Like a lot of people, I rely on voice mail a lot. Most of my sales are handled via online transactions with no assistance on my part. Most of my support issues are handled via email. But with a global customer base, I can’t always be there to answer the phone when a customer does […]

Do you ever feel like you’re not in control of your own workday? A lot of people do. They get to work and have little say over how to spend their time. Sure, they can prioritize projects and tasks, but overall the projects and tasks are set by external forces. They don’t get to pick […]

My oh so clever 11 year-old son Nathan gave me this flowchart. I gotta hand it to him. The kid’s tenacious.

(Click to enlarge) 

Best of the Web
Every time I see the Culinate site, three things happen. First, I wish my site looked that good. Second, I wish sold food instead of software, because even with the best site design in the world, you can’t match the richness and warmth that beautiful food conveys. Third, I wish I could […]

When I loaded up new screenshots a few weeks back, I decided to replace Lightbox 2 with John Reid’s PopBox. The more I see Lightbox, the more I find it annoying. It just seems slow. And no matter how many times I use it, I still hit the back button occasionally.
It turns out I’m not […]

I was recycling some old magazines today, and I accidentally dropped the May issue of Quality Digest on the floor. It fell open to a page I had put a hard crease in. I looked at the page again and it still makes me go “Wow!”
It’s just a single sentence from the Statistically Speaking section:
“There […]

Someone on the Business of Software forum asked how others motivate themselves to get working. This is a timely question. The jump from FlowBreeze 1.x to FlowBreeze 2.0 has been a long struggle. The code base has grown 3X and of course that doesn’t include the re-writes and thrown away code. Facing burn out in […]

When Google rose to the top of the search engine food chain, they created several commodities. One of them was backlinks. Google’s algorithm places a premium on the number of incoming links to a site. The more incoming links a site has, the higher the site will rank. The higher it ranks, the more traffic […]

In my last post I kind of took a pot shot at Microsoft’s focus on SharePoint Services, insinuating that the internal push was driven in part by competition from Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I don’t think that Microsoft really has much to worry about. Yeah, Google Spreadsheets are still kind of kludgey. But I’m […]

It’s late Saturday night and before hitting the sack I decide to catch up on a little web reading. On a lark I went over to the MSDN blogs home page and searched for Excel. After all, I make Excel add-ins, and who better to find out the latest Excel news than from the Microsoft […]

My first programming experience was in Computer Math class back in High School. It was taught by Mr. “write this down and never forget it” Gray. Mr. Gray was a witty guy, but he wasn’t Mr. Witty. Mr. Witty was the Biology teacher, but he was actually kind of loony. But he wasn’t Mr. Looney. […]

Without much fanfare, BreezeTree Software released FlowBreeze v1.4 the other day. I’ll get to the fanfare bit later. The following is a summary of the changes.
New Features

Apply Styles: Applies the default styles to all the flowchart symbols and lines in the drawing.
Toggle Gridlines: By default FlowBreeze hides the gridlines. This simply lets you toggle them […]

Proposed SAT Question
Liberal is to Linux as Conservative is to _________.
Only in America would we politicize operating systems, but I’ve seen analogies like the one above before. Of course, in reality it doesn’t hold water. Most (sane) people don’t pick their operating system based on ideology.
Douglas Karr has done some analysis and found that a […]

If you use FireFox on a daily basis, no doubt you have your own list of favorite add-ons. But who has the time to constantly be on the lookout for new ones? So, this list was put together for anyone who does business online and needs tools to help you be more efficient.
The Top 10
1. […]

Before making my first blog post in a long time, I noticed that my Akismet spam filter for WordPress had rounded up a few hundred of the usual suspects. I hate to just delete them without review since I’ve had a few false positives. After a few page downs I noticed something. They all have […]

Everyone likes to write about web sites and blogs catering to small businesses. That’s fine. Many people like Escape from Cubicle Nation, Wall Street Journal’s Startup Journal, OnStartups, Creating Passionate Users, among others. They’re good sites and are worth a read. Even if you read them just for inspiration or entertainment, you can usually pick […]

Thanks to Matt Inglot for writing my belated New Year’s resolution for me. (Yeah, I’m running a little behind on that one.) The recent tax season has convinced me his 5 Tips for Staying on Top of Your Books for Small Business Owners is just the sort of advice that I should be implementing. Especially […]

Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:

Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
Put keywords in […]

This has been a really big week here at BreezeTree Software. Apparently, there are over 5000 new employees here. I know because everyday I get hundreds of emails for them.
I’m not too sure about mussolini@breezetree.com. It probably won’t be too long before the other employees start complaining about him. And ehemp@breezetree.com - what’s he, some […]

What a way to start a Monday morning.
I installed the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for FireFox. The installer prompts you to import all your bookmarks into your del.icio.us account. I like to keep some bookmarks private on my PC. I’ve got bookmarks to banking and investment accounts, among other things that I don’t want to post […]

In the Flow is first and foremost a company blog for BreezeTree Software. As such I’ll try to keep it on the level and post only about “important” stuff. “Important” is a dubious term, but in this blog it applies mostly, but not exclusively, to:

Company news.
Product anouncements.
FlowBreeze and other (future) product tips.
General flowcharting, process mapping, […]