Magnet
We had some car magnets created by our designers, but printed by the Lubbock
FastSigns franchise. The last time that I discussed the magnets, we were
having some problems with the printing, whereby the colors were not entirely correct.
Yesterday, one of the signs which was on my wife's truck was removed while she was at the Walmart on Quaker street. I assumed it had be stolen. Today, I got a phone call from a concerned Lubbock citizen. He asked politely, "Do you work with Resolution Software .... I have one of your signs."
Apparently, some local jokester decided to take it off of Steph's tailgate, and placed it on his vehicle. His fiance noticed it today, and decided to have him call me. I'll pick it up from him tomorrow sometime.
Thanks!
Weekend with Erik
Erik, my business partner, recently flew down (with his daughter) from the Northern Virginia area to discuss strategic planning, and meet some of our employees that were not with us during his last trip (more than a year ago). Left to our own devices, and without our wives or children around, we were able to discuss market strategy, and project status, as well as potential new ventures and products.
We discussed and reviewed
Project X, which has been under wraps for about 8 months now. It is slowly inching toward completion, and we are hoping for a product launch by mid-September. I've written previously about our usage of
Java,
Spring,
Hibernate, and other technologies (I believe we may be one of the only Lubbock technology companies to be embracing these breakthrough technologies), and they are proving to be very stable on the backend. However, the GUI needs some work.
The entire GUI is being reworked during the next few weeks. Unfortunately, GUI work usually requires that you write it entirely before you find out that the pieces do not fit together very well. In our case, about half of the pieces fit well together, and the other half would not make sense to anyone but one of the developers. Considering this is going to be marketed to a very non-technical audience, it must be usable by my grandmother.
So, today we spent a good number of hours working on how to create new GUI elements which would replace those that we have that do not work (and hope that the new ones work very well).
Run and Hide .... Here Come The Bees!
On the 24th,
Seth made a
quick mention at one particular hot space ... web analytics. He highlighted
103Bees.com, though I'm not 100% sure why. It's a neat product, and it is certainly simple (its best feature is its simplicity). It follows the same logic as the ultra-useful
MyBlogLog (which does everything that 103Bees.com does, but also tracks outbound link popularity and community members who show up on your site). Designers / developers drop in a single line of Javascript and they are done.
And while it is a neat tool (I installed it on a low traffic site as soon as I found out about it, similar to my trial of
HitTail.com), it is not
yet a complete tool. Web masters and designers will still need something that can analyze logs (and I postulate that 103Bees.com will need to go that direction to get people to pay for their product), and probably another package or two to worry about
click fraud.
Most of what 103bees.com and HitTail.com do, is available in the log files of websites, and the log files are a source of many, many other interesting tidbits. Numbers like which page was the most frequent entrance page. Exit page. Which browsers were used. How long the user stayed on the website. Common paths of users through the website. Etc... A Javascript Wizard (
Brad Feld claims that the
genius behind MyBlogLog is such a person) may be able to do these statistics from Javascript. But they are not there yet.
A much better tool (right now), would be
Google Analytics, or even
AWStats, both of which are free, excellent log analyzers.
I doubt Seth (or anyone with a large website) is running their site solely using just one tool (103bees.com or even
Web Side Story). Most of our sites use two or three of these tools at all times, to ensure that the short comings of one aren't hampering our real growth. [This comes with its own set of problems, of course.]
A note on
Google Analytics: Years ago, the premier in this space was
Urchin, which just a year or two ago,
was gobbled up by Google, and is now Google Analytics. We use Google Analytics for a few different web sites and their ability to track the "funnel" (albeit, it is not
flipping the funnel) is great. Unfortunately, when Google bought them, they quit developing the Urchin product, which really means that if you want to use the Urchin package, you better like using Google's products. Many of the reports which used to be available within Urchin went out the door, as did any type of integration with shopping carts, etc... that they used to have. Overall, I think Urchin was a better product. But we live in a Google world.
Tomorrow AM, Meet Dr. Presley
Tomorrow morning, my father,
Dr. Steve Presley, will be speaking at a local Lubbock radio station,
Talk Radio 580 AM, at 7:00am.
I'm not sure what he will be
speaking about. However, considering his background, and the research that he has been doing, it could be anything
Malaria,
West Nile,
Black Plague, or even hunting season.
I doubt that this will be about his
New Orleans research, as he hasn't been there in a few months, and is due for another trip. My wife is hoping to get to go with him on the next trip, so she can collect lots and lots of bugs.
JDbMonitor and P6Spy
Today, as announced
early today on The Server Side,
JDbMonitor version 1.0 has been released. This particular product looked familiar, and after doing some digging around, it appears to be very similar to a very useful product that hasn't seen any recent development,
P6Spy.
We've used P6Spy over the last two years to sit in between our web applications and our databases to see which SQL commands are run the most often. It also will allow you to see how long PreparedStatement's take, and other very interesting statistics. Unfortunately, P6Spy is no longer supported, and the News on the main website was last updated in 2005. We've had some issues with certain types of preparedStatements inside of
Informix, and also in using the software within
Tomcat with
DataBase Connection Pooling.
JDbMonitor looks like the new player on the block, and if they perform as well as P6Spy did, then they should see some decent success. Users of
MySQL and
PostgreSQL could probably use this type of utility, as well as Informix (which is what we usually run P6Spy on). EnterpriseDB has a built-in tool, called
DBA Manager, which is a similar utility for PostgreSQL (native, rather than a Java utility).
Miscommunication
I found out very directly today that my previous post about the
winner of our Lubbock Business Expo Auction was incorrect. Apparently, there was a miscommunication about the winner from the
Lubbock Chamber of commerce.
I was told that Jeff Flowers, from Benton Insurance was the winner. Turns out, it's actually Jeff Fowler, from
Aycock and Fowler, a local Lubbock insurance company! Congratulations! We look forward to working with you in the future.
Jeff contacted me today to let me know that he'd like to me with us next week, and discuss possibilities for a new website for them. We're looking forward to it.
Treo Corrupt SMS Database?
Once I accumulate about three days worth of SMS messages within my Treo 650, the SMS application will begin behaving incorrectly. For instance, incoming messages may cause the Treo to perform a restart of the phone. Deleting messages will also occasionally cause the phone to reboot.
This fix for deleting the Treo SMS Message database works to fix this problem, about half of the time,
but it does delete all of your chat and SMS logs. As quick note though: Sprint users should use ##377, not #*377 as the phone code to view the error logs.
Also, version 1.13 Firmware appears to have the same problem.
Blog Relocation
Just a quick update .... we've made some significant changes to our main website,
www.Resolution.com. Specifically, we've uploaded our
media kit, and are moving our Blogs to our website.
We will continue using
Blogger to write the blogs, but will now publish them to our own server.
In the future, this Blog will be
found at this location. The site feed will be
here.
Becton Insurance Wins The Bidding War
Our auction item, which we gave to the
Lubbock Chamber of Commerce several weeks ago, was purchased June 30 by a Jeff Flowers from
Becton Insurance, a family owned insurance company in Idalou, who service Texas and New Mexico. Jeff was the one and only bidder, and appears to have snagged an almost $2000 service package for $250, plus 10% in fees. Way to go!
We haven't yet heard from Jeff, but we look forward to hearing from him about what we might be able to help him with.
Palm Treo 650 and SharkMsg
One of my pet peeves with my Palm Treo 650 is the same gripe that I have with every other phone - how do I correspond with someone when I miss their call? I realize that they could leave me a voice mail, and I can get back to them at a later date. However, in this day and age I would like to be able to let the person know when I will be getting back to them. This is especially true of my wife, business partner, close family members, and employees who often call me from their cell phones.
Treonauts, a wonderful website and blog for fellow Treo users, had a review of a freeware program called
SharkMsg that does exactly what I am desirous of. I've only had a few hours to work with the software, but it allows me to send either a stock SMS message (similar to an IM away message) or a custom SMS message to an incoming phone caller, or to a phone caller that I recently missed.
A few simple examples:
- If one of my employees calls me from their cell phone, and I'm on a conference call with a client, rather than calling them back, I can instantly reply with a canned response, or write a new response for them. Something like "I am on a call with client XYZ, I will call you back soon."
- If I miss a call from my wife, rather than typing my response, I can reply to her phone call with a canned SMS response, or write a new response for her. Something like "Ok honey, I'll call you back very soon."
There are some great screen shots of the product on the
Treonauts website.
Email On My Palm Treo 650
I'm one of the few proud owners of the versatile
Palm Treo 650 phone / PDA in the Lubbock market, and I thought I would share some of what I've found useful while using this phone over the past 7 months. This particular post is about its email functionality.
I received this phone, flashed with version 1.12a of the
Sprint Treo ROM, as a present from my lovely wife, to attempt a simplification of my business and personal relationships. However, between January and late February I just didn't have the time to use it for anything more than a phone. It works very well as a phone, including the
BlueTooth which had been flaky on my last phone, an
LG PM-325. My two complaints are that I sounded choppy to the person I was talking to (only with BlueTooth), and the battery life when using BlueTooth was minimal with the included 1800 mA battery.
In February I took the time to get the default eMail client,
VersaMail, to work with our custom email setup. We keep our email system in our Lubbock office, and to get to the email system one has to go penetrate two firewalls (a hardware firewall/router and a secondary software firewall), and then the security on the actual mail server (which is a third machine). This requires opening up an IMAP or POP3 (I chose the superior IMAP) hole in both firewall systems, as well as a sendmail hole to allow myself to send email from the Treo. I rapidly found out that VersaMail does not get along well with our
dovecot email solution, and I had to go find a new email client.
ChatterEmail was the obvious solution. My 30 day trial with ChatterEmail ended in the purchase of the software, which is excellently supported by the developer (
Marc Blank). Without any modifications Chatter was able to read email out of our email servers. I did one small issue, a conflict between the 1.12a version of the ROM and Chatter which caused the software to go into an endless reboot loop. When I upgraded to the latest stable 1.13 Sprint ROM, the problems appear to have gone away. It also solved many other problems like the BlueTooth audio (mentioned above).My only complaint with the email functionality is that the data connection (on Sprint phones) takes over the radio and no phone calls can come through. However, this is not a Treo or a Chatter problem, but is a limitation of the Sprint CDMA protocol.
Email functionality ...... is certainly a wonderful thing!
eWorkMarkets.com
Has anyone out there worked with
eWorkMarkets.com ??
I ran across an ad that they had a few days ago, on a blog site as I recall. They are a procurement service for consultants, similar to
eLance or
Guru.com, but with a focus on all types of consulting projects not just those that are IT related. Many of the projects that I've seen up for bid are for business reorganizations, marketing consulting, and business advisors. They appear to have a very stiff upfront fee and a significant project fee on top of that.
I suppose if they are able to source a significant number of projects, then they may be worth the fee. However, I'm a bit leery of the thousands that they want up front.
Anyone worked with them?
Development Status of Project X
We're not ready to let the cat out of the bag yet about our newest software product, however, it should be quite revolutionary in the low-tech space that it's going into. We have split the development of the product into three general sections, with three different personnel working on the project. The sections are:
- Backend development
- Frontend development
- Algorithm development
Each person on the project team has worked on two different sections, to ensure that we have no specialists (I consider that to be a good thing).
Backend Development consists of working with the
Spring Framework,
Acegi Security,
Hibernate, and outputting XML. Testing is done using
Freemarker an wonderful templating language.
Frontend Development consists of working with
Prototype.js,
Scriptaculous, and other Javascript libraries. Validation and AJAX are also necessary skillsets on the frontend.
Algorithm Development is one of the most interesting, and may be the only part of the system which could be considered Intellectual Property. Needless to say, we have to compute between several hundred and several billion combinations in a rapid amount of time, and are getting to use some non-traditional programming methods to achieve the speed improvements that we would like.
So far, all three teams are working well together, and have been able to keep up with each other. No one is yet in need of being sent off with a
toilet seat -- but that could change, of course.
Toilets A Go-Go
Rick Segal (who I found through
Brad Feld's post today) pointed out some serious issues with context today, in his post about his
toilet seat. Though I'm not inclined to send my developers into a customer's office with a toilet seat, I do understand what he's talking about.
The power of context is certainly amazing, and it can make people do some unusual things. For instance, most of our male developers go from
Power Developers into a
gaggle of tweens as soon as someone brings a female into the office. My employees didn't say or do anything they wouldn't normally do, but now there's something (the female!) out of place. Try taking your kids to McDonalds, not a problem. Now take those same kids, preferably a two or three year old, into your local
4 or 5 star restaurant, and see how the patrons react. You may end up with
this particular story, from
Waiters Rant. Need more excitement?
Take a normal pocket knife, the kind used for cutting shrink-wrapped electronics open, and stand in line to get on an airplane. In Lubbock, Texas, no one will bat an eye, but you will be asked to ship it home. In Las Vegas, Nevada you'll be lucky to not be arrested.
Back to developers and business people in general. Once a project starts up, or the details are all supposedly ironed out it's easy to forget that you have to pick your head up, look around, and make sure that you're still on track from time to time. Hopefully, if you're not on track, someone will gently nudge you in the right direction. Otherwise, you may realize that your manager is sending you to the grocery store, with a toilet seat.
[By the way, Rick has got to be fast on that BlackBerry to get all of that out while waiting around in
Home Depot. That, or he's as handy as I am, and got to make multiple trips.]
Recurring Payments and Billing
Our next project, which is still under wraps but will target the Hospitality Industry, will need some sort of electronic payment interface. We're using Java on the backend, but hopefully anyone that we integrate with will have sort of language-agnostic interface.
We're currently looking at several different options, and the key features we're looking for are quite basic:
- Ability to accept payments for Credit Cards and eChecks
- Handle recurring payments (for monthly, quarterly, every 6-months, annual, etc...).
Right now, we're in looking at
TrustCommerce,
PayPal, and
Google Checkout as well as the possibility of rolling our own service using
Authorize.net. The Business of Software Forum has had some interesting threads about this
here,
here, and
here. Today,
Particletree has an article on the process required to sidestep PayPal (and others) and save some money in the process.
We've never tackled online payments directly, usually tackling the payment processing through a third party hosting an eCommerce script, so this should be an interesting task over the next few weeks.
Twttr
Talk about saying "Hey, I thought of that."
Odeo, the makers of odeo/play (a podcasting aggregator-type service) apparently released some new software recently, called
twttr. This new software appears to be similar to
DodgeBall, which
Google bought up some time ago. I've discussed a similar service more than once with
Resolution Software employees.
The thing that I find interesting about the service is that, well, it's almost there, but missing two things. As a user of the service, you can send SMS messages to their SMS number (40404), and from there, anyone in your group will get it. Imagine being able to let all of your friends / contacts know that you were "
Hungry", or "
Headed to Lunch", with one fell swoop. That's what the service does. It also archives all messages on the website, so you can login and see a running history / timeline of the messages between yourself and your friends. You can also view the messages from friends of your friends.
Although it's something of an interesting software / Web 2.0 widget, I don't really understand (1) The target audience and (2) How they're going to make money. Business fundamentals.
Most users will not want their messages archived and publicly viewable. This is, unfortunately, going to keep many from using it, I would think. Additionally, I would think that the ability to specify different groups of contacts. For instance, I might want to message all of my employees that I'm "Headed to Lunch", or "In a Meeting". It might be useful to have my friends, and wife, in a separate group, that I can message "Time for a Beer", or "Headed to the Lubbock Symphony". The two wouldn't have the same context of messages. Anyone using the service would need to have only one context of contacts, the way that the software is currently setup.
The second issue, how they are going to make money, is always a problem. The
FAQ says very clearly that there won't be any charges for the basic services. So, there might be charges in the future. But how do you charge someone for sending and receiving SMS messages? Their phone provider does a decent job of that already. I suppose they could embed advertising in the messages some how, but that would be done BEST if it was somehow tied to GPS. However, that's no trivial task.
I would think that they've got a few issues to work out before they have any sort of mainstream adoption. And I would think that the simple fact that they have two products, neither of which are likely generating any money (last I checked, Odeo was free).
SpoonFedBib.com
I've blogged about the launch of our
SpoonFedBib.com website in the past, which was to have some significant fuctionality, including the ability to scour the archives of the
Library Of Congress searching for books (by ISBN number), and would then store the book information into our local database for students to use. The system was designed to help students with their research, and was going to be developed and given to students at no cost.
However, over the past few months we have done very little development on it, and it's not fully functional as-is. The reasoning is simple ... we had two software projects that both needed our attention. SpoonFedBib.com is one, and the other one is still under wraps. We have chosen to work on the one which is still under wraps.
Don't worry, we haven't abandoned SpoonFedBib.com, we are just focusing our efforts on a different project for the time being.
Did you know ....
... Baking Soda in the Fridge is
pretty useless? The
wonders of marketing will never cease.
BBB
I received a request for some information in the
BBB yesterday, which claimed that someone (likely in the Lubbock area) wanted some general information about my company, and then gave me a form and a URL to fill out this information. It said nothing about who wanted the information, or why they wanted it, just that they wanted it.
I went ahead and gave over the information that they were looking for, though I think it might have been more straightforward if the person requesting the information just called me, or came into the office. Even better would be if the BBB let me know who wanted the information, and for what purpose, so I could decide whether or not to respond.
Anyone know, does the BBB really have its
roots in the mob? I've known for a long time that the BBB is NOT a government entity, but most people still think that it is, and that a BBB approval (or their $400 sticker) was worth something. Hint:
It's really not worth anything.
Lubbock Real Estate
It's that time again ... to find a new home for my business.
Our lease is coming up for expiration, and the new landlord want us out, and quite frankly, we want out as well. We've been clashing over parking, doors, decorations, signage, security systems, and fire codes since they moved in.
Yesterday I started calling around Lubbock to see about other commercial properties which we might be interested in, and came across a quandary for us. We've never had retail frontage, because most of what we do requires that we be working without significant outside interruption,
and walk-ins create external interruption. This implies office space, much like an attorney or a CPA might use. However, retail frontage would certainly improve our exposure, depending on where we are located at, and could be worth some extra $$$'s per foot to have the exposure and signage.
I met yesterday with Kay Ward, a realtor at
Westmark Realtors, who showed me some space at a nearby office / retail complex, and although the building would be fine for our usage, the price was a little higher than we've been paying, and it's also next door to a new competitor in the area. [Side note:
At the competitors new offices, which appeared to consist of 3 desks constructed for 2x4's and plywood, there were several interns milling about, who explained that they were a "full service marketing and advertising" company, but couldn't give any more information than that, as they were waiting for their bosses to get back from lunch and tell them what to do.]
Today, I'm hoping to get to tour some of Lubbock with
Michael Lamberts, who appears to have several properties which might be potential new homes for us in the very near future.
Ruby on Rails
We always enjoy looking at new technology, especially technology that's potentially poised to revolutionize the markets that we work with.
Anytime a technology can claim that it makes developers happier to be at work AND it appears to make the general "day-to-day" work of programming less tedious AND it makes claims that it's faster to develop in than the leading 800-lb gorilla, I'm interested in hearing about it.
A business partner of mine has been using
Ruby to develop some test cases for one of his clients, and is using it as a prototype for future work that we may be able to expand upon for other clients (specifically, monitoring of remote systems and building test cases for other software packages using Ruby). He just finished up his first week-and-a-half with Ruby, and has nothing but good things to say about it.
He thinks that spending a few weeks to convert some of our internal software, and potentially moving most of (or all of) our clients over to Ruby, could be done quickly, and with an extremely fast ROI. More fascinating is that future "features" to our software could be done faster than are currently being done.
Even so, most of Ruby's current attraction is from a group called
37Signals, who employs the creator of
Rails. Rails is Ruby's "crowning glory", as a framework that wraps up most of the best of the Java frameworks, plus some, into a single framework.
Some useful Ruby on Rails tips can be found here.
Root DNS Servers
This is a very neat map, showing off the root DNS servers around the world.
Just in case you want (or need) to know where the nearest DNS root server is, you can check
here.
Click Fraud, Let It Happen?
This week, Eric Schmidt exposed something that I'm a bit chaffed about, perhaps more than just "a bit". Specifically, his thoughts on click fraud are that it's just going to happen, there's not really a lot that they can do about it, and as such, they (Google) will assume that advertisers will simply fold the cost of click fraud into their ROI calculations. Obviously, I'm paraphrasing, but you can read more about it here, where
Eric Schmidt speaks about Click Fraud.
This is the exact view (and solution) of the problem that I would expect from an academic professor, and reminds me of studies I've seen describing problems that could have innovative solutions, but that then go "Well, that's just how it is..." in the conclusion. Eric is right, to an extent.
Click Fraud is factored into the ROI that we show for our clients. As such, the CPA cost includes an extra 20% factored in, as 20% of our clicks are fraudulent. More, on some days. Less, on others. But usually, right around 20%.
The issue I have with his statement is not the statement he makes about ROI's. Because, he's right.
Advertisers already calculate the click fraud into their ROI. What he's wrong about is that advertisers will ignore the fact that their advertising costs are through the roof, and obey the almighty
Google as Google drives traffic. Because traffic (volume) and ROI are not the same.
Here's an example:
On MSN, right now, we are seeing (for a sample campaign) a CPC cost of around $3.00, and a CPA cost of around $12.50. Factored into that is that we have found very few, if any, fraudulent clicks on MSN (for this campaign), so MSN is either doing a really good job, or the various click-bots, etc... haven't found these keywords on MSN. This delivers around 33 clicks / day, and about 8 conversions.On Google, for the same set of keywords, we are seeing a CPC cost of around $3.50, and a CPA cost of around $15.00. Factored into that is that we see around 20% of the clicks as fraudulent on Google, although Google will not reveal anything about what it does, or doesn't, charge for. This delivers around 400 clicks / day, and about 93 conversions.In this case, Google is doing a decent job delivering volumes of traffic. However, if the budget allowed for (and it does in this clients' case) MSN to be able to generate more traffic, we would allocate the money to MSN rather than to Google. Why? The ROI is much greater.The other issue, which he completely side-steps, is that from a financial point of view, Google has no need or desire to solve the click fraud problem. The theory goes, that as long as Google provides volume, and a "reasonable" ROI, then they will be able to drive traffic, and the average advertiser will have to advertise on Google to ensure that they get the volume of traffic that they (or their clients) need.
As such, if the advertiser pays for 20% of clicks that really are junk, Google has no incentive to credit them 20% of their spend. By giving back 20% of the clicks, Google doesn't get any new advertisers. They do not get a credit from the government, or any new traffic to claim. In fact, if they did pay back for click fraud, they would lose 20% of their income (almost all of their $18 billion annual gross income is from AdWords). So, what reasoning do they (or any search engine) have to solve the click fraud problem?
None.
RedHat Linux
At Resolution Software, we've been using
RedHat Linux since it was around, and
SCO UNIX before that (as well as
Slackware and
IRIX). Over the past decade, we've tried out many different variations of Linux and Windows for our clients specific needs.
For instance, when
Gentoo Linux showed up, it was very popular with the "hardware crowd" that wanted everyone to build the software specifically for their hardware (without the bloat that other distributions had). It seemed like a good idea at the time, but we found that it made some hardware upgrades difficult or impossible, although when it worked, it was blazingly fast.
Other distributions that we've used and liked very much are
KNOPPIX, which works tremendously well for recovering and working on broken Windows machines (usually better than Windows itself), and
Damn Small Linux which is phenomenal for resurrecting old machines which Windows won't work on any more, or is just too slow. We haven't yet done much testing with
Ubuntu or
Kubuntu, but we will be doing so sometime this year.
However, in the meantime, the best all-around distribution that we have found is Red Hat Linux, which as of a year or two ago, became
Red Hat Fedora Core Linux. It is amazingly stable, and we've deployed it as everything from database servers, web servers, fax servers, mail servers, and replacements for Windows servers (using
Samba). We use Red Hat for all of our production machines in our Lubbock offices.
This article showed up yesterday on
Digg about some things that Red Hat has been doing (I'm told that
Google uses Red Hat on most of their systems), which has some interesting statistics about Red Hat. Specifically, their net profit % has gone down over the years, although the net profit $$'s have been going up. Additionally, they are spending more and more on R&D -- which is great, because they are supporting more and more Open Source projects, especially with their acquisition of
JBoss.
Hibernate
A post over at
The Server Side recently focused on some of the good and bad of
Hibernate, a technology that we've had the privilege of using more than once or twice. In fact, we've got Hibernate going in about six different projects, to varying degrees, and have to agree with most of what
Shine Technologies has
to say about Hibernate.
It's a great technology, it beats the heck out of writing JDBC statements all day long, but you better have some RAM on the machine that's running Hibernate, and you cannot forget that the end result is that your hitting a database -- and databases are often the kink point in any large scale application.
Back from California
We had a great trip to California for a wedding;
Dan and Angie tied the knot in a beautiful ceremony. We stayed at a local chain, called the
Ayres Inn.We managed to make it to both
Newport Beach and
Laguna Beach, on different days, for some great fun-in-the-sun on the beach, and playing in the waves. Our last day there (July 4th), we made a stop by
Knotts Berry Farm for a bunch of roller-coaster happiness.
While driving around Newport Beach, we saw the headquarters for
ClickXchange.com, one of the larger affiliate advertising companies, with which
Resolution Software works with on a daily basis. We also managed to get some great food at a place called
Cafe Tu Tu Tango. If you get a chance to eat there, I highly recommend the lamb chops, the clams, and the flan.
