I have decided to move Boring Drivel to a new website... I love Blogger, but I love Movable type better... You can now find my drivel at Fingertoe.com Movable type is little more full featured, and I don't have to use outside tools to allow Comments, Syndications etc. Anyway, I hope those of you who read this will check out the new site!

So, we are flying down to Portland tomorrow. Julia gets her own seat on the airplane she is pretty excited about that. We where going to drive, but 1 hour in the plane seems a lot nicer than 10 hours in and out of the car.. I am leaving to visit my friend Dean in Alaska on Wednesday. We are going to go on a short snowmachine adventure.. Should be pretty fun.. I will post pictures when I get back..

Work has been very busy.. I am learning everything that I ever cared to know about leasing. My business is still rumbling along really strong. I keep coming home from work and feel too exhausted to think about much of anything.

I am playing with PHP/MySQL these days. Seems to be a pretty powerful tool.. I keep leaving out the semicolons at the end of each line.. Programming is quite aggravating sometimes... I would suppose that anything that is profitable is..

Those of you who are too lazy to download a RSS news aggregator now can just add the RSS module to my.yahoo.com.

Once Yahoo is on board, it is only a matter of time before everyone else must follow suit. I have been using Bloglines as my home page for several weeks now, and I am very happy with the 'new internet' experience.

In other RSS news, Blogger just added atom feeds as a feature. Pretty nice! My new feed is at http://www.reighley.net/blogger/atom.xml The old feed will continue to work howver.

So, I have this strange habit of taking what most people would think of as a 'harebrained' idea, and trying to sell it to as many people as I can. Here is this weeks attempt:

I think that sabbaticals should be an encouraged benefit within more companies. I have been asking around, and a sizable portion of the people I unscientifically polled said that they would be willing to accept a reduction in pay in order to have 6 to 12 months off every few years.

So many people define their lives based on there employment. I think we quickly become slaves to the paycheck, and our true passions get buried or subordinated to advancing our career. Our vision becomes so focused on one very small part of the world that we lose a substantial amount of are capability to be creative. How can somebody be asked to think outside of the box when they have been trapped inside the box for years and years?

Today's businesses have to be extremely agile in order to be successful. When people do the same thing year in and year out, they get comfortable with it. They resist change. Commonly, there is such narrow perspective that an organization may not be able to see the big picture to even understand that change is necessary.

If we want people to think outside the box, we need to let them out of the box once in a while.

I see very good benefits to both parties in an organization where sabbatical are commonplace.

The employee gains the ability to spend time serving the real passions in their lives. Their family, churches, charities, Learning more, Relating to people more. They will feel like they are working for a company that is enabling them to do what they love, not a company that is preventing them from doing what they love.

The employer gains a workforce that has a better perspective on the world that they are serving. They gain a workforce that is used to change, The common absence of key people makes the rest of the team stronger, and more understanding of the whole operation. Infrastructure will naturally develop to adapt quickly to changes that need to happen.. Their employees will be better known in the community, and the company will gain goodwill from the community involvement as well as a more healthy community to draw its workforce from. Employees will also be more loyal, and less susceptible to burnout. .

The costs exist, but they probably could be split between the employee and employer, and both parties would feel that they where getting a pretty good deal.

What do you think of that idea? God made a similar 'suggestion' to Israel, but I don't believe they followed it. They didn't follow many of God's rules.

I am trying to learn discipline, so I need to keep writing. Sorry to bore you. ;-)

Our washer broke last week. This week it was our car. The Saturn is getting quite old, and was spewing black smoke like crazy. Andee took it to a shop, and they figured the engine was going bad. (I am sure that it is eventually) The said that they stopped estimating the cost once the got to 3900 dollars. I think that they overlooked the fact that somebody (nameless) overfilled the engine with oil. Once I removed the 6 quarts of oil and changed the plugs, the car began running returned to its pre-oil burning state.

Anyway, I am in the market for a cheap ugly car with a substantial amount of life remaining. (The flavor that Dave Ramsey would recomend) It would be nice if it held 2 kids easily. The Saturn is running fine now, but I know that it is on its last legs.

My other projects of the week: I have been looking for a good content management system to migrate the liferoads website to. I am looking at Mambo, but am still unsettled. There are a lot of decent Open source CMS's out there. I figure free is a good price.

I purchased a juicer. (Oops. I must have forgotten a principle from my last post) Now I can have a nice glass of Apple - Carrot - Bell Pepper - Celery juice whenever the baby is awake. Julia likes to put the veggies in the juicer. When she makes it, she will try it... Then she makes a very funny face and say "yuuuuuucccck!"

Well, This week is about up, so I figure I better make another post. It has been a busy week, and It always seems that the busier I am, the less you get accomplished. (And unfortunately for you reading this, the less interesting stuff I have to talk about) I guess I will have to be philisophical this post.

We bought a washing machine. Our old 1978 model is not working satisfactorily and I found enough things that are going to be wrong with it shortly, that I figured I would be fixing it every month for the next year or so. We bought a new front loader. I am always impressed with the price variety of items like this. The front loader washers run from about 550 dollars to 1400 dollars. All of them clean clothing. It is interesting to try to break down the cost difference to figure out what people are paying for. I am sure that the 1400 dollar models have an extra part or two... (high temp water heater) That may add 100 dollars or so. They are a little larger, which may add 30 or so dollars to the manufacturing cost. Other than that, people are paying for utility or luxury. How much more is it worth to be able to run slightly larger loads of laundry? Apparently it is worth about 600 dollars. (We decided against purchasing this additional utility)

My business makes it's money off of selling utility. The software I wrote really does not cost that much to manufacture, and I have already re-couped the development costs. What my clients are investing in is a reduction in their inconvienence. My software saves their staff hours and hours of work. Most of them find my software to be a termendous bargin.

I would bet that there are a lot of people who are addicted to utility, and probably buy utility that they are unlikely to use. I look in my laundry room and see the massive collection of small kitchen appliances that I use once every 3 years, and I am pretty convicted. I probably have 400-600 dollars worth of utility that is being wasted on the shelfs in there. I really could use the space provided by the shelving to clean up and organize some other messy areas of my house, So I am wasting the utiltiy of my shelving, storing utility that I will rarely use.

Josh's boring drivel is now interactive! Now you can click on the "interactive drivel" link at the bottom of each post, and add your own comments!

Have fun!

My predictions for 2004: RSS internet technology will become mainstream. I recently started using news aggregators, and I think it has totally changed my internet experience. I figure it is only a matter of time before everyone starts using these.

RSS feeds are basically headline lists that are published by websites. So if you have some websites that you enjoy reading, you can tell your news aggregator software where the rss feed for that website is located, and it will periodically check it and let you know what is new on that website. After reading the headline, if you are interested, you can click on a link and read the actual artical.

I started using bloglines.com. This is a web based aggregator, so anywhere I have an internet connection, I can log in, and see what is new with the feeds that I am interested in.

Bloglines also has a feature that allows you to have mailing lists sent directly to your bloglines account. Bloglines makes up an email for you to subscribe with, and when email arrives in that account, it displays it in your aggregator. When you are not interested in reading the newsletter or when the email address begins receiveing spam, you simply unsubscribe in your aggregator, and the email address is no longer valid.

Setting up the account on bloglines is pretty easy. They also have a feature that recomends feeds for you, so it is pretty easy to find stuff to read.