this is time for labels that Adilas has already billed out for.   this particular job was for MPX New Jersey as they had four new custom labels per Kelly

- Steve would like a one page document that talks about history of adilas and how the hosting of the system evolved. Different server levels - shared hosting, semi-dedicated servers, full dedicated servers, VPS (virtual private servers), stacks/clusters (linked and joined dedicated servers), etc. Steve would like to use this document to help with sales and up sales of systems.

- Josh popped in and set up some times to meet with both Steve and I. We also talked about some other possible options using cookies and printing settings. CFCookie and CFPrint. Josh is working on a number of smaller projects.

- Eric joined and had some questions about special accounts and where we are headed from there. We setup a time to talk later today about taking special accounts out to the gift card level. That would be awesome.

Small video recording with Wayne. He started out with a question... Is the world flat or round?

- People will often use examples to base their judgements off of.

- How we think and what we think we know. The perception of knowledge.

- Senses and how people perceive things - say choosing and seeing a color - lots of variations - first the physical pieces are different, secondly how does the brain perceive things. 

- Distraction, multi-tasking, true focus

- Training and a preset of memory items - recalling learned pieces and then mixing those things together as things happen in real time. 

- In certain scenarios, we start filling in certain blanks based on what are brains are giving us vs what is being actually shared.

- At times, some of the people involved can almost see a picture in their head of what is needed and where things are going and how things will work. They have the original vision even before they start into the project. Some people will start catching the vision as it starts to unfold over time.

- Questioning our own belief systems - checking things at the door (to the mind).

- Meeting expectations - Was what was delivered what was really asked for? This is hard to hit this mark. Often we are off by some degree or another.

- Small story of linked pieces (security based) and what people perceived to be the problem. Sometimes they pointed to one piece but technically, it may have been some other contributing factor or some other process that occurred. Some times the end user, using our site, they see a certain problem and assume that it means something. However behind the scenes we have multiple servers, different technologies, permissions, settings, user interface, etc. All of those things get mixed together to make the outcome.

- In Adilas, we have a mixed bag due to how many different things we offer and how many different ways these people use what we have to offer. That makes it a challenge. Wayne also started talking about some historical aspects and how things came to be. At the time, based on the needs, the knowledge, the skills, the technology, the outcome came from those mixed variables. If looked at from that historical perspective, things may make more sense vs looking at things later on based on a new set of variables.

- Group effort - it takes a village to raise a child.

- Wayne was having fun and wanted to serve in the church - As part of that, he moved to Portugal and wanted to get involved. He has been involved. Kinda like a senior mission of sorts. Sometimes higher leadership callings are a ton of work. Wayne was talking about different callings, responsibilities, and options to serve. As you get into things deeper, you end up learning tons from who you are working with and serving vs just teaching them in a one-way direction. It becomes a great two-way street of learning. We are constantly learning. Enjoy those learning opportunities.

- Often we think that we are right about something (pick a subject). If someone proves us wrong (in a nice way) and helps us think in a new direction, we become an advocate for that cause. This really comes into play when working on a team or in a team setting.

- Customers - super important. We get paid to do a job (whatever that job is). We may not get extra praise for doing our job. Our customers have certain expectations. They may not compliment you on doing your job. If they, the customers, have a problem... and you help them and fix the problem, you could gain a customer for life. That is where you get an elevated level of praise.

- Customers are always right except when they are wrong - kinda funny. At times, you even need to fire a customer. Wayne was talking about being a nice guy vs transacting business and still being a nice guy. There may be a difference. Being able to say no.

- Rationalization - still thinking of being in a start-up mode. We are getting better and better at that. It has been a slow process. We were talking about sales, but this could go into a lot of other areas.

- Steve was talking about some future goals and where we want to take things. We would like to keep progressing the ball down the road.

- Light talk about server issues and getting help from our team (aka Wayne on the server side). Good stuff.

- The dream and where are we headed... even with a dream, we have had multiple 90 degree corners that we didn't expect.

- The reoccurring revenue model is kinda like an insurance agent and basing things off of those reoccurring services and playing as a group.

- Pioneering the road. We are constantly unrolling and watching what is happening all around us. We don't have a book or a full plan to follow.

- When a new business starts... it tends to be on a smaller level. Everybody knows what is going on and hopefully following the same vision. As you grow, you start getting some new variables and they may not be part of that same vision. As it grows from there, it could completely change. It grows in needs, complexity, resources, etc. Sometimes the original startup people may not like and/or accept all of the changes and complexity.

- Light talks about changing job titles and job responsibilities. What are you passionate about? Do you like what you are doing right now?

- What is our model? Currently we are trying to structure our model so that it could keep persisting. We honestly don't know where all of these things are going. Wayne said... Ok, how do you get there (meaning the vision and dream)?

- What is it that we are selling? What is our model (in writing)? That is somewhat hard to put a finger on. It is so flexible and versatile it makes it hard. We have a lot of customization and lower priced offerings. Some of those pieces have been huge for us. From big to small - we are finding that if we can help the customers out with their dreams, things for us keep unfolding and unfolding for us and for them. Taking the next logical step. We don't want a tidal wave, but we would like to increase sales.

- Questions about managing pricing and updates (what is rolled out) - Who pays for what and who uses what?

- Wayne has a brother, Scott, who does a lot of consulting on sales.

- Steve's idea is you get everything vs selling a multiple module application. It seems easier to sell the whole thing and then just set the prices based on their sizes (business sizes). We talked about seed money and even doing some project fund matching to get the project pushed forward. We have full custom (black box code) and we have core products that everybody gets. Steve was saying that we are a somewhat community funded, open source product, but still slightly different. We are a software as a service type model (SaaS).

- Wayne was talking about direct metrics - What are our customers using and doing inside of the system? What can we measure and what can we check? Basically figuring out a price per value type metric. Subscription and what are you getting for your dollar value. We have even talked about giving the software away for free and living off of the other services (byproducts) that get produced. We have talked about charging for hosting, storage, processing, etc. vs just charging for the software.

- One of the extra services that they were talking about was "business coaching". Sometimes, as we go down the road, we have seen some of these same scenarios play out and we are gaining knowledge. Some of the knowledge and experience is worth quite a bit of money. What if the system could help coach someone through the process through navigation, processes, and training.

- Steve is trying to get into some of these CPA (certified public accountants) groups and helping them run with all of the off shooting products and byproducts. If we allow for some white labeling options, these CPA groups could really run with some of the other pieces of the puzzle.

- Steve turned some of his thoughts to the adilas café and getting this single login and then they could come and work, play, learn, train, buy, sell, and participate in the adilas community. We just build the software and then let the others who are around us help provide the other outside services that are needed.

- Steve would really like to help change the business model and the ways that employees and employers work and coordinate together. As a fun side note, we, at Adilas, are already doing some of this. It is very loose right now, but we are currently helping companies get interconnected and plugged into the correct pieces (reps, consultants, designers, customer code, business coaching, oversite, fulfillment, etc.). If we use the adilas café correctly, we could allow so many other parties and/or individuals to help provide a piece of the puzzle for any number of different companies. We would like to make that part of the adilas model.

- Wayne was talking about even outsourcing inventory control and inventory management. Often we think that topic, inventory management, resides inside the company, but it doesn't have to. More analytics, more oversite, more management tools, etc. We could build that.

- We, as a company, need to really look into the user login process and how to separate the users from the systems (single sign-on). They the users, need to exists outside the systems but still be able to play within the different systems. Eventually, we want to turn the request and accept process out to the users.

- The deeper we get, the deeper we are seeing more and more needs to be built out on the global adilas café model. The system is too big for one single person to know everything. It seems natural for the adilas community to help fill those needs.

- Wayne - What is your action list? Where do we head from here?

- Steve - Let's get the servers and database stuff super stable. Then we work on the single sign-on and the database split up (datasource and/or world building model). Build up the adilas café and the adilas community - this could be the adilas marketplace, adilas university, and the main system (adilas as a platform).

- Wayne wanted to know what the tick list was and then also how are we going to make that happen? Goals, budgets, timeframes, etc. Basically, going beyond the dream and into the logistics of getting there. Making assignments and allocating funds and time and resources.

- https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/developers_notebook_home.cfm?q=adilas%20caf&sort=asc - link for some research on the adilas café concept.

- If we were to get super busy, say 10 times or 100 times more than what we have, we would need some major help. The adilas café and the adilas market would really need to be in place for that to happen.

- From Wayne - The art of leadership is helping other people do what they want to do because they want to do it.

See attached for the video recording of this meeting.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

After the meeting, Steve and I kept talking about some options.

- We could use the camp adilas project as a precursor and even be able presell an industry specific buildout. That could be really cool.

- Help push the adilas café and help people see that they could make some great money by learning adilas and providing different skills.

- If we got enough of the community into the adilas café, they could virtually help staff the adilas university model.

- Steve talked about giving away personal adilas accounts and then allowing them to schedule, train, or do work for other clients who need their help.

- Steve wants to build the ultimate business tool and then let others provide the services that come from that product.

- Light talks about playing at the wall (API sockets) and custom white label solutions.

- Our goal is to head North (speaking about a general business plan vs a perfect goal setting and fully budgeted business plan). Everything that we are doing is in a constant state of flux. That gets really hard to nail down.

- There is a fun paradigm shift taking place using Adilas and the adilas café and adilas market as tools to help solve the employer/employee relationship. Tons of great options.

- We are surrounded by tons of cofounders. Each person is playing a role.

- The next biggest thing is a step in the right direction.

- We are going to keep breaking our projects into more and more chewable pieces. That will help with energy, moral, and code sign-off.

Eric and Brandon had a small brainstorming session on gift cards and using them inside of special accounts. See attached for some new brainstorming notes. The newest notes are at the bottom under a date of 12/2/19.

Eric is going to keep pushing along. He is also planning on doing some research to get some ideas how other systems play with and use gift cards. We will be circling back around later for more planning, meetings, and development.

After Eric and I were done, I spent the rest of the time doing email stuff.

I got an email from Josh and he had to help out with some family stuff. I pushed up a small file for him to test and we will reschedule our meeting. I used the time to do more emails, pay bills, and coordinate meetings with other guys and gals on the adilas team.

Bryan and I got together and merged in some code. We did a small code branch from his work with expo. We then pulled back up some sub inventory searches and exports from back in September and merged in some of that code (one of my branches). We did some light testing and Bryan will be taking some of that code and pulling it over to advanced PO searches for sub inventory. The new code was dealing with advanced sub inventory searches and exports on invoices. Slowly making our way through the different reports.

Steve, Dustin, and Danny were on the morning meeting. Each of them checked in and lightly reported about where they were at on their different projects. Steve had some questions about some of the up and coming servers and the states and status of those servers. I mentioned to Steve that maybe we need some kind of official request form vs just emails and verbal requests. Those are hard to track.

We also had some discussions about the efforts that we are trying to make to get our guys and people to help contribute and use the elements of time to keep track of things. Steve has been a great driving force for good in that direction. He is even starting to tie in the elements of time id numbers to the guys invoices and pay. That will help. Sadly, when it is tied to someone's pay, it starts to become important. Once again, using the system and making it be the bad guy (in a way). We've done that before.

Alan lead some team training again this morning. See attached for a copy of the recording. We had Alan, Bryan, Danny, Dustin, Josh, Steve, and myself in the training session. We covered recursion (interloping functions and/or self calling functions) and got into closures as well. Some of these are somewhat advanced techniques. Along with that, we lightly talked about base cases, how to jump our of recursion processes, map, reduce, filter, each, stacks, queues, and other programming options.

We spent some time talking about FILO (first in last out), LIFO (last in first out), and FIFO (first in first out) operations. These are pretty common in computer programming and how to loop through various records. As a fun side note, those same terms are used in accounting and inventory tracking on how to account for items being moved through a company. Interesting.

We did some light dives into the underlying Java libraries and using Java stacks (arrays). Alan went over some options and member functions like push, pop, size, etc. We also talked about using built-in member functions to help format and string things together in modern script languages.

See attached for a copy of the training and recording.

Shannon and I met and went over some ideas and questions presented by Chuck. We pushed up his copy of the presentation gallery outline. Some of his questions and comments were in yellow. See attached.

As Shannon and I were talking. We decided that we wanted the new presentation gallery to only go so deep. We virtually wanted to put a small floor on it and help it have a bottom (a border or boundary). We don't want it to go any deeper than 4 to 5 levels deep. Our plans deal with drill-down options, icon tiles, icon lists, awesome (static) screenshots or collages of screenshots or small videos at the bottom most level.

We talked about showing related items in different places, where they turn up... there are pro and cons to that. Some people may think, I've already seen that section, I'm not interested in going in there again. Other people may need multiple options to get to that section due to their angle of approach and/or there interest levels. If we repeat certain key features, it may actually play into the system mentality and system thinking type model. Once again, pros and cons to both approaches.

After we finished going through Chuck's new ideas and questions, Shannon and I went back to more brainstorming on CRM (customer relationship management) and CMS (content management systems) in our presentation gallery outline. We will post those changes as they become more defined.

Adding a setting to the Fulfillment Homepage that allows control of the refresh rate.

12/3/19: Just wanted to give you all an update that I have spoken to Chris and I have determined the issue they are having.   This is not something new, just something that sat on the back burner for a while.   I have an idea how to get it fixed so I am looking into that piece of code now.   Also, they are not utilizing the discount engine so I have a meeting with him tomorrow morning to help him play around with it.   

12/3/19: We’re having an issue with our receipts when we print anything with a discount. For some reason it completely cuts off the amounts on the right side of receipt, but only when discounts are applied every other time it’s fine. Got any suggestions?

Both Alan and I joined the GoToMeeting and spent a couple more hours working on the tax-v5 code branch. This is the round 5 code changes for the sales tax project from about a year ago. We have a ton of new code that needs to be merged in, that has been basically sitting on shelf due to who has time to review it and merge it in. We are working back on that project and hoping to keep chipping away at it. Once done, we'll switch and work on another project. Alan and I are using this time to help each other get through and/or push through some of these long or grueling type projects (not the most fun but it needs to be done stuff).

Met with Chuck and went over some ideas that Shannon and I had come up with from an earlier meeting. Chuck and I reviewed his changes to the presentation gallery outline and we made a few more notes. Some of the new things are in yellow.

After that, we started looking at the next round on the camp adilas project. Chuck is taking his Adobe XD (layout, graphics, mock-ups, and design work) and moving it into real web code (HTML and CSS and JavaScript). Super cool and I was amazed at how well the web versions were a complete replica of the graphic mock-ups. I even had to ask Chuck, is this a graphic or code based. That is awesome.

Anyways, we went over a few things and then even looked at some code. Really exciting. As part of our conversation, I approved Chuck to bill us for some JavaScript training on a weekly basis. The ideal would be between 4-5 hours a week to help him improve on those skills. I was really happy with what I was seeing on the HTML and CSS side of things.

See attached for a couple small screenshots. Two of them are HTML/CSS pages (actual web code) and the other is a graphic mock-up and an actual web page.

Nice and quite morning. I spent the time doing emails and recording notes from yesterday.

Touching base with Alan on different projects. We also made a small plan for our meeting later today.

Wayne jumped on the meeting after Alan left. We ended up going over a number of questions about the servers. As part of that meeting, Wayne released the data 11 box to me for final testing and okaying for production (going live). We talked about a small internal process and that should help with communications.

Shawn joined the meeting and we touched base on 2020 tax and withholding updates. We decided that Shawn would take care of the new numbers and data and I would handle the PDF's for 1099's and W-2's.

Wayne released the data 11 server to me earlier today. I went in and updated files, checked settings, and updated some shared database tables and ran some database updates. The data 11 server is now ready to go and I sent an email to Wayne, Alan, Steve, Cory, and Shari O. letting them know that they could start adding clients to that machine.

Working with Alan on the sales tax round 5 branch. We are in the middle of updating and merging the files into the master branch. The old code branch had a number of merge conflicts, so we created a new branch (tax-v5-new) and are reverse merging in code to get rid of the merge conflicts. I was back merging code and Alan was working on custom black box code that was part of the project. Mostly a work session today.

Emails and recording notes.

A bunch of us were gathered for the morning meeting. Danny and Steve were talking about sales options for the camp adilas project when I joined. After that, Wayne, Steve, Danny, Dustin, Alan, Eric, and myself were on the call. A few random questions about servers, aggregated totals, custom database instances, etc.

Wayne lead out the training session. We had Alan, Bryan, Dustin, Josh, Wayne, Brandon, and Steve on the meeting.

- From Wayne - focusing on the process vs just the code. Strive for test driven design.

- Going step by step vs trying to design the whole thing at once.

- Currently, we all do testing as we are building the new code or features. The test driven design process leaves a virtual trail (crumb trail) of what was done and what was tested. That becomes very valuable as the processes get more and more complicated.

- It may take awhile longer on the frontend, but over time, you will save time and be able to have more confidence in your code and subsequence changes later on.

- We went through a number of test options. As a side note, Wayne spent some time making sure that we know that we can create mock datasets and be able to fake the results.

- Unit testing and making sure you are testing the smallest unit of that function. Be specific.

See attached for a link to the video recording.

Shannon and I met up and pushed up some older documents that we found. They were for a class that Shannon taught back in October of 2015 for the up and coming adilas developers.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=371&id=4040 - Link to a page with 9 different class outlines for exploring business functions

https://data0.adilas.biz/adilas_training.cfm - If you want to see the videos use this link - search for the name Shannon and you will find the videos for those classes

We did some exploring in some of the older pieces and then rolled into the content management stuff on our outline for the presentation gallery.

We found these files in a folder called Exploring Business Functions class. We don't think they were ever uploaded but we wanted to add them to our documentation here. They were created in October and November of 2015.

Met with Chuck for about half an hour. We touched base on a few things and then went into some of the new progress on the camp adilas project. He is working on coding the pages and showed me some new pages. One of the new things was the ability to pop up a modal (sub window on top of the main window). The new code looked really cool and we also talked a little bit about some relative positioning of some of the sub menus and what not.

Chuck had a couple of questions about the design and which direction to go in. We switched gears and looked at some older sites/pages inside of adilas where we had to make similar decisions (what to hide, what to show, and how to pass in hidden choices). We also decided that Russell would be a good match for helping to wire up this application when the time comes.

See attached for a couple of new screenshots.

After the meeting. I spent the rest of the time doing emails and recording other notes from the day.

Alan and I met up and worked a couple of hours on the sales tax round 5 project. This deals with custom tax rates 6-10 and some other custom naming options. 2 hour work session. I was merging files and Alan was updating black box pages and checking code on different servers. All part of the same project.

Cory and Josh were talking about the number of clicks, settings, and being able to show/hide certain fields. The two hot points were the shopping cart and the PO (purchase orders) page. Basically, getting items into the system and then being able to sell out those items quickly. We are leaning towards some shopping cart settings and also breaking down the needs into smaller steps as we know that some of the pieces may end up being really big.

We talked about sketching things out on paper/pencil and then moving things into a graphic mock-up, coding and then wiring things up.

We showed both Josh and Cory some of the new graphic mock-ups that are being done by both Jonathan and Chuck. We looked at some of their ideas and mock-ups to talk about options, layouts, and configuration options. We talked about showing them, meaning our clients, some of the mock-ups and graphics of where we are heading, that would be way better than having them design things from the ground up.

Managing customer expectations. That is always a challenge. As we were getting deeper and deeper, we are seeing more and more needs/wants of being able to configure and customize their own settings and such.

One of the projects that we talked about was dealing with updates and helping to let our clients know about certain updates before they get rolled out, especially if the updates may have consequences and/or possible issues. Some of the high traffic areas are carts, invoices, and state compliance stuff. We talked about delaying some of the updates instead of just pushing up new code.

Josh recommended a update log that could be searched and even have a small blame section - who coded it. Hopefully blame is the wrong word, but we all know what that means.

Maybe a different section, like the developer's notebook, where we could publish some of the updates and make announcements. We also talked about scheduling the code pushes and making sure that we aren't running faster than we are able.

Molly joined us towards the end of the meeting and had some great comments. Good stuff.

Molly and Spencer were talking about phase 2 in their woo-commerce project. It is a cross between woo-commerce and a backend adilas API socket integration (codenamed wooAdilas project alias). They were talking about some of the newer Adilas features such as customer loyalty points, discount engine stuff, gram tracking, tiered pricing models, etc.

They would like to get their hands on more of the backend database information on some of these newer topics. We talked about possible custom API sockets, new public facing API sockets, or even passing virtual cart data back and forth. As the discussion progressed, we even came up with an idea of a database storage record called a cloud cart that we process and fill in the data and then pass that back to the user through the API socket connections. Just an idea.

At the end of the meeting, we talked about another project and which developer would be the best fit. Molly is doing great and headed in the right direction. She has been interfacing with the different developers very well. That is awesome. She gets my vote. Good stuff.

Emails and recording notes from the day.

Russell gave me a phone call and we chatted for about half an hour. He is going to be working with Chuck on a number of projects and we chatted about priorities and direction. He is recommending that we do a cost analyst on the camp adilas project. We talked for awhile about both seen and unseen costs and hidden benefits as well. Great conversation. Russell has instructions to keep working with Chuck, do some project management, coding his own projects for adilas, oversite, and working on a new adilas business model with dependables and cofounders. Lots of interesting things. Good stuff.

This sort of goes with making a more user friendly po process. But a way to bulk print all barcode labels on the PO would save clients heaps of time.

Danny, Dustin, Steve, Wayne, and I were on the meeting. Danny and Steve were working on some custom logic when I joined in. After that, Wayne had some questions on security, internal processes, and systems audits. He has a client that has tons of questions about these topics. He was just looking for some information. We sent him a link dealing with some Q and A's that we answered.

https://news.adilas.biz/2019/10/25/adilas-database-information/ - q and a about servers and database stuff

- Outsource and use Newtek (the server farm) for all special needs - backups, disaster recovery, virtualization, limited access, and other service plans.

Steve and I spent some time talking about database design and aggregated data totals. We ended up talking about grouping, flagging, tagging, and how to manage those loops and/or processes. As part of our design we ended up talking about the phase from Eric - Extract, transform, and load. We dived in deeper on some of those pieces and tried to make some plans.

Focusing on what we have... We have to start there. We love to promise things but that always takes time.

Steve and I were having a conversation about sales and how to use what we have and then building what they need, meaning our clients. We also talked about getting new clients and/or helping to service the existing clients by capturing some of the byproduct services (setup, training, consulting, design, custom code, oversight, management, etc.).

Tons of new setup for a new development laptop for me. Lots of running database update scripts, getting code snippets in place, and setting up my local environment. This tiny element of time is only a fraction of what it really takes. I've probably got 2-3 full days into setting up all of the pieces that go along with a new developer instance. You have Adobe ColdFusion, MySQL database servers, IDE's (where you do your code - your development environment), Git (code repository), email, GoToMeeting, Zoom, files, photos, scans, web/browser settings, OS (operating system) setup, Microsoft Office, Adobe products (code, graphics, and other tools), printers, FTP (file transfer protocol), custom tools, etc. The list goes on and on. It literally takes days.

Working with Steve and Dustin on their cultivation stuff. We were talking about clean-up reports and clean-up routines and how to help their clients with some of their processes. After that, Steve and I had some conversations on how to help some other clients and what options were available. We really do have a lot of options.

Working more on the tax-v5-new branch for the sales tax version 5 updates. Merging in files from code branch to code branch.

We met up and pushed up some new code for some white label pieces. We also briefly talked about the update and scan inventory items to help with a delayed update for the inventory counts (cycle counts or update inventory counts).

On the morning meeting this morning with Steve, Alan, and Wayne. Most of the meeting was pretty casual. Light conversations but nothing of major importance. Most of us were doing our own thing and making small comments back and forth. Light prep work for some upcoming training, later today.

Alan did some team training today. We had Brandon, Alan, Bryan, Dustin, Josh, Russell, and Wayne on the meeting. The main topics today were dealing with closures such as map, reduce, filter, and each.

- Using each - iterate through each element.

- Using filter - limit records based on a specific condition.

- Using map - modify or transform each element.

- Using reduce - convert data into new type.

- As a syntax help tip... most of the closures have this format for the possible arguments - value, index, array or key, value, struct.

- Alan like the reduce function - lots of power. As a note, when using reduce, there is a previous and a starting value (where did you start and what are you currently working with that was possibly altered from a previous loop).

See attached for the video recording.

Met up with Shannon and did a session on the presentation gallery. We were working on bullet points under CRM (customer relationship management) and CMS (content management systems). See below for a small list... still in the building and editing process.

1. Business Functions

1.1. Sales
1.1.1. Inventory tracking
1.1.1.1. Start to finish inventory tracking
1.1.1.2. Item usage histories
1.1.1.3. Unlimited
1.1.1.4. Reports, exports
1.1.1.5. Images, scans, multimedia
1.1.1.6. Units of measure
1.1.1.7. General items
1.1.1.8. Serialized items (stock/units)
1.1.1.9. Time or services (unlimited)
1.1.1.10. Fulfillment
1.1.1.11. Sub inventory (parent/child)
1.1.1.12. Transfers
1.1.1.13. Internal builds (manufacturing)
1.1.1.14. Ecommerce settings
1.1.1.15. Updating inventory counts

1.1.2. POS (Point of Sale)
1.1.2.1. Invoicing
1.1.2.2. Quoting/Ordering
1.1.2.3. Secure shopping cart
1.1.2.4. Barcoding
1.1.2.5. Custom buttons
1.1.2.6. Discounts & campaigns
1.1.2.7. General items
1.1.2.8. Serialized items (stock/units)
1.1.2.9. Time or services (unlimited)
1.1.2.10. Locations & tax settings
1.1.2.11. Hardware options
1.1.2.12. Custom designs & layouts
1.1.2.13. Ecommerce tied to POS

1.1.3. Customer options
1.1.3.1. Loyalty points
1.1.3.2. Preset discounts
1.1.3.3. Purchase histories
1.1.3.4. Payment history
1.1.3.5. Accounts receivable
1.1.3.6. Customer billing
1.1.3.7. Online bill pay
1.1.3.8. Images, scans, multimedia
1.1.3.9. Customer accounts
1.1.3.10. Reports, exports

1.1.4. Reporting
1.1.4.1. Sales reports
1.1.4.2. Profit reports
1.1.4.3. Daily/weekly/monthly reporting
1.1.4.4. Per locations, per salesperson
1.1.4.5. Deposits
1.1.4.6. Purchase histories
1.1.4.7. Trending items
1.1.4.8. Automated P&L
1.1.4.9. Exports
1.1.4.10. Advanced filtering
1.1.4.11. Save your own reports

1.1.5. Payment solutions
1.1.5.1. Normal POS options (cash, check, etc.)
1.1.5.2. Merchant processing (credit cards)
1.1.5.3. Online bill pay
1.1.5.4. 3rd party payment solutions
1.1.5.5. On account (customer credit)
1.1.5.6. Custom configurations

1.1.6. Ecommerce
1.1.6.1. Real-time (live) inventory counts & tracking
1.1.6.2. Fully integrated systems
1.1.6.3. Online product purchase
1.1.6.4. Customer login portal
1.1.6.5. Online bill pay
1.1.6.6. View histories, statements, orders
1.1.6.7. Fulfillment
1.1.6.8. Fully configurable (settings)

1.1.7. Other special functions
1.1.7.1. Work orders
1.1.7.2. Layaway
1.1.7.3. Recipe/builds
1.1.7.4. Hidden line items
1.1.7.5. Reoccurring
1.1.7.6. Barcode/QR code generators
1.1.7.7. Emailing capabilities
1.1.7.8. Discounting engines
1.1.7.9. Quantity tracking & thresholds
1.1.7.10. Loyalty points
1.1.7.11. Gift cards

1.2. CRM - Customer Relationship Management

1.2.1. Sales & purchase tracking
1.2.1.1. Payment tracking
1.2.1.2. Monies owed
1.2.1.3. Accounts receivable
1.2.1.4. Purchase histories
1.2.1.5. Invoices/quotes

1.2.2. Customer profiles
1.2.2.1. Holds additional information & subs
1.2.2.2. Log notes
1.2.2.3. Additional contacts
1.2.2.4. Reoccurring billing
1.2.2.5. Purchase & payment history
1.2.2.6. Groups & types
1.2.2.7. Preset options - discount, tax category
1.2.2.8. Photos, scans, files, media
1.2.2.9. Expandable custom fields
1.2.2.10. Manage relationships
1.2.2.11. Unlimited customers

1.2.3. Customer tracking & follow-ups
1.2.3.1. Unlimited notes & logging
1.2.3.2. Show/hide notes on calendar
1.2.3.3. Show/hide notes in customer portal
1.2.3.4. Purchase histories - what did they buy?
1.2.3.5. Accounts receivable - what do they owe you?

1.2.4. Calendaring & scheduling
1.2.4.1. Elements of Time
1.2.4.2. Reporting
1.2.4.3. Billing

1.3. CMS - Content Management Systems

1.3.1. Upload content
1.3.1.1. Permissioned
1.3.1.2. Image galleries
1.3.1.3. Files/Media/Content
1.3.1.4. Pre-filled custom documents
1.3.1.5. Digital story telling
1.3.1.6. Manage content relationships
1.3.1.7. Multi-file upload

1.3.2. Web presence & ecommerce
1.3.2.1. Custom controls
1.3.2.2. Categorize
1.3.2.3. Turn things on/off
1.3.2.4. Change web pricing
1.3.2.5. Show/hide things on web
1.3.2.6. Provide long descriptions, specs, reviews
1.3.2.7. Full ecommerce experience
1.3.2.8. Shipping options
1.3.2.9. Customer portal
1.3.2.10. Online bill pay

1.3.3. Data controlled content
1.3.3.1. Point & click interfaces
1.3.3.2. Template based & custom options
1.3.3.3. Permissioned based
1.3.3.4. Create unlimited content
1.3.3.5. Edit content & record histories
1.3.3.6. Advance content (virtual data assembly line)
1.3.3.7. Business world building
1.3.3.8. Store, view, interact as desired
1.3.3.9. Backend logic based on content (cause & effect)

1.3.4. Whole system
1.3.4.1. The whole system is technically a CMS
1.3.4.2. System look & feel
1.3.4.3. Backend layout & design - what's under the hood
1.3.4.4. Built-in core flexibility
1.3.4.5. Custom anything (Dream it up! We'll wire it up!)
1.3.4.6. Data & content storage
1.3.4.7. Tracking all data interactions
1.3.4.8. Access points (who, what, where, when)
1.3.4.9. Solid foundation of permissions & settings
1.3.4.10. Dynamic possibilities (Let's grow together!)

1.3.5. Hosted solution
1.3.5.1. Cloud based
1.3.5.2. Ease of use - mobile, home, work, travel
1.3.5.3. Automatic updates
1.3.5.4. No hardware & minimal IT requirements
1.3.5.5. Built on multi-server environment (getting more than most businesses could afford on their own)
1.3.5.6. Backups & disaster recovery
1.3.5.7. Data & system security
1.3.5.8. Managed services
1.3.5.9. Not charged per devices or per users
1.3.5.10. All system pieces in one spot
1.3.5.11. Interconnected & accessible
1.3.5.12. Access to support & training

- still working on the outline for these sections below **

1.4. Expense Tracking
1.5. Payroll
1.6. Calendar
1.7. Data Connection
1.8. Accounting
1.9. Reports
1.10. Business Intel
1.11. ECommerce
1.12. Big Data

Met with Chuck over a GoToMeeting session. Below are a few of my notes from the meeting.

- Light review of what is going on with Shannon on the presentation gallery. Shannon and I are still building out the main outline (prep work). Chuck is currently not doing any design work on that so that Shannon and I could finish with the first round and working on the outline.

- Review about plans working with Russell. Both Chuck and Russell have green lights to work with each other and keep advancing the ball in various areas and on different projects.

- We went over the camp adilas project. Chuck is working hard on building out the different pages including some of the modal window pop-ups (sub pages within the flow of the site). We also spent a little bit of time talking about "plugging" or "tabling" unknown pieces. We talked about charts and options for showing pre-built dynamic charts vs building things from the ground up. Lots of available options there. Both Russell and Alan are great resources for charts and plugging in those things to pages.

- A couple of challenges that were extended to Chuck - Have your wife check it out (what you are doing and building - get some feedback), have someone else who knows nothing about the project look at it - get their feedback, and on purpose change up the background images to see how things look as the background change (alpha, transparency, color schemes, font colors, etc.)

- Light review of how the training was going. Chuck reported on where things are at and making progress. Good stuff.

Working on the sales tax updates - version 5 of the sales tax project.

On a GoToMeeting session with Cory and Tim from Herbo. There was also another lady on the call, Jennifer. They have a project that deals with an auto roll-up between mother/daughter corporations. Somewhat of an aggregated system or enterprise system of sorts. The holding company needs and/or wants certain cross corp actions to be automated between the different systems. There is also another major piece that deals with reporting some of those same numbers and values back to the holding corporation (mother system).

Most of the meeting was going over ideas and making a small plan. As part of the plan, Cory was going to go over things screen by screen and pass them over to me. See attached for all of the scans and my notes. I worked on my notes on 12/12/19.

Recording notes and working on new laptop setup. Installing programs and what not.

Wayne popped into the morning meeting and let me know that two new servers were ready. I took down some information, did some simple testing, and then chatted with Wayne about some other options and things that are on the horizon. He is working on hardening the servers (that is a technical term for making the servers harder to hack or getting rid of vulnerabilities on the servers).

Alan joined in and we went over a couple of projects. Just touching base. We will be working again tomorrow on the sales tax project. I let him know that we have a possible project that may need to be looked at but it is still in the quoting phase. After we were done, Alan bailed out.

I spent the rest of the time doing emails and other to list stuff. Including more laptop configuration and pushing up new code from Wayne.

Touching base on 2020 tax and withholding updates. Other emails and to do list stuff.

Onsite meeting with Kate at Caisson Labs in Smithfield. We met and ended up doing some talking, training, and light consulting. They have a custom product (hybrid cross between custom software and an adilas web backend). We talked about their custom product and some of the pros and cons there. I brought home a small list of things that I was going to do. One was a small bug fix and the others were plans moving forward. As a side note, the bug was fixed and pushed up to all serves on 12/14/19.

They are planning on using more of the normal web based adilas system vs the full hybrid product. Certain things work better on different sections (software vs webware). They love the hybrid application for label printing, shipping, and fulfillment stuff. The custom screens are very simple and they provided the developer exactly what was needed (100% custom work flow). However, the custom piece doesn't have any permissions so it is almost too open and any user could tweak any value without permissions to block certain actions. Also, as things are updated on the web version of adilas, they have to keep requesting that updates be made on the custom hybrid system. They are linked, but not tight at the hip and updates roll out at different times. Small challenge for hybrid apps.

Spent an hour and half doing some project planning. I got a two page email from a client and also an 11 page document with screenshots and a small proposal for some cross corp interactions and automation. Most of the stuff already exists (or is at least close), but you have to do it all manually. We also want to add in some new mappings and groupings. Spent the morning writing down ideas, drawing samples, and making scribbles (notes and arrows) on the multi-page printouts.

This note was added later on (12/23/19) but the notes and scans were added to time id # 5283 in the shop.

Both Steve and Dustin were on the morning meeting. We spent the entire meeting going over two projects. One was a client meeting that I had yesterday and the other topic was summarizing data and creating enterprise or analytical systems for aggregated data and reporting. Both topics were somewhat interrelated. Here are a couple of highlights.

- We talked about a triangle or pyramid type model. As we talked about it, we decided that it would be more of a stepped triangle or stepped pyramid due to how the summaries, roll-up options, and aggregation of data that takes place. We honestly don't know who deep or how high it needs to go. We see the bottom step or base of the pyramid being the daily transactions and transactional data on a per corporation basis. We see one of the next steps rolling up the totals and starting to get into summaries and aggregated totals on a one-to-many relationship between corporations or business entities.

- A couple of variables that have already been a challenge when doing aggregated totals have been vendors and store/locations. This note came from Steve as he is currently building out a custom aggregated totals report and API socket to move data between corporations.

- The other major take away from the discussion was dealing with web based code vs software. We have a couple of tools and places where custom software has been implemented. That is awesome and fills a need, but as soon as something needs to be changed and/or updated, the software type model falls apart. In some ways, we don't even have access to the code and/or even own the code. It is held by a third party. That makes it really tough. Steve would like us to focus on making everything fully web based so that we could modify it if needed.

Wayne lead a developer's training session on more unit testing and getting deeper into a group project for storing shared files, content, and assets for our clients. Wayne, Brandon, Bryan, Josh, and Alan were on the meeting. Here are some of my notes. See attached for the video recording.

- Setting a focus on certain tests. You could also exclude certain tasks or tests from running. Simple additions to the code. To focus a test, add a "f". To skip or not run something, add an "x".

- Unit testing and virtually telling a story of the steps in the testing process.

- Logical organization of your testing

- Behavior driven design (BDD)

- Talking about ColdFusion mappings, reusing code and creating functions, specs and executable documentation, mocks and creating mock-ups, and other topics.

- There was some discussion about extensions, classes, and sub classes - object oriented programming concepts.

- Creating code in a minimal view or minimal code base mentality

- What are the long term effects and the stability of the code when unit testing is added and/or included (including the confidence in the code base)? How does that effect the whole team and not just the individual who was running or writing the original tests. As a separate question, what do the results mean... think of the others who will one day run these same tests. Pay it forward.

- Thinking about asynchronous function calling and keeping local variables clean without cross-contamination (mixing variables and values due to asynchronous calls and responses).

- More on mocks and pretending to have certain values

- Testing and picking one piece clear through the end and then go back and add the next step. Follow it all the way through.

- The size of our testing code library - start small and where we are and then build up our library from where we are (current projects).

- Going back to your tests before and after you new changes.

- Many different ways of testing code. What is the value of writing tests?

- Keeping things small and tight. Unit testing should be both small and tight.

- Focus on the process (why) of what we are doing vs the what or how we are doing it.

Working with Shannon and brainstorming on business functions and working on an outline or breakdown report of what is what and how does it play together. See the attached document for where we are working. We flagged some of the items to help us remember where and/or what was modified from our last meeting.

As a side note, we are trying to use the concepts of the data assembly line for our own pieces and development processes. Keep kicking the ball down the road and be willing to circle back around as needed.

12/16/19: Brandon can knock this out when they are ready.

12/12/19: 576025 is asking for images to be purged from multiple corps. Spoke with steve and he recommended the following, which I emailed today...."The best thing to do would be to have someone go in to all of the images you don't want and make them inactive. Then adilas can write a script that will purge those images from the database. Let me know once this is complete and I will get someone on it."

4/6/20: See attached image for report look. Will pull from inventory engine and inventory #;sf. The report will pull from the thresholds set in the inventory engine (no changes to Josh's code) and only those items that are below the set threshold will show. Ex. if item is set to 20, and it has 20 in stock= won't show. If item has 19 then will show in report. The report will show the on hand quantity for the item (parent and subs) Same example, this item would show 19 as quantity.

1/21/20: Waiting to hear back from Molly's client on what direction they want to go.

1/7/20: Spoke with Josh about this and also Molly. Josh thinks he can do something that won't be super complicated if we use his existing threshold "engine." Clients would add min in his engine. We could direct it to a different page so clients wouldn't have to access from shopping cart. It would make it location specific due to the fact that it is connected to the cart location (I believe). He could do a simple report that pulled that data and if clients had different threshold settings per location the report could pull both.

Molly really wants to do something simple, but maybe a step above what Josh has, although the multiple thresholds for different locations hadn't originally occurred to her as something her client might want. We need to discuss further.

12/16/19: Currently exists in the shopping cart. Called Inventory Engine. Dealing with thresholds. Currently not tied to locations- only categories and items. If you have multiple locations it can get messed up. Not in inventory report itself.

Molly's vision includes another field in item itself. So when you set up the item, you put in a threshold quantity. Dashboard would show all items below their threshold grouped by category, vendor, item, and live quantity.

Brandon proposes a separate table- master setting for tracking thresholds- turn on if yes or no. No= leave it. Yes, allow for extra piece. Automatically set it up. Show the locations if they have them.

adilas will match funds if built as core.

12/12/19: I have a client who is requesting something related to adilas project referenced below. Specifically, they are requesting a dashboard, that shows inventory items (at any current time) that are below an item level qty threshold. 

12/12/19: Scott has quite a few plants that need tags. We are going to start small with pulling in rfids for the plant batches that have already been created.

There is a project 2/3rds complete that can suck plant data into adilas from metrc.

Met with Chuck to go over some progress on the camp adilas project. Here are some notes from the meeting.

- Report on showing it to someone else who is not involved - He showed it to his dad. He recommended the ability to add packages (buy this and get this and that). We already have this (called recipe/builds) and we could tie it in through the custom cart or POS system.

- From our last meeting - He added tool tips, different backgrounds, and different screen sizes.

- On the coding side, we talked about file imports and includes on backed CSS pages and code - backend stuff.

See attached for some new screenshots with different backgrounds. As a side note, the background won't change on each page... it will be a setting and the user will set what they like and then it will follow them through the application. In our demo, we switch the background tons of times to show options, in reality, it will be a single cool fixed image that the user sets. We will most likely have a corporation setting and then allow users to alter things as they choose (if that is allowed by the corporation). Pretty cool.

Emails and updated a company logo for a client. Small changes.

Dustin joined the meeting with Alan and I today. He had some syntax questions and he and Alan ended up working together for an hour on one of his projects (cultivation and pagination on some of the phases). They switched between ColdFusion code and JavaScript code to get it to work. They both did awesome. In the mean time, I was setting up my new laptop with FTP accounts and installing programs from Calvin.

Once Alan and Dustin were done, we decided to break off and each work on our own projects vs doing the paired programming. We will pick it up again next week. All in all it was a good session.

Working with Bryan on a few different projects. We merged in some code and got everything all pushed up and ready to go. Towards the end we were working on some error messages and making sure that correct white label colors and logos were shown. It works great once someone is fully logged in, but if they aren't fully logged in, it currently goes to a system default and shows the adilas logo and colors.

Emails, follow-ups, recording notes, paying bills, etc.

I made a couple of code fixes. One was on the basic sub inventory search, I made it so that closed packages (sub inventory items) didn't show up. Only active packages that are open and/or disabled show up. The closed ones won't show up on this search any more. I also added in some new code to help with the snow owl header menus and bringing in the corp-wide settings for top snow owl navigation. These were things (settings) like corp, customer, location, parts, items, customer queue, etc. They are all tied to dynamic settings per corporation just like the rest of the system.

Emails, checking out options, and talking with Dustin about being our own style. We lightly talked about business coaches and business consultants and still being your own style.

Working with Danny on a deep code review. He is adding 6 new view only permissions dealing with view only on vendors, PO's, customers, quotes, parts/items, and expense/receipts. We were dealing with 50+ pages and lots of black box changes. Great session.

As of 1/6/19, this project has been started by Bryan. He had some downtime and Molly asked him to start. She knows to put these requests through to Cory in the future.

Would add it to normal advanced line item search and super advanced line item search through html, and need to be able to export both as well.

12/16/19: Currently when you pull an advanced invoice search, it gives you the option to specify a category, or you can leave it as all. But the data doesn't pull into the report. The tax category pulls into the report. Many clients would like to see the category as a column in the report. 

This would be core and simple to do.

Both Russell and Jonathan were on the meeting. We had a good talk and discussion and it was mostly lead by Russell. In a way, we lightly took over the meeting and Jonathan didn't really get to report on much of what he was working on. Here are some notes from the meeting.

- Talking about a visual appeal

- Function vs form (look and style) - this is always a debate

- We need to find the balance between the number of settings and what can be customized

- Russell really wants things to be... powerful, beautiful, and easy

- We spent some time talking about design concepts and layout options

- Small animations and even icon animations

- Both dark and light themes (general overtones)

- We talked about setting a choice way up high at the top level and altering other sub colors and settings based on the top level choices

- Education mode as a highlight - we may want to focus on this and figure out a way to capitalize on things. From our feedback, this seemed to be a highlight and an interest point.

- Help files and having the little side menu be dynamic and let the users decide to show/hide the help options

- We talked quite a bit about videos

- Jonathan was talking about having the help file side-by-side with the page that it is referencing. Being able to see the real page and the help file (tutorial or image) next to each other.

- Dealing with help files, we talked about all kinds of different types of media, visual, print, courses, etc.

- One of the main goal is... helping people to navigate the system. Some of that means hiding certain things, streamlining the flow and processes, and being able to get our users to navigate through the system.

- The onboarding process - that is a big key

- Russell and Jonathan were talking about user tests and user testing (what can they do by themselves and what do they need help with?).

- Lots of talk about removing the clutter

- Using the quick search and being able to search the systems for key words and then flagging and tagging the other navigation options for key word searching.

- MVP - Minimal Viable Product approach - keep it simple

- Jonathan really wants to get a requirements document setup. That would really help.

- Part of the conversation was dealing with getting both Jonathan and Russell together to get and share ideas

- There are two parts of the system that Russell really wants to help out with. They are the shopping cart and the media/content pieces.

- Light talks about making a single page interface for the cart and other pages and/or processes

- Preferences vs opinions - we are really trying to help educate and help out our clients. It is really hard to please everybody.

- Spending time to develop and explain the "why". That is how we help motivate and influence change.

See attached for a few screenshots from Russell.

Meeting with Cory and Molly on different projects. One of the topics was inventory threshholds and a virtual inventory engine. We talked pros and cons and discussed developers and who could do what. We also talked about some cross corp stuff.

Some of the projects are small and quick, but we tend to fall off the wagon by having so many things ready and virtually queued up.

Met with both Bryan and a client over a Zoom session. We ended up going into the live database and looking at data. They had some questions. We answered questions on the cross corp invoice to PO process and also did some training on the global find and replace features within the system.

Back on with Danny working on code review and sign-off on the six new view only permissions. We ended up going backwards and loosing up a few of the pages. We had them almost too tight (took away too many of the options and navigation).

On the phone with Russell talking about goals, vision, and direction. He is wanting to play more and more with the adilas team. We talked about some fun ideas and options. We also reviewed a meeting, earlier today with Jonathan, and some of the new visual direction (graphics and navigation) that we are working in.

On the morning meeting with the guys. We were all working on different projects. I think everybody is virtually buried right now. Keep chipping away at it.

Adilas team training lead by Alan Williams. We had Alan, Bryan, Danny, Dustin, Russell, Brandon, and Eric on the meeting. Steve was there, but I believe he was on another call and just muted.

Anyways, most of the session was dealing with arrays and different ways of getting the same results. Mostly a practice session of sorts. We did some hardcoding, some loops, and even got into some closures such as map, reduce, each, etc. We talked about hardcoding things vs dynamically creating content and pros and cons of both. Lots of good comments back and forth and good team or peer training going on. Good stuff.

See attached for both the video and the chat log - we were passing code samples back and forth.

On sales and customers... we need to add that we have customer queues and sub queues. Also paperless office on the CMS (content management systems) stuff. Just a thought.

Once we got into it, we spent most of our time working on the expense tracking business function and brainstorming ideas and outline levels. Nice meeting.

Chuck and I met for half an hour and went over some ideas and projects. We touched base on the sales flyers and presentation gallery stuff. I told him that Shannon and I were still working on the outline. We then switched over the camp adilas project. Chuck showed me some new web/CSS/HTML mock-ups and we chatted about some options. The project is going along great and everyday new pages are being mocked up in real web code. It always takes a process to go from graphic mock-ups to real web code with CSS and HTML code.

- We did talk briefly about a break through with icons as part of a dropdown menu. Chuck had to do some research and some trickery to get it to work. We lightly talked about some JavaScript options for helping to strip out the choices from the hidden form fields.

See attached for a couple of screenshots from the project.

Meeting with Brandon and Steve to talk about business plans and options.

- We talked about our independent model. Both pros and cons. This is for both developers, designers, and our rep/consultants.

- We are looking for people who want to be part of this model. We really want to focus on those who want to play the game with us.

- Running at max output levels and how to work on efficiency stuff.

- Making those hard decisions. That gets really hard.

- On training... is that really helping right now? In some ways yes, and in some ways no.

- Using the community funded projects to help manage flow of expectations and funding.

- Selling what we have and getting people started at that level. More things could come in later on.

- Seed money and how does all of that work out? We are still trying to figure that out.

- We really need to get some of our guys down to one project and help them get focused and stay focused. That gets really tough.

- We have so many projects... we almost get lost.

- Getting our guys to be responsible and accountable for what they are working on.

- We are spending monies on all kinds of things... which ones are really valuable? There has to be a balance point.

- Sometime it takes a hot plate or major pressure to make you want to change (burning platforms).

- How long does it take to get a new developer? There is a big lead up and a long transition period.

- What if we restructure things a little bit? What would that look like and where would we turn?

- What about a proposal and some planning to get to the hub type model?

- We want to have a small team. We know that we need help. How do we structure that? We love the idea of independents, dependables, and even cofounders. We know at some point we may need to get some employees (keeping it small) but we want to keep it at a manageable level.

- What if we had companies hire their own developers? We help with the project management and meet with them to keep them going and what not. We could really gain there without getting super overwhelmed. As new code comes in, we could virtually cherry pick and harness the work and efforts of other developers. Some of the big companies may really benefit from having their own developers.

- We sub stuff out to Newtek (the server farm). What if we allowed some of the development stuff to be subbed out and virtually use their own developers?

- Play at the wall - this was an API socket dream. Any outside developer could play and code against the virtual wall.

- We may need to step back and help mange the flow vs coding all of the pieces. These other companies could really benefit from what we have to offer. How can we help them get over their pain and get past the next level.

- How do we bill for our time? Talking about Steve and I. Currently, we work for adilas and adilas pays us. If we work for the clients, they really should pay us for our time.

- Question that was asked by the business consultant... What is your exit strategy? What are you doing to get there? Are you looking to get a pay off, reoccurring revenue, a retirement plan, etc., etc. Good questions.

- There is a difference between core development and custom development.

- Talking about developers... What if we figure out their rate (the developer) and then add on to it (for our time) and we then help them charge for it and we then pay out and also make a little bit. Normal add on services.

- Steve was saying - we need to say no more free lunch. We have a viable solution. If you want more, you need to bring your checkbook.

- What about charging for our time? Meetings with Brandon? Meetings with Steve? Meetings with Alan? Meetings with Russell? etc.

- Steve and I really love the dreaming process.

- If we could charge more for the custom development, that would help.

- Sometimes we keep beating our head against the wall until it hurts. At that point, you start looking for options and how to relieve and/or get rid of that pain.

- Making a switch... instead of the business running us we need to start running our business. Steve loves the idea of using technology to run our business and solve our problems. That is awesome.

- Selling our services (custom code, design, and project management) and not just our software.

- Charging for productive hours. This could be for our time, code sign-off, project management, custom code, etc.

- What if we went to more of a controlled open source type model? Going beyond software as a service (SaaS) model and getting into a virtual open source model that is tied into the underlying SaaS model. What does that combo look like or what do you call it?

- We haven't had a project that we couldn't handle yet... Sometimes it takes a lot of time and requires a number of different steps, we've been able to see the steps and then setting up a plan to get there. It takes time, money, talent, and the plan.

- Steve and I want to get out of the middle of the volcano (analogy that we were talking about). There are lots of fertile valleys all around us.

- These companies want to succeed. They really don't want to build out the whole software solution. They just want it to work.

- Making a scalable model. We even talked about a new virtual testing environment for these companies.

////////////////////////////////

Talk about the automated cross corp stuff and aggregated totals being pushed between corps (herbo project - see email).

We need to talk about our plans with the product lab.

Danny and I did another session on the view only permissions. There are six new permissions. We got files merged in and uploaded to data 0. Danny is going to test things and then let me know. We'll push files to the other servers either later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Emails, pushing up new files, and cascading new view only permissions to all servers.

Steve and Dustin were on the meeting this morning when I joined. Steve was talking about some of the new ideas of adilas being able to sell or resell some of the services that are needed. Fun new ideas and momentum in that direction. Hopefully it will get us out of the hot spot in the middle of the volcano.

Just an idea, but what if we treated adilas like a giant code library and allowed outside developers to virtually checkout out certain files, work with them, and then turn them back in to be code reviewed and merged in to the master code branch? That would be really cool. The goal is to allow full custom code that comes from outside developers. We want to keep the projects small and then keep merging in the custom pieces. We'll help them setup their own testing environments, with our help, with our code, with our databases and/or a copy of their live databases, and then help them keep moving forward. We'll run their projects through the system just as if they were our own. We'll help with planning, getting them started, assets, code review, sign-off, merging in, and other processes. All of this will be billable as a service.

Yesterday, Steve and I had a good conversation about selling more than just our software. This is one of the ways that we could help sell the custom code and hosting side of the equation. Fun stuff and great ideas. Steve and I drew some pictures and talked about options. See attached for a scratch drawing of some of the ideas.

Talk with Alan about opening up his own virtual channel and/or how could you help relieve some of this pressure? Maybe a couple days a week doing what Brandon does. Talk with him and help to get some on the job training and mentoring. We could really use the help.

We talked about some of our new ideas of opening up the development model allowing outside developers to do some custom code and development. Somewhat of a managed open source software as a service type model.

We also talked about adding in some new buttons on our own time homepage (black box our own thing) and add in calendar options for Brandon, Steve, and Alan. We could expand that as needed. We also talked with Alan about increasing his wage for the new year. Good stuff.

After the meeting between Steve, Brandon, and Alan, we kept talking. Steve wants to get Russell on the calendar time options. He is a huge asset that we could use and he would do great.

- We will eventually need to loop in the adilas community funded projects (and other custom projects) and who is doing what. We need to keep pushing on that avenue.

- We also talked about how we open up these opportunities, different services, it eventually feeds the marketplace and creates options for other persons.

- Steve really believes that allowing this more open or custom version of software as a service (SaaS) model is where things are going. We need to keep sharing and opening up the environment. It is managed, but we can do it with our model. Steve was saying open custom software as a service (OCSaaS) or some other name. Cool stuff.

- You are building off of a platform - that is huge.

- A perpetual model - it just keeps going.

- Steve was talking about a class he had in business. He had to decide are we fixing it, selling it, or closing it? Those were the challenges in the class that he had. You had to figure out what to do. It comes down to one of those three main choices (fix it, sell it, or close it).

- Steve was talking about how a reoccurring and perpetual business model is totally possible and where we are heading.

- We want to keep the internal team very small. However, we could harness other companies employees and help them keep pushing the ball forward.

- How can you help us build out this adilas business application (platform)? Steve would love adilas to be the most valuable tool that they have in the closet. Help us lift where you stand. We can work with all kinds of people and keep building together.

- Steve - keep using technology to solve your business needs.

- If you want to play, you have to jump in the water. The water keeps moving. You almost have to be in it to keep playing.

- This adilas model keeps moving. It literally keeps going and you need to be in and on it in order to play the whole game. We will keep involving and touching outside parties and working with and harnessing some of those other resources. We'll keep growing and moving together.

- Light talks about some of our developers and what they offer. We will keep helping to expose some of their products and also the other outside 3rd party solutions.

- Steve and I really want to help our guys have a victory. Keep helping that process to come to pass. Lots of little victories.

Shawn and I touched base about tax and withholding stuff. We planned a different time to work on things on Monday before Christmas. After that, I spent some time working on emails, recording notes, and transferring things from small post-it notes into adilas. Busy times. If things are going at a normal pace, I can put them directly into adilas. If things are flying faster than normal, I scribble things on post-it notes and then have to go back and add more details. The never ending process.

Around 3 pm, I got on a Zoom meeting with Russell. We were chatting and pitching ideas back and forth. Russell has been working on a project and as part of that has created some different assets. He has been working on a business plan, code, and some marketing ideas. We are really hoping to be able to join forces and bring some of those pieces to the adilas family. We were chatting about a number of different options. Here are some of my notes.

- If we open up things for outside developers to work on our new testing environments, make sure and add plenty of checks and balances. The absolute ideal would be a full API socket interface and have them play at the wall. That is still a ways out, so we may have to open up some other channels.

- Make sure we charge for our time. That is huge.

- We spent some time talking about ownership and being able to get a residual back from that.

- By helping others succeed, we succeed. That is really true in many ways.

- Some of Russell's priorities are to help stabilize, improve, maintain, and plan for the future. I thought that those were fun priorities.

- Russell would really like to help with project management and job costing.

- There are these things called web components. They are virtually like mini code snippets or functions that can be used over and over again without rewriting all of the code necessary to make them run. A simple call, with some parameters, and it does its job. Russell and I talked about some new adilas web components like table components, ajax search components, cards and actions and moving things between stages (like trello cards - project management software), and modal components (interactive pages that could display or show more details where needed without leaving the underlying page). We had some great discussions about some of these options.

- As a side note, on the cards (both tasks and actions) and being able to move things from stage to stage. We also talked about an even deeper idea of being able to allow users to build their own processes and then move things simply through those processes with point and click setup, rules, validation, automation, defaults, etc. Basically, a way to build your own virtual data assembly line by using tools that already exist and being able to string things together in such a way that it works, is simple, is custom to you, and fits your needs. All from pre-built tools and processes that could be strung together to create these custom processes. Great idea.

- We talked about the company culture and how important that is.

- Making a business plan and putting things in writing. We have a number of very loose business plan type things. Steve and I are on the same page (ish). It would really help to get everybody else to know what the plan is and how we intend to roll things out. As part of this, Russell showed me a small plan that he is working on. We went over some of the ideas. See attached for Russell's proposal and business plan (starting point document).

- We talked about models and how to best combine all of the pieces. There are lots of moving pieces. We talked cores, layers, themes, industry specific stuff, custom code, etc. It gets pretty deep, but it gets fun.

- As part of the model, we also need to be able to strip things off and get rid of extras that are not needed. That is just as important and being able to add new features. Keep it simple, where possible.

Danny, Dustin, and Steve checked in at different times this morning. Mostly some quick questions. Once we were done with that, everybody just started working on their own projects. Pretty casual.

Training session was cancelled due to Christmas stuff. We will hit it again after the holidays.

I used this time to work on getting caught up on emails and recording notes from post-its into adilas.

Shannon and I were talking about new happenings inside the system. From Shannon, setting up healthy boundaries - that really helps. Setting up boundaries allows for showing respect for self and for your clients. It is important.

- Dealing with boundaries, we need to setup clear expectations of we go to here, this is provided, this is not, and anything beyond this point (needs to be defined) we need to charge for. It all comes down to expectations and what not. This is where we begin. This is where we end. These are your responsibilities.

- The system really is "as is" - anything beyond that needs to be paid for and covered.

- In a way, some of our clients virtually bully us and just push on us so hard. If we set some healthy boundaries, that really helps.

- Shannon and I went in and looked at a video from Jonathan Wells - video demo of a new adilas nav and layout - As we were watching, we kept stopping things and talking about it. If the link above doesn't work, try this one.

- As we make the things more standard, that will help with navigation, lower the need for training, and general ease of use.

- Putting the settings right where they are used and/or needed.

- We loved the idea that Jonathan had about being able to quick search nav (navigation options, buttons, and links). This allows a user to virtually type in a word like discount and the application would show all kinds of links, options, pages, etc. Super cool idea.

- Education mode within adilas. A switch that could be turned on/off at any time. That would really be awesome.

- Tag line from Jonathan - Where Operations and Accounting Meet

- Being your own style and be willing to go through different drafts and iterations and versions. We get to say and be our own style.

 Met with Chuck to go over some new progress. We touched base on a couple of other topics. We then jumped right in to the camp adilas project.

- Discussion on some marketing efforts for the camp adilas project - leaning towards the name Wander Ways.

- Possible WordPress plug-ins and using API sockets to talk back and forth. That way the clients have their own site and still get the full adilas backend engine. If we go with a WordPress plug-in, that may be a great angle for us to pursue in the future. Currently, we want to acknowledge that angle but it won't be our primary focus.

- Light talks about competition and some sales ideas and goals.

- Chuck reported on his cross browser compatibility issues. He reported on multiple issues and multiple browsers. Good exercise and we learned quite a bit. Possible support issues if they are using a really old browser. See the scans for some funny screenshots (black and white versions).

- We may want to put some JavaScript checks for browser versions - this is especially true once we get out to the customer facing front end.

- Conversation about CSS variables. Chuck is building out more and more include files to make updating an easier task. Code once and use many. Make it maintainable.

- As a side note, we went over some light training and I gave Chuck an older training link with some videos and other resources.
https://data0.adilas.biz/adilas_training.cfm - code training is towards the bottom of the page

At the end of the meeting, we made some introductions between both Chuck and Jonathan. Chuck did a small demo for Jonathan on what he is working on. Exciting times.

See attached for a couple of screenshots to document the progress and development process.

Met with Jonathan and went over our own version of a spec list. What is needed? We talked about his latest video walk through and the impact that it is having on different key adilas players. Good stuff and fun to see the reactions. Lots of positive feedback. Here is a link to the video from a couple of days ago - https://adobe.ly/2PEhYI4

Below are some new notes from our meeting today.

- The value of the page and what is really important? Focusing on the task at hand. Sometimes we can get distracted by the tiny details.

- Spec sheets - what does that mean and what are we really looking for? Sometimes that spec sheet develops over time through meetings, feedback, and decisions. Currently, we are somewhat in the mode of just in time spec sheets vs big long lists that have been prepped and formatted. We may lose some efficiencies but we gain in a real way by talking about real ideas and subjects. Not everybody likes it this way.

- Timing and what is needed and when. Timing is huge.

- Talking about adding colors and backgrounds. See attached for a few screen samples with some background colors and background images. Just playing around.

- Meet, change, meet, change - R&D format (research and development) - This is somewhat how we are managing the projects right now.

- Delightful (key word) - We want it to look good and be fun to work with (delightful).

- Global nav searches and pushing that further (new quick search option). This could be huge. Being able to search the app for anything that matches a few specific key words. We could show navigation, buttons, links, help files, videos, tutorials, tours, tips, etc. Fun options to think about.

- We spent a little bit of time talking about what the "education mode" means and what and how that would look like. We decided that if we turned it on, it would show all kinds of helpful info and tips to help orient a user. If they want, they could turn it off and the tips and hits would go away. They could turn it on/off as often as needed (the help options would change based on where they were in the app).

- Making custom software easy - that's what we are trying to do.

- Sent Jonathan a link to some research on fracture - https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/developers_notebook_home.cfm?q=fracture&sort=asc - as a note, fracture is somewhat of our code name for some of the ideas of where we want to go (future project). Things keep breaking and sub dividing (fracturing) right underneath us. We are trying to embrace the changes and roll with the changing landscape.

- Going forward, we are planning more screenshots with more customizable options, real data layouts (fake data but simulating real pages), being able to drag and drop to help with sorting, and building up to CSS style guide stuff. As we go further, we may end up adding graphs, charts, and other eye candy type stuff. Just trying to fill out the navigational app with mock-up data.

Eric had me review a video screen capture from one of his meetings with a client. I watched the video and took some notes. Eric and I will go over the note on a later call or meeting.

In the rest of the time I kept plugging through to do list stuff, emails, and recording notes and uploading screenshots from other meetings today. Busy day.

Recording notes, emails, and finishing things up for the day. Setup a new system for a client and bridged over a couple of admin users between their corporations.

Emails and getting some bank statements out to a vendor for verification.

Steve and I were on the meeting most of the morning. Dustin popped in and we talked about a few quick things. He is doing great. After that, Steve and I did some of our own stuff and also spent some time talking about some upcoming pieces. There are always some challenges and Steve really likes to keep figuring out the next step. Here are some of our notes.

- We spent quite a bit of time talking about an abundant model vs just trying to hold onto what we have. We really feel like we live in an abundant model (lots of options). We have an upcoming situation that we need to figure out if we are continuing, altering relationships, or moving on - dealing with an outside party. We spent quite a bit of time talking about this subject.

- We spent quite a bit of time talking about bringing things up to the next level and how the virtual data assembly line (stages and flex bubbles) play into what we both have and where we are going. We have had great success trying to follow that model. What is the next logical step and how are we going to get there.

- Steve and I spent some time and we were drawing on the screen and talking about ideas and current models that we are trying to follow. We were looking at the tri-facto model with system features, number of clients, and education and training legs of that tri-facto. We are trying to fill in more on the education and ease of use side of things. Some of our new efforts are dealing with the graphic designers like Chuck and Jonathan. We spent some time and looked at their (Chuck and Jonathan's) newest progress reports and where they are going. We also talked a lot about the future potential of what they are doing.

- From earlier this weekend, I had a guy who asked me about adilas and what it does. We talked about a platform based model that we could build on. We related it to a chemistry set and the ability to mix and blend those pieces. Basically taking custom development to the next level by mixing and blending what we already have. Build new, change up ratios, enhance existing, etc. Being able to mix and blend like a chemistry set, made sense to me. I thought that it was a fun analogy.

- Steve and I spent a lot of time talking about transitions and handling those transitions. Steve was talking about how business is all about transitions.

- We talked about burnout and how that can effect you now and even later on down the road (virtual flashbacks and post stress stuff). It is real. How do we deal with it, how do we prevent it, and how do we build going forward?

- Running a business takes a lot of both physical and mental abilities - it is a challenge.

- We need to be compensated for our time and efforts. We give a lot of stuff away for free. It is kicking our buts.

- You are either part of the problem or part of the solution. Where do you want to be?

- We are really wanting to attract people who really want to play (developers, trainers, designers, consultants, etc.). That may take a specific bread of people, but that is what we want.

- Steve and I will be doing more and more project management as we go forward.

- Focusing on one project at a time. Staying focused. Maybe something like one main project and maybe some small filler projects. Currently we get really spread out and somewhat lose focus.

- We talked about bottle necks and being careful about who is doing what. If you create too many key points (certain people do certain things), it creates bottle necks. Be careful. Keep things moving and flowing.

Meeting with Andy and Paul from Elevele.

Ongoing Bio Track API issues

Josh and Alan joined the meeting to go over needs and current development of the pieces. Josh helped to run the meeting and did great. Alan and Josh were tag teaming. Alan was showing things on his screen and Josh was talking to the client. Towards the end, the client asked about more dedicated server type options. Steve was helping to give them some more information about the current server transformation options.

Andy and Steve were talking about technology, kiosks, standalone systems, using tablets, custom menus, etc. All kinds of ideas. Lots of ways to use technology and how to promote their brands and what not. Some cool ideas. Some of that gets into custom options and development.

Shawn had a fever so we connected through text messages. We will try to get together later this week.

I spent the afternoon doing emails, recording notes, following up on things, and trying to clean off my plate of things that needed attention and/or a little bit of loving.

Steve and I spent the morning working on a custom gram tracking project that Steve is working on. He introduced a number of new settings and variables. Most of them were in the sub inventory level and dealt with sub inventory attributes and custom mapping and weight multipliers. We were working on code and following logic through the process.

Talking with Calvin and his partner Jacob from the IT Dream Team. Good meeting. Both parties came away with some new ideas and options. We listened to their pitch and took some notes and tried to catch their vision and position. They then let us talk and explain a few needs and pain points. By the time we were done, we had somewhat of a short term plan and scheduled an additional follow-up meeting for next week.

I took a bunch of notes. There are under Calvin's folder under a file name of meeting_with_calvin_12_24_19_modified.txt

There were four of us on the call. Calvin, Jacob, Steve, and Brandon.

More work with Steve on the logic for his custom gram controller pages. We also chatted and talked about our meeting with the IT Dream Team and possible options. Calvin and I also did some back and forth debugging on the adilas label builder app. Calvin got it all fixed. The problem ended up being a change in the SSL (secure socket layer) encryption level and that was causing things to fail. Basically, we had to open the connections up a bit and allow for multiple different types of secure connections (multiple or statements to allow different options). Some changes were made and we did some light testing.

Have a Merry Christmas!

A couple of the guys were on the morning meeting. Danny checked in, Eric checked in, and Steve was on the meeting. Eric and myself were talking about version control and testing. These are somewhat smaller things but they end up having bigger consequences down the road. Eric was putting in his vote on both pieces (full version control and testing). We already do a lot of version control, but there are certain custom projects that we let slide through without putting them in version control. It doesn't seem to be a problem right at first, but it bears its head later on if work is needed to be done on those pieces. We have had many a file that gets overwritten and changed because it is not in the master code repository or master code branch. We do pretty good at the core pieces but we struggle a little bit with the custom pieces. Eric volunteered to help with some code sign-off stuff. He doesn't want to do the big projects, but he does want to help with some of the purely custom stuff.

- Small possible bug with core loyalty points and being able to get the redemption value clear down to zero. A client reported that they had to leave one cent in the account. They couldn't get clear down to $0.00. That may be a rounding error or a simple greater than or greater than or equals type thing (mathematical  operator sign). Eric is going to follow that one around and get it finished.

After Eric left, I only stayed on the meeting for a little bit. Steve and Danny were working on getting a local development environment setup for Danny. I spent the rest of the meeting doing emails and recording notes.

Met with Eric and went over a couple different things. I added some notes to the special accounts and customer loyalty points projects. See attached. We also spent some time working on adding in my cart favorite buttons to the web general inventory search method (API socket). We did some research and project planning for that project.

Bryan and I were working on a page that deals with inventory updates and trying to get things out to the sub level. It already exists in one form, but the client wanted it in another form. We were working with sub inventory and were running into some painful situations switching between parent items and sub items. I told Bryan that I would add a note to our meeting notes that we need to circle back around on sub inventory and really detail it out. The current issue is, you can get things to flow through pretty easy if you go in one direction. If you ever need to go the other direction (pulling things back out and/or reporting), it gets much harder. We would love it to be smooth both backwards and forwards.

Working on getting the two newest servers commissioned and configured. Wayne did all of the prep work almost two weeks ago. I just now am getting around to doing the final touches and updating files, database values, and settings.

Met with Danny to work on allowing certain special characters into sub inventory attribute values. Certain special characters may be dangerous due to a thing called cross site scripting (XSS). Normally we restrict certain things to keep the data clean and safe. There is a new label requirement coming for 1/1/2020 which requires the clients to be able to use certain special characters in the sub attributes. Those values will eventually be used on labels.

Danny and I got in there and made a few changes. We merged in the new code and pushed it up online. After that, I kept working on the two new servers and prepping things so that we could release them as live production servers.

Emails and recording expenses and deposits.

Working on some new servers. Wayne released data 12 and data 13 to me a couple of weeks ago. Finished up some quick checks on the servers and got things ready for release. Sent an email out to the guys to let them know that those servers were ready to go.

Steve and Danny were on the meeting when I joined. They are getting things going and having fun. They were talking about some options to chat with a developer who may want to play in the white label arena. Just talking at this point. Dustin and Eric joined the meeting as well. After Steve and Danny were done, Eric had a number of questions. Including some questions for Steve and I about doing more core adilas stuff. We chatted and gave him the verbal go ahead. Eric has been a great help and brings a number of key pieces to the table. Good stuff.

One of the topics of the day was dealing with API sockets and 3rd party solutions. A ongoing question was, are we building things to push data or pull data? Who is responsible for what part? Those questions always come up and then it comes down to what points are being pushed/pulled and who is paying for what development? Good conversation and Eric has a great working feel for what is going on.

We briefly talked about using Eric to help with some of the new campground stuff and having him help with that wire up job. We have some other things that we need him to do first, but making good progress and developing a good plan. If we could get Eric to switch from custom development to adilas core development, that would be awesome.

Wayne joined the meeting and we went over a few server questions. He is doing great. We will be using the new data 12 server to take over where the older data 2 server was working and it's load. This is somewhat of an experiment and we are going to do some prep and dry runs prior to pushing things live. If this work well, we will circle through and update all of the older servers. The model changes slightly, but we gain in a number of ways by upgrading hardware, software, application files, and configuration. All good things.

Wayne also showed me how to work with some of the domain names that we have out there. Currently, we have tons of domain names that are purchased but just sitting out there in one way or another. We would like to point those domain names to the current adilas.biz website. Little bit of maintenance work but it should be good and beneficial going forward. 

Danny jumped on and had a few questions about his local environment. We helped him do some light debugging and got a few files in place. All is well now with his local development system.

After that, I spent some time prepping and recording notes from earlier today. Busy times.

Update the corpwide settings page to the Snow Owl functionality. There were multiples of these so I moved this one on.

top_secret/secure/corp_wide_settings.cfm

Jonathan from Epic Enterprises Consulting came over to my house and we had a meeting. We covered a lot of ground and had a good meeting. See attached for a scan of my notes from the meeting.

- Maximizing vs optimizing - Sometimes we (people) just try to push on the gas and get as much out of things as possible. Very natural - this is called maximizing. The other less common option is doing what is best or getting the optimal results vs the maximum results.

- MVP - We have heard that MVP stands for minimal viable product. Well, it was explained today with a few other variables. What about minimal viable plan, minimal viable service, minimal viable (fill in the blank), etc.? Cool concept.

- We always need improvement

- We were talking about expectations, boundaries, and defining the scope. Without those pieces, you can get run over or overwhelmed pretty easy. Once a scope is defined, you can say yes (if you want to), and then say this is the price for doing that. Tie the two together if possible.

- Definition of a company - a group of people - teamwork at a deeper level

- We spent quite a bit of time talking about the term "Executive" and what does that mean. My current view of an executive is what I see on TV (media) of a boss at the top who commands his employees and somewhat has the final say of things... not something that I really want to be. As we talked, we started to redefine what an executive could be... Here are some of the ideas and concepts: An introspective person who has found themselves at or near the top of a competency hierarchy, who seeks out and wields or aligns themselves with true principles. Respect for other, respect for self, helps and loves others, loves to learn and improve, helps to protect the vision. I liked those ideas and concepts much more. I could do that type of being an executive.

- There are five major roles that need to be fulfilled in a company. Instead of just roles, ideally, you actually have people in place who can carry each of these roles and own it. Otherwise you just have a smaller number wearing multiple hats. The five people are: An organizer, a doer, a creative type, a consultant, and a salesman. The goal is to align talents with tasks.

- What is the definition of success? We don't have to create the same successes that the world has created. We can be our own style.

- Byproducts and harnessing those different avenues.

- People enter the timeline and the story goes from there.

- We talked about lots of our people and what role and talents (attributes) they bring to the table. I listed off 15 to 20 key players that we deal with and have interactions with.

- Jonathan wanted me to read a book, not just read it, but speed read it. He then took ten minutes and showed me how to do this... my definition won't do it justice, but here we go... Totally destroy the structure of the book, browse it, look for single words that are interesting, spoil it if you want to, jump around, create curiosity anchors across the story, make it fun. Then speed read it (glancing over things quickly) and pull out the main points. If something interests you, read deeper, otherwise just try to get the main points.

- Dealing with speed reading, I was thinking that we could help people get interested in adilas that way... sometimes it may look too big or complicated but if people were to browse and find some curiosity anchors and then skim over some of the benefits and features, it may be a better way to consume it then trying to virtually read the whole thing. Just an idea. Make it fun. As a side note, I'm trying to head in that direction by working on the presentation gallery (non linear, visual, outline type format for a presentation or demo).

- Ask yourself, what am I selling? Is it what you are thinking?

- We went over some time management stuff. See my scans for a better version of this... but imagine a small grid with four things down the side. They are: Day to day (fires and being overwhelmed), strategizing, distractions, and time wasters. Then across the top, you have two columns, they are normal and optimal. Pretend that you have an 8 hour day. In the normal column, you have almost all of your day in the day to day (fires and being overwhelmed) column. You only get a few minutes on the strategizing, distractions, and time wasters columns. You are just buried and go from problem to problem (that's what it feels like). On the optimal side, you have about 2 hours of your day doing the day to day (fires and being overwhelmed). You have 5 hours of strategizing (trying to outwit tomorrow's fires), and half an hour each on the distractions and time wasters. These numbers aren't perfect, but represent a better way to do time management.

- Trying to outwit tomorrow's fires - strategizing

- From Jonathan - Books are a form of mind enhancement.

- Life hacking to make something out of what you are given - if you hack it, you make it work how you want it to (at least kinda sorta).

- A knowledge worker - what does that mean? They know something more about something. They need a rhythm or a cadence. They need to have a commitment factor to help them play.

- "10% of what I peddle (sell) is hope." - Quote from Jonathan. I really liked that. I may start using something like that in my pitches. I sell potential, which is a form of hope.

- At some point, every company becomes blind to itself.

- We were talking about disfunctions and trying to reinvent the wheel on different topics. Jonathan was using a word that kept hitting me in the face. It was "rejecting", meaning rejecting or not allowing certain primary functions to take place or do their jobs... We talked about rejecting structure, rejecting responsibility, rejecting proper pricing configuration, rejecting executive time management, and rejecting a coherent form (what, who are we).

- Take the pill of actually solidifying who we are and what we do - scope.

- Dealing with time... It's not too late...

- Positive manipulation - This may sound bad, but we all use this in one form or another. We talked about positive manipulation and how that is both best used and when and why. Lots of variables for it and also lots of reasons to use and employ that kind of a tactic or use that kind of tool.

- Alignment to a core principle - that can get pretty deep.

- Trying to "cheat" the core principles - what cause and effect relationships does that have and mean? This was a conversation about what are we doing and how are we virtually trying to cheat a number of known principles. Not trying to be dishonest, but not doing certain things on purpose. For example, not having an employee type structure, not having proper supply and demand pricing, not having a known form or structure (what does your business do and what products and/or services do you provide).

- Kicking against the pricks - analogy used on animals in agriculture. The prick helped to prod the animal to do certain things. If the animal rebelled, it would kick against the prick and drive it in deeper (causing harm or more pain). We talked about this analogy and how sometimes if you try to avoid or reject certain things, you end up hurting yourself in business.

- We talked about what makes a mom and pop shop a mom and pop shop? What could they do differently, if they wanted to? Key word, if they wanted to. How could certain principles help them become bigger - once again if they wanted to. People, talent, origination, funding, broader scope, marketing, product line, etc. Interesting conversation. Jonathan wasn't saying we (adilas) are a mom and pop shop, but we are on purpose not implementing all of the options, thus keeping us at a certain level.

- He gave me three things to do: 1. Read the book - "The Go-Giver" - speed reading style, life hack, and non linear format. 2. Commit to a consultant. and 3. Start making incremental improvements (as prescribed). As a side note, I said that we were making incremental improvements and he said that would be good. He then added "as prescribed" and that somewhat changed the direction. Just a side note.

- We have to figure out the people first. Then we can get to the other pieces.

- Jonathan was recommending a board of advisors vs a board of directors. Small changes to focus, direction, and style. Interesting. 

Emails and getting started. Recording notes and reviewing things from a business consulting meeting from yesterday.

Danny jumped in and reported. He was excited that he figured some stuff out.

Dustin jumped in and touched base.

Steve and I were chatting. He and Danny had a great meeting with a consultant/developer. His name is Grant. Talking about all kinds of angles and what does it take to get and keep a customer? Light talks about niche type arenas and areas. Where do you compete and what do you bring to the table? Back to supply and demand type scenarios.

- Is the world flat? That is a trick question... As technology increases and as business grows, things tend to flatten out (become normalized). Steve and I were using a GoToMeeting session to bridge miles and miles - all through technology.

- We are having different consultants and sales type persons talking more to us. Lots of management and motivational type consultants trying to help us out and getting things going. Lots of flavors and getting things moving in a direction.

- Steve is hearing a small bell ringing… somewhat of a warning bell of sorts. We need to change some things and work more on what we have and what we offer. Currently, we are all over the place and not fully focused.

- David and Goliath type scenario

- We really want to work on our own product and help refine it and make it better and better.

- Small talks about protection and how can we preserve that? We want to keep building and growing and we know that there are some risks out there.

Great team training meeting today. We were working on real world problems and things we do all the time inside of adilas. We went over building form controls how we have been doing and where it could possibly go. Really fun seeing the different ways and even how we could push it clear out to the component (reusable custom code/tags) level. Lots of fun. We had Steve, Brandon, Alan, Bryan, Danny, and Josh on the call.

We spent some time going step by step and building on the last code sets. We talked about scoping variables and when to not scope the variables (scopeless). We did quite a bit of training on reduce options and the power of modularizing the components. This leads into an MVC (model, view, controller) type level with options. Good stuff.

See attached for the video.

Recording notes and reviewing past notes and ideas. This is how I learn.

Met up with Chuck to go over some of the camp adilas project. He showed me some of his research on different sites, ideas, concepts, and products. He then showed me a number of new things that he is working on in the design realm. We talked about customer facing websites, advertising, sales, his team that he is working with, template/layout decisions, and web domain names (website names) stuff. Good meeting.

On a side note, Chuck was showing me some of the new date pickers, animated checkboxes, and other form controls. Some of which, he is wiring up using his own new JavaScript skills that he is learning through training. Really exciting.

See attached for some screenshots.

Shawn came over to my house and we did some work on payroll stuff. He was busy working on new state and federal withholdings. I haven't started yet, but will be working on W-2's, 1099's, and other PDF reports for payroll.

As a side note, I got a call from Shari O. with an update as well as a call from Russell with an update on where he is at with things. Lots of good stuff happening.