I humbly offer the “T-Strap”, a method of joining two R-Straps together. We loop the straps into each other so that the assembly resembles a gun shoulder holster. The padded portion of the R-Straps are fixed to each other in the back between the shoulder blades. The bottom of each strap (where the camera hangs) may be connected to the belt. Pictures are probably helpful at this point.

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Since I’ve steadily migrated to shooting with prime lenses, I will most often shoot with two cameras, wide and fast on one, mid-to-long and fast on the other. A comfortable two-strap system has been my holy grail. I want a setup that is quick to manipulate and has good weight distribution. I also want it to be as small as possible and not interfere with clothing.

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My dad frequently used a saying about “plowing the back forty”. It popped into my mind today – and I connected it with putting kids to work on a farm, and how most modern parents are not afforded this luxury. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was thinking about how I could still keep a small business running when I didn’t have the time for the laborious tasks it required. Hmm.

My idea is thus: I will pay my children to pack and ship certain orders for me. I will pay them  the profit on each order they ship (eventually, they’ll learn how to maximize their earnings). They also have to have the urgency to ensure that all orders ship within 48 hours, that will be the harder part to sell them.

What I’m hoping is that the scope of this idea will make it very exciting to them. Why not let them particpate in the success of the family?

As mild-mannered, alter-ego web-developer-guy, I was deeply entrenched in an analysis of product pricing with my boss this past weekend. We were at an industry tradeshow in Orlando pitching our wares. Our product is a web-based inventory management system that’s been developed and used in-house for the last 5 years. Offering it for a monthly fee that was NOT based on sales dollars made sense for us as a way to create fair pricing and still differentiate us from competitors. To get to a “unit cost” of service, I wanted to distill the product down to some core metric.

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