AT&T moved up our cut/switch time today to 5:00 pm central time.  The servers will go down at that time and should be back up by 7:00 pm.  We're sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

We will be moving our servers into a new facility on Friday, December 19, 2008.  The move will begin at 7:00 pm central time.  We expect to be down for 2 hours, but there is always the possibility of more downtime.  This move will help us to better serve our customers through increased speed and security.  Thank you!

On November 1^st, we finally moved into our new offices!  The build out took us a little longer than we thought it would, but that is to be expected.  We now have a place to train our customers should they want or need extra training, a place that can hold us and still give us room for future staff expansions, and a way to expand into new businesses.  We also have a meeting space, private offices for programming, and, of course, a fridge, microwave, and coffee pot (programmers live on coffee and Mountain Dew).

There has been some consternation among staff and advisors about the new businesses this allows us to move into.  As of September, we became a Dell reseller and also added the Manhattan and Intellenet lines of cables and peripherals.  These steps and our new office space allowed us to add a small retail and repair component to our existing business.

To our existing school and organization customers:  Don’t Worry!  We are not going to start calling you to sell you keyboards or PCs.  We would be happy to sell you any of those but our relationships with you are based on our software products and will continue to be.  We added the retail and repair components to expand our business, but also to expand our involvement in the Advance, MO community.  Advance had no place to purchase pcs and peripherals or have pcs repaired.  I wanted to add this business because I get tired of driving 30 miles to buy a USB cable and I thought other people in the area probably were too.  We even thought we should make separate websites for the retail and software businesses so as not to “worry” our school and organization customers.  Or even have a separate name for the retail store (I preferred the Leftorium or Buck’s Stereo World, you can look up the references), but in the end we all agreed to combine it all. 

So thank you all to our customers that have allowed us to grow!  The build out took too much of my time, as any building project does, but it will allow us to serve our customers better.  Thank you all so much for your patience.   On the blog at www.bluechalksoftware.com/journal.aspx, you can see a few pictures of the new offices and a really cute picture of Elwood working the phones (Finn tried to climb up on the chair but couldn't quite make it).  Thanks again.

Logo on the wall (the photo is crooked, not the logo)

Reception area

Training/meeting area is to the left.  The Plasma TV was bought for to use as a PC monitor for training purposes, but stayed on CNN, Fox News, and CNBC for most of the election and the stock market crash that preceded it.

The retail wall.  More stock is coming in.

Elwood works the phone. "I've drank a whole pot a coffee and I'm not leaving until I sell 2 work order subscriptions."

For some reason, when we updated the tool bars in the system (removing java applets), we left the tool bar code out of a table in two components (Facilities Reservation and Simple Inventory Management).  In IE the main pages in those two components looked fine but in FireFox,Seamonkey,Netscape, and other Mozilla based browsers, the grids and other info were pushed to the bottom of the page and you had to scroll down to find it.  The non-microsoft browsers were actually showing the components in the correct way -- the toolbar code was out of the table which rendered it at the top of the screen with a huge gap between it and the grids.  Since IE has a tendency to ignore some HTML, it looked right, but wasn't right (in the sense of true HTML rendering vs looking a the output of a page).  So the Mozilla siblings were right but looked wrong and IE was wrong but looked right.  This is starting to sound like a philosophy class so to summarize and clarify - the pages now look the same in all browsers.   The bug is fixed.

In other news, our new office build out is going well.  More news on that soon.