If you’re guilty of ever saying “our salespeople are idiots” I challenge you to rethink your conclusion.

Expect salespeople to generally do the following things:

• Walk close to NOT OK lines (sometimes crossing over). They make more money operating that way.
• Be more on the customer’s side vs. the company’s side regarding pricing, product customization requests, payment terms, etc. They want to maximize the odds of getting the sale, and deep down inside that drives them.
• Get irritated when people at HQ mess with sales they worked hard to create.

Key thing is to have authentic conversations with the salespeople, let them know you understand that their comp plan drives their behavior, push them back from the NOT OK lines that they’re tripping over, and give them respect for doing a tough, tough job (humans don’t naturally deal well with continued rejection, so they’re really taking one for the team.)

Salespeople drive revenue, the lifeblood of business—give them the respect they deserve.

At RecruitMilitary we use Unfuddle as our IT work queue. I just noticed on Friday that we have 5,000 closed tickets (which makes it the 2nd company where we processed 5k+ tickets through the system), so I thought I’d give a product review based on our experience.

When I joined the company, we had no source control nor shared ticketing system. So Unfuddle had the perfect feature set to knock off both of those critical needs. We started with Subversion for version control, and later added Git repositories.

Things I’ve noticed:

• Multiple projects seem to always want to collapse back into one.
• You have to nag people outside the department on tickets assigned to them.
• Unfuddle has a responsive development team when we reported a bug, they sometimes knocked it out that day.
• The reports are just enough to keep things organized.
• Email notices are nicely formatted & get the job done.

What would I like to see from product:

• Nothing from a feature standpoint.
• Continuously improving app speed & reliability. Occasionally it can slow down noticeably, but overall it’s usually pretty snappy.

If your company is still in the dark ages, I highly recommend giving Unfuddle a try today.

A while back, I helped put together a website for pineypeakoutfitters.com which is a 7,500-acre, high-elevation private ranch completely surrounded by Colorado’s White River National Forest. For over four decades, it had served as a haven for 400-500 elk and numerous mule deer, but has recently been opened to outsiders.

I saw the directory for the source code of the site last night, clicked into the site, I forgot how much I liked the simple design, and how nice the photography was that Snap Advertising gave me. They made putting together the website easy!

WARNING: If you’re not interested in RPG games, or Ruby programming, ignore this blog post.

A few years ago, when I was learning Ruby, I had an idea for a game.

Here are my initial notes for the game that I jotted down before writing code:

• You start out with a small team of heros.
• Foes start streaming in.
• You fight the foes.
• Results: deaths/stats upgrade/skill acquirement.
• Payment: you get paid for your hard work and effort by the town for your kills.
• Shopping to upgrade equipment.
• Cash in experience for stats upgrades.
• Heros can permanently die.

The inspiration was the “Tower Defense” games that were hugely popular.

I considered basing the game engine on D&D, but instead chose Fudge game system.

I implemented a number of features, including:

• Name generator
• Creature library
• Foe generator
• Hero generator
• Combat system
• Items system
• Skill system
• Open ID

Why did I do all this? To amuse my son, Emerson. We played the game on my computer.

I have tossed it out onto the Internet (http://towndefensegame.com), so you can play the game too :) Source code (rough & unrefactored) has been posted to http://github.com/ryw/town-defense-game for your amusement. I decided to not try and quickly clean up the source code before posting, except what I had to to get it deployed.

The UI is ugly and layouts need fixed in certain browsers, sometimes a hero dies during battle then gets hit again and is somehow brought back to life (bug), there are no tests, there is no instruction on how to play the game.

But it’s out there now so Emerson can play whenever he wants, and now I’m motivated to clean it up.

Feel free to play it and see if you can get hero’s on the top 20 list. I’m warning you now, however, that Emerson is competitive.

It was over a year ago that Michael Guterl (@mguterl) and I started Cincinnati.rb. Our inspiration was Seattle.rb, but we really didn’t get it right.

I think what is hurting us the most is the lack of a quiet cafe-style location near the center of Cincinnati where people can either choose to show up or not, and come or go as they choose.

We have had meetings at RecruitMilitary HQ and EdgeCase Cincinnati HQ, but those locations just feel uncomfortable for some reason, and meeting coordination is no fun.

A cafe in Kenwood or maybe even as far south as Norwood would be the ideal area, being generally central to the Cincinnati metro area. Can anyone think of a place somewhere around there that would be a good place for 2 to 20 geeks to gather with their laptops and code and hangout together on a Tuesday night?

I’m happy to share that today I helped the President of RecruitMilitary, Drew Myers (@drewmyers), switch over from his tired, slow, clunky Dell laptop to a brand new MacBook Pro. When I showed him how quickly command-space searched all his email & files, he was rightfully impressed. He’s going to have many other pleasant surprises in the days to come!

I certainly don’t think Mac is right for everyone, but Drew has the intellectual curiosity needed to adapt to OSX, and of course we have experienced Mac users Michael Guterl (@mguterl) and John Lauck (@johnlauck) in addition to myself to help Drew along.

Side note: I’m starting to think that Ubuntu has a trajectory that could threaten Mac at some point in the future (as well as Windows, of course). And that’s a blog post for a different day.

I’ll report back in a few months to comment on how the conversion has progressed.