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Name:
Kim Bjork
Web address: http://www.infoaxis.com
Why
did you get on the web?
I was making so much money doing contract Lotus Notes software
development for companies like IBM and American Express that
I decided enough was enough. It was high time that I find
a profession whereby I could work 2 times as hard for 10 times
more people and make a 100 times less money. Where else can
you get these kinds of fascinating and rewarding challenges
but on the web?
What services to do offer?
Half of our business is Notes/Domino development. The other
half is all web-only work. The web stuff is traditional site
design, development and hosting via hostaxis.com and spokanebusiness.com.
This is with a couple of twists though. We only host sites we
develop and we only develop sites we maintain. We are a turnkey
operation specifically targeting companies without web expertise
or infrastructures.
Other related services include FTP mirror site hosting for
off-shore companies, "rentable" web browser-based, Domino-hosted
collaborative applications and in about 3 months, credit-card
processing services for those without the desire to maintain
their own CC processing infrastructure.
What
do you like most about the web?
Other people keeping all that info and software on their disks
instead of me having to keep it on my own drives. I like this
a lot. It's really nice of them. Don't you think?
What
do you like least about the web?
Friends, neighbors and relatives asking for
free web pages.
AOL. Training wheels from hell.
Sites with poor navigation tools.
Tasteless, meaningless, useless, ugly clipart
and animations.
IRC. Communicating via realtime keyboarding? Huh?
Browsers.
These things have got to be the dumbest
UI imaginable. ;-)
What
for you is the most useful web technology?
The transport protocol and IP addressing. I know, those are
really internet technologies but without them, the web would
be nothing. Even after 15 years plus as an internet-using
dork, I am still in awe of the complicated simplicity of routing
packets and getting two computers to actually understand one
another. On a global scale, this truly, is a non-trivial feat.
Second, are tools like NOF and Notes that are able to
hide many of the complexities of web technologies from a
feeble mind like mine, allowing me to produce reasonably
useful communication applications for businessmen and their
companies.
Why
do you use Fusion?
Because it delivers the biggest, baddest bang for the least
amount of coding. Especially when there are outfits around
like coolmaps.com. Once you get past NOF's idiosyncrasies,
which all languages and development packages have, Fusion
provides a real decent package for producing and managing
small to medium sized web sites.
NOF is a great equalizer. Although most of my professional
life has been spent serving large companies, my heart has
always been with the small businessman. I'm one myself.
Like Notes, NOF gives a developer the tools to produce quality
sites at small business prices. Economies of scale which
generally favor big business is flattened by products like
Fusion.
Also, NOF integrates well with Notes via the Domino Connector
which gives the best of both worlds via a robust application
server (Domino) and a precision HTML layout tool (Fusion).
Does it get any better?
Your
favorite web sites?
I actually don't use the web much. Too confusing. What,
with all these linky things and earls and hot sputs here
and cool things there. Geesh! I get on the web knowing what
I want and end up somewhere I didn't know I was or how I
got there or how to get back. Can't Microsoft fix this?
;-)
clicktv.com - gotta'
relax once in awhile.
lawguru.com - fascinating
and hopefully never useful.
groupcomputing.com
- Notes-centric industry rag.
lotus-developer.com
- required reading (for me).
escapeartist.com
- great vacation planner.
Will
the world go crazy on jan 01 00? ;-)
Naw, but I think February 29, 2000 will offer a suprise bite
in the butt for a lot of folks.
Interestingly, an old dBase II program I wrote in 1985
for a real estate company was finally retired this year
due to a change in the millennium. It's been running non-stop
on a S100-Bus, 8086, Compupro CPM "server" with a 40M harddisk
using Wyse terminal "workstations." I think this company
will even upgrade their server. Ya' think? But who knows,
this is not an outfit that easily parts with something that
works. ;-)
Thank
you Kim!
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