Writers block or something like that

Right now I'm sitting in a coffee house with a few of my buddies (where we go to get out of the house and still get work done). My main objective of this outing was to post to my blog, although I can't figure out what to write about for the life of me.

I keep a list (using iPrioritize of course) of potential blog topics. The list is probably 100 topics long, yet each time I've tried to start writing I get completely stuck. So, here I am, worn out after a long day of work with so much on my mind that I can't say anything at all.

Here are some random thoughts that probably could be whole posts if I could get my shit together and actually write something decent:

• Selling something is really, really hard. Every time someone actually signs up and pays for an iPrioritize business account, I do a little dance around my "office".


• Has anyone else noticed how big of a pain in the ass it is to actually get people to pay when they say they will? I've had a few large groups of people sign up for iPrioritize and I invoice them separately after setting up the accounts. It's funny, we shoot emails back and forth every five minutes, but as soon as I send the email invoice which is just a link to PayPal to pay, they magically take several days/weeks to pay when they promised payment by the end of the day. I really don't comprehend. When I give someone my word I pay ASAP. Apparently I'm in the minority


• Customer service is a bitch. Check that, doing customer service well is a bitch. I spent about 8 months of my time as an engineer working on product and process improvements to reduce customer complaints for our company. I can foresee having to implement some of that stuff (on a smaller scale) with iPrioritize down the road. If I don't, I could end up spending all day answering questions and inquiries. From my experience thusfar, about 25% of the people contacting me have legitimate inquiries, the rest are answered in the FAQs. I need to do eventually improve the complaint/inquiry process to reduce the number of contacts while still answering the user's question.


• This earl grey tea I'm drinking tastes like sewage.


• Marketing is more fun, more frustrating, and more rewarding than programming. When you are programming there is less unknown. Your goal is your end product and you need to do a series of steps to get there. Sometimes those steps don't work as well as you had hoped, or take longer than planned, but you always end up with tangible and the desired output - your completed site. Marketing on the other hand, is more fun (because it taps into my creativity more and also results in some human contact), more frustrating (because sometimes a bunch of time and money yields nothing), and more rewarding (because you actually MAKE MONEY).


• I hope I'm never in the public spotlight to the point where the media questions my every move. I'll be honest, 99% of what I watch is either on ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPN News so I relate everything back to sports in my mind. This whole Parcells and TO thing is crazy. Dude has an injured hamstring...in the pre season...leave him alone. When "the player" feels better, he'll practice. If you stick a microphone in front of ANYONE every single freaking day after work, they're going to give you something quotable. Imagine walking out of the office every day and having a slew of reporters at your car asking about your f*ck up earlier during your presentation. To top it off, they've already got a quote from your boss saying that you need to step up your game or they might put someone else on the project. I'd probably go on a profanity laced tirade and start throwing shit. I think athletes and coaches deserve more credit for putting up with our wacked out media on a daily basis.


• You wanna know something that I enjoy? Watching our basketball team kick the living shit out of other countries. Blah blah blah, the rest of the world is catching up to us. Maybe Argentina and Spain are, but there's nothing like barely squeezing out a 103-58 win over Senegal at 6:30 in the morning to start the day off right.


• Every girl in this place looks kind of hot from a distance, only to disappoint up close. Nice from afar, but far from nice. Oh well, I'm sure we look really cool - four guys sitting at a table with their heads buried in lappers...


• Does anyone else think that new Maria Sharapova commercial is freaking amazing? I know it's on like 5 times an hour, but I always stop what I'm doing and turn my head to watch.

That's all. I'm running low on battery and quite frankly getting sick of listening to the crappy jazz music here so I'm going home.