BitLizard’s Blog

Its an inevitable part of life’s journey, I suppose, that when you’ve accumulated about 50+ years you start to see friends, family and co-workers pass permanently from your life with an ever increasing frequency. For me, it started with a high school friend who died far too prematurely in his 20′s – beaten to death in a drug deal gone bad. Then more recently with one of my closest friends during the teenage years, Mark Swenson, who died in a motorcycle accident a decade ago after a difficult life. More recently still was Dan Duerr who graciously helped us through the dual hurricanes of 2004 and was an inspiration to many.

Now its time to say farewell to my friend and boss Mark Miller – or officially Melvin C. Miller of the M. C. Miller Company. Mark’s dream was to grow the business to a point where he could throttle back a little and indulge his passion for sailboats and sailing. But as many business people know, you may own 100% of the shares of a business but the business also ends up owning you to a point also. There was always one more big project that would require his direct involvement. One more decision he felt that he couldn’t ask anyone else to make. One more employee he had to protect from the wrath of his brash, hothead VP! Without seeming to have a “driven” personality, he was a driven man and his passion was first and foremost the M. C. Miller Company. His reputation was both his sword and shield. He was “old school” — a cash flow guy rather than an investor guy.

Mark died in his sleep on June 21st. The period since has been a difficult time for me personally. Though we did not socialize outside the business to any great degree, Mark was a close friend and we worked together on many different projects. He always sought my opinion on just about any topic, business or personal. And he taught me some very important lessons about people and business over the 14 years we knew each other. Mark especially enjoyed pushing me out of my comfort zone and loved the shock and awe he could evoke in me by his sometimes anarchical behavior. Thanks, Mark… I needed that.

In his last will and testament, Mark left control of the company in a trust to the benefit of his employees.  The business is going to continue forward in the directions Mark has established. Eventually each of us will be adding to this legacy in our own way and I think the company has a glorious future. Thanks Mark for trusting us with your business. We will not let you down!

At the office we are having a memorial for Mark on August 1st to mourn the passing of our friend. We seek closure but I am not sure if we can close this wound so easily. He will be missed by a great many people.

Family and Friends business, M. C. Miller Co., Mark Miller, MCM

ROI (or Return On Investment) is the bottom line when evaluating a stock holding or a business endeavor. If your primary reason for going to college is to have a higher salary than your hapless friend who became a plumber’s apprentice, then you may need to take a few additional math courses. This is one of my pet peeves — and is probably self serving since I don’t have a college degree myself. But anyhooo…

I got to thinking about this today after seeing this blog posting from Zoho. Yes, I agree with this completely. That college degree that may have cost you $120,000 in real money and untold amounts in “lost opportunity” costs, will almost certainly prove to be a losing investment in the long run. You might have been better off investing the money in penny stocks.

Having said that, if your goal when going to college was to party down nightly (and daily?), rock out and meet the love of your life — ok, now that might be worth the money. But don’t pretend its any sort of investment in the classic sense. 

Suffice it to say is if you give me a resume to look at I don’t pay any attention to the education section. I, like the Zoho folks, want to see what you have done in life; what products you have made; how other businesses valued your participation.

Investing business

I’ve started a new section called the CodePlex on the web site. Its up there on the menu at the top of the page, next to the Bazaar. One of the things I wanted to do here was start to share some useful software tidbits when I had them and when the situation under which they were developed allowed for it. So its starts today with the offering of wrapper classes for the FreshBooks.com api. FreshBooks is a great site for outsourcing your invoice preparation, delivery and followup. It is especially useful, I’ve found, if you have a lot of subscription billing or recurring invoices.

FreshBooks provides an api (application programming interface) for manipulating the functions of the service from another program. You could, for example, write an application for your PocketPC-based cell phone that would allow you to enter an order from a customer while at his location and have FreshBooks deliver the invoice instantly via email. Or you could review your client’s payment history, log time against a project, add travel expense, etc. If you were proprietor of Accounting software, you could offer a link to FreshBooks as a replacement or alternative for printing invoices and envelopes.

My wrapper classes allow a C# programmer to easily access the functionality of the FreshBooks.com web site. The first few classes were started by Donald Halloran and I later picked them up and extended them to cover the entire api. I also created a test routine that exercised a significant portion of the methodology. The project is being released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which means it is free software that can be used for any purpose, free or commercial. Derivitive works, such as a repackaging of the library or expanded the library to include additional functions, must also be distributed under the Lesser GPL.

And let me give a shout-out to the team at FreshBooks.com. They have scarily reposonsive customer service and the developers are fully engaged and communicating. I admire them a great deal and would like to reshape my own development team along similar lines.

Programming and IT business, code, FreshBooks, software