My web hosting account came up for renewal this week, and I just can’t do it.  You see, about two months ago we had a little “incident” where several of my sites on the same host were defaced, with no good explanation as to how/why.  We suspected it had to do with a FrontPage Extensions vulnerability at our web host.  Which wouldn’t have been that big a deal if the note I sent via the company’s prominently displayed “Tell our CEO how we’re doing” link hadn’t been summarily ignored.  Twice.So this weekend, to take my mind off a grueling week at work (don’t ask - wasn’t pretty) I decided to drill in and migrate my stuff, including blahgKarma, to a new hosting account at A2 Hosting.  I found A2 via 43Folders (thank you Merlin), where they not only heartily endorsed A2 (they host 43F), but had a sweet 20% off coupon.  And, I could finally dump Windows hosting, which I’ve been wanting to get around to for some time, but haven’t.So far, so good.  The A2 control panel, cpanel, is WAY better than my last host’s.  And, Fantastico is making for some fun playing around with various Open Source web-based CMS installs, including Drupal which I used for a project last year and liked.Web hosting is certainly a commodity these days, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy it inexpensively AND have it work well.  Now if I could just find something with a cpanel equivalent on an OS X Server backend, I’d be REALLY happy… 

A local landscaper came by last week offering to trim trees at our house. We agreed to have a variety of trees trimmed, which the landscaper priced by the tree, and included the trash removal (i.e. no charge item). As it turned out, we had to drop one of the trees to be trimmed - a neighbor’s which he preferred to do otherwise with. The landscaper accepted the change this morning, dropping it from the work, but when presenting the bill had increased the price by $75 for the trash removal, which he had included previously.

We changed the scope, he accepted it but I suspect knowing the price increase was coming, which we found out about at the end of the job. Who was right? We expected the vendor to deliver what he promised (these items at these prices) and he expected to make his money (this much for the job). By not presenting a new price before the work started he turned what otherwise would have been a very happy customer into a negative outcome and no or negative reference. Mismatched expectations…

Set, maintain, manage and deliver to a clear set of expectations - they don’t have to be point-level tasks and you don’t have to charge by the task or T&M to ensure satisfaction, but if the work changes and so will your price - be up front about it and put the customer in the driver’s seat.

The moral of the story… when you’re working with customers, they typically want to know what they get from you, how much of it and what it costs - however articulated. If you’re pricing by the job, both parties should expect to exchange value on the results… if the customer wants to change the scope and you don’t like it, be up front and discuss any impacts - you don’t have to accept the change, but you also shouldn’t expect to creep your fees any more than you’d expect to let the customer creep (or in this case, shrink) the scope.

This vendor won the battle and lost the war… Its a shame to do good quality work but leave the customer unhappy because you either didn’t want to have the conversation, or worse because you are trying to “sneak it in”. Manage those expectations…

I scan around 150 blogs at the moment via RSS, and

I’ve read about folks who use blogs as a way to capture info they’re likely to be interested in (themselves) later, and until recently thought “Why would you want to do that? - Just store the stuff on your HD”. Well, today I think I figured it out - my hard drive doesn’t really have an application that would allow me to annotate the material like I can on a blog (read: mini content management system).

Lets say I want to start tracking “stuff” about a particular topic. I want to make notes on the “stuff”, link to websites, maybe maintain a file or two (although not many), etc. I could do this in my main blog by tagging the content… or, if I think a different audience may be interested in the material (like mainly me, but perhaps a few others), I could just jam it all into a separate blog altogether.

I’m thinking about trying this… WordPress has a decent tagging mechanism and I may cross-post the stuff to both blogs, but this will give me a chance to check out what (if any) multi-blog capabilities WP has. Wish me luck!

Hey TechWatchers… this just in, from Halley

Once again, Sandy is a wealth of info when it comes to Enterprise Architecture, or rather where my interest lies

If 2006 is the year of the tech comeback, as I commented recently, I think its also the year of Enterprise Architecture, or maybe more to the point, the Year of the Enterprise Architect, although I admit I

Found a great new blog called “Fire Someone Today” a couple of weeks ago, thanks to Scoble, who posted on it here. One exerpt I really enjoyed from the author

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Great little tidbit on a blog by Tony Dowler called Career Path, which I