The Wal-Mart Effect

Wow, so I guess it's been about 5 months since I last blogged. Sad, isn't it? It's funny that when Olivia finally blogged a week or so ago she said that so many days she has every intention of blogging, but then then she remembers only once she's in bed almost asleep. That's the exact same thing that I've been doing for quite a few weeks now.

For anyone who's still checking out my blog, here's a recap of what's been going on in my life the past few months:

With the help of some rented scaffolding and a lot of paint, we painted our great room. We also purchased our new TV that we've been dreaming of for a LONG time. It's a 50" Panasonic Plasma (50px600u) and it is AWESOME. I'm totally hooked on Discovery HD Theater and find myself watching documentaries about everything from Preying Mantises to forest fires. It's really amazing what a difference HD makes. And it's funny to think back a few years ago when I thought HD was one of those things that wasn't all that big of a deal and wouldn't ever catch on. There's still a lack of HD programming, but it's getting better.

At work, the Agency has been picking up quite a bit of steam lately, especially with the addition of the largest retailer in the world and a little company you may know: Wal-Mart. Getting a large client like this has always resulted in a flurry of activity while we staff up and add new and exciting technologies to offer to our client and our employees, but I've never seen it happen like this - mostly because we've never serviced a client this large. It's incredible. And the next few months are going to be quite an exciting ride.

In my freelance business, I wrote on here last time that things are starting to really pick up. Amazingly, things have only continued to get busy. A coworker of Mike was spinning down his freelance business and was looking for someone to take on about 5 or 6 of his clients, so I took those on back in late September. And than I've had a number of clients refer other people to me. I also began offering hosting for my clients back in December and that has also been extremely successful.

I also started up an online community for older Toyota mini truck owners back in the late fall. ToyotaMinis.com is the name of the site and it's been slowly getting more visitors. I created it because we have always had a lot of those older Toyota truck owners on CustomTacos and I wanted give them a community that they could call their own. Admittedly, I haven't spent much time developing it or making it as full-featured as CustomTacos yet, but hopefully I'll have some time to make it better over the coming months.

Thanks to mother nature, Motorcycle riding season went late into December and January with a number of warm days that allowed some extra riding time before putting the bike away for the Winter. My little Ninja 500 now has over 6000 miles in about 2 seasons of riding. I expect that will continue this spring and summer as the Geek's Angels are already planning at least one long trip.

I've decided that I want to try to get back into going snowboarding more often. I also decided that if I was going to do this that it would be in my best interest to buy my own equipment so I don't need to rent a board every time. So I purchased a pretty cool board package from BoardZone.com. We actually went to Wintergreen yesterday and I got to ride it for the first time. And thanks to my Mom and Dad, we've booked a week at Winter Park, Colorado for November 2007. I can't wait.

Last but not least, I'm thrilled that NASCAR season is starting back up. The Bud Shootout was last night and the Daytona 500 is next weekend. The only problem with this equation is that NASCAR + HD + client work = bad productivity. Go Toyota!

Posted by Jeff at February 11, 2007 12:27 PM