Happy Tuesday! This week I have a lot on my mind. I want to accomplish a few things before the week is over, such as a project inventory for my business. I also want to work on my taxes since the filing deadline is just around the corner. In addition I’m starting an exercise routine at about three times a week. I have a bike with broken tires that I would like to get fixed. I love biking, how about you? 
This week I expect to start looking into my pitiful tax situation. I think I underpaid my taxes last year, which is not good. 
Underpaying means that I will be sending the United States Treasury some dough with my tax return.
But wait a minute! I run a business. Yea, so that means that I can deduct the expenses, to some extent, from my income. God bless America, there is still hope! I’ll be finding out in the days ahead and report back with news.
With the sad subject of taxes behind let me talk about something more exciting. Yes, I’m going to expand my little plot of land on the Internet by writing for about two more blogs. While I can’t reveal all the details just yet, I can say that one blog is on the subject of personal finances and one will continue the work started on this blog. The latter will feature at least one new posting every single day, Monday through Saturday. (I don’t like to work on Sundays.) I’m excited about this opportunity to practice and improve my writing talent. Hope you are as excited as I am. 
Stay tuned. God bless and make it a great week!
This week I begin work on a new web development project. The project’s goal is to launch a new section on this website, JCruz Presents. The project consists of integrating an existing layout, designing templates, and integrating content. I’m excited to be working with 
again. So not only do I get to design but I also get do some coding. This project is expected to last several weeks. Do you know any good web design and development resources? 
For over two weeks I’ve been reading and reviewing issue tracking systems, in particular open source [1], PHP scripts [2]. Unfortunately there aren’t many options. Finally, I am going to commit to Eventum [3], even though I’m skeptical about their future software development. I am skeptical mainly because MySQL was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems.
To me it is one of those things I’m making a choice on because I have to (my company needs an issue tracking system), but I’m looking at the long-term picture and it is very blurry. I would at least be relieved if they had an active community around the product, a community that included developers, testers, and end-users. Forums would be good because I’m not geeky enough or have ever been attracted to mailing lists. I guess that’s the challenge with most open-source software, the uncertain future of it. The worst story I have experienced was when activeCollab suddenly changed from open to closed source, distancing small shops and open source fans. I am wary of the open source software that hangs around beta versions for more than a year and projects that include only one developer.
Regardless, I love and support open source software, and will continue to do so in the weeks ahead. I hope that, should development on Eventum end, Sun will give it to the community to further develop via Sourceforge or Google Code.
Moving is almost a part of my life, like my skills and education. Not something to be proud of because there is always a price to pay when moving. I feel too tired to move again, the expense and stress associated with moving sucks, as well as having to pack and unpack, and lift heavy furniture around.
So what exactly am I up to this time. I’m moving in more furniture and stuff from an apartment to my residence. So I have to reorganize all the rooms to make room for the new things. Not looking forward to it, but hey, it has got to get done.
The good news is that once it is all moved in and unpacked, I will be more relaxed. The thought of actually dipping my feet in my pool sounds good right around now. Hehe.
Well, I gotta go now, I have some kitchen items to pack up and move in. Oh, the official moving day is this Saturday. God bless!
WordPress 2.3 is near and, according to Matt, it is coming out with tons of new features. This week I will be busy preparing and making the upgrade to the newest version of this neat blogging tool, not once, but several times. Presently, I maintain about 5 separate installations of WordPress. This blog you are reading also runs on the WordPress software. I love open-source software 
, how ’bout you?
Make it a great week!
A few weeks ago I found out Plone 3 was released. That same week I started reading up on this content management system from their website. They have a healthy portion of documentation and even archived conference chats. Beginning this week, I will take the evaluation to the next level by deploying test sites and reading up on this open-source software and its capabilities. I’m excited and looking forward to implementing this as a solution for a publishing company I work for.
Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets. -plone.org
I heard from several sources that implementing Plone was a challenging task from a technical perspective. Thankfully version 3 makes the software a bit more user-friendly. That means less to worry about and less time spent training. Another challenge for me is to become familiar with Python, Zope, and ZODB. Python is a high-level programming language. Zope is an open-source, object-oriented web application server written in Python, with ZODB as its object database.
After your business’ publishing needs outweigh WordPress, I think it becomes only natural to consider a more powerful content management framework like Plone.
Make it a great week!
This week my goal is to finish moving into my new home. The actual move already took place in August but I have so many things that need to be unpacked and organized. This week I get to mow my lawn for the first time ever and clean up the entire house on my own. It is going to be tough, but well worth it in the end. Home Sweet Home.
This week I am playing catch up as I try to enter and reconcile entries in Quicken, my personal accounting software of choice. As long as the data is up to date and accurate, Quicken can help you plan for live’s big events, for tax time, track investment income, create and follow a budget, and much more. I am not a big fan of balancing my check book by hand, but I do like to download transactions and reconcile accounts using this computer software.
Regrettably, once in a while I fall behind in keeping the numbers up to date. This results in even more work later on. :( Catching up on financial entries doesn’t sound much like a project; nevertheless, it is one of those things I have to get done.
One of my personal goals this year is to bring my net worth from negative red to positive black. Quicken is the tool I am using to track of my progress. For more information visit Quicken on the Internet.
About Project Expressions: Each week we take an exclusive look at one of the many projects I am working on. Not only do you get insight into my active projects but also hope it can serve as a source of discovery, innovation, and learning experience for you.
This week I am evaluating an open-source business intelligence platform known as Pentaho. The challenge will be in taking our list of requirements and checking them against Pentaho’s features and capabilities. In addition I am new to web hosted Java applications and look forward to setting up this type of server environment for production use at one of my companies. While I look into this business intelligence platform this week, see for yourself if this enterprise-class reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow solution can help your business operate more efficiently and effectively in the coming year. For more information please visit Pentaho on the Internet.
About Project Expressions: Each week we take an exclusive look at one of the many projects I am working on. Not only do you get insight into my active projects but also hope it can serve as a source of discovery, innovation, and learning experience for you.
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