A colleague shared a couple of quotes from Thomas Carlyle.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance,but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

A message from the 37Signals guys that really resonated with me. They discuss the importance of bringing your message into the organization and mention Apple as a recent example.

Getting the message in is about feeding the culture. It’s about making people proud of the work working on. I think it’s an important lesson for anyone building a team. Getting the message in is as important as getting the message out.

Who was the genius at Pepsi Co. that approved the Super Bowl XL campaign for Diet Pepsi? A few of them have been waisted at the office because we assumed they were of the regular (non-diet) kind. We also had a fourth variation of the regular Pepsi, Super Bowl edition which looked identical to the lower-calorie can but it did not make the lineup. I ask again, who approved the visual campaign for the Super Bowl?

The details are not known at this time but the Phoenix Business Journal broke the story that Google was set to announce operations here in the valley. More news should be known tomorrow with an announcement from local and state officials.

update: it is official, Google will create an office which will be primarily focused on engineering, operations and IT support functions. Another indication the technology industry is growing in Arizona.

I am helping a good friend of mine change web hosts for his company website in Mexico and it has become quite a time-wasting nightmare. Here in the US, web hosting and domain name registration has become pretty much a market where companies compete on price, reputation and more importantly value-added services. You can find reliable hosting companies and pay as little as $9.99 per month. If you decide to change hosts, most registrar companies offer you a control panel where you can manage your domain and change your DNS entries as much as your please.

The domain name will point to the new hosting account in a matter of hours while the change propagates across other DNS servers. However, things with this particular company things are not quite so easy. Countless emails have been sent with no result. The domain name has not been turned over to my friend so NIC Mexico (the company responsible for the .mx TDL) cannot make the necessary DNS changes. The registrar company even asked my friend to pay for a 1 year renewal before accepting to change the domain name to his name which I find to be a extremely bad practice. We already have the new hosting account ready, we are just waiting for the DNS changes to take place but it appears that things are not this easy when dealing with this specific company.

After this experience, I am going to contact the companies which I use to register and host my domains because of the great service they have provided thus far. To this day, I will continue to refer friends and clients to them because of the great experience that I have had with them. Don’t take good service for granted because it can make a great difference when you are in need!