Jeremiah Owyang has a good post describing how the current recession is diminishing the value of the guru and putting more focus on the things in business that matter:

The recession. This is going to cause a purging of the opinion-makers, pontificators, and the gurus to be passed up as companies need to make decisions based off intelligence, information and references of previous success. Why? their very jobs are on the line, as they have to be accountable for their budgets within their corporations, and demonstrate a return on investment to their management beyond ‘awareness, buzz or thought leadership’. 

Must admit my time for opinion has been set aside in place of doing things that produce measurable results. When you are in the process of rebooting and rebuilding your business you measure where that time is spent and what it did, if anything, for your business. You also measure what dollars you are spending and if you are financing the right causes.

The Chamber promoting businesses that aren’t in the city where we’re located

Like the Chamber of Commerce renewal that I’m currently deciding on. Last year it didn’t seem like the local chamber did much of anything for our business, but they seem to have some plans in place where they might be useful in 2009. There are three other insurance agents in the Chamber, none of which even have an office in the city where the Chamber is located which kind of bugs me. Shouldn’t the Chamber be for businesses who offices in town, creating client foot traffic in town, not just those who live in town but have businesses located elsewhere?

As I explained to my wife, when we have a client travel to our office, they travel through town and see other businesses and signage. We are creating business traffic in the city and benefitting the other businesses by simply having an operation in town. Those who don’t have a business in town are not providing the same benefit. While a business owner who lives in town may have a right to be a Chamber member by not having a business location in town they are not sharing any client traffic back into the pool for other members. I realize that there are many home-based businesses, heck we have one too, but I don’t believe home-based businesses with no foot traffic that travels through town provide the same benefit. Agree, disagree?

So we’re comparing the Chamber membership to the local Eagles club membership.

We’ve never been Eagles members before but we have a bunch of clients who are Eagles members. Any readers Eagles members? Tell me about it in the comments area. It seems like our dollars might be better spent being a member there instead of the Chamber and it costs less to join too (like $80 versus $200). To join, according to the Eagles official website (emphasis mine):

To be eligible for membership in the Fraternal Order of Eagles, you must be a citizen of the United States or Canada over the age of 18 who believes in God.

Citizen of U.S check, 18+ yup, not an atheist, so ok there (I think). We have more than a couple sponsors to get an application so ok there as well. Guess we’re onto phase two. In the Chamber there is no initiation or interviews, just paying the $200 fee every year. Less business, more community focus in the Eagles versus the Chamber as well as social focus. When people talk about how effective social networking is online, I wonder how joining the Eagles compares offline.

Back to the gurus

I don’t feel sorry for most of these gurus. Don’t see spending a penny on them for either of our businesses but if I ran into one online or offline who had a particularly good business idea, I’d open the wallet. So I’m not completely discarding their value.

However if they are as good practicing what they preach then they don’t need clients to listen to their opinions, they can use the advice to generate work for themselves in these lean times. This might be my biggest problem with people who talk a good game: can they do anything with their advice or do they just think others can benefit from it?

Now there is a difference between someone who consults that also does work. Like a programmer who offers consulting on the side while they have contracts and are doing programming work regularly. I have huge respect for these consultants. These are gurus that should rarely fall on hard times.

Truth is many people around the country right now are having to buckle down and work harder. I think at the end of the days, weeks and months the country will be better. We’ve got to get the loan channels open again though. It’s not helping individuals or businesses when the bank purse strings are super glued shut. 

Don’t know about you, but it’s getting harder to stay positive with the economy and bailouts and other negativity flowing, but hey, at least condom sales aren’t hurting:

According to data from the Nielsen Company, condom sales went up approximately five percent in 2008’s fourth quarter and around six percent this January, compared to last year. Just as millions of Americans resorted to nesting during the Great Depression, they are repeating the trend again in our current recession.

What empirical data can we draw from this? More people staying home and doing the horizontal bop instead of out spending money at the mall?

Or maybe it is just people afraid that if they don’t use it, they will lose it?

There are physiological factors, but, you know, sex slumps sort of beget sex slumps. Being sexy and having sex begets more sex. Sex is its own aphrodisiac. If you don’t use it, you can lose it. Testosterone levels — which men and woman have — start to diminish and your body and mind get habituated to not having sex.

Wish I had more to say on this topic but there are sometimes where quotes and links speak for themselves.

Was talking with a client yesterday and the subject of cold calling arose. The client was wondering how things were going in our business reboot 2009. I had mentioned that part of every week involves me doing some amount of cold calling. I mean frigid, icy cold leads. Calling people out of the phone book that are not on the Do Not Call list and/or face to face marketing.

And yes, this still works. Some salespeople have told me over the years that this is a waste of time and I can’t disagree more.

 
Cold calls are bridges to humility

I’ve been calling primarily from our business line at all different times of day and night (never cold calling before 9am or after 9pm and rarely on Sundays) and the caller ID recognizes our business name clearly so anybody picking up the phone will know exactly who is calling. Not using computers to spam mass calls or some other annoying mass contact strategy. Just picking up the phone and dialing one … at … a … time. And I do not call anybody cold who is:

1. on the Do Not Call List. Each number is checked each time before calling and our DNC database is kept current.
2. has a first name listed in the phonebook I cannot pronounce correctly. I like to be able to ask: “is this John?” “Mary?” rather than the more formal: “Is Mr. or Mrs. Jones available?” I’m sure this puts off some people who do not know who I am and hear me addressing them by their first name, but I feel more comfortable and have had more success starting this way than being more formal.

Tuesday night this week I called someone totally new and random, had a very friendly, productive conversation over their speakerphone, made an appointment and went out yesterday and added a brand new client to our 2009 rebooted insurance business. These folks are really nice too and took a bunch of my business cards and promised to help us out with additional referrals.

Then on the way back to the office I stopped off at a nearby mobile home park. There was a big sign as you enter the park that stated in bright red lettering: NO SOLICITING. I drove straight to the manager’s office and walked up to him and introduced myself as a local, independent insurance agent who had lived in town for nearly 20 years. I asked him if it would be ok if I brought a brochure stand with me for mobile/manufactured insurance to his office. He not only said yes, but promised to put it on his desk right by his computer so that anybody who asked about insurance he’d have it there handy for them. Right on.

Yesterday was one of those magical cold lead marketing days. There are plenty of days where the opposite happens, where you are shut down, hung up on and worse. It’s not easy being a cold call salesman but it is very humbling. That brings me full circle to the client I was speaking about who asked me why I kept cold calling people when I could focus on more warm leads.

There are several reasons but the one that is most important to me is humility. To remember how hard it can be to grow our business and attract new clients. If all one does is work the warm and hot leads, including the referral leads, it can spoil you. Or at least it spoils me. I want to appreciate the bond that people have with those they do business with and how easy it is to break, but how hard it can be to solidify.

Add to that, in the current economy especially we’re providing a valuable service for people with important coverage with excellent rates from good companies and serviced by a family owned and operated agency. It’s a driving force to get on the phones or stop by in person and tell our story. Some folks, perhaps many at times, won’t want to hear our story or take part in our journey but it shouldn’t slow us down.

So to other salespeople reading: keep some cold in your marketing. Humility is very important in business and with clients. Never forget how hard it can be to forge a new client relationship and how easy it can be to lose one. It’s not just about plans, products, companies to me, it’s always been about people and relationships. People can choose to change who they want to do business with at any time for any reason they want. Thank your clients often for the privilege of doing business with them. We sure do.

Twittersheep is one of those does one thing service websites. Twitter has a lot of those, oddly enough. Just go there type in the twitter name you are interested in and wait for the result. It will show you a tag cloud of each Twitter follower’s bio section. Here is mine, taken (presumably?) from 1,600+ followers.

Interesting that so many people are following me using the words ‘social’ and ‘media’ in their bios. This either proves the words are cliched or reinforces that my comment last week about Twitter being a lot about those who are into Twitter and those type of services. Some readers will note that, blogging aside if you count that anyway, I haven’t fully embraced social media to date. I am planning to try and dive into this space and experiment with the 2009 reboot of our offline business, but not there yet.

Being nitpicky, the name of the service bugs me a bit. I don’t think the folks kind enough to follow my occasional Twitter update would like being referred to as sheep. Not sure being ‘part of the flock’ is flattering either. But hey, this is a long way from the dumbest named services on the web.

For readers active on Twitter, what are the prominent keywords for your Twitter followers? Note: if you have a lot of followers (like thousands) it may take a long, long time to process. I tried one Twitterer with tens of thousands of followers and it was still processing after the time it took to write this entire post. If you take a screenshot you can use BB tags to share the picture in the comments area (e.g [img=path_to_img]) below. Go ahead, give it a try. I’m curious if the tags social media comes up prominently for many others. Guessing the answer is yes.

You might have heard last week that cereal giant Kellog’s has stopped sponsoring Olympic swimming sensation Michael Phelps because he [gasp] was caught smoking something in a bowl in a picture in a British tabloid. He hasn’t admitted to smoking pot, but it seems a little like Clinton saying he ‘didn’t have sexual relations with that woman.’

So who are some of Phelps other sponsors that could turn tail and run? AT&T, Powerbar, Omega, VISA and Speedo. Making matters worst, USA Swimming has suspended Phelps for three months.

Dave Winer, a self-admitted once upon a time (but no more) weed smoker, has one of the more reasoned takes I’ve read to date about the statement that Kellog should have made, rather than throwing Phelps under the chronic bus:

What a bunch of stinkers they are at Kellogg’s. They could score so many points by saying something like this: "We don’t encourage pot smoking, but we understand that some people do it. We have so many bigger problems to tackle in this country, and Michael Phelps is such an incredible young man and hero, we decided to be heroic ourselves, and cut him some slack, and keep him on the corn flakes box."

If I were working in the marketing department at General Mills, makers of the famous Wheaties cereal and Kellog major competitor, I’d suggest it was time to rally behind Michael Phelps and pick up his sponsorship.  General Mills has one of those rare marketing opportunities involving an incredible athlete and should consider not staying in the grand stands. They wouldn’t have to glorify pot smoking, but they could send the message that teamwork involves sticking by your teammates, something Kellog isn’t doing by distancing itself from someone they once supported.

Then again, they’re already ahead of Kellogg in the cereal wars, so they don’t have to take any risks entering the Phelps media maelstrom. They can sit back and let Kellogg take heat for getting behind a champion who allegedly smoked pot. The thing is Phelps doesn’t fit the stereotype of the lazy, out of work pot smoker in any shape or form.

Really let’s put the pot smoking allegation aside for a moment and look at what Michael Phelps has accomplished in the pool. It’s like looking at what Pete Rose did as a player.

Phelps the masterpiece of swimming tapestry 

Phelps did something no other human being has ever done before by amassing eight gold medals swimming in the freaking Olympics! Don’t know the last time any readers got in the pool, but swimming is hard, hard work. I get tired swimming one or two laps in the pool and I don’t smoke and barely drink. Swimming fast is a thousand times harder. Phelps defines the word champion. He deserves to be on Wheaties boxes and getting major sponsorship deals everywhere.

Now let’s talk pot. Ooooooo.

Pot isn’t evil

Why we haven’t decriminalized this drug is beyond me. Somebody can get wasted on beer, wine and hard liquor but gets in trouble for smoke a blunt? Strange. Let’s legalize marijuana, heck, General Mills and Kellogg both can make their own brands of weed and spend our tax dollars jailing the bigger criminals in the world.

As for the crazy talk about boycotting Kellog? Please. Over this dropping Phelps news Kellogg is showing they don’t have any stones but boycotting their many products because they are being politically correct? Equally dumb.

The time for marijuana legalization is coming

Someday soon – perhaps over the next 10 years - we’re going to see an uprising of companies and/or more major mainstream celebrities (not celebrities like Snoop Dogg or Cheech and Chong) stand up and say: enough is enough on marijuana being illegal. Jail should not be a place for pot smokers. And if you are ‘caught’ smoking pot somewhere where you can’t hurt anybody or anything, you shouldn’t be treated like you did something horrible. This could be the kind of change President Obama talked about. Wouldn’t it be something if marijuana was legalized under the Obama administration and it helped turn the tables on the national deficit? Don’t get too excited if you read the tea leaves in his inauguration speech. But hey, who knows.

But pot smoking is not, not, not cool everywhere all the time. If you are caught driving a vehicle and hurt somebody or their property while stoned, I have zero sympathy for what your sponsors or the police do to you. Yes, that includes Michael Phelps if he does smoke the stuff recreationally. Let’s not torture the guy for having a little fun.

July last year I learned about a program called Belvedere from Lifehacker that helped keep Windows desktop file and icon clutter managed. This morning, thanks Betsy, I learned about Fences from Stardock which is another free program (this one in beta) that allows you to manage groups of files on your desktop. The short video walk-thru explains the various features of Fences, but the most attractive one to me is the double-click to instantly clean your desktop.

While Belvedere is good for getting the clutter off the desktop and into other organized places, there is no quick hotkey way to bring it back. This is where Fences shines gives the ability to group the clutter and decide right down to file by file what you want to do. I was hopeful that Fences would allow me the ability to group off the desktop items in one fell swoop like Belvedere, but after installation and checking it out that doesn’t appear to be an option. Maybe that will be added in future update?

When you run Fences for the first time a handy option is included that will auto sort your icon clutter. Here’s the before and after shot of my desktop.

Before Fences:

After Fences (auto organize on first time program run):

Note: in the screenshot above to the right is the program Rocketdock and not a part of Fences. Rocketdock is a handy Mac-style program launcher.

The auto sorting fences created are as follows:

• Quicklinks – contained folder shortcuts and one game shortcut misidentified by Fences (should have gone into the ‘Programs’ fence)
• Recent Things – most recently accessed files on the desktop
• Programs – click to launch these programs. Redundant for those using Rocketdock, unless you have programs you want to try out (like Fences) and then once you decide you will use them regularly enough to add to Rocketdock.
• Web Links – Mine was empty since I almost never save web links to the desktop. I deleted this group.
• Folders – I would have thought the folder shortcuts placed in Quick Links would have gone here, but not the case. I deleted this empty fence too.
• Files & Documents – this fence was the only one with a scrollbar and sort of a catchall for everything else. So now instead of having my entire desktop fill up with junk from left to right, this would catch everything? Nope. When you add a new file it goes to the desktop and must be sorted. Bummer.

If I’m not going to take time to delete or move the file on the desktop to a folder off the desktop, it’s doubtful I’d move into a fenced off area. It’s really a bummer that Stardock didn’t add a feature which captured anything saved to the desktop and auto sorted. Without that feature, it’s sort of a non-starter for me. It’s not a bad start.

The best solution is not having to run program(s) like these at all. Just be neat and not clutter your desktop, but that doesn’t seem to work for me who likes saving things to the desktop for quick access versus navigating to a file. For example, when I want to save a picture that I’ll use in a blog post I’m working on like this one, I’ll save it to the desktop and then drag it into Windows Live Writer. The step that I neglect all too often is the cleanup of this image file. That’s where Belvedere has come in handy. Good news for fellow Belvedere users, you can still run alongside Fences.

I’m going to try using both Fences and Belvedere for awhile and see how it goes. My early opinion? This adds another step to the process of organizing the clutter and if I’m going to organize, why rearrange dust? Instead, it should be cleaned away like Belvedere does, right? That said, the double-click for quick clean desktop could come in handy and I liked how I could make organized fences around my desktop image of the notes on the guitar fretboard. Only problem there: as new stuff is added, I have to reorganize, which I probably won’t do. I’m mixed on this one, but curious what others think. Grade: C+

Dave Fleet republished with permission Doc Kane’s curious take on why he thinks more businesses are getting into Twitter than blogs which boils down to blogging taking more time and effort:

Unlike many other forms of new technology, one does not need to be a tech whiz to get up and running on Twitter - and this is a huge advantage over blogging.

Huge advantage? I wonder about that. It takes much less time to craft 140 character maximum updates than write a blog post, no argument there, but what about the other time Twitter takes that blogging doesn’t? The time to track, follow and reply to updates from others you follow? The time to find new and add new followers or remove those who are disruptive?

I think Twitter is a bit overstated in terms of long term business value. It’s a lot more useful than I originally thought and have since taken that criticism back, but it’s not something that every business or even most businesses that require an online presence absolutely must be involved with to help their business grow and succeed.

And, despite my affection for them, blogs aren’t absolutely required either.

Twitter as the relationship builder for, well, Twitterers

Sure, Twitter is great for building relationships with those who are into Twitter. But is that demographic vital to your business? I can safely say I’ve never had one client mention Twitter to me – ever – in our offline business. We have done business with plenty of young, old and middle-aged folks. I mentioned Twitter to a salesman trying to pitch yellow page ads to me and you’d have thought I was an alien.

Reality check.

Twitter is a massive river, flowing fast, free and wild and untamed at times. An online comparison I’ve made several times is a gigantic IRC chatroom with comments aplenty. Some of this activity river is caught by Google, but quite a bit isn’t. If you want to get something out there very fast, Twitter works great. If you want to follow along with feedback on a topic or event in real time, especially if folks are using hashtags like #topic_keyword to group, Twitter is a functional tool.

But Twitter sucks when it comes to the past.

Yeah, you can search through past tweets, but if they are stale beyond a few days or weeks, or in some busy twitterers case a few hours, it isn’t as useful. You can retweet and try and start up an old discussion, but that doesn’t work too well. And what about search engines? Something every business should care about because if people can’t find your business and you, how are you going to do business?

I started a blog for the reboot of our insurance business, but haven’t gotten setup with Twitter yet. Am I doing things backwards? I don’t think so. I wanted to make sure our new website got ranked in the search engines ASAP. Commenting on and/or through Twitter might make that happen if somebody blogged one of my Tweets, but it would be faster to just setup a blog and write an introduction post.

Here’s the funny thing: I didn’t even get my first blog post written and Google had already indexed the blog. The blog isn’t even linked off the home page of the site yet (bad, I know, but I’m not happy with the design yet, long story). Wonder if I had setup a Twitter account and made a few tweets referencing the site and see if the tweets got into Google faster?

Here’s a humorous aside. I showed my first offline business blog post from Saturday to a couple different friends. One loved my introductory blog post entitled, Saturday Morning Insurance Fever and another remarked that it was “too personal.” Since we are in a small town and our insurance agency has a personal feel, I’m ok with things being a little more personal in tone. I think the blog format, even for a business, works better in a less polished, but still professional tone. I’m hoping to post more informational pieces related to the insurance world going forward, but when you start a blog out and realize that some people reading might not know what a blog even is, it makes you go hmm. I need to show this first post and the blog in general to some clients and get their feedback. It’s on the to-do list, believe me.

Back to Twitter. The same friend who gave me the feedback on my first blog post that it was too personal has been using Twitter for his new online business Merchant’s Mirror (MM). He seems really excited about how Twitter is working for him. Allowing him to communicate with people in real time. I’m not completely certain how great it has been for generating business for MM so far.

My friend, Ben, is also blogging through his business site. I checked how many updates the Merchant’s Mirror blog has had since the year started? Three. Decided to check Google and see if I could find his “Merchant’s  Mirror goes live!” post. Indeed, it was the second result. Interesting that the tag for ‘live’ was ahead of the actual permalink page. Next I went to see what I could find in Google for the MM Twitter account. A search through Google for ‘twitter merchants mirror’ leads to Ben’s personal twitter account, not the business twitter account which is, appropriately located at twitter.com/merchantsmirror 

I was impressed to see that this account had 157 followers already. Well done, Ben. But I think my search engine point is made by trying to find merchant mirror tweets versus blog posts. One is easy to find, the other is not. This is what leads me to Twitter and blogs being two entirely different tools for a business owner. I think if a business can do both, it should. Not every business must have a blog, but those who would like to share information with their clients in a pull instead of push environment as well as help improve the online visibility of the business website blogs are powerful and useful.

Business blogs must be updated on a schedule

But blogs are far from perfect. I think a blog that is seldom updated does very little to help the business. In fact, if the blog gathers too much dust — it’s been too long without an update or updates seem to come with no pattern or reliability — then it could give the impression that nothing is happening at the business. Ouch, that’s the opposite of helpful.

So once you decide to start a blog for your business, then make it part of the workflow to keep it updated. I think it’s even more important for a business blog to be updated than a non-business blog. I don’t mean posting nonsense just so you can say hey, the blog is updated, but if there isn’t activity in your business that you can write about, then it’s not living, it’s dying. If you haven’t got the writing chops then designate blog updates to a trusted employee or partner. Make that individual your reporter and have them send the copy through you before hitting the publish button for the final ok. Make it a priority.

Too much hassle? Then don’t do a blog at all. It’s not the end of the world having an online business presence without a blog. Not having a business Twitter account isn’t either.

Ben’s MM blog is on the edge of not being updated enough to be as useful as it could be to the business. I wonder if a client and/or prospective client with a busy life and business subscribe to something that isn’t updated on a schedule or routine? My feedback for my friend’s business blog is simple: update on a schedule. If the schedule is once every two weeks or once a month, that’s cool, but there should be a minimum amount of updates on a schedule for a business blog.

I’m going to try and have a minimum of once per week updates to our business blog. I have a bunch of different post ideas in my head and need to put them down digitally. If I can update a couple times a week that would be awesome, but my goal will be once a week updates on average.

Effort is everywhere in business

Now getting back to Doc Kane’s comment that blogs require effort. Of course they do. Running a successful business requires lots of effort. Running a successful marketing campaign requires effort. Heck, running a successful business Twitter account requires effort. I’m sure the MM twitter account didn’t get 157 followers with no effort. I’m having a hard time thinking of anything in business that doesn’t require effort. You have to work it.

I plan to get on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn with our business, but am taking it slower. First, I’m starting with a blog and making sure I can schedule regular updates. I’m doing this blog for tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, I’m worried about today too, and I think Twitter would be a handy tool for dealing with today.

For those businesses who don’t have a blog or use Twitter

Before publishing I asked another friend who is in the printing business how things were going. While some of their competitors are laying people off their business is up 30% and they are having a great year. They don’t use Twitter and they don’t have a business blog.

Twitter or blog absolutely required for business? No. Might one or both be helpful for some businesses? Yes. It’s up to you to decide in your own business how well these tools might fit. Be careful about jumping in just to say you have one because it might be better staying on the sidelines.

Just to tell you how out of touch I was with what is happening outside of working offline, I had to be reminded that this coming Sunday is the Super Bowl. Sacrilege! This morning, though, I’m cracking up over the PETA veggie sex ad (YouTube video) that didn’t make the cut. Thanks Mike Doe for the chuckles.

Asparagus, broccoli … sexy? LOL. They’ve got to be kidding. I’m not sure what’s more funny though, the use of odd-shaped vegetables (hey, what wrong with the old phallic standbys? Cucumbers, carrots, you know) as sexual innuendo OR the fact that YouTube flashes the Warning: Adult Content message before you can visit and watch said video on their site.

Seriously, trying to make an event where grown men violently knock the crap out of each other family wholesome fun is a bit twisted. I can see baseball being more wholesome but even that sport has bench clearing brawls and violent collisions at the plate.

Violence ok, sex not ok, is that it? Time to grow up, NFL. All of us got here because of the latter and most as a result of being squeezed through our mother’s you know what. Having witnessed this first hand several times I’d say it’s a beautifully violent event and men have the easy part by a long shot in the birthing process.

Of course having sex with vegetables isn’t going to lead to any baby carrots. I’m just thinking from a practicality sense of women having sex with a head of broccoli. That’s going to get very messy – in a non-sexual, turn-off way. Little crumply shards of broccoli everywhere, eww. The vision is not working for me. At all.

The PETA commercial as comedy is funny but them trying to shove home, pardon the pun, some poorly veiled message that meat is bad and unsexy while vegetables are good and sexy puts PETA even more fringe than I already thought they were.

Now ladies don’t forget the next time you are on the vegetable aisle that PETA is counting on you to get very horny when see that pristine head of cauliflower. Don’t let them down. And disappoint the NFL at will. Go Cards!

One of the more useful Firefox plugins has been the Skype add-in that changes any phone number into a clickable link to make a Skype call. But somebody got the grand idea to change the plugin with an upgrade so that it shortens with elipses the phone number like this:

Huh? Hey, put that full phone number display back! The first thing I went into the add-in options to try and figure out how to change it so the full telephone number displays but didn’t see how it was done. So I went to the Skype extension for Firefox help page and it still shows the full phone numbers being displayed.

I found some more current versions of the plugin via Google search like v2.3.0.31 and v2.3.0.22. Tried v2.3.0.31 downloaded from softpedia and that was a bust (link intentionally removed).

According to the Skype forums, they withdrew support for the separate Skype plugin back in September 2007(?). Yikes, how did I miss this? Now it’s part of the installation process for versions 3.x of Skype? You have to select in the options that you want the Firefox plugin. So I reinstalled Skype from scratch attempting to try that option. Only see the Internet Explorer add-in option.

So I checked the internet explorer option and was curious if my phone numbers would be full length in IE.

Nope. Outside of hacking the Firefox plugin code, which seems like the only option remaining to fix this to me, is there any option or way to turn on full numbers display? Anyone? Bueller? Before I start digging through the plugin code, I want to be sure I’m not missing some option somewhere to fix this.

Many Americans tuned in to watch President Obama’s historic Inaugural address on January 20, 2009. I wasn’t one of them.

 
photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/acaben/3216045876/

In fact, didn’t even DVR the event. Instead I waited until – or rather made time available - Sunday morning five days later to read the text version available via the Washington Post and have blockquoted text that stuck out to me.

Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Take exception to the word “never” in the first passage. The last eight years there have been plenty of short-cuts and settling for less. It hasn’t, however, been a path for the faint hearted. The American people have had to endure the 9/11 attack, our government either lying to us or being seriously duped (whichever you believe) about the presence of weapons of mass destruction, a President and congress who spent like the money would never end and most recently a collapsing economy.

But Obama’s inauguration shouldn’t dwell much on what happened the last eight years, it should focus on the future. He gets into that a little bit, but it’s still way too non-specific for my taste.

And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

The debt clock is ticking and I don’t think we’ll see President Obama be able to do much about it in his first term. I expect a lot of spending in 2009, perhaps more than even George Bush did in 2008. I hope one of Obama’s goal is to stop the incredible growth of the debt clock by the end of his first term and start reversing the trend by the end of his second term, should he be re-elected. If all Obama does is try to spend us out of this economic mess, I’m going to be very disappointed.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

New era of responsibility. I like that one. I hope this starts with personal responsibility and an increase in common sense in the judicial system. There are far too many regulations and laws in our system and it’s time to simplify things. I hope this is one area the Obama administration can have some influence in changing.

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Maybe delivering safely to future generations should have been Obama’s slogan instead of ‘change’ as I feel much less safe in America than I did when George Bush took office. I don’t see how Obama can live up to the incredible expectations he set for himself over the next four years, but time will tell. If the only things he does is not only feel but make America more safe and sets a brighter path for future generations, he will earn himself a second term.

I’m rooting for President Obama and our government to get their act together. No more excuses, no more political garbage. If the American people are expected to pull together and fix things, the government which is supposed to be about us and for us should work equally as hard.

We’ll check the scorecard periodically to see how things are coming along over the next four years. As always, your thoughts on Obama’s inaugural address are welcome below. Are you, like me, waiting for some specific plans to be executed? I know he just took office, so he has a little more time, but I’d say the next 90 days is critical to get some serious forward thrust. His first action was to halt all pending legislation proposed by Bush on his way out but that is fairly commonplace from what I’ve learned. What will Obama change? What do you want him to change?