More Spring

April Fools Day. Nobody played a trick on me today, boring, would have liked to see or hear about a joke. The weather is better lately, finally warming up, it was +6C today and the snow is melting, still a long way to go. I hope it will melt slowly otherwise we have a flood.

Learned that a former boss of mine has been retired, too bad that things have to go that way, but then again, if he had been more humane and be a better business manager, he still would have been there. Funny enough working with someone for 18 years, is almost like a marriage, good times and bad times.

Stayed inside all day and still wear my track suit, worked the computer all day and created a mailing list of all USA chief plumbing inspectors and their departments, lots of work. I ordered a Dell server, initially listed at Dell's web site for $650, ended up paying with delivery and all the software and extras about $2,000. Still I think it is worth it. I had rebuild an older PC to become a Linux server, but it is limited to what I can do with it, mind you, I have limited knowledge of Linux. Maybe that's the problem. The new one comes with Small Business Server that has MS Exchange server included and ordered a single user Blackberry server software. Linux does not offer that, or at least I am not aware of it. I should have it within a few days. This is what I like from Dell, made to order. It always cost more, but in the end I have something that will work for me for years to come.

Oh recently I made a trip to Florida and ended up changing a hotel on the fly and used Expedia.ca. Due to the Canadian March break all hotels were fully booked, therefore the hotel cost me a fair bit ($200) but the pictures of the hotel were nice and showed a decent outdoors bar area. I get there and it is a walk up motel with the front facing a busy street and the rear facing someone else's marina. Luckily I stayed in the rear. The AC did not work, the button was broken, the room was really old and smelled. Next morning I pretended to stay another night and asked for the room rate and was quoted $130, so much for better Expedia prices. In any case, I check out and eventually was asked by Expedia too write a review of the hotel, I said my piece and then they came back to me and suggested that I re-write it and not to quote prices. So there you have it. How honest of an operation is this? I have decided not to use Expedia anymore.

I started today's blog with the idea to write a piece about a colleague (a friend lady) of mine. But decided against it, I probably could write about a 1000 words, and all of it would be good....... so I shut up while I am ahead of the game.

Upflush get quite a number of hits these days. A number of inquiries have turned into orders so this is nice. Finally all the work on the web site start to work for me. Now I hope that my Euro Sales Inc. consulting web site also get more hits. I got one result from a recent mailing today, good lead and I hope that I can solve the manufacturer's problem. This is the type of work I like to do, and to help out people that have product and certification problems. Unfortunately none of these "problems" are easy fixes otherwise I am sure they would have solved it themselves.