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Websites You Should Know

Last night aired a news story that I had the fortune to be part of about web sites people should know about. It was easy for me to come up with a couple sites that I thought everyone should know about: mint.com and pandora.com. I love these sites – real love. After that though, I had a tough time thinking of any others that I think everyone should have in their arsenal. Maybe I’m a little old fashion, but I think everyone should have a portal home page, for me it’s iGoogle.com. It has become a necessity for me to bring everything that I like to keep an eye on into one place where I can quickly keep up to date. A lot of my suggestions for web sites are about being more efficient. Which makes sense, since we are in the business of making people more performant.

Most of my other suggestions are for small business owners or programmer-types. For payroll, I think all small businesses should use paycycle.com. It makes payroll easy. Which for someone that is more interested in helping our clients than managing the office, is a must-have.

There were a couple of comments on the wowt.com site that say they’d like to see more of this type of information. Hopefully, I did an okay enough job that I might be able to share some more. Let us know what you think are the sites that everyone should be using.

Celebrating the Moustache!

Volano is holding its second annual moustache event; most of the team is growing honorary facial hair. We’re not raising awareness or taking donations, nope, we’re just doing it because it looks silly. The rules are simple and are based on one overarching tenet – moustaches rule. So you can butcher the beard, shear the soul patch, and vanquish half the Van Dyke. BUT DON’T SHAVE THE MOUSTACHE.

We did this in October last year and later found out that was a faux pas. Because there is a dedicated month for this: Movember (a combination of the words ‘Moustache’ and ‘November’). Movember is an annual month-long event involving the growing of moustaches during the month of November. The event has been claimed to have been invented in 1999 by group of Australian’s. Of course. A similar observance in the United States and Canada, called No Shave November, involves a full beard as opposed to a mustache.

So what is in this for you? That’s easy: pictures. At the end of Movember we’ll be posting pictures and you can comment on who looks the goofiest. Stay tuned.

Back in the spring, we met Jeremy Heeg through Twitter and had him do some contract work for us developing a Windows app that tracks the indexing of land records for the register of deeds of South Dakota counties. He was willing and able to take this project and run with it. After that application was complete, Jeremy had more work to do on CrowdPicks.com and Volano was on the downside of the ebb and flow of project work.

In October we posted our latest open position to our blog. A few weeks later, Jeremy saw the post and sent us an email. We met a couple times to discuss his requirements and goals, we extended an offer, and now Jeremy brings our team to the magical and lucky number seven.

We’re very fortunate this worked out so well. Jeremy brings great talent, aptitude and attitude to our team.