Completion Satisfaction

Yesterday I heard Tater Salad, Ron White, telling a story about his friend, Dr. Phil (is he a doctor?).  He asked “Doc” for some advice for his son about building self esteem and confidence and Phil’s advice was that he should finish everything he starts.

One of my mental hangups is that I seem to finish nothing that I start.

It’s the word, “nothing,” that points out bad thinking because it’s just not true.  I have finished many things over the last couple of years, mostly for my employer.

For instance, the media server I wrote for MightyPages.com is a cluster of three cloud instances that work as a team under a single IP address to answer image queries by visitors to our listings search and those of our customers.  Instead of loading all images into the content delivery network at once from aggregation feeds, like GetAuto, it loads images on demand and created the three sizes we display within our products.

The media server was a huge programming task and I completed it in one chunk over a few days.

Completing the project RIGHT NOW with distractions, I think, is the secret to me finishing something.  The task doesn’t have to be a short one, but to get completion satisfaction, the job needs to be continued almost to the exclusion of all else, even social interaction.

I still believe an online network for children under 13 that’s completely controlled and monitored by parents with no public find features (it’s not Facebook for kids).  This would be a pay-for-use service.  I might be naive or stupid or both, but I believe there are a number of parents who would pay for such a service — enough to make lots of mailbox money and end my (self inflicted) financial woes.

And, I think creating a distribution of Linux for old computers so parents can inexpensively provide a computer for their children would be a cool thing to do.  It should integrate with the kids online service so that parents can approve web pages that their children may visit (such as school sites, and safe games sites, Wikipedia, whatever).

I believe Poker Guts! would be a neat online game on Facebook.

I also have a Farkle game.

Things aren’t really awful, as I sometimes choose to believe.