Most years in August I manage to get away for four or more days to a lake in western Maine. The lake was formed by a dam, which flooded the surrounding countryside in the 1940’s. There is a lot of driftwood around, and the lake is relatively shallow, making it unsuitable for power boats and jet skis. This means the lake is relatively quiet, and it is a favorable habitat for moose and loons.

The place I stay in has no electricity, and, being in the shadow of a substantial mountain range, it has no cell phone service, (for Verizon at least). Usually I arrive relatively fried, and yet even after a couple of days my head starts to clear. Before returning to the fray, I wanted to remind myself of some of the good things:

1. The ratio between time spent being active, and time spent in a chair is reversed compared to a normal workday. We spend the these days paddling, hiking, exploring, swimming, cooking, photography, walking, chopping wood, bicycling and picking blueberries.

2. Most of our idle time is spent in company. We sit around drinking beer, conversing, counting loons and mergansers, and watching the sun set. We spent a couple of hours watching a spectacular lightning storm where we were practically inside the storm.

3. As time is spent away from personal electronics I find I can think more clearly. When you are not responding to persistent external electrical stimuli, you can take notice of the natural world.

4. As the workday world begins to fall away, I find that I have the mental space to think of less trivial things.

5. In a different environment, you can cultivate and improve skills and competencies that you’ve neglected, or try something that you have never done before.

6. The Fallacy of Indispensability. After I get back, I’m reminded again that the world managed to get along just fine with out me…that my inbox isn’t exploding with important messages, that there is little or nothing that I need to deal with that can’t gracefully be dealt with even with several days delay.

7. What my inbox does show, however, is that I’m subscribed to dozens of useless eMail lists. My RSS feeder delivers fifty or sixty useless messages per day. I’ve got too many files on too many computers on too many servers.

8. Above all, what these days teach me is immediacy and focus. Or rather, they remind me again of how far we have strayed from our ability to give each other our undivided attention in our conversations, and in our work. Somehow, little by little, we have allowed all these electronic toys to erode our lives. Which means.. happily.. we should take more vacations. 🙂

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and evolving ideas and projects that we stumble across as we move our former database development and network support company into startup mode for a technology-based home health-care delivery service provider. Being grant funded ourselves, we’re very much looking over the the grant landscape.

We are located in the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologiesa technology incubator affiliated with the University of Vermont. Our major extracurricular activity is the Vermont Software Developer’s Alliance, a non-profit trade group which promotes economic development in our area, primarily for software development companies. Both organizations, by the way, are looking to encourage high-tech businesses to start up and/or relocate in our state.

My quest to duplicate the functionality of OutLook using Mac Mail seems to be chugging along.

1. When forwarding, you get an automatic insertion of a “quote” line which goes along the left margin. To eliminate this line, highlight the text. Then Select Format->Quote Level->Decrease This will eliminate the quote line.

2. I didn’t “get” the inbox, and the smart mailbox paradigm, until somewhere I saw it pointed out that this is similar to the ITunes interface where you see your entire collection all at once, but you can create “playlists” from the whole collection. Think smart mailbox=playlist, and miraculously it works.

3. What I was really looking for are rules that I can define which causes inbound mail to be moved to a custom folder. In fact in the “On My Mac” section allows you to do just this. Create a folder for a subset of inbox messages. Then create a rule which moves the message from the inbox to the folder.

With these revelations, and further refinement of iCal and Google calendars, I could almost dump Windows. Exceptions are Word for Windows (Mac Word is too weird), and OneNote. So, I’m still running Parallels with Windows Vista Business for these applications.

Notes and annotations (in italics) from the vtSDA meeting 7/16/2008

Presenter: Joe Kuklis – President and CEO of GSP Consulting

Presentation on the nuts and bolts of federal grants and contracts.

• earmarks
• competitive
• discretionary
• procurement

  Earmarks
  These are usually annual. Ideas are due in January. It will be 9-14 months before you would see money from an earmark.

  Competitive
  These would be competitive grant applications, like SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) grants.

  Discretionary
  Never announced (fix the collapsed bridge in Minnesota).

  Procurement
  These are contracts to supply goods and services to an entity of the government.

  Soliciations are shown in Federal Business Opportuntities (BizOps https://www.fbo.gov

  Note that there are bunch of consultants who advertise a front end for www.fbo.gov, take care when doing a Google search that you actually end up at the government web site. No payment or registration is required to view the solicitations. Also check out the Federal Register.

  Vendors to the government, and grant recipients must be entered in the Central Contracting Registry or CCR. Bitter Experience Department:
  Note this is a multi-day process… be sure to start six or more weeks in advance of the time that you want to submit an application or respond to a solicitation, because you will need to be registered as a requirement of your submission.

  There are 1400 federal grant programs. Somewhere, somebody in the federal government wants to give you money. All you have to do is ask nicely.

  Strength and Needs Analysis

  Programming

  Messaging — i.e. “how is this going to save $$$?”

  Legislative champions are critical

  Advocacy, how are you advocating.

  Note that the average legislative aide is about 24 years old, and they may have oversight and decision-making power over millions of dollars.

  US DOL Technology Planning Grant

  Other DOL Grants at http://www.doleta.gov/SGA/sga.cfm

  Avoid grants that are “wired”. This is where the bid solicitation is written in some way that only a single company will be able to effective carry out the obligations of the bid. Sound illegal ? This works both ways, you can sometimes receive a “sole source” contract, whereby the contract doesn’t go out to bid because you are the only company capable of performing the work. Isn’t this illegal? In some cases there is a dollar threshold under which the governement entity isn’t required to go out to bid. Sometimes the entity will issue a series of smaller contracts, each one under the threshold, instead of a larger one that would otherwise have to go out to bid.

  Create collateral in advance such as

  White papers.

  Handouts

  Opportunities for presentations:

  Present to the people in DC (relevant subcommittee chairs)

  Present to your district representatives and senators

  Present at a “DC-Day” — usually 1x per year.

  Political considerations

  Get on the approved government procurement schedule, the GSA.

  See their web site at https://www.gsaadvantage.gov

  Be a subcontractor to a prime contractor.

  Most (all?) large contracts require set-asides for small, minority, women-owned etc. businesses.

  Theare a dollar percentage of the the full contract.

  You can be a sub for Lockheed-Martin!

  Note that a “small business” is less than 500 employees (!)

  Some federal grants require a match.

  The Players
  

  Program Managers – These are the folks who are responsible for overseeing the actual technical details of the contract or grant. They may be scientists and engineers themselves.

  Contract/Procurement/Grant Managers – These are the people who oversee the nuts and bolts of the adminstration of your grant or contract. Talk to these people when there are questions regarding billing, timing, indirect rates, etc.

  Small Business Liasons

  Prime Contractors

  Peer Companies

For all of us multi-taskers, it sometimes seems to be impossible to focus on doing just one thing at a time. If I actually ever had an epitaph engraved on a headstone somewhere it might be something like Lawrence Keyes 1952-20038 “He spent 13 years of his life waiting for Windows to reboot”.

The Windows reboot problem just engenders multi-tasking…in the mornings, I manage to boil water, grind coffee, and filter the coffee all in the time that it takes my workstation to boot up, connect to the server and open OutLook.

But, once up and running, there are the multitudinous distractions of the web; you can always find something more interesting than what you are supposed to be doing.

So, now, stay focused. In one tab of your browser, go to http://www.nowdothis.com. Put in your tasks for the next hour or three, or the morning, in the order in which you should do them, and, you’ll get that little frisson every time you click done. The page immediately refreshes, and tells you what the next thing is on your list. Brilliant.

Disclaimer: This blog post was not on my list.

Stupid Internet Service #1020202

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Take the multiple eMails confirmations you receive after planning a trip, and then get a nicely formatted, consolidated itinerary from TripIt. Just don’t expect any intelligence. By the time you’ve massaged everything to work…you could have printed out ten itineraries that you formatted yourself. I especially like the third line from the bottom, “unable to understand ‘Hotel Reservations’ “.