Fear of confrontation destroys dreams

Over the past few weeks I have been dealing with people in the centre who have been, let's say, less then pleasant. I spend a lot of my time pumping myself up with enthusiasm. I constantly think positive and always look on the bright side of things. One of the reasons you very rarely hear about some of the real problems that I face on a daily basis is just that I try to construct my reality so that I can always feel light, bouncy and positive.

because of this I tend to think of other people as people who can basically be trusted and that the majority of people are good and honest. However, this has meant that I have slow to deal with people who start to cross the line between what is acceptable in a gaming centre and what isn't. This was partly because I wasn't totally sure what should and shouldn't go on myself.

Over the past month I have focused my views on what is acceptable behavior and what isn't and Yesterday it culminated with the banning of several people from the centre who crossed the line big time.

I have learned a lot in the past few weeks. Stuff you can only learn from being in situations like these and that experience, regardless of how unpleasant they were, I would not trade for anything. I believe that I've started to cultivate a real no bullshit (bad word justified) attitude to people when it is clear they have no intent to follow rules put in place to benefit others, and who will wiggle and squirm and use the most stupid and foolish techniques to get what they want.

In this episode I have realized just what it was at the beginning that stopped me confronting these people. Fear of confrontation. Every time I had to approach people and tell them to behave in a different way to that they were acting in, my heart beat would increase and I would sweat.

What kept me confronting though, and not backing down, was my remembering my views on change. That change is constant and that in this world, you can only succeed by changing. I realized that if I feared confrontation I would be fearing the thing that I claimed I wanted to represent, change.

Now I barely need to think twice before telling someone that their behavior is unacceptable and to tell them the consequences of the continued behavior. I wonder though how many of the people who are afraid to go into business for themselves are afraid to do so because of the fear of confrontation....

- James

Open Source Stuff

Ok!

In the last post I was talking about Open Source software and how valuable it can be. I got quite a few responses from both the blog and off it so here's the list. :-)

Open Office:

The open source equivalent of Microsoft Office, providing you with a complete suite of office applications, the more obvious being a presentation package, a writing package and a spreadsheet package. Other less obvious ones are a math package and drawing package and a database package. These programs are all compatible with office documents and can save into the office format so there is no compatibility problems. Some of the buttons are placed in different places but generally all the functionally of Microsoft's versions are in these open source ones.

Fire Fox:

So much has already been said about Fire Fox that it doesn't really seem necessary to do so here apart from the fact that it's a kick ass browser with a bookmark system that I wouldn't swap for anything!

Ink Scape:

Open source's answer to the likes of adobe illustrate. Of all the open source Apps, this is the one I am most in love with. It is so easy to find your way around and combines the very best from all the other drawing systems such as Flash, Coral draw and Free hand. I installed Ink Scape and literally within the hour I had figured out my way around just about all the basic functions of the program. The more complex functionalities took a little longer but once they are figured out. Well, it's just awesome. :-)

NVU:

The Open Source web developer package. Being able to go toe to toe with the likes of Dreamweaver is no small feet but NVU manages it.... just. Although it does lack some of the functionality of Dreamweaver (Such as a dynamic online/offline file management system) NVU totally schools it when it comes to table management. While Dreamweaver is clumsy and confusing in it's table management system, NVU is easy, simple, and understandable. All in all, if you are a casual webmaster or someone who designs websites purely for their own ventures, this software is a must.

Blender:

I haven't done much in the way of 3-D Graphics or animation so I would really have trouble trying to compare this software against its peers in it's industry segment but if anyone who does work in this area could tell me what they think of this software then I'll update the blog with a thumbs up or down :-) Having said that, from my limited experience it looks like a serious bit of software.

GnuCash:

An open source accounting program. I'm constantlly telling myself that I need to start to take proper steps to sort of my accounting and I'm confident that this program will help me with this no end. Although it should be said that there are several programms out there that are designed to sync with the commersial accounting pacakages and until they all support GnuCash it could be problamatic. But still.... £150 saving is not to be sneased at ;-)

The Gimp:

And finally! In the world of image editing there is only one constant rule. Photoshop is king. It really is hard for any product to go up against it and one of the reasons for this is it just has an unshiftable reputation as the best and that reputation doesn't seem to be letting up any time soon. However at over £500 for a full commercial version of the package it isn't cheap and unless you are going to make full use of all it's functionalities it really could be an expensive investment when you consider the open source version. The Gimp has gained something of a cult status around the graphic community especially among Linux uses who, have no other option.

Naturally the great thing about all these programs is that you can try them out at no cost before deciding whether you want to rely on them. It's unlikely that you will prefer every software package over it's closed source peers but even then the cost factor may well swing you. I recommend that you try all of them out. There's nothing to lose and a few thousand quid to gain ;-).

It should also be noted that I haven't covered Video Editing packages. After a good deal of searching I concluded that, unfortunately, the open source video and sound editing programs just aren't mature enough for them to be seriously considered. For those who want to do videography... A mac is still your best bet.

Have fun!

- James

Linux and Entrepreneurship

Linux?! What about it?!

Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction when I was first told that I could use it in my business. My second reaction was “No games run on Linux. None, Zip, Keine, Niches, Zero” Then I actually engaged my brain and realized that businesses don't need to run games on their computers and that they are by far the biggest buyers of Linux machines.

I did some more research. My heart raced, I was in “The Zone” I was learning stuff. Stuff I had absolutely no idea even existed. In fairness I was already primed to receive this kind of information since I had been going on an open source crusade for various bits of software for a while but now I've started to put all the pieces into a business concept that I could consider mature enough to seriously pursue.

Many of us who are website developers, graphic artists and the like are no doubt familiar with the very high prices that many software packages command. Dream weaver costs £375, Coral Draw costs £300 and so on. For a cash strapped entrepreneur who needs to start his business on the cheap or a large company with hundreds of computers this is no small deal. Even, arguably the most basic productivity software packages, like office, cost £300.

In fact this is true to such an extent that I've identified 8 software packages that I need to have on the new computer I want to build for my business and these software packages cost a total of £2,358! That is a lot of money!.... However the really cool thing is that for each of these packages I've found an equivalent open source project that is at least comparable and in many cases better then the industry standard version!

Linux is just another open source project. The biggest problem with it is that it can be hard to setup on a system, but once that is done, it's just as easy as windows to any normal user. The fear of it being this insane thing that only computer geniuses use keeps a lot of people from using it.

The concept of saving £2,358 on a full development computer got me thinking that, surely there must be other people who would want to save that kind of money, but don't what to learn how to install Linux or spend hours searching through all the different open source projects for the really good ones. Naturally the biggest stumbling block is that people simply don't know about this other way of doing business.

In the next few months I'm going to be doing a few experiments into this to see whether my suspicions are correct.

The first experiment is this, Comment if you want my next post to say what all the software packages I found are and where you can get them for windows. If I get enough shouts I'll post them ;-)

- James

Portal Metafisica Torny!

OK!

Yesterday was quite a packed one and I learnt some very valuable lessons.

Yesterday was the first Portal Metafisica tournament and despite not quite as many people turning out as I would have hoped, we never the less had a rally great time. I currently use intellicontact to contact all the members of portal metafiscia (of which there are now over 140) whenever I have news for them and although I did send out an announcement of the tournament, I now see that I left it a little late and more crucially, only sent it out once.

The next time that such a tournament will be on, I intend to send it out at least 3 times over the course of 2 weeks before the date of the event. Packed with lots of other great stuff about the centre naturally :-). We'll see how that improves the attendance rating and I'll post the results on the blog ;-).

The actual torny itself was really cool and it came down to a show down between Mevs and Mini Disc. They were drawing in points at the end and drew another 2 matches matches before Mini Disc finally got the crucial shot in that sealed the torny for him. However, he then decided that he'd be willing to trade the copper head razer mouse he'd won for Mev's prize, 7 free hours on his account. So everyone went away happy :-D.

In other news I'm working on a side project that I hope to show you guys the finished results of soon ;-). Oh, and I've started reading the Ebay Millionaire which a how to book of Ebay from a group of Titanium Powersellers.

That's all for now!

Cya!

- James

The Nitronworks Blog One Year Anniversary!

Today we celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Nitronworks Blog and Wow! I'm not sure whether or not I expected to still be doing this one year on but I know that I hoped I would be. A year is a long time and soooo much has happened in that time. Two of the largest things that have so far happened in my life happened in 2005. They were finishing a 14 year project known as school and the second was the founding of Cyber Management Ltd and the starting of Portal Metafisica. The Project known as sleepy ninja had been in my mind for a long time. In fact, to see just how long lets take a quick look back in time.

That's what I love so much about Blogging; you can see what you were doing a long time ago with little effort and look at how your mind has changed in that time. Here is an excerpt from the very first post ever, here on The Nitronworks Blog

23rd January 2005

“..... Other things that I will have to do between now and the exams are the Extended Essay and finishing off my TOK essay. The extended essay is a 4,000 word long essay. The research question that I have chosen is "What are the key success factors for entering the cyber café business in the UK in 2005?"

Just 3 months to go... But they will be seriously cramped ones, so I'm going to sign off now and work on my extended essay.

- James”

That gives a good idea of just how long sleepy ninja has been in the works and, not only did I complete an essay on the subject, but I also completed what I said I was going to do in the essay title! :-P How cool is that?! ;-) and as The Nitronworks Blog has been going for a full year now I thought I would share some cool statistics about it and Nitronworks as a whole.

1.In 2004 500 unique people visited Nitronworks.com, in 2005 the number of people who had been to Nitronworks was 6 times that amount, 3,000 people.
2.The number of sessions in 2005 was just under 15,000.
3.Over 2,000 people have been sent to Nitronworks from other sites and on average each one has returned 6 times.
4.Nitronworks is listed as number one in Goggle for Nitronworks and Sleepy Ninja, is number 3 for James Coombs (we'll see about that) and number 50 for Space entrepreneurship (ditto).
5.The Nitronworks Blog now has 80 posts with more then 23,000 words.
6.Nitronworks as a whole holds page rank value of about 200 PR.
7.The record number of comments on a Nitronworks Blog post was on Thursday, December 15, 2005 with 8 comments.
8.In 2005 the Google Bot has visited Nitronworks over 1,200 times.

Here's to the next year and may my world change even more in it! :-D

- James

Sleeping in the Dungeon of the Sleepy Ninja

Lots of cool stuff been happening at the centre. Membership now up to 120... still a fair bit to go before we hit our target but we're getting there.

My Dad has gone off to Bath for a few days which left me with a bit of a problem. Namely, I didn't have a clue how I would get into town to get to the centre. After looking around at the options I learned that I could either sleep at the centre or pay at least £20 for a B&B. Well the obvious choice was right there, especially since I had just finished “Sam Walton's: made in America”. :-P

So I'm writing this as I sit in the centre with the lights off and getting ready to sleep on the sofa, with the small fridge stocked up with precooked pizza. Ahhhhh! It's must be the life of an entrepreneur :-P.

We have the retail section up and running although the selection we have isn't the best. I'm working hard to get it up to full capacity and stocking the really popular games. I've also been working with some of the people who visit the centre (and who read the blog, hi Will) on the portal metafisica website. I'm going to split it up into two different sites, one focused on the centre and it's community and the other focused on the retail section. This is important since a lot of the retail goods we sell can only be sold in any volume over the Internet as they are specialist products.

I've also been doing some conceptualizing about a possible future project that I've nick named Chatty Ninja ;-) and for a while that's what I'll be referring to it as, so get used to it :-P. At least until it's much further down the project path :-).

- James

To Some it's Fascinating, To Others....

OK, don't have much time to post so here we go,

Finally got the account with pinnacle sorted out and put in an order for most of the gaming titles that I'll be stocking. Naturally it's only a working list as there are a few more distributors I need to bring on board and titles will continue to be released over time, but for the time being, I have my gaming title retail section taken care of. The suppliers do next day delivery so I'll try and get some pictures up once everything is done :-D.

Now! The Computers.... Well, yesterday was quite a day and they were full for a good part of the afternoon and evening. I mean really full, I mean that there were about 9 or 10 people hanging around waiting for computers to become free! :-D. The membership is also growing steadily. One of the centres goals is an active membership of 200 and we're now almost half way there.

That's pretty much it for the moment. I'll let you know when I start doing something a bit more interesting. In the mean time... :-P

- James