It’s official, Apple has just released the new hardware offering, the iPad a few minutes ago. It’s basically a big brother to the iTouch with some additional features and performance (at least as much as I can tell this far into Steve’s introductory presentation).

Although the price hasn’t yet been announced, I suspect this will be in direct competition with the Kindle, so it’s no wonder Amazon released their Kindle development kit early. But is it enough for Amazon?

I will bet that even if the Kindle is cheaper, and has a longer battery life, the iPad will trump the Kindle soon enough. Not only does it do a lot more (watch movies, etc.), IT’S IN FULL COLOR!! Being able to read a book in color is much more exciting than if it’s just in black and white. And Apple already has the iTunes store ready for distributing and selling digital media, including books. Never mind the hundred thousand plus applications in the App Store!

I hate to say it since I buy tons of books from Amazon, but watch out for digital media (digital books). It’s going to be hard for Amazon to compete with the iPad. Even if the iPad ends up costing significantly more than the Kindle, which I suspect it will.

Update: Apparently the battery life on the iPad is 10 hours of video or 1 month of standby time!

Update 2: I predict the demise of the Kindle if Amazon doesn’t do something very very soon. At a $499 entry price for the basic iPad, it’s a no brainer. The iPad $499 version has multiples more storage space, better processor, gaming, videos, tons of apps, books of course, and did I mention it’s FULL COLOR! The only benefit the Kindle has right now is the quantity of books and Amazon’s distribution channels. For now…

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2009 has been my busiest year to date since I’ve started blogging almost 4 and a half years ago and founded LandlordMax 6 years ago! Looking back, it’s hard to believe everything that’s happened. Which is why I’m going to take a breather today and look back at 2009, to share with you all that’s happened. Every once in a while I like to do that, and it’s been way too long since the last time.

When 2009 started, LandlordMax (the property management software company I founded) was growing at a very nice pace and the real estate market hadn’t collapsed as far as it has today. We were in the process of trying to release our biggest ugprade, version 6.05. We were also trying to get a Mac version out in the first half of the year, and hopefully get much further on the networked multi-user version. I had also just published my book Blog Blazers (November 2008) in which I had interviewed 40 top bloggers about their take on blogging. Above that I was in the process of a major redesign of this blog. Those were the major items on my plate as 2009 started.

Overall it mostly went as planned, with some surprises and exceptions. The biggest unexpected was just how much work it was going to take to make it all happen. If I had known ahead of time just how busy 2009 was going to be, I probably would’ve been a lot more stressed. Sometimes ignorance is best. In any case, here is my journey broken down into sections:

LandlordMax

Just to quickly re-iterate, LandlordMax is the company I founded about 6 years ago. The company primarily builds and sells property management software to real estate investors, property management companies, property managers, banks, colleges, and anyone else who needs to manage rental properties. The software manages the accounting, workorders, invoices, leases, tenants, buildings, and about a million other things. It’s a very useful and powerful piece of software.

When 2009 started, we were very actively working on a major upgrade of LandlordMax, which eventually was released as version 6.05 in May 2009. In it we included many new features, including a large amount of charting, email integration, Outlook support, whole new sections (accounts, contacts beyond tenants, vendors, etc.), over 20 new reports to the already more than 100 reports, and lots of other exciting new features. It was a massive undertaking that although started long before the year began, was finished before the year ended.

The only downside is that we couldn’t offer all the features we had wanted to and release it within a reasonable time. For example, we wanted to offer a feature we called “Archiving”, but as we tried to implement it, I realized it was going to be a major undertaking, taking more time than I wanted to get this version completed.

We also tried to get check printing into the software but had I to make the very hard decision to push it to a future release. After having committed a lot of time and money to check printing, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be doable within the time frame we had. So for now, this is a feature that has been put on hold. I hate to see all that effort put on hold, especially after having already invested so much effort and time, but it was the right decision. It was the hardest decision I that I had to make in 2009.

That being said, LandlordMax version 6.05 was very successfully released in May 2009. The feedback and comments we received have been amazing. Here’s just a few samples of the latest testimonials: 1, 2, 3. And those are just the ones I’ve published here on my blog, there’s many more on the LandlordMax Success Stories page.

Within days of version 6.05 being released, a big push went forward to make it available on the Mac. We’ve been working on this on and off for some time, going as far back as 2007. The problem with the Mac version is that there’s always tons of small and extremely annoying differences that need to be correctly handled. Things from how the installer works to how the program is rendered on the Mac. But this year I decided we had to make it happen no matter what. What I initially thought was going to be a certain amount of worked turned out to be a lot more than I had planned. And I mean a lot more! On the scale of 3-5 times more work!

Back in August 2009, I was already mentioning here how the Mac version was going to be coming very soon. That we only had one issue remaining. How wrong I was! A month later, in September I wrote about it again saying how wrong I was in my last post. We had resolved it, but now there were other issues.

One issue that was particularly troubling was due to the fact that LandlordMax is built on the Java platform. On the Mac, Leopard uses Java 5, and Snow Leopard uses Java 6. There is no overlap, and you can’t choose one version or the other, they each use a different version. Which means to support Leopard and Snow Leopard we needed to make LandlordMax fully Java 6 AND Java 5 compliant!! We’d been planning to upgrade to Java 6, but we were hoping to push that off until after the Mac version was released. Turns out we had to deal with it now.

At the end of October, we finally released the Mac version of LandlordMax! And it was compatible for all versions of the Mac OS, Leopard and Snow Leopard. Not only that, but you could take a backed up database file from the Windows version and move it to the Mac, and vice versa. In other words, you could use LandlordMax interchangeably on the Mac and Windows!

The Mac version of LandlordMax has since been received with lots of enthusiasm as shown in this initial testimonial, with many more to come. But in terms of estimated cost, we spent several times more than I had initially planned. And this is after having already committed lot of resources in the past.

During all this, the property management software market has dramatically changed. A company that’s been buying up many of our competitors over the last couple of years in the hopes of becoming a major player, Domin-8, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. They acquired companies such as Rent Right, Spectra, Tenant Pro, iCam, Management Plus, and so on. This is big news because most companies have very limited success after filing for Chapter 11. Not only this, but we’re already starting to see people jumping ship as they’re learning the news. No one wants to be stuck with a software from a company that’s no longer around, especially with the speed of technology today. Which means 2010 may be a very interesting year for the property management software market. A shakeout year…

And as you all know by now, the real estate market has also been going through a major recession! You would expect our sales to be impacted negatively, but quite the contrary has been going on! Our revenue growth hasn’t stopped in the slightest, we’re still growing at the same fast rate as before as shown below (the graphs below only include sales of LandlordMax):

All in all, it’s been a great year for LandlordMax. Things have definitely been going in our favor. The only thing we haven’t yet succeeded in doing is releasing the networked version. A lot of work has already been done here, but the progress has been slower than I’d have liked. Not because it’s hard or a lot of work, which it is, but because I’m always having to allocate effort away from it to other more immediate items. For example, to get LandlordMax version 6.05 out on time, we had to pause the effort on the network version for several months. And for the Mac version, well let’s just say that all the effort was focused on the Mac version during those months. Like I said before, the Mac version required much more work than anticipated and I made the commitment to follow it through, even at the cost of delaying other items.

Which means that this year, we’re now working very hard on the network version. I expect there will be a new version of LandlordMax before the networked version is available, but I can’t confirm this. I also believe it won’t be until at least late in the year that the networked version will be available, if not in 2011. Above this, the website is in the process of going through a major uplift! That’s what’s going on right now. We’ll see what happens. I can’t wait to write a similar post when 2011 comes on what happened this year!

Blog Blazers

In November of 2008, I published the book Blog Blazers. In Blog Blazers, (also available on Amazon), I interviewed 40 top bloggers, (bios can be found here). The book took me a good year to publish and I’m very proud of the results. In it I asked everyone the same questions so that you the reader can compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. Not only that, but one of my goals was to make sure the questions had a lot of follow-up material so that you could continue learning after you were done reading the book. Questions such as What was your most successful blog post ever? Which books and websites do you recommend to new bloggers? What’s your best tip for writing a successful blog post? To name just a few. I even wrote some follow up posts to help people find further resources such as 10 Most Popular Books in Blog Blazers.

Because the book was released in mid-November, it was just in time for the Xmas rush. And of course, because it’s a new book from a new company (Levac Publishing House – owned and operated by yours truly), there were some initial distribution issues. For example, Amazon will only initially order a limited number of books for new books and from new publishers. And because of this, Blog Blazers was almost immediately out of stock on Amazon. The good thing is that although it took alittle bit of time, we were able to resolve the issue quickly enough. And of course, it’s a good problem to have!

Other than that small initial glitch, Blog Blazers as a whole has been a pretty smooth ride. Most of the issues with the book were in it’s production, the marketing and sales was fairly similar to LandlordMax. Actually, I learned so much from the production side that I ended up writing a 3 part series on how to publish a book. Here is the link to the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The biggest thing I learned about publishing books is that profits can only really be made by selling books in large volumes. You have to move at least 10,000-100,000 books to make any kind of money. Less than that and I’m at a loss how you can make any profit (assuming you have a marketing budget). The profit margins are definitely lower than I expected. To be honest, I really did learn a lot more than I ever expected about the book publishing industry. I now have a very big appreciation for the effort that goes into making a good book, and just how hard it is to produce and succeed. I now thing that books in general are under-priced. That being said, lots of copies of Blog Blazers were moved. Right now there’s just a fraction of what I initially printed left before I need to make a decision on the next print run. So that’s pretty exciting.

In regards to how the book has been received, it’s gotten a ton of glowing reviews. It’s been reviewed on major websites, blogs, magazines. It’s landed me several interviews, podcasts, radio spots, video reviews, guest appearances, etc. It’s been used used for a workshop at Drake University. What’s also very excited is that on Amazon, a site known for it’s reviews, Blog Blazers has gotten an average 4.5 star out of 5 stars! Almost no books get 5 star reviews, it’s extremely rare. Most books get anywhere from 3 to 4 stars. 4.5 stars is exceptional!

As the year has been wrapping up, I’ve had to decrease my marketing efforts. Right now the book is mainly selling itself through word of mouth. I might put another big marketing push or two, but I don’t expect to put as big a marketing push as I did in 2009. It’s a lot of work and because of that I believe it took a lot of my time away from LandlordMax. It was ok for 2009, but I can’t commit as much time to promoting Blog Blazers in 2010 as I did in 2009, not with everything coming down the pipe for LandlordMax.

Overall though, Blog Blazers was a success which I’m very proud of it. The only thing is that in retrospect had I known beforehand what it takes to publish a book I doubt I would have done it. The last time I had calculated, I put 1000-2000 hours into publishing the book. That’s just my time! This doesn’t include the money I invested. It’s definitely a costly endeavour. So if you’re planning to write a book, you should really check out my book publishing series I wrote on my blog (mentioned earlier). It’s a BIG project! Not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just nice to know what you’re signing up for before you actually do sign up.

FollowSteph

As always, in 2009 I continued to write articles/posts here. The biggest workload came from a complete custom re-design of the site. And I have to give credit to Reuben Whitehouse for it’s success. He designed the new logo, as well as the whole look and feel. If you’re interested, Reuben wrote a blog post about how he designed and came up with the FollowSteph.com logo. It’s a pretty cool post with lots of pictures and explanations on how he did it.

The other big news for FollowSteph is that the Feedburner subscriber count, which I don’t publicly post yet, has been climbing fast. In 2009, the blog grew in subscriptions by 500%!! I can’t even begin to describe how exciting that is!! Normally I’d see a 50% to 100% yearly growth, never 500% times. 2009 was a big year. Very exciting stuff!

For 2010, my main goal is to increase my blog postings, bring it back to my pre-2009 levels. 2009 was just so insane that I have to admit I didn’t post as much as I use to. Especially the last few months of 2009. In November and December I only had 2 posts each. My goal is to get back to my usual posting schedule of at least once a week, preferably more if time permits. It’s definitely not a lack of ideas and things to say, it’s a lack of time.

RealEstatePigeon.com

RealEstatePigeon.com is a completely new website/project sponsored by LandlordMax! I’ve never once talked about it. This is the very first time right now!

RealEstatePigeon.com is expected to be publicly released later this week or early next week. You’re more than welcome to check it out now, just be aware that we’re putting on the final touches as we speak. There are a few outstanding graphical issues. That and I’m in the process of seeding it a bit more before fully going public with it.

What is RealEstatePigeon.com? It’s a Q&A (Questions and Answers) website about real estate. The website is based on the success of StackOverFlow.com, a Q&A website for programmers. The idea is that you’ll be able to ask real estate related questions and get answers. Not only that, but because it’s a community website, you can also show off your real estate knowledge and answer questions posed by others.

The differentiator here is that unlike discussion forums where the answers are all listed in chronological order which makes you have to read everything just to get any idea of what’s going on, you’ll be able to quickly see the best answers. This will work because all the answers get voted on, and the best answers will get pushed up to the top based on the number of votes. So the better an answer is, the higher it goes and the quicker you can get to it.

Not only that, but the website is going to have a reputation based system. What this means is that you receive reputation points for each of your questions and answers that are up voted. The more reputation points you get, the more real reputation and credibility you get. And the more real reputation you have, the more real opportunities you’ll get offline, in the real world.

For example, on StackOverFlow people have gotten such high reputation scores that it’s attracted the attention of people looking to hire experts. Yes, opportunities are being presented to people directly because of their reputation scores! People are getting contracts because of their reputation scores. People are getting hired for work because of their reputation scores. Basically, people with high reputation scores are attracting the attention of others who want to work with them.

Therefore the goal of RealEstatePigeon.com is that not only will you get answers to your real estate questions, but you’ll will be able help others (and as a side effect show off your knowledge). And in return for helping others, you’ll be able to potentially achieve success yourself! Who wouldn’t want to work with a mortgage broker who had a high reputation score. What about a knowledgeable real estate agent? When you approach an investor for money, wouldn’t it be great to be able to show them how much you know and your reputation score? Even better, I can’t wait to hear from the first person who tells me they got approached by investors instead of them having to approach investors because of their reputation on RealEstatePigeon.com!! That’s the ideal goal! To get people come to you rather than you going to them!

2010

To summarize, in 2010 I plan to:

• Continue to grow LandlordMax
• Release at least one new major version of LandlordMax
• Get very close to releasing a networked and multi-user version of LandlordMax
• Finish the major uplift of the LandlordMax website
• Sell out all the remainder copies of Blog Blazers’ first print run
• More than double the number of subscribers to this blog
• Bring back to the posting frequency to pre late 2009
• Launch RealEstatePigeon.com with success
• And have a lot fun doing all of the above!!

Let’s see what happens.

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Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is having a competition contest where he’s giving away books he’s read, one of which is the book I published called Blog Blazers.

The idea behind the contest is that you have to pick one and only one book which you’d like to have a chance to win. As of this moment, he already has 1203 people comments (entries) for the chance to win a book. What’s really exciting is how many people are voting for Blog Blazers!!

If you haven’t already commented for your chance to win a copy of Blog Blazers, now’s the time to enter!

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I hate to admit it, but I have more printers than I have computers. Why is that? Is it because I love printers? Not at all. It’s because it’s economically cheaper to buy a new printer almost every time I run out of ink.

For example, today on Amazon I can buy the Canon iP3600 Inkjet Photo Printer for $43.08. Don’t be fooled by the sale price, just do an Amazon search for printers in the $25-$50 range and you’ll find lots of printers in that price range. Many are cheaper than this Canon printer, I just picked it because the discount wasn’t as heavy as some of the other models.

Now if we look at the price of ink cartridge to replace it, what they call the value pack, to replace all the colors including black, it comes to $41.05. Yes, it’s actually cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy ink. And I get a new printer!!

I understand that ink is where printer manufacturers make their profits, and that more often than not the printers themselves are loss leaders, but this is a bit ridiculous. Is it just this one case?

Epson has a WorkForce 30 Color Printer selling for $59.99. To replace the ink requires a $16.49 purchase for black ink and a $32.99 purchase for color ink. Combined, that’s $49.48, just $10 shy of a brand new printer!

And it’s not just Canon and Epson that do this, pretty much all printer manufacturers are in the same boat. Too often the price of replacing the ink is equal to or greater than the price of a new printer.

I do understand that the ink packs they give you with new printers aren’t the same size as replacements, but most people don’t generally think about this when they’re in the store itself making the purchasing decision. What we’re thinking is in the first case I get a free printer. In the second, for $10 more we get a whole new printer!

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why people such as myself have too many printers.

And don’t get me started on how shoddy most printers are built these days. How many printers have you had that lasted more than a year or two before they stopped working?

PS: The prices on Amazon have already changed from when I initially wrote this post.

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The quick answer: Yes! Absolutely get vaccinated. The quicker we can stop this virus in it’s tracks, the less chances we have that it mutates. Right now it’s a relatively mild virus, but it has has the potential to mutate. If we have the ability as a society to stop it before it can mutate, then we should. Not only that, but why get sick if you can prevent it, especially if you happen to be one of the unlucky few who gets hit really hard by it!

Because of all the media attention this vaccine is getting, and because it feels a bit rushed, a lot of people are somewhat skeptical of getting vaccinated. Today I’m going to try and answer as many questions as I possibly can about the vaccine. And although I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching this information, I’m still not a medical expert. Therefore if for any reason any information in this post is incorrect, please let me know right away.

How does the flu vaccine actually work?

Both the seasonal and the H1N1 flu vaccine work the same way. They basically help us create antibodies to fight the “real live” virus. How this is achieved is by injecting us with a tiny part of the DEAD virus. Again, it’s NOT live. And because the virus is dead, it cannot grow in us. But what it does do is allow our bodies to combat it, and hence build an immunity to it.

This is also generally why we don’t get sick from a vaccine. The virus is not live, and hence is not infecting us. It’s possible that we feel some minor flu like symptoms, and this is a good thing. It means our body is reacting to the dead virus and fighting it off, building antibodies.

Can flu shots cause the flu?

No. The vaccine ONLY contains DEAD virus. If you do get the flu after a virus it’s because you came into contact with it from another source, such as a door handle, a handshake, an infected air particle from someone coughing in the same room, and so on.

As well, do remember that the vaccine’s effect is not immediate. If you get the vaccine in the morning, you’re not immune that afternoon. The vaccine works by letting your body react to the dead virus, giving it the ability to pre-build antibodies before it’s exposed to the real live virus. Therefore you have to give your body the time to create these antibodies. For H1N1 it can be anywhere from 10-21 days for your body to build up it’s immunity.

Am I completely immune to the virus after I get vaccinated?

No. No vaccine is perfect! Most flu vaccines are 70-90% effective. It really depends on how closely matched the real virus is to the virus you were vaccinated for. So for example, if the H1N1 virus mutates significantly, then it’s possible that the vaccine’s effectiveness drops. Even more reason to get it now, so that we can stop it before it gets a chance to mutate. Studies have shown that if at least 70% of a population get vaccinated, it’s enough to extinguish most viruses.

In any case, right now it’s appears that the H1N1 vaccine is about 85% effective. That means that 15 people out of 100 people that got vaccinated will still get affected by the H1N1 virus.

The good news is that if you do get affected, it’s very likely to be much milder than if you didn’t get vaccinated. And if it does mutate, you may still have some partial immunity. Some immunity is better than no immunity.

Studies have also shown that people who get vaccinated do get sick less and miss fewer days of work.

Do healthy people need to get vaccinated?

Yes. Healthy people do get sick. Although in most cases their symptoms are much milder than the young and elderly. However when newer (for lack of better word) strains come out, such as the H1N1 flu virus, they are just at risk if not more so because of the Cytokine Storm produced by their body’s immune system. In the 1918 pandemic, it was the healthy young people that seemed to get hit the hardest.

If nothing else, although the symptoms may be milder to healthy people, they can potentially expose a lot of other people, such as their kids, their grand-parents, their parents, their grand-kids, their nieces, nephews, etc. Basically they can expose people who’s immune systems aren’t as robust as theirs.

What about the Guillain-Barre syndrome?

In 1976, a very small but unfortunate number of people developed GBS (Guillain-Barre Syndrome) after getting vaccinated (300 people out of 48 million). The vaccine that was given then didn’t go through the usual process like the H1N1 vaccine did. As well, even though it was never officially proven that the vaccine caused GBS, that vaccine is no longer used.

Studies have since then found that there is no difference between people who get flu vaccines and those who don’t in terms of getting GBS. But your chance of getting GBS after being sick from the flu is much greater than your risk of getting GBS after a flu shot.

In other words, getting the flu vaccine overall drops your rates of getting GBS. Do remember that the flu itself can cause swelling of the brain, it can cause comas, seizures, etc. The odds of getting GBS from the flu itself are higher than from the vaccine.

Is there mercury in the flu vaccine?

In some vaccines there are tiny amounts of thimerosal in the flu vaccine. Thimerosal prevents bacteria from growing in the bottle of vaccine. Thimerosal breaks down into a kind of mercury, but not the kind that causes mercury poisoning.

What are adjuvants?

Adjuvants are additives to vaccines to make them more effective. They basically cause your body to make more antibodies and to make them faster. It’s almost like pressing a turbo button on your immune system.

Adjuvants also help people with weaker immune systems since they aren’t as strong. Again, remember that the whole idea behind a vaccine is to expose your body to the virus and give it a chance to build an immunity to it. If your immune system is already weak, it may not be able to fully build up an immunity to it without a boost.

The other benefit of adjuvants is that it gives vaccine manufactures the ability to produce more vaccines in less time, which is great for rampping up vaccine supplies in times of pandemics. It does this because each flu vaccine needs smaller amounts of the dead virus to have effect. Less virus means less time reproducing large quantities of the virus. If H1N1 had turned out to be more virulent, or if it does ever mutate to a more virulent form, adjuvants will give us the ability to manufacture more vaccine quicker.

Are adjuvants safe?

Adjuvants are correctly considered to be safe. Most people don’t realize that many other vaccines do include adjuvants, some given to babies. They’ve been around for a long time. So far the results have been positive.

The only reason non-adjuvant vaccines are recommended to some groups such as pregnant woman is just because they’ve never been tested. It’s not because negative results have been found, it’s simply because there is no data. It’s actually been recommended that if push comes to shove for a virulent strain, and the choice is between an adjuvant vaccine and no vaccine at all, that the adjuvant vaccine be taken. It does appear to be safe, but it’s also hard to ethically test some specific groups of people (such as pregnant women).

How do you get the vaccine if you have egg allergies?

Unfortunately most flu vaccines are grown in eggs. If you have serious allergies to eggs, you may not be able to get the H1N1 vaccine.

That being said, I haven’t really done the full research into what options are avaialble for those with egg allergies, so if you do have these allergies, please feel free to comment below and let us all know.

Can kids become Autistic because of the flu vaccine?

There are two arguments people generally refer to when asking this question. Firstly, they point to the small amounts of mercury (the thimerosal mentioned early) as the cause. Studies have shown that this isn’t the case. In Denmark for example, thimerosal was taken out of the vaccines and it didn’t reduce the autism rate in that country. The WHO (World Health Organization) have also come to the same conclusion after several studies.

The second argument is that the rate of autism has gone up in correlation to the increase rate of vaccines. But if you remember your science 101, correlation doesn’t imply causation. Just because something is related it doesn’t mean it’s the cause.

For example, as the number of pirates have decreased, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore the lack of pirates is the cause of global warming. Since the 1950s, both the atmospheric CO2 level and crime levels have increased sharply therefore CO2 causes crimes. In both of these cases it’s obivous that the correlation doesn’t imply the cause but sometimes the lines are fuzzier.

For example, as cell phones are being used more, autism rates have increase, therefore cell phones cause autism. I highly doubt this is true, but it’s a less obvious example. If you go one step further, as vaccinations have gone up, so have the rates of autism, therefore vaccines cause autism. Again, just because something is correlated it doesn’t mean it’s the cause. It’s back to the same type of argument: As ice cream sales increase, the rate of drowning deaths increases sharply, therefore ice cream is causing people to drown. Absurd, but it is actually correlated.

Conclusion

Should you or shouldn’t you get vaccinated? Yes, you should absolutely get vaccinated if you can. To be honest, there’s no reason not to.

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Although I try not to post too many customer testimonials here about LandlordMax, I just couldn’t resist the following one from Dallas Powell. Especially since we just released the Mac version of LandlordMax.

I’m just writing you to say thanks for developing this awesome  software and keeping on top of it with frequent updates and fantastic new features. You guys are a top notch company. I was really happy when you offered it for Mac’s. I liked it enough that I bought it and boot camp with Windows for my Mac to be able to use it and the only downfall was having to get on the Windows partition which I don’t like. I can now use this awesome software right on my Mac!

To those who are considering a purchase, I can assure you that you will be happy with it. I needed something easy to operate without having to spend a lot of time figuring it out. Within a couple of hours I had the software completely figured out with out having to read the literature that comes with it. Just start inputting information (a property, a tenant, etc) and it will all become clear.

- Dallas Powell

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“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
- George Santayana

Why is there such a big push for the H1N1 vaccine right now? Why did the United-States declare a state of Emergency for the H1N1 virus? Why has the WHO (World Health Organization) been so public about escalating the H1N1 virus to a “pandemic”?

It’s because we’re learning from our past. Well hopefully we’re learning. Back in 1918 people were too slow to react to the biggest Pandemic in recorded history. And when they did react, it was either too late or too slow. The time to react is not once we’re in the midst of a full virulent pandemic storm. Rather the time to react is before it becomes virulent. Even with today’s modern medicine we still can’t cure the Influenza (Tamiflu isn’t really a cure). All we can do is prevent it and treat the symptoms.

Back in 1918, before it really struck at full force, people just kept saying it was “only just the flu”. Nothing to worry about. It’s just another cold. Yes, initially it was, but that quickly changed. And even then, many people still kept saying it was only just a flu. It wasn’t until people started dying, and even then it wasn’t for some time, that the population really started to react.

If you don’t know the history of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, I strongly recommend the book The Great Influenza – The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry. It’s an amazing read! The information and knowledge in the book is priceless! Not only does he follow you through the history of the pandemic, Barry also explains how influenza works and why we still need to be just as vigilant today.

The 1918 pandemic is chillingly similar to today’s pandemic. Firstly, the 1918 Influenza was an H1N1 Influenza virus, unlike the Avian Flu’s H5N1 makeup. If you’re not familiar, Influenza can come in a number of forms, H1N1 being one, H5N1 being another, and so on. Each form is different enough that if you have immunity to one it doesn’t give you immunity to another (so for example being immune to H1N1 doesn’t give you immunity to H5N1). This is why there are seasonal vaccines, there are just too many possible forms. As well, to make things more complicated, the Influenza virus can be different enough within one form to only offer partial immunity to that form (and in some cases none at all). It’s almost like variations within forms!

But getting back to the 1918 pandemic, it too started with an initial mild first wave. It’s the second wave that brought death and carnage to the world. The second wave was of the same form but much more virulent. So virulent in fact that in the most severe cases it killed within hours of when people showed the first signs of symptoms much like the death this week of the 13 year boy in Toronto who died of H1N1 with 48 hours of showing symptoms. Statistically, the 1918 flu killed anywhere from 2-20% of those infected as opposed to the normal rate of 0.1%! The good news is that in most cases it just made you really sick, but please don’t confuse that with how many people it killed. It killed complete families. It devastated whole communities. Governments in the US collapsed. Cities collapsed (Philadelphia, etc.). Booming cities became ghost towns. In terms of scale, it’s estimated to have killed over 100 million people. In today’s numbers that would be over half a billion people!

This is also incidentally why the WHO, and governments around the world, are pushing so hard for everyone to get vaccinated as soon as possible. We want to stop it dead it in it’s tracks, to prevent it from mutating into a much more virulent form. We don’t want to give it that chance. Not only that, we know that the H1N1 has the potential for being a real killer!

The similarities don’t just stop there, the H1N1 from 1918 was much more virulent to the healthy young people than to the young and elderly. Sadly, hundreds of thousands of children were left without parents after the virus had finished it’s run. Not something you normally see from the seasonal flu.

The reason it can be so deadly in young healthy people is because they are so healthy. It’s not actually the virus that kills them in many cases, it’s their own body. Rather than just sending in special soldiers and snipers from your immune system to attack the virus, it has to send in it’s full arsenal. Now in many cases, it’s not a big issue, but if the virus fights is strong, your body reacts accordingly (not exactly but close enough). So what happens is that you get your own personal World War 3 waged in your body. In most cases your body will win, but have you ever seen a battlefield after a big war? There’s not much of it left. In this case, the battlefield IS your body, specifically your lungs, so there’s not much left. This is called a Cytokine Storm.

This is often what causes you to die. And you’re lucky enough to survive the onslaught of the battle, your lungs are so beat up that they get secondary infections such as pneumonia, bronchitis, etc. In 1918 they didn’t know what to call this. Today we call it ARDS (Acute Respitory Distress Syndrome). If you get ARDS, your chances of survival are low. In 1918 you had a 10% chance of surviving. Today I believe it’s now up to a 50% chance of surviving. Better but not great. Incidentally, this is why SARS was so scary.

Just how fast can it happen? Here’s a story from the book The Great Influenza: “In Cape Town, South Africa, Charles Lewis boarded a streetcar for a three-mile trip home when the conductor collapsed, dead. In the next three miles six people aboard the streetcar died including the driver. Lewis stepped off the streetcar and walked home”.

Yes today we have better treatment for secondary infections such as antibiotics, but we definitely don’t have enough supply for a major pandemic. It’s believed that the world supply of antibiotics would be depleted early on in a significant pandemic, and manufacturers wouldn’t be able to keep up with demand. That’s part of the cost/benefit of our society’s “Just in Time” inventory. It helps reduce costs and wastage, but we don’t have much backlog. Again, we still have no cure for Influenza itself, all we have is medicine (antibiotics) to treat secondary infections.

Which is why we need to get the people who will be most sick (or most likely to pass it to others) vaccinated first. Not just because they’re more likely to suffer and die, but also because we want to be careful not to overwhelm our already over stretched medical system. In most places in North America, the medical system is already running at more than 100% capacity. That’s right, more than 100% capacity!

If you compare the medical system today to the 1918 medical system, they may have been better prepared. The hospitals back then were running well below 100%. In 1918 the bed per capita (ie number of beds for a given number of people) was much much better than it today. Even with this extra supply of bed and staff, you hear many stories from survivors who while in the hospital never saw a doctor. In some places people couldn’t get beds, even with bribes. People would lie on the floors waiting for others to die so that they could take their beds. It wasn’t pretty. And that’s with a bigger padding than today. It’s not about the quality of care, or what treatments are available, but just about being able to see a doctor!

It’s believed that our current medical system can’t even handle the extra surge from a mild pandemic! Never mind a virulent one. We just don’t have the resources for the surge in capacity. It looks like our hypothesis is about to be tested, and it’s already proving to be accurate. We are ONLY in a MILD Pandemic right now. Hopefully that’s all it will be.

The good news is that we have much better communications today. The fact that Barack Obama has already declared a state of emergency for the United States is phenomenal!! In 1918 it was hushed for as long as possible. Declaring a state of emergency early means we’re already starting to allocate resources before it’s a massive problem. It means we’re trying to prevent it rather than react. Not only that, but making people aware is a good thing. There may be some fear and panic right now, but compared to what happened in 1918, it’s way better.

In 1918 because they tried to hide the spread of the virus (it was during World War 1 and they were trying hard to boost morale – an Influenza pandemic killing millions doesn’t exactly boost morale), they created even more fear and panic. People had no idea what was going on. People didn’t trust anyone. Would you? It was a mess. Actually the cities that fared best, such as San Francisco, did so because they publicly shared truthful information. People were informed. Information was the key. And because they knew what was happening, what to expect, they dealt with it much better. The unknown is scarier than anything else. When you watch a scary movie, the anticipation up to the moment is the scariest. Once you see the bad guy, you’re no longer scared. The unknown is what’s scarier.  So I only have praise for Barack Obama because he’s already started to allocate resources ahead of time. Great job!!

In terms of prevention, learning from 1918 (and other pandemics), it’s almost impossible to stop Influenza. This is why in the spring the WHO basically suggested there’s no point in stopping air travel. It was too late. With the Avian flu they still had a chance, but with H1N1 it was too late. It had already spread.

To give you an idea how far and wide it can spread, almost no one was safe in the world in 1918, before they had commercial travel like we have today. Even remote locations up in the North Pole got hit. Researchers were recently able to resurrect live samples of the 1918 Influenza from Alaska. The only communities that were able to save themselves from the 1918 Pandemic enforced very strict quarantines, almost to the point of being extreme. No ONE, and I mean NO ONE was allowed in once the quarantines were setup. Even something as innocent as a delivery of mail could devastate a community. Most communities failed, even with strict quarantines.

Yet still some were able to enforce quarantines where no one died. Communities such the town of Gunnison, Colorado. In October of 1918, in advance of the pandemic, they shut down the town for about 2 months. No public gatherings. Lawmen blocked all the roads. Train passengers weren’t allowed to get off the train to stretch their legs, not even outside. There’s even a record of a couple trying to drive through the town who got thrown in prison and quarantined. Basically they took very drastic measures but it worked. The neighboring town, Sargeant, esperienced 6 deaths of out 130 in one day. The quarantine worked. If you’re interested, you can find a list of newspaper clippings from 1918 with dates as the events unfolded here – it’s very informative.

Of course in our global world, it’s already too late. There’s no way to quarantine yourself. What you can do however is stay away if you’re sick. Please, STAY HOME IF YOU’RE SICK! This is how the virus passes. In our modern society, we’ve grown up to tough it out, throw some dirt on our wounds, and go to work. That’s the exact behaviors that cause the virus to spread. We need to change our way of thinking. If you’re sick, don’t go to work. Stay home. Don’t go out to public places. If you don’t need to go to the doctors then don’t. And especially, if you don’t need to go to the hospital then please don’t.

Even if you’ve been vaccinated, remember it’s not 100% effective. It’s 85% effective. You still have a chance of getting H1N1. However if you do get it, odds are that it will be much milder. As well, be aware that the vaccine is NOT immediate. It takes time for the vaccine to take effect. Your body has to build an immunity to it. It takes days, even weeks (I’ve read as much as 3 weeks with H1N1). In that interim, you CAN STILL CATCH the H1N1 flu. Each day you’re less likely, but you still can.

And please, please, please, if you already have the flu, don’t go get vaccinated while you have it. Firstly, it’s too late. Secondly, it won’t help, you’ve already gotten it. It’s not a cure but a prevention method! And this is why a lot of people think the vaccine is sometimes ineffective. If you were already infected but hadn’t yet shown signs (even more so if you show symptoms), it won’t do anything for you. It’s totally useless in that case.  Again, it takes some time for vaccine to take effect, so you should get it sooner than later. The longer into the pandemic you wait, the less effect it will have.

For example, today in the news I read “Desrochers said she is anxious to be vaccinated because her grandson is sick with flu symptoms.” Are you serious? If you already have the flu, the vaccine is not going to help. It’s not going to make your grandson better. If anything, all you’re going to end up doing is infecting other people. It means you’re going to nullify the vaccine for everyone you come into contact with. It’s just wrong. But people are misinformed, and unfortunately the message being communicated is completely inconsistent.

I’ll give you another example. I was talking to someone locally who had just seen her doctor, and they informed her not to get the vaccine. The reason given was that it was a live virus and could be potentially dangerous because you needed a strong immune system to fight it. She is one of those high at risk. Her doctor couldn’t be more wrong. The vaccine available to her includes the dead virus, not the live virus. Secondly, she is exactly the high risk person that needs to get the vaccine. Why did it happen? Because the information traveling around is inconsistent. In marketing terms, there is no consistent message. That is to say, unless you educate yourself and your smart about what sources you refer to, etc., there’s all kinds of conflicting information. No one is stepping up and what’s happening is it’s creating misinformation, and hence fear and paranoia. We’re, sadly, repeating history in this case.

While I’m ranting, the other thing I don’t understand is why we aren’t delivering the vaccine faster. As far as I can tell here locally, it’s not the lack of vaccines that’s stopping us. What’s happening is that the vaccination clinics are only open for a few hours at a time before they decide to close down for the day so that they can close at their expected times. Don’t they understand, this is a race. It’s a race between getting the majority of the population immunized before the virus has the time to take hold, and in the worse case mutate to a virulent form. We’re not running out of vaccines right now. My local station giving the vaccine is only open between 2:30pm and 8pm. Within an hour the lineups are so bad that they have to close to let all the personnel go home by 8pm. At this rate, they’re vaccinating 4200 people in my city per day. Within a month, that’s approximately 100,000 people. In a city of about a million, that’s 10% of the population in a month, way less than majority needed. At that rate it would take until midway through next year just to hit 50%. Now I do understand that they are scaling up each day, but with doses available now, there’s no reason to close the vaccination clinics so early. If it’s a staffing issue, I’m sure there’s a solution to be found.

Since I’m on the topic of vaccinations, right now we spend more researching the West Nile virus than we do on Influenza, yet Influenza kills more people per year than the West Nile virus has killed since it was discovered. Why is that? With one pandemic, Influenza can kill more people than AIDS in several decades (the 1918 pandemic killed more people from Influenza in 6 months than AIDS has in 25 years). And not to downplay AIDS, but Influenza is much more transmittable than AIDS.

Not only that, but if you look at the economic costs of Influenza each year, just in terms of sick days, it’s very significant. It’s not a cheap virus. Why aren’t we developing a vaccine against all type A Influenzas, which would encompass all the different forms including H1N1. Because there’s not enough political interest, and hence not enough funding. If we could just invest 1%, or even 0.1% of what’s spent in Iraq (an accounting rounding error), I’m sure we’d make amazing strides forward. And the ROI (Return on Investment) would be significant. Imagine if we could wipe it out!

Alright, one last comment on vaccinations for now, if the vaccination effort is a success and the virus doesn’t have a chance to mutate to a virulent form, that is very few people die or get sick, what do you think will happen? People will start to complain that it was for nothing. That it was over-hyped. That it was a waste of time and money. That we scared ourselves for nothing. But did we? That’s success!!! Success IS that nothing happened.

If you think back to Y2K, did anything happen? No, because we invested millions, if not billions to prevent it. Unfortunately if nothing happens, people assume it was for nothing. Nothing happened on Jan 1, 2000. But you know what, a LOT of systems would have failed had we not put in such a big effort beforehand! Thankfully because of that big effort nothing happened. It was a success! Yet today people think it was over-hyped and not a big deal.

What about the Avian flu? Was that over-hyped? What happened? Nothing! Again, millions and millions of birds were slaughtered to prevent it from spreading. Every outbreak was quickly addressed. Thankfully the virus wasn’t too contagious and they were able to prevent a pandemic. A lot happened to prevent a pandemic. There’s a reason nothing happened. It was a success!

The same is true with 9/11. Before and after 9/11 many terrorists attempts were prevented. Of course we never think of that. All we think of is the one failure. Until something breaks down, it really wasn’t needed. It’s over-hyped. It didn’t do anything. That’s prevention. We need to be aware of why prevention is so important. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

What are you waiting for, go get yourself vaccinated as soon as possible. Be a part of the solution, not the problem. Now’s the time to do something!

In the next little bit I plan to write about the vaccine, such as is it safe, what about this or that. If you want to make sure you won’t miss, you may want to subscribe here to get it by email as soon as it’s available.

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I’m proud to announce today that the latest version of LandlordMax (version 6.05b) is fully Mac compatible, for ALL Mac OS’s (including the latest Snow Leopard)!

For those of you who have been following the developing story here, it’s been quite a journey that started a long time ago with more than one false start. The last big push, starting in the Spring of this year (2009) resulted in this release of LandlordMax.

One of the best benefits of the Mac version of LandlordMax is that you can transfer your database back and forth between the Mac and Windows versions. So should you decide to change computers, it’s not an issue. Your database can move with you, regardless of if you get a Mac or a Windows computer.

The Mac version of LandlordMax does include all the features and functionality already available on the Windows version. That is, you get over 100 different reports, you can quickly find out which of your tenants are late paying their rents, you get full accounting, invoicing, workorders, etc. You can also send any report you generated directly from within LandlordMax as an email attachment. If you want to an idea of just the features we released for this latest version (6.05) you can see the complete list here.

Again, I’m very proud to announce that LandlordMax version 6.05b is fully Mac compatible with all Mac OS X versions, including the latest Snow Leopard. Welcome new Mac users!!

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Before I begin, I’m going to disclaim that I’ve used Randy Ray’s PR services for my company LandlordMax in the past (he’s one of the authors of the book The Big Book of Canadian Trivia).

That being said, if you’re into trivia, especially Canadian trivia, you’ll want to check out Randy Ray and Mark Kearney’s latest book The Big Book of Canadian Trivia. I have to admit when I first received it, I wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of it. I definitely didn’t expect it to be telephone book sized. Yes, you read that right, telephone book sized! Although it doesn’t have as many pages, and the font size is much more readable than a phone book, it’s just as thick. Hopefully that gives you an idea of just how much trivia this book contains.

Because this book is a trivia book, what’s interesting is that you don’t have to read the one page after another. You can jump in anywhere and start learning right away. And because you can just jump in anywhere, you can focus on the topics that are more interesting to you (and there are a lot of topics).

The only problem I have with this book is I find it harder to write a review for it because it is a trivia book. Most books are focused on a specific topic or ideas whereas a trivia book is about much more random and short topics. Compared to most trivia books I’ve seen though, The Big Book for Canadian Trivia offers a lot of value for your dollar. I can’t imagine the amount of research and information gathering that went into this book. Even just perusing through this book you’ll learn something.

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