Call Me Ed

UPDATED: This was just a test post. The show was removed. Get ready, though, good stuff is coming.

Remember when Michael Irvin was playing for the Cowboys and one night he got caught in a hotel room full of 'hos and drugs?

He calmly greeted one of Dallas' finest with a question.

"Do you know who I am?"

I thought of that story today. Twice. It made me laugh.

I try my best to support locally-owned businesses in my everyday life. I go to my local hardware store over Home Depot and prefer local restaurants over casual chains like Applebees or Olive Garden. (And don't even get me started about Wal-Mart.) Even if I lose a few dollars, I think it's important for the community.

With photography, I would hope those in my area would treat us the same way. Of course, that's not always the case. I think I just take it extra-hard when folks in my own home-town choose a competitor based solely on price.

I'll get over it.

A few nights back we made 'smores in the fire pit. There were some extra ingredients. When I came home the other day, I found the remnants of a king-size hershey bar–half of it gone and it appeared that the offending animal chewed directly through the wrapper (see image below). I thought we had been invaded by large rodents.

Turns out the rodent was Taylor. She found the bar in the lower shelf of the pantry. Her two year-old hands are quite adept at opening pantry and refridgerator doors, but she couldn't unwrap the hershey bar.

Apparently that wasn't enough to stop her.

The best book I read last year isn't available at Barnes and Noble or Amazon. It was Getting Real from the folks at 37signals. In fact, you can now read the book free online. In Getting Real, the authors share their philosophies for designing, building, and marketing web applications.

Since I also build web applications, I was able to take away tons of useful information. However, I think the book has some wonderful nuggets of wisdom for any business owner - especially one in a service industry or who works with technology.

One of the best philosophies I took away from Getting Real was this: when it comes to managing a project, drop features, but don't move deadlines. Why? Because moving deadlines is easy. There's always tomorrow. There's always next week. When you get in a cycle of moving deadlines, your project never gets finished. Even worse, people inside and outside of your company don't trust your messages.

Instead, get a workable product out the door on time–even if it doesn't have every feature you intended. After all, you can continue to upgrade your project as you go.

I actually put the philosophy into place when I built DropProof. I said to myself, "this is going out next week, even if it only does 1 thing." It worked. It was great. I just keep iterating it as I go.

The sad thing is, you can't convince other people to embrace this philosophy. Some people will always have a final list. Some people are fine with tomorrow.