FYI, I’m going to move how to set up the marketing in the Black blogosphere to the Internet Hustles section I have on the right side. It should be details and be a permanent fixture on the site. I’m working on it now. But since it is my birthday week (tuesday was my birthday, wednesday was my sister birthday, thursday is my brother birthday and sunday is my other sister birthday - parents never explained that to us yet), I’m going to work on that content on the weekend. But I wanted to just make comments on the photos of celebrities I have seen all week:

That Must Be His Great-Great-Great-Great-Ancestor

I swear that R.Kelly look just like Abraham Lincoln in that photo. The case they built up on this brotha, I don’t know how he going to beat it and wonder why a plea deal was never in the works. If they got credible witnesess that say that’s her in the video, that’s all a jury needs.

Just Like Speed Racer, I Predict Sex and the City Will Flop

Ain’t no one caring about Sex In the City movie except the media trying to hype it up. And those hands..ahhh! Ain’t going to be no sex in no city with hands looking like they supposed to be folded together at a funereal. OMG, those hands!

All Brothas Have That Goofy Look When They Take A Photo Like This

The only thing better than taking a picture holding a nice female from behind is taking a picture holding your ex-girlfriend from behind..haha.

I’m sorry but I cannot believe after filling up my car today that the average working class voter would allow some trivial Rev. Wright “drama” affect who they choose to elect this fall. The cost of what I had to spend filling up is about as real as it gets. I seen the faces of everyone else at the gas station filling up and they are not happy. And they are not happy at the grocery store either at the higher price of food. This food and gas inflation is hurting real people, so to all you media pundit characters like Ron Kessler at NewsMax and the rest of you propaganda clowns that think Rev. Wright is an election year issue, you need to visit a gas station to realize what working class voters are really thinking about this election year.

Today is my birthday and thanks to the rising price of flour, my birthday cake was very expensive compared to last year. Gas is now $4 for the car. I will be honest - I do not feel old man or anything. I would be pissed if I was someone who now in my late thirties and BS all my life doing unfulfilling ish like dating dimes, smoking weed and drinking cheap liquor. It is cats in their late thirties that look older than Morgan Freeman because they are stressed and lived a messed up shallow lifestyle.

What I wanted for my birthday more than anything else was to be at Fooky, Inc. office and continue to work on the upcoming release. I feel good knowing I have an office, got customers interested in my product, got a product that will serve the customers we targeting and I don’t have deal a tech bigot sitting on my board of directors trying to tell the Black man what to do and how to do it. However, I was sidetracked today on some small ish and didn’t realize until 6 hours later I was making a big mistake and wasted my time. I was messing around with DotNetNuke and realize I didn’t learn my lesson last week messing around with TwikiWiki – both of these packaged solutions are whack as hell to me.

Both DotNetNuke and TwikiWiki are these Content Management Systems that are free-based and when I read the specs and look at what they offer up front, I admit I lost myself and start going “wow, I can leverage this!” and jumped right on them. But it wasn’t an hour after dealing with them I’ve learned the hard way I wasted my precious time. See, both of these packages are pretty much the reason I didn’t move my tech company to Silicon Valley. These packages are the reason why I’m not worried about my counterparts in the search/information retrieval industry and why I’m not worried about them. See, these packages are the result of groupthink, a bunch of techies who provide lowest common denominator “cool” features and don’t have a freaking clue about the word “business solution”. See, I put real web development work at Fortune 500 and small business operations and know what “business solutions” means and know most of the techies I work with don’t know that that word means.

See, the problem I had with both DotNetNuke and TwikiWiki was you have to deal with their ugly ass template and like WordPress or TypePad, if you have to do something out of the box, you have a big learning curve to figure out how to do it. And this is the rub – the learning curve period to customize both DotNetNuke and TwikiWiki can be put to better use by learning how to create the raw solutions from PHP and ASP.NET yourself, not trying to figure out how they freaking put together a bunch of generic, commodity portal pieces ish. I could have built all three-tiers and QA the kind of web site I wanted to from scratch in less than six hours rather than trying to read up on DotNetNuke and how to develop a module and screw with .dnn and providers and all this other module template bullcrap. And TwikiWiki, oh my freaking gawd, I never saw such an extreme attempt to try so hard to be robust but have the result look like a piece of generic looking ish.

I’m all for build versus buy, but when you are in the big leagues, you can’t be running the same ish everybody else is doing and trying to figure out how to customize ish. You got to be innovative and to be innovative, you have to know the real nuts and bolts of this stuff - the true grit. I forgot I have worked on several contracting projects in the past trying to rip out crappy content management systems that was supposed to be hip and ish and I was paid to rewrite them raw dog ASP.NET or PHP. I remember one piece of Content Management System crap called Octane8, well that is another story. It is better to just learn the technology raw dog instead of wasting your time trying to play with packaged solutions. With packaged solutions, you get the low-quality features everyone else got and if you want to seperate yourself from your counterparts, you got to waste time trying to play in someone else sandbox. That was my lesson and never again, I’m doing my own sandbox from this point on.

This reminded me of that overhyped web site called EverythingBlack.com back in the nineties that was using some web directory software that was expensive and could not scale while I hand built my own web directory called Blackindex.com. Well, ask Patrick McElroy what he doing now and ask what Ed Dunn doing now in this web game (Fooky.com leverage some of the same code from Blackindex.com) and you see why Black people need to learn this technology from the ground up instead of depending too much on packaged solutions.