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A friend emailed me a link to an article about Wordpress found Matt Mullenweg. I thought some of you might like to see the reply.

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the link http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/the-way-i-work-matt-mullenweg.html. I had to wait a few seconds to get past the commercial. I’m surprised how similar Matt and I are. One  thing I have considered is turning my email off and only checking it 4 times a day. Those urges to read and answer every email that comes in does distract me from my work. Like Matt, who wasted money on getting an office, we almost wasted money on getting an office. It is a complete waste of time. Also, like Matt, I try to work with self motivated people. I do not have the time nor the inclination to look over anyone’s shoulder.

I was just talking with Jim Buckler, the CEO of Soholaunch the other week. We both wondered how Matt made his millions on free software. I guess when you have investors like the New York Times it gets easier. I also see he is a programmer who has done specialized work that is not free. That too is similar to our model. We offer people free listings, free classifieds, free events listings and even access to our free blog. We get advertisers as well as Google Adsense money and web contracts. The software we use is either a small fee or free. All the value goes into the development. People often ask why we charge less than half of the big companies like JPL. We save on the overhead. All the work goes into development and not much money into software. We can do the average $40,000 website contract for $15,000 and so on.

PS I thought I would send you this link since you love your Blackberry. http://blackberry.wordpress.org/ It is another one of Matt’s deals.

To kill two birds with one stone I posted this to our PAontheweb blog. No sense letting a good article go to waste J

We all see the people in front of stores ringing their bells and asking for donations for the Salvation Army this time of year. I happened to look into that on Christmas day and found that William Booth, son of Samuel Booth came from a very wretched background. Below I have pasted in the article on William’s father Samuel Booth who had two sons named William.

Extracted from Widipedia:

Samuel Booth (1775–1842), the father of William Booth, was born in Belper, Amber Valley, Derbyshire, England. He was tall and often wore clothes that made him look like a Quaker; knee-breeches, drab-cloth suits, and cut-away coats. He married Sarah Lockitt in 1797. At that time, he was a nail-maker. The industrial revolution made his job redundant, therefore he tried to set up some building companies and became an architect. This provided him with sufficient funds to buy a house at Colston Bassett. Samuel and Sarah had a son named William, but he was not the William Booth who founded The Salvation Army. Sarah died in 1819 and William died five years later.

When Samuel Booth went to Ashby-de-la-Zouch to drink the water in hopes that it would cure his rheumatism, he met Mary Moss. He proposed, but she declined. He soon renewed his proposal and pursued her until she agreed, although he was sixteen years her senior. They married and had five children: Henry, Ann, William, Emma, and Mary. Henry died at the age of three. This William became the founder of The Salvation Army. Emma was an invalid from birth and she died without ever marrying at the age of forty. Mary eventually became Mary Newell, and she lived until she was 69.

As Samuel was forced into bankruptcy by successive trade recessions, he moved to Nottingham. William was eventually to say of him:

“My father was a Grab, a Get. He had been born in poverty. He determined to grow rich; and he did. He grew very rich, because he lived without God and simply worked for money; and when he lost it all, his heart broke with it, and he died miserably.”

Samuel Booth was not a religious man, and although he had little interest in his children, he insisted that they attend church regularly.

Samuel began to lose more money and he was forced to move into a house on Sneinton Road in a poorer neighbourhood, but he eventually moved back to Nottingham. It was there that he died. He was baptised on his deathbed, after which he committed his wife and children to God. Those who surrounded him, including his son William, sang Rock of Ages as he died.

William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912) was a British Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878-1912). The Christian movement, with a quasi-military structure and government – but with no physical weaponry – founded in 1865, has spread from London, England, to many parts of the world and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid.
Early life

Booth was born in Sneinton, Nottingham, England, the only son of four surviving children born to Samuel Booth and Mary Moss.[1] His father was wealthy by the standards of the time, but during Booth’s childhood, as a result of his father’s bad investments, the family descended into poverty.

In 1842, Samuel Booth, who by then was bankrupt, could no longer afford his son’s school fees, and 13-year-old William Booth was apprenticed to a pawn-broker. Samuel Booth died later that same year.[2]
A plaque on the house in Nottingham in which William Booth was born on 10 April 1829.
“William Booth” statue at his birth place in Nottingham.

Two years into his apprenticeship Booth was converted to ’salvation’ and Methodism.[3] He then read extensively and trained himself in writing and in speech, becoming a Methodist lay preacher. Booth was encouraged to be an evangelist primarily through his best friend, Will Sansom. Sansom and Booth both began in the 1840s to preach to the poor and the “sinners” of Nottingham, and Booth would probably have remained as Sansom’s partner in his new “Mission” ministry, as Sansom titled it, had Sansom not died of tuberculosis, in 1848.[4]

When his apprenticeship ended in 1848, Booth spent a year looking in vain for more suitable work than pawnbroking, which he disliked and considered ungodly.[5] In 1849, Booth reluctantly left his family and moved to London, where he found work and lodging in a pawnbroker’s shop. Booth tried to continue lay preaching in London, but the small amount of preaching work that came his way frustrated him, and so he resigned as a lay preacher and took to open-air evangelising in the streets and on Kennington common.

In 1851, Booth joined the ‘Reformers’ (Methodist Reform Church), and on 10 April 1852, his 23rd birthday, he left pawnbroking and became a full-time preacher at their headquarters at Binfield Chapel in Clapham. William styled his preaching after the revivalist American James Caughey, who had made frequent visits to England and preached at Booth’s favorite church, Broad Street Chapel. Just over a month after he started full-time preaching, on 15 May 1852, William Booth became formally engaged to Catherine Mumford. In November 1853, Booth was invited to become the Reformers’ minister at Spalding, in Lincolnshire.
[edit] Early ministry

Though Booth became a prominent Methodist evangelist, he was unhappy that the annual conference of the denomination kept assigning him to a pastorate, the duties of which he had to neglect to respond to the frequent requests that he do evangelistic campaigns. At the Liverpool conference in 1861, after having spent three years at Gateshead, his request to be freed for evangelism full-time was refused yet again, and Booth resigned from the ministry of the Methodist New Connexion.

Soon he was barred from campaigning in Methodist congregations, so he became an independent evangelist. His doctrine remained much the same, though; he preached that eternal punishment was the fate of those who do not believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the necessity of repentance from sin, and the promise of holiness. He taught that this belief would manifest itself in a life of love for God and mankind. Eventually, the Booths’ children became involved in the ministry.
[edit] The Christian Mission

In 1865, Booth and his wife Catherine opened The Christian Revival Society in the East End of London, where they held meetings every evening and on Sundays, to offer repentance, salvation and Christian ethics to the poorest and most needy, including alcoholics, criminals and prostitutes. The Christian Revival Society was later renamed The Christian Mission.

Booth and his followers practiced what they preached and performed self-sacrificing Christian and social work, such as opening “Food for the Million” shops (soup kitchens), not caring if they were scoffed at or derided for their Christian ministry work.
Reverend William Booth, General of the Salvation Army
[edit] The Salvation Army
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In 1878 the name of the organization was changed to The Salvation Army, modelling it in some ways after the military, with its own flag (or colours) and its own music, often with Christian words to popular and folkloric tunes sung in the pubs. He and the other soldiers in God’s Army would wear the Army’s own uniform, ‘putting on the armour,’ for meetings and ministry work. He became the “General” and his other ministers were given appropriate ranks as “officers”.

Though the early years were lean ones, with the need of money to help the needy an ever growing issue, Booth and The Salvation Army persevered. In the early 1880s, operations were extended to other countries, notably the United States, France, Switzerland, Sweden and others, including to most of the countries of the British Empire: Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, New Zealand, Jamaica, etc.

Often the beginnings in other countries occurred through “salvationist” activities by non-officers who had emigrated. With some initial success they would contact London to ’send officers.’ In other cases, like in Argentina, a non-salvationist told Booth that there were thousands of British people there who needed salvation. The four officers sent in 1890 found that those British were scattered all over the pampas. But the missionaries started ministry in Spanish and the work spread throughout the country – initially following the railroad development, since the British in charge of building the railroads were usually sympathetic to the movement.

During his lifetime, William Booth established Army work in 58 countries and colonies, travelling extensively and holding, “salvation meetings.”

Booth regularly published a magazine and was the author of a number of books; he also composed several songs. His book In Darkest England and the Way Out not only became a bestseller after its 1890 release, it set the foundation for the Army’s modern social welfare schemes. It compared what was considered “civilized” England with “Darkest Africa” – a land then considered poor and backward. What Booth suggested was that much of London and greater England after the Industrial Revolution was not better off in the quality of life than those in the underdeveloped world. And he proposed a strategy to apply the Christian Gospel and work ethic to the problems. The book speaks of abolishing vice and poverty by establishing homes for the homeless, farm communities where the urban poor can be trained in agriculture, training centres for prospective emigrants, homes for fallen women and released prisoners, aid for the poor, and help for drunkards. He also lays down schemes for poor men’s lawyers, banks, clinics, industrial schools and even a seaside resort. He says that if the state fails to meet its social obligations it will be the task of each Christian to step into the breach. However, Booth was not departing from his spiritual convictions to set-up a socialist or communist society or sub-class, supported by people forced to finance his plans; Booth’s ultimate aim was to get people, “saved.”

Booth asserts in his introduction,

I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It was asserted in some circles that In Darkest England was actually written by the crusading journalist, W.T. Stead, who, in his own words, acted as a “literary hack” for the General when Mrs. Booth lay dying. However, this assumption was swiftly dismissed by Stead some years later, declaring that, “The idea of Darkest England.. was the General’s own. My part, of which I had no wish to speak.. was strictly subordinate throughout.[6]

In Darkest England and the Way Out was reprinted several times and lately in 2006.
[edit] Later years
Grave of William and Catherine Booth, in Stoke Newington

Opinion of the Salvation Army and William Booth eventually changed to that of favour. In his later years, he was received in audience by kings, emperors and presidents, who were among his ardent admirers. Even the mass media began to use his title of ‘General’ with reverence.

In 1899, Booth suffered from blindness in both eyes, but with a short rest, was able to recover his sight. Later in 1899, he had to have his right eye removed and had a cataract in his left eye.[7]

William Booth was 83 years old when he died, in Hadley Wood, London. He was buried with his wife in the main London burial ground for 19th century non-conformist ministers and tutors, the non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. In Booth’s honour, Vachel Lindsay wrote the poem, “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven”.[8] Charles Ives, who had been Evangeline Booth’s neighbour, set the poem to music.

Click here to visit TheWarriorSong Website. This video rocks! Help support our troops. I just wish I had found this before Veterans Day. Soooo. Thank you to all my former comrades in arms!

Just in case you wanted the lyrics:

I’ve got the reach and the teeth of a killin’ machine,

with a need to bleed you when the light goes green

best believe, I’m in a zone to be, from my Yin to my Yang to my Yang Tze

put a grin on my chin when you come to me,

‘cuz I’ll win, I’m a one-of-a-kind and I’ll bring death

to the place you’re about to be: another river of blood runnin’ under my feet

forged in a fire lit long ago, stand next to me, you’ll never stand alone

I’m last to leave, but the first to go, Lord, make me dead before you make me old

I feed on the fear of the devil inside of the enemy faces in my sights:

aim with the hand, shoot with the mind, kill with a heart like arctic ice

I am a soldier and I’m marching on

I am a warrior and this is my song

I bask in the glow of the rising war, lay waste to the ground of an enemy shore

wade through the blood spilled on the floor, and if another one stands I’ll kill some more

bullet in the breach and a fire in me, like a cigarette thrown, to gasoline

if death don’t bring you fear, I swear, you’ll fear these marchin’ feet

Come to the nightmare, come to me, deep down in the dark  where the devil be

in the maw with the jaws and the razor teeth,

where the brimstone burns and the angel weeps

call to the gods if I cross your path and my silhouette hangs like a body bag

hope is a moment now long past, the shadow of death is the one I cast.

I am a soldier and I’m marching on

I am a warrior and this is my song

my eyes are steel and my gaze is long

I am a warrior and this is my song

now I live lean and I mean to inflict the grief,

and the least of me is still out of your reach

the killing machine’s gonna do the deed,

until the river runs dry and my last breath leaves

chin in the air with a head held high,

I’ll stand in the path of the enemy line

feel no fear, know my pride:

for God and Country I’ll end your life

I am a soldier and I’m marching on

I am a warrior and this is my song

my eyes are steel and my gaze is long

I am a warrior and this is my song