesis, you can read a recent Wired article Dan wrote on the topic. I plan to pick up that book too to see what new insights Mr. Pink has to offer.

Labels: business, misc

For the first time in history, Boeing demonstrated a manned, hydrogen fuel cell powered aircraft. I had written about a Sonex electric aircraft I saw at Oshkosh last year, albeit as a static display model that used 250 lbs of batteries. It would only operate for about 18 minutes at full power, or just a small fraction of the time you'd expect from a gasoline powered aircraft.

In this case, the flight was at a speed of 55 kts, at an altitude of 3300 feet for 20 minutes in a converted motor glider, so the range/capacity is likely to be on par with the Sonex. Boeing does not anticipate that hydrogen fuel cells will be able to provide primary power for a commercial aircraft.

I think that the outcome of these recent demonstrations show that the future of air travel will continue to depend on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Short of a miraculous discovery, when fossil fuels are exhausted hydrocarbon fuels will need to come from biomass feedstocks. After a rash of articles inspired by a recent Science article critical of biofuels, even Time Magazine has jumped on the dogpile, parroting the statements that biofuels are a scam and an environmentally damaging approach to generating energy.

In the future, the sun and wind will likely provide enough energy to heat our homes and provide us with electricity. Those energy sources may even power a commuters vehicle a few dozen miles a day. But to move something like a ship, a truck, a train, or a plane, it appears we'll be dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels for some time. This might not be the case if the energy density of battery technology would approach that of hydrocarbon fuels per kg., but thus far it's still several orders of magnitude away. Even with the thermal to mechanical energy inefficiency of the internal combustion engine which averages around 30%, energy density is still the primary advantage of conventional fuels over batteries.

Perhaps the best chance to please everyone would be to use wind and solar power to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, combine it with hydrogen, and synthesize clean burning hydrocarbon fuels. I suspect that no sooner than a method became practical, there'd be another dogpile forming, no doubt protecting existing interests by decrying the evils of robbing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Renewable energy certainly has a lot of controversy and drama associated with it. You wouldn't expect that from a field that should be primarily technical and scientific, but when anything has the potential to affect economics, politics, and the environment, technical arguments seem to hold little sway.

Labels: aviation, biomass, energy

My friend Peter asked if I would write about the amount of water it takes to produce a gallon of ethanol. I have often heard this figure to be quoted at 1000 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol. I wasn't sure how accurate this was, so I started doing some investigation. I found that I live in a county in Colorado that has the most irrigated acres of any of Colorado's 63 counties, accounting for 11% of the state's total. I found that corn requires a moderate amount of irrigation as far as crops go, about 16.5 inches per year in my county. Alfalfa has the highest watering requirements or about 23 inches and melons only require about 8 inches annually. When you compare irrigation requirements with Colorado's average rainfall of 15.5 inches per year, it is obvious that more than half of the corn's water requirements must come from irrigation and this is even more apparent when you consider that corn only grows for 3 months out of the year and during those months, the rainfall total is only about 5 or 6 inches.

Some of the irrigation is provided through surface canals fed by mountain runoff and some is from center pivot irrigation which brings water up from deep wells. I will calculate the energy cost per acre of using a center pivot irrigator assuming a 200-foot deep well and a 50 psi pressure at the pivot's center.

Since an acre is 43,560 sq ft. and we need to apply 16.5" of water to it during the corn growing season, this comes out to 59,895 cu. ft. or 497,128 gallons of water per acre. Last year's average Colorado irrigated corn yield was 189 bushels/acre and the average conversion rate is 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn. So the ethanol yield per acre is 456 gallons. Dividing that into 497,128 shows that the number of gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol in Colorado is around 1100. This seems quite substantial. Colorado has a very dry climate where virtually no crops can grow without irrigation. In most of the corn belt states like Iowa and Illinois, the average rainfall is closer to 40 inches per year, and so irrigation shouldn't be necessary and thus even though it may take just as much water to grow corn as it would in Colorado, the rain will fall whether you're growing grass, or forest, or corn, so I don't think that the amount of water consumption is as much of a concern as it is in states like Colorado where water is considered a scarce resource.

I mentioned I'd also do the energy calculation for lifting the water from a 200 foot well. 497,128 gallons of water weigh about 4.1 million lbs. and lifting that much water 200 feet and maintaining 50 psi at the center pivot would require 1300 M ft-lbs of energy. This is equivalent to 490 kWh. Derating for a pumping efficiency of 65% we can estimate it would require about 760 kWh in electricity consumption per acre at a cost of $76/acre using $.10/kWh for the electricity rate. With corn selling for around $4.60/bushel, this accounts for about 9% of the value of the corn. So spending $76/acre seems like a reasonable trade-off considering that without irrigation, the corn yield in Colorado would be close to nothing.

Water is the most renewable of all natural resources but sometimes it's treated like it's a scarce or even endangered resource. The stuff does literally fall from the sky. So I guess it all depends on one's situation as to whether water is scarce or plentiful. If you are in the middle of a flood, water is anything but scarce, yet if you're dying of thirst, it can be more precious than gold.

Is it worth 1000 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of ethanol? Again it depends on one's perspective. If you need to drive a car for 20 miles, 1000 gallons of water will be of no help, but a gallon of ethanol certainly would be. And in the majority of corn-growing states, not planting corn on the land will not prevent rain from falling on it so there'd be no real water savings.

Labels: energy, ethanol

I became a Firefox user about a year ago when Internet Explorer 7 started crashing every ten minutes on several of my computers. I looked all over the Internet and could not find a reason for the failure. When I encountered the message: "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and must close." The extra information, namely this:

AppName: iexplore.exe AppVer: 7.0.6000.16608 ModName: oleaut32.dll
ModVer: 5.1.2600.3266 Offset: 00065401

was of no use to helping me isolate the issue. I don't know what I did that caused this to start occurring, but because IE is so tightly integrated into the XP operating system, I don't know of a way to remove and reinstall it, or even if that could fix the problem. So I started using Firefox and found features in it that I liked and so now I use it exclusively.


I became a Thunderbird user the same way. About a week ago, my Outlook Express kept failing while trying to retrieve email from one of my POP accounts, giving me a cryptic error. I had confirmed that all the information and passwords were correct and after a few hours of fiddling with it, I made the problems go away by installing Thunderbird. Thunderbird took all of my email from Outlook Express and converted it over as well as my contacts list. Converting over my backlog of saved emails and contacts was what prevented me from getting off Outlook Express for so long. If I had realized how easy it would be with Thunderbird, I would have converted over a long time ago.

Labels: misc

I have a feeling this will be one of those blog entries that will generate a long tail of hits.

I came to the realization that I've never worn out a Norelco or Remington razor yet I've owned a number of them over the years. But I have worn out a number of shaver batteries. My first Norelco razor was a plug-in only model. I was lured into buying a battery-powered model that would let me shave without being tethered to the wall outlet. Over the course of a year or so, I noticed that the charge on the battery wasn't lasting very long and so this eventually became no different than the model that had to be connected to the AC outlet all the time. I bought a replacement when I was planning a camping trip and would not have dependable access to an AC outlet. Over the course of a few years, this model did the same thing, i.e., its batteries wore out and it also had to be plugged in all the time.

At the time, I priced a service that would replace the batteries and figured out, like many others, I'm sure, that it wasn't much more expensive to buy a new razor than to repair an old one. So I opted to get a Remington R9190 model that I could clean by running it under the water tap. What would they think of next? It had amazing capacity, providing 60 minutes of shaving on a single charge. However, after about 18 months, it too, needed to be left plugged in all the time.

I figured that these razors only needed new batteries, but knew that it would require getting the right kind of batteries, and then having to do some unsoldering and re-soldering. I found a website that sold shaver batteries and would provide the correct ones for the razors based on their model numbers. In this case, the razor model numbers I wanted to fix were a Norelco 6843XL and a Remington R9190. I found the battery packs at Electricshaver.com. In the case of the 6843XL, I received a single AA 600 mah NiCad battery with solder tabs at a cost of $9.95. The R9190 battery pack contained a pair of AA NiCads with solder tabs that were joined together at one end. I had to cut these apart to actually install them so it probably would have been better if they just provided two AA solder tab batteries. That battery pack cost $14.95. I realized afterwards that I could probably just have just ordered 3 regular solder tab AA NiCad batteries from any of a number of Internet sources for around $3.00 each and saved about $15. Live and learn.

The Norelco 6843XL came apart quite easily. I just removed two screws (although I did need to use a torx driver) and then popped its snap joints apart. The battery tabs of the single AA battery were soldered through the PC board, but with a solder sucker and some solder wick, they were easily removed and the battery was replaced.



The R9190 wasn't as easy to disassemble. There were 4 exposed phillips head screws which I removed, but the casing still would not come apart. After a lot of time fiddling, I found that there were two more hidden screws under the rubber backing and once these were removed, everything came apart. It was first necessary to pry up the corners of the rubber backing which was glued down on the back of the shaver (as shown in the photo) to expose the hidden screws. I came close to giving up on it. It's the reason you may have found this posting, because searching for 'Remington R9100 R9190 R9200 shaver battery replacement' came up with nothing on the Internet. So I figure that within a few weeks of posting this, it will start to get hits because if I'm having this problem, chances are pretty good that others are as well.




The main reason I'm posting this is because I know how much I appreciate it when I find some obscure piece of information on the Internet that allows me to fix something that I'd otherwise have to throw away. I'm disappointed that Norelco and Remington continue to build products whose batteries cannot be easily serviced. I've read recently that many cellphones get replaced when their batteries goes bad after around 18 months of use. I find that to be extremely wasteful, and in the case of most cellphones, completely unnecessary because the batteries are generally easily replaced (unless you have an iPhone) . Of course, the battery packs sometimes have excessive markups on them when purchased from the manufacturer so that probably contributes to it as well.

I think that building batteries into a product in such a way that they cannot be replaced by an end user is unacceptable. Rechargeable batteries are only good for around 500 charge cycles and then they must be replaced. I wouldn't want to be associated with a product where the batteries are so difficult to replace that the battery life determines the useful life of the product.

The R9190 has two AA NiCad batteries soldered together with some wiring. They are relatively easy to replace once you figure out how to get the case apart.

Both shavers are working great now and I can again enjoy the experience of untethered shaving.

Labels: household repair, technology

LinkedIn allows you to add a single image to your profile. It is only 80 x 80 pixels in size and so you don't really have many options as to what you can put there. My recommendation is that it should be a headshot so that a person who may have never met you can pick you out of a crowd.

There is a strong temptation to put in a picture of yourself engaged in an activity you love, possibly one that defines you, such as being engaged in your favorite hobby or perhaps posing with your pet. But I'd say that if you do that, you'll find that it won't meet the objective I mention above, i.e., letting someone who has never met you to pick you out of a crowd. Anything else in an 80 x 80 pixel image will make your face smaller and thus harder to recognize. Take, for example, the 3 images above. You probably won't be able to figure out who the first two people are, but you'd have no trouble recognizing me from my mugshot. The image doesn't have to be captured by a professional photographer; you can do it yourself, or even extract it from an image with other people in it as I'll explain later.

You shouldn't feel that putting a photo on your profile is narcissitic or egotistical. For many of us, it may be just the opposite. It's there as a convenience to others. It may help during a LinkedIn search by a long lost colleague if your name brings up 10 people with the same name. Your image may be the thing that identifies you as the person they are looking for.

There may be a good reason why you don't want to put a photo on your profile. I have a friend who doesn't want his photo on his profile because he's concerned about age discrimination. He's 24 but only looks like he's 19 and and he doesn't want anyone to think he's just a kid. But that's not a problem for most people on LinkedIn.

If you uploaded a photo when this feature first became available, you may have had trouble with it cropping the image incorrectly, but LinkedIn has improved the upload feature and allows you to center the cropping box anywhere in the photo. This means you can upload a photo with several people in it (in case you don't have a digital image of just yourself) and may be able to crop it to have just your face in it. So if you tried this feature when it first became available last year and didn't get a good result, you can give it another try and see if it works better now.

Labels: linkedin

EntConnect 2008 is over and it was another great conference. We had a number of new people there this year, thanks to the efforts of our regular attendees in recruiting like-minded individuals. Historically, our attendees were primarily made up of those who were Midnight Engineering Magazine readers or who had attended previous conferences. With the magazine out of print, we recognized EntConnect was taking on the feel of a reunion which is not a sustainable way to run an annual conference. People often acquire other responsibilities so eventually, without new recruits, a conference that depends only on previous attendees will shrink down to the point where it makes no sense to continue holding it. We all enjoy the conference too much to let that happen.

At the end of each conference in the past, we had brainstormed on ways to make it better, but in the time that elapses between the conference, everyone gets busy and no one has the time to do the promotion. EntConnect is a small conference and it's not a money-making venture, just a labor of love that barely covers its expenses, so we don't have a big budget for promoting it. This year a small group of volunteers started having regular conference calls about 8 weeks before the event. We offered a substantial discount for early bird pricing (which is now in effect for the 2009 conference), and we also enabled the ability to register and take credit cards on-line via a service called RegOnline. In addition, more of us have the administration privileges to modify the website, which reduces the workload for John Gaudio, the conference organizer.

After the early bird pricing expired, we offered discount codes of up to 1/3 off the cost of the conference and promoted it to local groups and individuals who would be a good fit for EntConnect. That effort didn't really produce the results we had hoped for. I'd estimate that more than 1000 people became aware of the conference through various email and on-line promotions, but only one person signed up with a discount code. Most thought that the reason for the low response rate was that it was done within 4 weeks of the conference and people have their plans already solidified by that time. So it may have been too late for this kind of last minute conference promoting. It seems that word-of-mouth has remained our most effective form of recruiting.

As much as I enjoy seeing the regular attendees, the highlight of the show this year was meeting the new attendees who are engaged in startups and other entrepreneurial activities. Several of the new attendees also gave presentations. Nathan Seidle of Spark Fun Electronics gave a great presentation on how he started his company while a junior in college and has experienced 100% year-on-year growth in his business for the past 4 years. Rob McNealy of Startup Story Radio talked about his startup experiences and gave a great storyboard presentation about his thoughts on entrepreneurship. Howard Keating of ZANA Network talked about his company's mission and on the topic of intellectual property as it applies to the small business owner. Steve Schmutzer of Firefly Medical gave an engaging presentation entitled 'Ten Lessons I Learned as an Entrepreneur' as well as bringing along a prototype of his company's revolutionary Infusion Management System.

We had 35 people sign up for the conference and with 5 cancellations, we ended up with 30 attendees. Of the 30 attendees, we had 11 first-timers, which is probably a new record. In addition to those I mentioned previously, we had Mike O'Neil of Integrated Alliances who gave a presentation on using LinkedIn, Gary Lundquist who talked about his latest venture, InnoSearch Colorado, and Andrea Shaver, the 13-year-old daughter of Dave Shaver, who gave an outstanding presentation on leadership and how she helped raise money for a specially-designed wheelchair for a disabled girl.

It was also great to meet other first-time attendees, including Kristie Colby of Colby Creating Consulting, Isaac Davenport of Syncroness Product Development, and Susan and Christopher Smith.

This was the first year I had time to participate in the pre-conference activities. We had intended to go skiing, but after having a delayed start on Thursday morning, my friend Court and I decided to just do some sight-seeing in Denver instead. First we stopped at the REI Denver flagship store and Court demonstrated his rock climbing prowess, quickly ascending a 5.10 level difficulty climb on one of the the tallest indoor freestanding climbing walls in the world. Next we went to Casa Bonita for lunch. I had never been there before, but had heard so much about it. It's a combination of carnival, theater, indoor theme park, arcade, and yes, you can eat there too. We explored many of the restaurant's 52,000 sq. ft. which seats approximately 1100 people in a number of areas with different themes. After that, it was off to do some Indoor Skydiving where I got to experience a whole new sensation of flying on a column of air. Later that evening we met at the hotel lounge for some dinner and conversation with several other conference attendees.

On Friday, we had a very late breakfast, which actually became our lunch, and about a dozen of us went out for some high performance go cart racing. The carts will go over 50 mph, so it was quite a thrill the drive them around a track which bore more than a passing resemblance to a scaled down Formula One track, complete with tight hairpin turns and super fast straight-aways that really required one's full concentration to stay in control. After that, we went to the Cherry Creek Family Shooting Center to do some trap shooting. It had been about 20 years since I had last gone trap shooting, so I struggled to break just over half the clay targets, but it was still a lot of fun. In the evening, we headed across the street from the hotel along with about two dozen other conference attendees to the Black Angus Steak House for dinner. There we met Nathan Seidle, who entertained us with his Port-o-Rotary phone. Later, we assembled in the hotel bar until they told us they were ready to close.

On Saturday I went down to the conference room about 8:00 to see if they needed any help setting up. I won't go into the details of the speakers, but you can get an idea of the speakers/topics from the 2008 schedule. We broke for dinner and got back a little late, around 7:30 p.m., and launched into the evening presentations. After the last presentation was over at 11:00 p.m. I got to play some poker, a game of Texas Hold 'em, which I had never played before but the rest of the players were familiar enough to talk me through the number of chips I needed to put in to keep up with the others. It wasn't like any other poker game I've ever played, but I ended up coming in second. Surprisingly, the winner, Rob Packard, passed on the Garmin C340 GPS and so I walked away with the grand prize. My wife is thrilled with it ;-). I didn't get back to my hotel room until nearly 2:00 a.m.

Sunday morning I was able to wake up at 7:00 a.m. without too much trouble and met some of the others in the restaurant where we had breakfast. The presentations started at 9:00 a.m. and continued until about 2:00 p.m.. We then packed up the conference room and about 16 of us headed out for a late lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant. After that, I drove Court to the airport for his flight back to California and then headed home myself. I was tired but content that the conference had gone very well and that we'll have a number of new recruiters to help expand next year's conference.

If you're reading this and are interested in running your own small business or startup, you should consider coming to the 2009 EntConnect conference. It's 50% off if you sign up now, and you can keep you calendar clear so you know that you'll make it. There's no better way to learn than to get advice from those who have gone before you and you'll certainly meet many of them at EntConnect which will be held in Lakewood, CO March 26-29, 2009.

Labels: entconnect