Same or Different?

Accomplishments. How do you react to them? I have some sort of 'buyers remorse' that follows on the heels of achievements. I'm briefly elated at my perseverance and excited about the progress, but then I feel kind of deflated about the whole thing. The challenge has been accomplished and it's receding into history. It's old news.

I tend to think that people are only as good as their last accomplishments. After battling a bevy of barriers and seemingly unreachable goals that were tougher than those previous, you always wonder a bit whether the next ones will be even more difficult.

There are two kinds of people though - those who get comfortable at their ability to do something, then do that same thing over and over, and those who treat an task as a stepping stone to another different and equally (or more) challenging task.

Once I've completed task X, I don't think much about ways in which I can do another X, I'm eager to do a Y.

So with a recent set of bugs and features fully squashed, and next steps clear and waiting for me, I'll have to shrug of the deflation of the last task's completion and push forward.

Researchinator is staring down a Y...

DevLogging and Getting Value From It

Referred back to my development logs of a year ago and I can see where I was in my project back then. Whew, wouldn't want to be facing all that work again. I think I'll do another off-site backup just for safety.

But I'm thinking I'd like to get some extra value out of that work-log. A thought is to pull it into a full featured editor and run some auto-indexing on it. Haven't looked at the state of those tools lately, but I'm assuming something will use dictionary help to identify stuff that might be index worthy. Would be a good longer term developer reference for when I get the sure-to-arise questions "Why the hell did you do that!?"

It's rewarding to see that I've made so much progress. I can't help but extrapolate and wonder how much further this project has to go tho.

Researchinator relishes the coming completion of this phase...

Knee Deep

Just in snow though. Winter arrived today in our corner of Canada. It had been a nice November, but now we're getting it. Twas nice to get out for some lunch in spite of the weather. The morning was spent learning what I had done for one complex element of my application software, so that I can hopefully make an informed decision about how some UI changes this afternoon should be implemented.

My existing code seems to partially explore the two options I've been considering. I need to think carefully through it and choose a path forward. It's not just an 'A' versus 'B' thing... it may include an 'A' and 'B' approach. I don't think there's a 'C' approach, and I don't think there is a none-of-the-above option either. I'm leaning a little more 'B' than 'A', but well, maybe not.

It's one of those kinds of days. I think the right answer is making an answer, rather than thinking too long to find the perfect outcome.

Researchinator struggles with alphabetic option selection...

Alliterative Lists

Four ways to ensure your blog entries are popular

1) Cool Use lots of cool buzz words and wear sunglasses in all your avatar pictures
2) Crisp Use short words and keep it to the point
3) Clear Don't get off topic, or you will lose the people who follow you based on subject.
4) Celery Eat lots of celery.

Now is that a good list of pointers for bloggers? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps they are good points, but when I see lists like that, I always wonder how much the accuracy and efficacy of the list has been compromised to achieve the alliteration.

Perhaps Coolness, Crispness, Timeliness and Brevity were a better choice for the items in the list, but if the author is obsessed with only using 'C' words, the latter two might fall off the table.

It gets more concerning when you see lists of 8 or 10 points all starting with the same letter. By the time you do that many, you are really searching for words with the same letter. Sure, English is pretty versatile. Instead of "Timeliness" I could perhaps say "Clock" or "Coordination" - but unless you luck out with the synonyms, it is usually clear that you're digging by that point.

Anyway that was just bugging me this morning after reading through a few blog posts purporting to guide my entrepreneurial life: success means using the letter "C" or something I guess.

Researchinator gets on to more important things, the letter 'D' perhaps...

Five Ways to Motivate Yourself on a Lethargic Day

A cup of tea in hand and moving slowly thru the morning. The trend for blogging (this is not a trendy blog if you hadn't noticed) is to make every entry about a list. Well, just to aid in your productivity, here's my list of 5 things I like to do to make progress when I'm not being as productive as I like.

1) Luxuriate In It Think back upon the last few days, have they been productive ones? Brains work best in an environment of variety. Working consistently on the same thing in the same way is not conducive to either productivity nor happiness. If you've had a few good days, let yourself take it easy for a few hours, better yet, get away from your desk and take a walk or something that changes the view for a bit.

2) Dangle a Reward That's a reward, don't get carried away with the dangling. Set yourself a very short term goal, pick something achievable and provide yourself a reward for doing it. For example, need to write a document, and you just aren't getting started? Hold off on that next coffee and tell yourself you can have it once you've created the empty document, and the title page. Maybe crafted a very-rough-and-sure-to-be-reworked Table of Contents. Set a time for it, perhaps 20min, and be sure to both hold firm to that as well as go get the reward. You made progress, that's very uplifting to the spirit as well.

3) Make a List A big de-motivator is having several things on your plate that need to be done. Even though they might seem clear, often there is some underlying uncertainty about exactly what constitutes completion of those items, so make yourself a bulleted list and just list the things you need to do, but make the items concrete. Not "Work on analyzing the competition" but "Make a table Documenting 5 competitors and their comparative characteristics." Similarly don't list huge, long term projects, but major steps: so not "Design new Website" but instead "Sketch out 3 front page layout options for approval"

4) Relish Deadlines If you're like me, you find yourself more productive when a deadline is looming. So if your nearest deadline is weeks away, you might find yourself lethargic. Take a look at that upcoming deadline and think about some intermediate steps. Now here's the tricky part, most of us need some threat to make the deadline have the magical power. So jot down those intermediate steps and send them to someone who'd care, preferably a colleague on the same project or your supervisor. Promise to hit those intermediate steps - bingo, now your ass is on the line. You look like a twit if you don't pull it off, so work at getting there. You might just find you deliver them and meet your "real" deadline earlier than expected. Oops, raises anyone?

5) Get Feedback This is a sneaky way to trick your own brain into action. Find something you've done recently that others would know about, pick it up (if it's pick-up-able) or think of a summary statement for it in your mind then go to that person (or send an email) and ask for feedback on how you did, or even better, what could you have done to make it more successful. A co-worker is fine. Even better, pick a person you don't like. The result? You'll probably, not necessarily overtly, get defensive. That's very primal energy you're feeling, it's fight or flight. You've already ruled out flight, as you went to them without needing to. So now channel that feeling of defensive energy into your next todo list item!

There you go a five item list. Some you've heard before, but I think some will certainly be subversive new ideas for you. Now am I eligible for Twitter link-backs and angry dissenting comments?

Researchinator turns to item 2 for inspiration...

Sometimes Titles Can Be Larger Than Articles

Meh

Changing Landscape of Tools and Languages

Planning a weekend escape to the outdoors. A late autumn, not quite winter thing. Should be nice.

Meanwhile I'm shifting back and forth between python and javascript/AJAX stuff while also reading up a bit on jQuery. The latter looks interesting, some of those features appear to offer some good benefits to my stuff. Will have to plan a migration, or exploration of it anyway. For now, just raw .js and hope that continues to provide good predictable results on most browsers. The landscape of tools and languages, and development environments, and hell, just OS versions is constantly changing. Would like to do some upgrades, but need some stable time first.

Fighting a migraine this morning too, as if I needed some distraction when trying to be productive. Such is life - I'll pretend this is a simulation of raucous staff noise, and my goal is to persevere and still be productive. Yeah, that's it.

Researchinator... well... you know...

Exposing the Gears

Met up with my student project team this morning. They seem on track. Struggling to understand one or two concepts, but are basically getting it.

It's interesting to see this architecture through other eyes. While it all seems clear to me, I'm aware constantly that it might not seem that way to someone else, and so try to evoke that perspective where possible. Even with explaining it to someone, it's not the right level of depth until they start trying to work on elements of it from a technical implementation perspective. Then the comprehension evaluation becomes much more valid.

One might understand what their transmission does, but until you open it up an start removing gears, you're never really sure how well you understand it.

In discussing the project it always leaves me enthusiastic and pumped to see the project financed and working flat out. But I know the stats are against that ever happening. Still, I hope I can at least persevere to get it live and out in the wild on trials before I have to admit failure.

I guess that's my typical approach to life. Expect the worst, but try for the best, and hope to be proven wrong.

Researchinator totally hopes for some pleasant surprises...

Monday Housekeeping and Firefighting

Morning starting with technical challenges remaining from the weekend. My primary email and website is down, due to my hosting company changing nameservers, and my registrar being unable to propagate my new nameservers after 3 days.

Not too impressed, I wish this was happening on a different account, but unfortunately I'm currently bouncing emails from friends and family, and unfortunately some professional contacts should they be trying to reach me.

Can only hope it's resolves shortly, but will be looking around for a new registrar soon.

I also have to think about Django hosting. I see a nice list of Django capable folk, but I'm also considering the google app engine hosting option, but will read a bit more about how hard it is to get a Django presence up. Perhaps try it with a dummy app first to see how it works.

I've also seen some details on how to get Django running on Amazon EC2, though there are some CPU time costs associated with that at earlier stages.

The morning is ticking away, and I'm still isolated... but I'm at least glad that my hosting and email are separate from my broadband service ensuring that the failures I have on any front is never wiping out everything else as well.

Researchinators mundane day is progressing slowly...

Oh the Highs, and the Lows...

Well, the lows anyway. The highs are few and far between for the start-up maven. There are pleasant euphoric moments when something works. And others when some high-falutin' VC will return your call, (before quickly backing away at any sign of risk). There are moments of supreme satisfaction when you face a barrier, hammer away at it for a week, then see it crumble before you.

But the lows, oh the lows. Slaving away with no support, for months on end. You just KNOW there are a dozen big technical barriers still ahead, and two dozen people who are going to lethargically block your path in sluggish disinterest, flippant lack of vision for anything ever being different or better. The dwindling savings are great too. Knowing you're forgoing a six-figure income while you burn cash in spite of your penny-pinching ways.

Then with all that weighing on you, up comes the next technical barrier. You know you can get through it, but you also know that it will involve many hours of slogging. What once was stuff you'd assign to a junior employee, and support them along, now you have to do yourself. It's a hard row to hoe, when you know your skills are better used elsewhere.

But perseverance is the key to success in entrepreneurship. If you can look at what you've done and be sure that you are taking a pragmatic approach to the product and a real market opportunity, you know there must be a path through the challenges.

Having been in 'the industry' for a couple or so decades, the most frustrating thing is seeing that projects and products I defined for other companies but which couldn't find traction among those who wouldn't buy in to the vision, emerge 10 years later as a brilliant new product from some other firm. Oh, the foregone first mover advantages. Oh the many ground-breaking advances lost to history but for the handful of people who saw the demo. For each one of those things, there's some former executive dope who probably tells people "Huh, we had a plan for that ten years ago, but we killed it."

But I'll take responsibility for all that failure myself. For each or any of those things that failed due to big corporate reticence and lack of vision, I should have persevered to the point of taking the design to customers in an end-run around the vision-less multi-layered marketing echelons, packaged up the design and requested ownership for external spin-out, or perhaps just blatantly stolen the design and launched on my own, and settled later if anyone noticed. But I didn't, so I'll bear that burden myself, and grumble about what could have been.

Researchinator struggles along....

Pausing, Logging and Keeping Up Momentum

A funny thing happens after a goal is reached sometimes - you naturally withdraw for some head clearing time. I've noticed this in my intellectual freedom zone that is my start-up. I'm motivated and pushed by my own actions and interests, so there's nobody else telling me what to do.
When I manage development groups, I'll usually do something following an accomplishment, take the group out to celebrate, skipping off an afternoon. Larger milestones often schedule a lessons-learned meeting to chat, vent and capture best practices. Even though there is much still to do, there's benefits of doing this take a breather approach.
I notice it in this free-form development work too. As I attain a goal, I seem to pull back and do some tidying, and do some big picture thinking. There's no shortage of next steps still required, but one seems to mentally need a bit of perspective after climbing a mountain.
That analogy is pretty good - it is like climbing a steep hill. When you reach a plateau on the way up, you tend to stop and take a breather in preparation for the next steps.
A downside though can be that it is sometimes tough to get back into the flow again. One should ensure that they know what the next steps are rather than waiting idly for divine inspiration. Just like the other development steps are planned, so should be your pauses and your re-engagements.
A technique that seems to work for me is to get back into the work by leading with to-do lists. I'm using this approach quite heavily. The rule of thumb is - if you're pausing, make a short next steps list in your log book or worklog file/blog/etc. It really has helped with productivity boosting, as you tend to make an effort to close off all the outstanding items before your next pause.

I run two worklogs these days - one is a private blog, the other is a text file in my core development area. When I'm working in the Eclipse environment I have a WhereAmI file that gets continually updated, in a very prosaic style. There I will often capture thought processes in trying to fix a problem, outlining my thoughts, the sections of code that are likely involved, even variable names and routine() names that are key. The result is that if I pause for some reason, I can quickly recover the area of activity. As well, I can recover the thought process I was going through.
The ancillary benefit is that the act of describing a problem will often evoke the solution. We see this as young engineers and scientists, talking to our mentors or supervisors. As we would start to describe an insoluble problem, you would come upon the answer half-way thru, and feel embarrassed for having brought it up. Later, I learned to have mock gripe conversations in my head to see if that turned up the solution, and often it would. The logfile/book does the same thing.
The file is also searchable, as is the private blog of course. The blog worklog I use for my other notes. Development that is not specifically in the Eclipse milieu, but also business building work, and broader interactions.

So those are just a few thoughts on managing the pauses, the tools associated with re-engaging, and not losing the threads of your engagement. Perhaps I should now turn to my task list at hand and try to make some progress following this last milestone achievement.

Researchinator reaches for the oars to find that they are still attached, functional and ready for action...

What Were You Expecting, Exactly?

On one monitor I'm watching a bit of NASA TV as an Ares rocket sits on the pad. Not sure what it's got on board yet, but it's fun to follow a launch of an old-school stick rocket again. NASA TV is great - they don't really care if there's a 20min shot of a rocket on the pad, with birds flying around. It's all content. No schedules to worry about for them, it seems.

Meanwhile, I'm working a bit more intensively trying to get through my latest pass thru the code for the next feature. A couple of steps forward yesterday... maybe one step back.

Still a bit curious about a VC contact last week. Reminds me of selling stuff behaviors. When selling things online, or even in the 'old' days in the paper, you'd often get a call asking if the item is still available. When you say yes, there is no other contact. One must wonder what answer they were hoping for.

Well, similarly a response from a VC, to an initial contact, was "Yes, we're interested in learning more, can you meet with us!" My response was "Sure, how about this date." Then there's no more response, and it's been several days. What answer were they hoping for?

Anyway, I won't worry too much about it. Building the business now, and that helps in the funding needs later on.

Researchinator displays some head shaking behaviour...

Spotty Blogging

Busy times, and I've been sketchy on keeping this part of the routine up. Must admit that the twitter universe seems to have filled that early morning niche.

A couple of networking events lately - a Montreal one, and an Ottawa one. While Ottawa has a large group of Start-ups, I've been finding that the networking events there are too often a sea of consultants and self-appointed start-up experts (who strangely are not doing a start-up themselves just now). A few too many self-appointed gurus.

The Montreal events have had a good mix of entrepreneurs, investors and media. That's a more enjoyable session from an entrepreneurial point of view. I should try to make it to some Toronto events, or heck, even a Kingston one perhaps. Will have to watch to see if there are any there.

Researchinator is here, just not always highly visible.

What's Cooking with Google Wave?

There's a lot of internet buzz about Google Wave today. I have to give credit to Google for the hype generated. That's free advertising that you can't buy. Then all the people tweeting and reTweeting about getting invites and giving invites. That' social approach to signing up your initial users is a good idea too.

The old approach was to announce a beta and wait for people who felt like debugging your service for you to show up. With the 'invite' approach, you make it seem like a privilege to be a beta-user.

The kick off for Google Wave, if you remember was a near hour long video'd demo, which was rather sleepy to my eyes, but created some 'peer-pressure' to tell viewers that the service is very cool, even if the actual demo didn't really seem that amazing. "But if that whole room of Californians is cheering, it must be cooler than I realize."

I do see some potential to move seemlessly from the asynchronous connection of email to the increased immediacy of chat, and the threading elements I saw for what I watched a few months back.

But I also think that email - for those of us who have used it for a good 25 years - has a role that is well understood. It fits into a spectrum of connectivity. Walking up to someone's desk is the most immediate and synchronous. There is a momentary delay in engagement if they're busy, but usually there's an immediate interaction. Telephone is the next step, where the user can selectively engage. Chat is similar, but has the other issue that once you engage, it's harder to disengage and hence the ability to manage your status. Still, once you disclose your presence, you get nabbed by chat-buddies.

With email there is a disengagement. Sometimes a recipient will shoot back a reply and a few messages will bounce around for a few minutes, rather chat like, but if there's no reply for 24 hours, that's not a shock.

Twitter fits in there too, now, perhaps slightly further up the asynchronicity spectrum, but slightly more disengaged. Some users ignore their @ comments. Some people follow people who don't follow back.

Google wave will open a new can of worms, frustrating some with a stickiness that regular email doesn't have. It may lower productivity because it converts an email into a stickier chat situation. But it might enable improved distance collaboration through enabling new group dynamics.

Then there is the complexity. With existing Outlook tools widely used, but confounding many non-technical users with cryptic, non-intuitive use of scheduling, resource booking and hard-to-use receiver-list management/creation, I have to wonder if the complexity of Google wave will penetrate beyond the geek crowd.

Regardless, there's going to be new cultural adjustment required to adopt it, and the jury is out on whether it will catch or not. I don't think this is a clear slam-dunk for Google, and could potentially be their Apple Newton - basically good, but unable to cross into broad adoption by the masses.

Researchinator will, for now, let it bake a little longer before opening the oven...

Titanic Global Economic Battle

Rainy day in the city, and several more of those to come. Weather has turned cool, averaging 15C for highs, and it's all feeling decidedly autumnal. It was around this time last year, give or take a couple of weeks that I embarked on this start-uppy crusade, and the economy quickly took note and fell apart because of it. Much like the Tech-bubble burst was in reaction to my last start-up launch.

Oh sure, the Goldman Sachs, AIG, FannieMae stuff is all well and good, but they were all in reaction to my endeavour getting on its feet.

So once again it's a battle of wills. Me versus the global economy. Who can hold out longer? Will I give in and take a job somewhere before the recovery hits, or will recovery happen while I'm still hammering away on my architecture and looking for angel funding?

Researchinator grits teeth and vows to beat this thing...

Managing Difficult People

From the annals of my people management skills, here's some guidance on managing an employee exhibiting a bad behaviour. This is actually from an exchange with someone who was asking for guidance with one of their kids, but in conflict resolution, it's mostly about people, regardless of what role they are in employee, friend, child, spouse etc...

A helpful concept from conflict resolution suggests that trying to ensure your 'opponent' has an easy way out is an important consideration in your actions. Sometimes you can make a problem bog down because you haven't given the other side an easy way to capitulate to your position without losing face.

They also say you shouldn't use the word 'opponent' - but whaddaya gonna do.

Given a person who is compulsively lying, for example, it's tempting to try and repeatedly catch them in lies, preferably totally undeniable lies. In reality, once you've confirmed that they are lying, there is no additional value in attempting to continually hammer them with further examples.

So while the lying is a problem, focussing on it too much, or always trying to set up the situation to see if she lies could fail by trapping her too much, as she gets into the lie then has no way out.

Think of the example of a grounded daughter, prohibited from using the computer, but who you discover has gone online to tell her friends the score.

While it's tempting to ask "were you on the computer last night" to see if she takes it to a lie, it might be more constructive in the long run (ie to get away from lying behaviour) to say, "I see you were on the computer last night - If you needed to let your friends know you're grounded, you should have asked first. We're serious about not using the computer."

By setting the other side up to repeat their bad behaviour, it entrenches the behaviour. If you can set them up to "model" or "act-out" good behaviour, it ends up building a path towards doing it on their own later on. Also, reinforcing the prohibition, indicating that there are plausible options around it, yet pointing out the right way to determine that, also helps to avoid trapping the person in a no-win situation.

For what it's worth, a bit of advice from the people-management lexicon.

Researchinator been there, seen dat...

Yep

Yep.
Researchinator sez, yep...

Getting The Week On

Some unexpectedly pleasant September weather, following a weekend with lots of outdoors time. A nice way to start the week. On the sched this week is progress on guiding a team of students, meeting up with a pseudo-colleague, and making progress on my app features. I wonder how many years will go into this, as I'm well past the first anniversary of initial exploration, and nearing the first anniversary of hard-core fulltime work on it.

Anyway, not going to blog all morning, so let's get down to it.

Researchinator is shovelling coal into the furnace and watching the pressure rise...

First Impression Management

It seems like every social networking service is full of bugs today. There seems to be this approach afoot of making changes on the fly without testing. Twitter seems to just throw up new loads willy-nilly to see if they work and pull them down when they don't. Suddenly text will be garbled across the screen, then it goes back to normal.

I'm not sure how I feel about that - coming from a "bullet-proof is the only option" background where we made sure our products were strong before showing them off, it seems very haphazard. Then again, nobody is scheduling surgery or controlling aircraft through twitter (yet) so perhaps you can get away with it. But it does erode the sense of a smooth, elegantly crafted-by-pros brand.

Then again, my service isn't even ready for prime-time, so I should talk. Fail early and fail often is the new mantra, but there is something to be said for making a good first impression as well.

Researchinator is a long way from a first impression, still...

Collaboration Time C'mon

Have some collaborating students that should help to move things along a little in my project. It's a good deal, but isn't free - takes a bit of my time moving forward as well. They seem eager, hope that keeps up.

Making some progress on my coding lately, for a change. Had some routine disruption with change of venue. A bit tough to adjust to the home office space again... but I'm persevering.

Plus the weather has changed. Cooler days mark the passage of time, and the passing of the nice summery time. Wearing a coat again today - yikes.

I'm shopping myself around a bit as well. Thinking about finding some paying employment, and moving the venture into the background. Need to both keep connected and would like to contribute to something funded again. My venture stuff can still progress on the side for a while. Hope to go-live with some features near the end of the year, in a very low visibility testing sort of way, with a handful of users.

Researchinator enjoyed the cool, schooly feeling day visiting students...

Diffuse Effort

Changing gears between consulting work and my venture development is a very inefficient time. As well, my shifting from leased office to the home office hasn't done me any favours, though I am progressing. The consulting stuff has very rigid deadlines, which motivates me better than a flexible, long term goal does. I really must return to my typical approach of setting some short-term goals for my days and weeks.

I've had people compliment me on my ability to be productive in a home office environment, but I'm afraid I'm still not very good at it. There are a lot of distractions, and for an unstructured project like mine, it can erode your effectiveness.

Still, I've done it successfully before, and will get back into the routine again. I need to invoice my previous work to get some cash coming in though. Oh and should check my investments to ensure I remain reasonably solvent.

I also have half a dozen other wanna-do simulation projects... but I will resist. When the urge overtakes me, I instead work on a description document for those other projects. That way I can capture the thoughts, but avoid getting into the rat-hole that is starting to render the code.

Researchinator tries to focus.

Distraction For Cash

Some contract work is providing income... well, it will in a few months when I can complete the billing payment received cycle. For now, it's mostly a drain on my energy, since it involves reviewing someone else's work. That alone isn't an issue, it's reviewing someone else's work anonymously, with no means to do a close inspection, and without any means to fix the huge gaping holes. Tough for a manager of complex technical projects to look at one from the outside and critique without opportunity to propose the repairs. But such is the life of a venture funding contract reviewer.

Making it tougher is that these venture folks tend to fund stuff regardless of the review process, so all I can do is stick to my principles, process, instincts and experience and let them do what they want with the info. I'll likely get the last cringe (not, laugh, I hate to see tech things fail) down the road when the venture fades away.

Meanwhile, my venture is fading into the background, but only as I'm distracted with this project. I think I'll be finished with distraction today, and be able to turn my attention back to my stuff tomorrow, finally. I'm eager to move forward under a new routine. I can again see a nice path rolled out in front of me. Even though it likely means funding opportunities for me are over a year away, I can at least conceive of a path that gets me there.

For now though, it's distraction for cash, and I should get onto it. The quicker I start the quicker I'm through with it.

Researchinator turns researchy eyes to someone else's mess, neglecting one closer at hand...

Free Form Week, With a Bit of Structure

Last week with office space before I shift to conserve some cash mode for the fall. I suppose if I came across somewhere with an office for 2 or 3 days a week, on a month to month basis for a $150 or something, I'd consider that. But for now, it's probably better for the wallet to save some cash.

I've got an actual deadline this week with a scoring and review document to be written for my consulting client. It's not going to put money in my pocket right away, but they'll pay up in the next few months. It adds a bit of structure to my otherwise flexible week. Meanwhile I'll make due with the tough life of total intellectual freedom and a flexible schedule.

Things could be a lot worse. You've gotta love economic downturns.

Researchinator runs frugal and free...

Still Holding On

So the doldrums seem to continue to a certain extent. I have been doing some application clean-up and some reach-out to funding folk, but everything is quite quiet. So, that means I'm also putting some resumes out to the usual suspects.

I guess in retrospect, the schedule I've kept over the past year has pretty much met my guess of the most likely path forward. I still think my venture concept is a strong one, and look how much stuff I've accomplished. However, my inability to find other collaborators has in large part been due to the pervasive fear people with families have about the economy. It's not very common for someone to want to drop their job and throw their lot in on a new venture once they are over 30 I think. People get too comfortable.

That's a good lesson for the future too perhaps, find myself a new grad with lots of enthusiasm, and a short list of dependencies. My success in planning ahead gives me the flexibility to skip a salary for a year here or there without feeling it. My scales balance freetime for my own intellectual exploration pretty highly against my normal 6 figure salary. Some people don't see life that way.

Taking some chances certainly gives you more of a sense of being alive. I think about some of those six year stretches I've done in the same job, and realize it all goes by pretty fast. When you're doing something more risky, you notice every month that goes by and you feel like you've gotten a lot more out of it.

So I think if I count venture concepts I've pursued at least for a short time, this is probably my 4th or 5th, including a couple hardware concepts that I explored on the side. Hell maybe 6th. But there have been two with substantial year plus investments and teams. One with a small virtual team that didn't go anywhere, and a three that took many hours of my time over a year or two on evenings and weekends. What does that add up to?

Theoretically, the bandied-around wisdom is that one in ten attempts succeeds. So perhaps I'm due. I just would hope that I could get my one success somewhere in the middle of the ten, so that the next few to complete the group were well funded failures, rather than underfunded failures.

I'm certainly not counting this one out yet though. If nothing else, I'm sitting on a patent from the investigations involved. Perhaps that will get me fifty bucks somewhere down the road.

Researchinator hangs in but is looking for somewhere to land as well...

Monday Reflection

Spotty coverage on Summery mornings. Where was I at this point last year? I was working on the project already, and relating both an interest in archeology and analyzing the psyche of the average software developer. Well, year later, I'm still in that boat, working on bits of software, more system level issues.

But I'm squarely in the trough of my enthusiasm. Facing an economy where every day I hear another story about lack of venture funding, tough times for entrepreneurs. I realize that really the only path forward will be finding an angel with a passion for this space. And my social connections probably don't include the right people to scare up some wealthy sports folk.

I'll persevere for a little while, while starting to layer on some salary hunting work, and simultaneously trying to cut my costs somewhat. Nice that the stock markets are growing, but it's hard to take advantage of that without truncating the growth. Perhaps I'll pick up a bit of low risk stuff this week, while I have a some spare cash that is not immediately alloted to something pressing.

Researchinator faces the bumpy road ahead as seen from the perspective of a Monday morning...

Blog as Work Log

Blogger is not my friend today. Can't seem to go to my Dashboard and get into other blogs. I've been trying to use a blog as my work log, keeping notes that I would otherwise write in a lab-book. However, today, I am getting error screens from Blogger, and I can't even see my stuff. That's not a good thing.

Now I'm wondering if I should be keeping a local copy. Or maybe not using blogger at all? I mean what assurance to I have that all my records will not disappear? Does blogger do punitive stuff if you keep your blog private? I wouldn't think so, but who knows.

I'm sure it will sort itself out - er, I hope so anyway. I don't want to have to get into an argument thing with Google to get my own research notes out of their system.

Meanwhile I'm working on application build process, and associated file management. Not the most fun or glamorous stuff, but a necessary evil. Tomorrow I have some meetings about getting some student collaboration on facets of my project. Not sure it will lead anywhere but seems a good opportunity. We'll see.

Researchinator is grumbling about tools that let you down sometimes...

Days of Change

These are the in between days, I can feel it. Things are a-changin'. Compare now to 6months from now, and a bunch of things will be different. I'm going to give up my office at the end of the month, and switch to the home office.

Mostly it saves money, and as well, achieves a change of venue, which is always good to energize me a bit. Barring sudden access to funding, I will need to shift my work into background mode so that I can keep it going if I find some contract work or a salary somewhere.

But the good thing is that after achieving first prototypes and patent filing, I can progress at a lower burn rate, and move the concept into a demonstration that will get some attention down the road.

It's been a good year of intellectual exploration and realization. Hope it gets some traction beyond that though.

Researchinator is looking at the calendar creeping towards autumn.

Something Works

Wow, a strange morning on the internet, as it seems everything I try to do involves a failed website. Twitter is down. Who'd have thought we'd become so dependent in such a short time. Like probably a million other people I googled "twitter competitors" to see what else there is.

Plurk is another option, I think I even registered a few months back, but it seemed to be a sad convoluted attempt at the same game, without much success. My login attempt was even less successful. Entering my credentials as they should look if I had in fact registered, didn't bring me a failure to log on, but rather to a 404 page for the Plurk site. Have they been hit with the same alien death ray?

I google within Google news to find that Facebook is also having some problems. I spend very little time on Facebook, as it seems a bit irrelevant to me now that I've been on Twitter for almost 2years.

Well, at least Blogger is working just now. I'm cumulatively posting this entry paragraph by paragraph in case it is next to crash.

Finding out when Twitter is really down is a bit of a challenge. There is the Twitter Blog, but that seems to be strangely idle, with the last entry over a week old. There is also the Twitter status page. That one, at least is up to date, and not taken out when the service packs it in.

Meanwhile I have real work to do I guess. First phase of my sideline consulting gig is in the bag, and so I have a bit of breathing room for two weeks or so. I've also lined up a meeting with university folk to discuss some project research to move things along.

The big thing on my plate though, is to ensure my house is in order, and do some intensive shopping around, cold calling of VC's and angel groups. This is a push to see if there's anything out there... though my sense is that there isn't.

The other thing is a chain of stuff that has to happen. I have to sell or otherwise dispose of some junk from my garage so that I can get my office contents moved into there. I'm going to give up the office and conserve that money, as I shift to a three way press: look for salary paying work, scan for funding opportunities, and incrementally continue the advancement of the venture's core software.

As that evolves, and my patent bakes towards granting, I will at some point perhaps entertain shopping the patent around for licensing or sale as well.

Such is my plan moving forward. Not the optimal path that I had hoped for, but certainly not expected given the current economy.

Researchinator thinks it's about time to check Twitter again, and if still dead, turn back to some Javascript work...

Where are my TIny Shoes?

Dealing with workers block is always a challenge, but the baby steps strategy seems to have worked. The last week has been tough to focus, but my goal of even doing a few of the smallest things usually mushrooms into actually getting some accomplishments under my belt.

I have a few days of technical document reviews on contract to an occasional client, which is nice to get a bit of cash into my pocket, though the billing cycle is quite slow. The opportunity to be productive on another topic is nice.

Then yesterday, I also managed to spend a couple of hours on some javascript/AJAX stuff that was buggy and solved it, so that felt progressive.

Today I've been cleaning up environment stuff, doing some system upgrades, security upgrades and trashing some desktop litter. But now I've managed to open Eclipse and PyDev and am soldiering forward on development stuff again. This afternoon I expect to put in a few more hours on the document review work.

These are the tough days of entrepreneurial life, finding a means to push forward when the opportunity turn it into a going-concern are still pretty nebulous. So I'll keep on trying with the small steps to get to my near term goals, and not let the big hill I'm on wear me down too much.

Researchinator plugs forward...

Kick in Pants

Just saw an article about the competition. Big corporate effort at solving some of the same issues as my venture is dealing with, but luckily they are going about it in what I think is an inferior manner.

The good thing is that there is some good data in the article about how much money is changing hands in that space. Plus it should serve to illustrate the poorer alternative to my scheme.

This creates both eagerness to deliver my offering to the marketplace, but also frustration that the odds of getting funding are so low in this economy. Grrr.

The other big frustration is that I've so often had good ideas, which were captured and even sometimes prototyped by my staff in other companies or fleshed out on paper, only to see them arrive 5,6,7 years later. I really don't want that to happen again with my current venture, but you KNOW it is going to if I can't get it off the ground.

Ah, the challenges of technology on a budget.

Researchinator faces the cold clammy truth of the real world...

Perseverance and a Cuppa

I've been expecting this period for the year it took to arrive. I'm feeling low on motivation, and staring at the funding gulf trying to make the leap from concept to active venture.

Concept proven, patent filed, but a whole pile of work to do, and it's mid-summer, the bank account is getting lower and I have to think about probabilities.

I've recently got a line on a short term consulting contract - interestingly enough for a funding agency for whom I'll review some business plans. Of course, they are not in the area in which I'm searching for funding, so it's not to perverse, but still a bit ironic.

My concept has a pretty good shelf life, I think, and there are many things I can do while trying to get it to catch hold, little nudges forward I mean, so perhaps there will be something that comes out of it in the future.

For now, I'll dedicate myself to the next 6 weeks, but after that I may be forced to step back from the venture. Perseverance pays off sometimes, but for every story I know of someone who persevered to make their business succeed, I know 10 who threw their money and years away on something that never caught.

Regardless of the potential given the money to make it go, without the money the chasm still sits there, no matter how much you walk back and forth on the far side. Or in the more common parlance of the start-up world, no matter how much I taxi around my patch of asphalt, without the runway, there's no flying today.

Researchinator opts for a cup of tea...

Designing for Humans, the Technical Innards

So, part of the venture is this app I've been mentioning. Python apps under their AUI frame appoach (a set of tools that lets you make applications more easily by giving you all the common pieces - windows, menus, and mix-match capability within the window of other subwindows) are versatile, but complex.

The graphical elements are provided under a superset of tools called the wxPython suite. There, you create panels of stuff, and on those panels you use sizers which deal with all the flexible positioning hassels that other programming languages make you do by hand.

THe behaviour is not always obvious. And hierarchies of sizers within sizers, panels within panels all give you size setting opportunities, and all try to impose their own as well. So you can easily get behaviour you don't expect and can't easily deal with. So many hours of my programming life hve been dedicated to trying to meke these things behave how you think they should. Mostly I've made it through, but the effort...

THis morning, with my year of experience behind me I'm looking at juggling around buttons and panels on the infamous app. There's that dread you sit with before committing to it. When you start to rip stuff up, you want to be sure you'll be able to recover from when things go awry. And you know they will.

But the result should be a better organized app, so I have to do so. That will be be journey today and likely tomorrow as well.

Researchinator delves into the challenges of the geometric positioning and human factors sensitivity...

How To Turn 500grams of E-Coli Tainted Beef into a Weed Wacker Repair Kit

This morning I nailed a couple of chores I've put off for a few days. It's a bit of a convoluted story, and it has nothing to do with building a start-up venture. Well, it does in that it took me away from the job for 30min this morning as I managed the transmogrification.

It all starts back in mid-April when, while shopping we purchased some beef. Now, we're not huge meat eaters, though we tend to do it probably 60% of the time, though we're just as likely to have pasta and tomato herb sauce, or beans and rice. Not because they are vegetarian, but because they taste good.

Anyways, there was a nice sirloin steak in the freezer for future use. Then, recently the news reports carried a story about E-Coli contaminated beef produced in the US imported by Canadian grocery store giant Loblaws and sold to Canadians.

Curiously, when US stores imported well inspected and cleared beef that come from farms where a BSE cow was later found, the Canadian industry was decimated as the borders were closed to Canadian beef for I forget how long. Okay, this gets me off on a further aside, of how the meat packers went on to screw the Canadian farmers by lowering the price the would pay for their product to almost nothing, while wholesale and retail pricing on Canadian beef in Canadian stores stayed put at pre-scandal prices. But I digress.

Anyway, no biggy. Loblaws makes no announcement at all. The media however tells consumers if you have beef with certain labelling and dates in your freezer, throw it out. Well, thanks I'm not going to throw away a $8 steak. It's not me that messed up, it was the meat producer/packer who contaminated the product, and it's up to the retailer to take that up with them. This is not my fault, I am not going to pay for it. It's bad enough I have to take time out of my day to deal with it, and that my health was at risk while that tasty contaminated slab of beef sat in my freezer waiting for me.

Change of scene: it's the summer of 2006 and I dutifully trim the grass around our house and in doing so, the black and decker weed wacker (sorry, I don't recall their specific product name) tears into its work. Moments later, the handle breaks off into my hand, and I have to awkwardly hold the central shaft of the thing to get the job done.

It's about a year later before I finally throw the broken piece into my car, and many months after that before I finally hit the brakes while driving past the Dewalt/Black and Decker rebuilt product and parts store just near my neighbourhood, and inquire about a replacement. No problem I'm told, what's the model number of the product?

Cut to a year later and I've finally not only looked at the part number, but remembered to not just write it on a slip of paper, but this time onto a piece of tape which I affix to the broken part. That very same day, I make it to the Dewalt store again, and inquire about the replacement. The good news is that it's only just under $5 for the part. The bad news is that four of them have been on order for months, and it doesn't look like they are available.

I go to the shelf and grab a late model weed wacker and say, "This shaft looks about the same, can you get me the secondary handle that would replace this one." No problem, says the store clerk at this small industrial products store, who incongruously looks, dresses and sounds like the male fashion correspondent for the avant garde collection at Milan fashion week. It's also about $5 and we'll call you when it's in.

Flash forward a week, and we've just heard about the E-Coli contamination, and the advice to throw out the tainted meat, and similarly find nothing on the Loblaws website, but a list of the products on the CBC news website. Our steak is implicated in this mess.

A couple of days later a message on our answering machine - apparently from Fashion File, turns out to be from the parts shop, and my part is in.

The stage is set for a world class transmogrification. Okay it takes me a couple of more days, but this morning, I put the hard-frozen contaminated steak into a plastic bag, and that into my re-useable Loblaws branded pseudo-cloth bag and jump into the car. Behind me on the floor still sits the broken grass trimmer handle presaging my upcoming meeting with fate. I'm en route to the grocery store ready for an argument, and vowing to talk really loudly about EColi tainted products with the customer service folk if I have any trouble.

I feel a little guilty, as my little rental office, global HQ, is located equidistantly between the grocery store and the Dewalt store, meaning I will drive into the office on my way, eliminating the opportunity for the exercise associated with a walk in today. But I proceed.

At the store, I approach the counter, and a not-too-cheery looking customer service person arrives to take my return. She says nothing, but goes to a sheet of paper at the far side of the desk, and then tries first one computer then another (she appears to not remember the password to get past the first screen). I see her counting out money - it appears I will not need my loud speech about how "You sold me EColi tainted meat which was publicly recalled and will not take it back!?".

She comes over, gets a signature (I make nonsensical scrawls in these meaningless unidentified signature situations) and gives me my refund, while also jabbing me in the thumb with her pen, and leaving an ink streak on my skin. Ahhh, her revenge. That will teach me.

Then the magic happens.

I take my $7.57 and drive it straight over to the Dewalt shop. I enter and see a lady shuffling box and power adapter awkwardly back and forth on a pile, seemingly oblivious to my standing a few feet away. I wait, figuring that a few seconds for her attention is courtesy, and am about to give her an 'ahem' when she notices me with a start, the chime on the door not seeming to have fulfilled it's intended function. In the back I hear the lisped accent of the fashionista regaling the middle-aged gentleman with the plot of a recent movie he's seen.


The exchange happens, and I have in my hand a handle which will hopefully fulfill the needs of my handleless lawn trimmer. The conversion is complete, tainted meat becomes grass trimmer repair parts.

Somehow there is some universal justice in this tale. Had the poor bovine whose years of grass eating been present, he would surely have approved of the lawn that had gone poorly trimmed for a few years.

Friday Progress

Second Friday this week - or so it seems, with a mid-week holiday on July 1. I had some good success yesterday with my app. I've been adding a second function, one of dozens that should eventually be added, and just got to the point where the app's side of the process seems to work. The other side is a client side piece that works over the net. I'll have to start looking at that next. Should be reasonably fast.

Oh yeah, there's another piece on the app. It's a readback function that needs to render the same results as the client experience. I've got to make that work too. The good thing is that they use roughly the same algorithm. Well, AJAX/javascript on the client has a different real-time experience than the pseudo multi-threaded python experience on the app side, but the decisions are roughly analogous.

Meanwhile a rainy day, and wet feet, and I have a visitor to HQ later this morning. Potential collaboration if we can find a mutually positive engagement approach. I'm concerned about losing focus on the first piece of this. But we'll see how that comes about.

Beginning to see the end of the tunnel in terms of the HQ office. Either I'll give it up in September to save money, or give it up because I have money. Odds are it will be the former, but we'll see.

Researchinator is wrapping up the week.

The Week Ahead

It's going to be a short morning, as I have a lunch meeting and gotta squeeze a barber visit in before that. Plus, it's raining, so the chance of a patio table for lunch is shot.

I've been making some good app progress. Just when I think I can get to a plateau by the end of the week, I realize it's going to be a poor week for productivity. A mid-week holiday (Canada Day) and this meeting, and probably another with potential contributor to the project.

Maybe I can delay that meeting until next week? No, I suppose Friday will be okay.

Thursday I have to work from home in the afternoon as an appliance delivery is happening.
So that's the balance of the week laid out for me. My calendar is just beeping at me - actually sneezing is my alarm sound - to tell me about my haircut.

Researchinator is feeling lethargic...

Leading into a Summery Weekend

Some days the Each Morning Blog threatens to become another twitter account. 140char seems to be enough to capture my thoughts. A little glimmer or contact on the investment front, returning a question. Glad to see they aren't actively ignoring me, but nothing concrete going down yet.

Friday, leading into the weekend, and next week a truncated, or maybe bi-sected week with the Canada Day festivities mid-week. I guess the Americans below will be doing a long weekend, as the 4th is conveniently located for them.

Well, head down and back to immersing myself in my software. Have a bit of momentum this week, so lets see if I can power through the day today and get somewhere.

Researchinator is a glorified typist...

Mid Week Momentum

Second day employing my bike to avoid the 10min walk in the heat. The bike gets me to HQ fast enough that I don't have time to work up a sweat, before I'm into the AC. A great compromise between walking and taking the car for such a short distance.

Today there are threats of rain in the afternoon, so I'll probably lunch at home and switch to automotive umbrella.

Did a presentation to a group of would be investors. Kind of a first exposure thing. It was a couple of days back now, so I'm not sure if there's something to be expected from that, or if they just slip into we're ignoring you mode if you were unsuccessful.

One would think all the conversation and reinforcing of my pitch slides meant it went well, but who can say. Likely the most I can expect is that they come back with a bunch of bureaucratic engagement crap. There's a little too much government in this bunch. There's a glimmer of Angel participation too, but not sure how cliquey they are with the others.

Meanwhile, the development is progressing again. I'd rather be spending time on my financial models, to be honest, but I have this burning desire to get my app to a plateau I can visualize. If only I were there, I could really move forward on the other stuff and get this boat moving.

Meanwhile, I have an old friend and colleague that I might just bring into the fray, but I really don't want to do it too early. Perhaps should drop him a note to say yes, but later, rather than have him wondering. I am enjoying the focus so far, and lack of distraction.

Researchinator trying to keep up some momentum

Corporate Beer

Trying to get back into the saddle. The travel work combo was reasonably good. I didn't do as many hours as I'd have liked, but then again, I was in Paris, so who can complain. While away I was called by an investor that I had connected with earlier, and invited to present the day after my return. The result was some scrambling to ensure my biz plan and slides were in good shape, but they were pretty good, and so I did that preso this morning.

My sense is that it went well. I had a 10minute slot, and it took me an hour and 10 to get through it. Not because I'm a lousy presenter, but because of the constant conversation that ensued going through the slides. I take it as good that there were pretty much only positive things to say, and the only minor criticism was easily addressable. My product offers A as alternative when people can't do B, and also offers C,D, and E. So the criticism that people would just do B, doesn't really fly. A is for when they can't do B, as is common in all these myriad common, all-day situations. Seems like a slam dunk, but who can tell.

The perception I have of this group is that they are big on bureaucracy, and a successful engagement means they slather you with coachy, touchy-feely, motherhood stuff, give you no cash, and use up tons of your time. However, I'm happy to be proven wrong, of course. I'll just continue to expect to be underwhelmed and enjoy being surprised should that prove to be the case.

Just now, it's after lunch, and I have the hiccups. It's hard to just jump back into your tasks when you've been through an event for which you were planning for several days. Perhaps going out for a beer with the colleagues would be best, but then again, I have none... so I'll just make some tea, and hope I can soon hire a whole bevvy of co-beer-drinkers.

Researchinator patiently waits for the first corporate beer day.

Labour Tourism

Worked several hours yesterday without a satisfactory conclusion. I'm a little disappointed with the support on some of the python discussion groups where a posted question gets no answers or even broad arm-waving suggestions. I might have to abandon my desired mini-goal and do a work-around. It's a minor UI thing I was trying to solve, and there are more than one ways to skin a snake.

Some wandering around Paris which was not so scheduled. I was intending to work diligently this morning, but found that the library experience here is not up to standard. No tables and work area, rather just shelves of books. Other libraries are huge museum like places requiring payment to enter and copious ID and actually photos for their administration. Wacky.

So hotel work is back. I will store some coulombs into my battery, then probably migrate to the wifi café I know down the street wherein I can get a good pot of tea.

There Are Worse Places to Have Wet Feet

Morning starts with wet toes today, Monday in Paris.
Accompanying my SO whoisworking today, I am just having breakfast on rue des écoles and thinking about how I'll get anything done today.
Yesterday the hassel was high heat and humidity that rendered me very very uncomfortable. Today the expected rain showed up and so my annoyance is wet toes. It's looking like my working spot will turn into the lobby of the hotel.
Researchinator nurses a nice strong, hot tea...

Combining Productivity with Preparation

Starting off with a headache isn't fun. At least it's a subtle one, not a skull cracker migraine today. Made good progress in spite of having some errands, yesterday. Need to do something similar today.

I've been, for a few weeks, generalizing an application from a single case, to include a second case, in preparation for ultimately adding a dozen other cases. So the adding of the second function, analogous to, yet different from, the first is the first real test of how generalizable my concept is.

Does what I've done in one area preclude such a generalization?

In little ways I've needed to tweak things, but still there's nothing that challenges my concept, so I'm happily plodding forth. I like to think that perhaps a week of work will get me through the hump, but next week I'm in France, working from hotels and wifi cafés and parks, so we'll see how much I accomplish.

My backup strategy will evolve too, 'cause I haven't hacked my NAS to allow remote unix-like ssl sessions. I think I'll bundle up an image and email it to myself after large accomplishments.

But getting the day underway, and don't want to do a half-assed job of it, but I realize that there's enough to do that I should take a few hours this afternoon to get ready for the trip.

Researchinator is using a whole ass today...

First Tendrils of Contact and Feedback

Making application progress while simultaneously pinging a few people in the investment community. Most conversations result in learning something about other people's take on what I have so far. These are super useful. Sometimes a point I make is missed, so I can beef it up. Sometimes they assume something - they always assume something - and I can set them straight.

Funny, I describe a market and a problem and a solution and mention a patent-pending product I have to address it, and their assumption is that I don't have anything done yet. I guess I have to repeat myself a few times, and say things in a few different ways so it really hits home.

Anyway, such communications challenges are useful feedback. I think of my first 50 investment contacts as prep work for 51 which will buy into the business.

I'm probably up to about 4 so far. If I can move off the development track at some point with a reasonably stable prototype 2, then I can start adding 10 of those a week or something.

Researchinator turns back to that pesky grindstone, nose first...

Morning From a Different Perspective

Well it's certainly not morning now as I turn in for the day and tap out a note on my iTouch. Today was tough, cause well, it's Monday and also due to a lethal combo of both fatigue and low motivation. There are ways to deal with that, and I did a pretty good job, I think. I did communications things this morning, and changed work venues in the afternoon, after putting lunch off for a couple of hours. The fatigue really kicked on, so I took a 10min nap in my comfy chair, and then found myself quite productive after that. I finished up the day with a good 3 hour block of coding that moved me nicely ahead.
Meanwhile I think of all the crap I've got to do, and how much more productive I can be with a fully engaged staff. Then the challenge of getting from here to funding weighs on me. I think too about the big cliquey deadwood machine that I may be about to engage with andworry that they will chew up all my spare time jumping through bureaucratic hoops and pissing contests to finally tell me with excitement that they can invest $35k or something similarly stupid in the venture.
These are the things that keep me up at night. Strangely, the technology continues to reassure me that it will work out. There is still a lot to accomplish there, bug at least that path forward seems pretty clear.
Well tomorrows another day and I'll be back at 'em hoping for a few good blocks of 2 or 3 hrs where things click and the yardstick Getz moved forward.
Researchinator is about to get some sleep...

Don't Let the Kitties Lure You Away

Good progress yesterday aft, though I quit a bit early to go home as my SO was returning from a week long business trip. Gotta pick up there, while the iron's hot, to mix a metaphor.

Got briefly distracted by a website showing pictures of cats sleeping in funny positions. I'll save you some productive hours by not posting the link.

Researchinator has a good dose of cute to start the morning...

Minimizing Distractions, but Not Doing Too Well

Not very productive with lots of communications things going on this morning, so I'll keep it brief. Some travel coming up in a couple of weeks, so trying to see if there are any events to check-out while in Europe.

Otherwise, really want to put this feature addition in my app to bed, but it's a long meticulous thing. The next one will be easier, I'm sure.

Researchinator tries to get down to it...

Patch the Bag, or My Punctured Fingers?

Lots of work yesterday on adding a feature to my app. Building a type of app that doesn't exist is a bit of a challenge. More than a bit. Sure you plan it out, but short on staff, at some point you have to jump in and start working on it.

Then layering extra functionality on top you get to see if your attempt to generalize for broad cases of use will really hold up or not. So far it's not too bad. I'm debating with myself over approaches. It's kind of like a plastic shopping bag full of scrap metal. You get a piece poking thru every once in a while, but you tape it up and hope it holds. Biggest worry is that the whole thing just shreds and you're done. I've added the new jagged piece into it, and am hoping it all holds together.

Okay, bad analogy at the end of the day, 'cause I don't think the app looks like a patched up bag with pokey bits in it. But the process feels like that, even if the analogy is less apt for the overall project.

I had planned this to be a cold call week, but there's a balance between managing the desire for funding and managing the show-off-ability of the product.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Got a collaborator meeting tonight - will see how that's sticking at least.

Researchinator tries to decide between bandages and tape...

Big Companies or Small

Great things about Start-ups

• Flexible schedule: You can work all night as well as all day
• Nobody telling you what to do: unless you get funding, or your collaborators are in today
• You're responsible for your own success: Yes, it's all your fault
• Realize your vision: Hope you don't mind re-runs in your dreams every night.

Great things about Big Companies

• There's always someone there to help: yes, they're right behind you. Is that a knife?
• Move at lightening speed: That's Stuart Lightening, 350lb, 85yr old racing champion of 1943
• When you talk, people listen: And you do talk, for hours. Then they talk. Once more around...
• Deep Pockets: There are big budgets to do stuff, and you use them up to do the littlest things.

Finding The Right Battlefield

Had a call this morning with an agency that is government related and purports to provide funding to start-up ventures. I'm always sketical of such organizations, as one's I've seen in the past mostly employ deadwood from big corporations, and seem to quickly form a clique with other cronies. What criteria they use for funding things is a mystery, and they are rarely accountable for their failures.

Whereas VC's will list start-up logos like trophies (until they go south) the gov't orgs seem to avoid acknowledging their record.

Well the call went positive, but I'm not naive enough to expect anything to come of it. I'll get an enthusiastic intoduction to yet another group of deadwood-agency and they'll queue me up with a bunch of other chumps to sing and dance while they make big sweeping statements about how the world works.

In the past I've seen broad comments to rooms full of entrepreneurs telling them that there are "no good managers around," or that "nobody understands the market", and "when I was in business..." I'm always tempted to ask, "yeah, but what have you done lately."

Oh well, I'm jaded but still enthusiastic. I think success involves skirting around the parade of losers and finding someone who actually has an ability to do things, not just talk about them. So I enjoyed pitching my concept this morning, and I'm happy to get in front of whomever I can find, but I won't fight any battles that don't have an upside for us - no point wasting the energy.

Researchinator is keeping the powder dry.

Getting Things Done?

Yesterday, as I was about to pick up on the coding work I had been doing the previous day, I thought about my rule of thumb regarding milestones. The rule is that to do something well it should be considered early and often. So if you have a deadline on Friday, and are sure you can get it done in a few hours on Thursday - you shouldn't count on that. Instead, it often helps to take a tiny chunk of time - say even 5 minutes - to review the work earlier. Ideally, you look at the stuff and move it ahead a bit every day leading up to the slot where you'll do the work.

So if the project is writing a document, you can create the empty document and give it a name, on Monday. Tuesday you might write a rough bullet point outline for 5min. Wednesday, fill in the introduction that sets the stage for the rest of the doc, and on Thursday do the big job of writing it.

What that does for you is two things:

a) it gets your brain working in the background on the task. Scoping it out, even if a bit means your brain will already have some structure thought out when you launch into it later
b) Often your attempt at spending 5min on Monday will turn into doing a bit more. What the heck, I'll do the outline too. Pretty soon you have a rough draft, and you polish it a bit on Wednesday. The result is your Thursday has less pressure, and you end up with a better document as you've had a chance to both write and refine the draft before finalizing.

So yesterday I was going to take a five minute review through my biz plan and pitch slides in preparation for a conversation on Friday, and ended up spending most of the day repositioning some stuff in the business plan. My thinking had evolved since the last review, and I really wanted to capture the adjusted course, so I jumped in.

I have a 5 point portfolio of product opportunities, and the intent was to focus on the first two elements. Now, however, I see that the first two are demonstrators for achieving the third, so I've repositioned that stuff, and it reads more interestingly like focus on number 3, with 1 and 2 being addressed on the way there. Much happier with that.

Nothing focusses strategy like the lens of time.

Researchinator basks in the warmth of the adjusted focus...

The Morning Tea Two-Step

Each day colder than the previous it seems. I think the weather is moving the wrong way. Sitting down to get the day started, but a first order of biz is to plan for a charity event tomorrow evening. I'm bringing my protegé from the volunteering org along for a fancy dinner. Should be interesting.

But today I'm hoping to build on the small bit of progress I was making yesterday at wrap-up time, and not get too distracted by industry watch stuff.

Kettle is boiling in my small global HQ office, and I need a cup of tea to deal with the remnants of those colds. I guess I'm still fighting off the straggler viruses on my way to recovery. I feel pretty fine, but there's a persistent cough hanging out and a bit of sinus action. One never really appreciates good health until it's under threat. One also forgets about things like that that you can't control, when doing a start-up. To think that a cold may be factor that makes you miss your opportunity to succeed. Stranger things have happened in the challenging world of bringing a product to market.

So tea and typing.

Researchinator types with two hands, and two hands for tea, it's tea for you and tea for me...

Picking up the Techy Side Again...

Another week gets off to a start, following a rather productive, sunny weekend. Worked on chores around the yard, and repairs to various doors it seems. Those went okay, and yet a big pile of other chores remain. Those things you do over and over, and wonder why you put yourself in that situation. Hedge trimming, weeding, garden plantings ugh.

Crap, I just realized I left the seedlings out in the sun without watering them this morning. Hopefully they'll be okay until lunch time, when I can get back and give them some attention.

Meanwhile, in my global HQ office, a downstairs tenant, running a Jamaican restaurant, but strangely forgetting how to use his alarm system. Not sure how you use an alarm everyday for years, then forget how to do so.

So while sirens wail from below, I'm trying to get on with my - ah, it stopped (again) - day.

I hope I can make some headway with my work this morning. I have been doing development stuff again. It's a trade-off between biz stuff and tech-dev stuff. I know I need to spend lots of time on the latter, later this weekend, but for now I'd love to get to some conclusion with the former.

So it's back into the Python world today. Let's see where it gets me.

Researchinator is getting all technical on your ass...

Regular is Unusual

A regular morning! How quaint and unfamiliar. Walking in this morning felt very poetic. There were literally flower petals falling on me and I walked through the scent of lilac. Very mid-springy around here.

Getting into the venture again now is crucial, as i've lost a bunch of time. The path forward is clear, the tools to do what I need to are at hand, and I'm ready to go. So up pops Eclipse and I'm slinging python and django around like the best of them. Well, probably not the best.

I also have a bunch of biz side things to do, but those can wait till next week. I have a conversation that I suspect is a funding agencies grudging check-off item to dismiss me, but I mean to have them painted into a you-gotta-fund-them corner by the time the conversation finishes. I mean they provided cash to my huge, global 'oceanography' company when I was there, you'd think they could do something for a venture that will actually create jobs and usable science.

Oh, on a side note - Twitter! Yes, I'm connected there on this project. Hello any followers, welcome to the (mostly) daily trickle of progress that is my start-up life.

Researchinator's tendrils spread oh so weakly out into the world...

Horse Says Who the Hell Are You

Trying to get back on the horse after so long off. I have been sporadically contributary, but not much. This second of the two back-to-back colds is almost gone now. Whereas the other one lasted most of 2weeks, this one was more intense for 3 days and is now fading.

I had a hint that it might be there on Sunday evening, May 17. Then at almost precisely 9:30 on May 18 - bam, I knew I had it, and was I pissed. I just had a cold, dammit. I can't have another.

But of course I knew that sitting next to me, my SO had just returned from Europe on the 14th, and a cold had manifested in her that day, no doubt caught and incubating during her trip. So I realized, she having been away longer than the rhinovirus incubation period, her cold must be a European variety... or at least a different one that the 2-week-nasty from which I had just extricated myself.

What does that mean? It meant I had no antibodies to that new virus, and there I was, 3-4 days after her return, with first symptoms. Classic incubation period, new virus guaranteed.

If there was any silver lining, it was that she had remained reasonably functional through the virus, so it didn't seem a virulent a bug. Plus by day 3 she came out for dinner with a group of us and wasn't too bad. Okay, I thought - this might not be another two week special.

So here we are on my day three, and sure enough, it's subsiding drastically. The headache phase kicked in pretty good by last night, and I pummeled it with Tylenol 3's through the night to get my first sleep in 3 days. The headache nips at me now and again through the day today, but I'm largely feeling better. Yesterday was rampant fever day.

All of this to say, that the researcher in me thinks that someone should be classifying this rhinoviruses based on symptom patterns. Sure, it's not going to be identical in everyone, but I'm guessing that we have pretty different immune systems, and if the symptomatic order was so similar in both of us (though the severity higher in my case) I wonder if we couldn't characterize the virus based on symptoms. The previous 2week bug, I think I picked up on a trip to NY. It was a longer duration, slower changing bug.

Anyway I hope I can get back to regular research work and development on my project now. I've missed too much time this past 4 weeks. Gotta get things in gear! Let's jump back on that horse rather than admit defeat after having been thrown, twice since mid April.

Researchinator is chomping at the bit, tho' perhaps I should give that back to the horse...

Camel's Back is Getting Sore

Sunny windy day, and horror of horrors - I've picked up another cold, back-to-back with my previous one. I'm worried now that this could be the cold that kills my business, rendering me ineffective for a while longer and as such starts the slide to failure.

Just when I really needed to press forward to recover from 2weeks of miserable illness, and I get another. This one is from Geneva, from whence my wife brought it home. I thought I might get through it, but sure enough 4 days later, whamo. Textbook incubation.

So I'll languish again for a while. Trying everything to deal with it. Which reminds me, I should take a nap, and see if I can't work through a bit of the discomfort this afternoon.

Researchinator is rapidly becoming the sickulator...

Black Hole Imminent?

Back home again - yesterday was in Montreal at a networking event. Not too bad, but organization could have been better. Met lots of people, none of whom will have any value in connecting me to funding, no doubt, but it's all good practice - cause you end up pitching your concept a dozen times or so.

The driving was fine, and the hotel okay, though again with the 4star hotel where you can't control the AC yourself. That sucks. At least the sheets fit the bed this time.

Weekend approaches, but SO is about to take off for most of the week again. Another quiet week. Ugh. I should pull a 48hour coding marathon or something. Nothing but typing, eating and feeding cats & fish. Hey - feed the fish to the cats and even that can be pushed aside.

Some inspiring thoughts resulting from all the start-up conversations. The fail quick and often approach sounds up my alley. lol Still waiting on patent close off. Doh.

Researchinator is stuck in an event horizon time freeze it seems....

Building Relationships

Yesterday didn't see me in the corporate HQ at all. Rather a lunch, some VC chat and a bit of time in the driveway to change my winter tires into the summer/all season ones. Today a meeting with a collaborator (hope he turns into that) and then off to a lunch very shortly. Tomorrow it's off to Montreal to commune with the community and see if there are some good investor connections to foster. A cheap nearby option, I hope.

But for now it's off to lunch meeting. Gotta meet with anyone and everyone these days.

Researchinator is talking, lotsa talking...

Out of the Woods, into the Bramble

A walk-in-able morning, with sun shining, flowers in bloom and a bit of a chill in the air. The sweater came off about 3/4 of the way through, but pleasant anyway.

My brief flirtation with a young contributor to my project flamed out with employment. I expected exactly this, but for some reason the younger set these days do not find communication a strong suit. Oh well, no harm, as I could forecast the direction in the absence of words. Still he thinks he can do some evening stuff, but that's just innate guilt talking and will soon fade.

Will keep looking for additional connections.

Meanwhile, I have to figure out how to get back on track as the 2wks of illness have drained me of momentum. I really need to make things happen over the next 8 wks. The patent continues to be a dogging force, but I will have to work around that. I did get to review and comment on a draft last week but haven't heard yet the result. Most optimistic outcome is still 2wks from filing, more likely he'll drag it out for another month. Jeeze.

Researchinator needs to find the path through the bramble and bracken...

Minor Friday Progress.

Reviewed patent draft. Hope this thing doesn't take much longer. Seems to me maybe a minor change to a bit here and there, and a couple of hours on the claims drafting.

Man - I wish this part was over. It was never this painful doing patents with a big corp. Now I unfortunately have this slow process that's not going anywhere fast.

Considering Vancouver travel at the end of the month. Need to look for meetup opportunities.

Struggling Due to Uncooperative Health.

Well isn't this great. The cold seemed reasonably past yesterday, and I even worked most of the day. But now another wasted day. A weird fever kicked in yesterday evening and laid me out flat by 9pm. Churning belly and feverishness continues today. I'm getting nowhere.

Sure can't take health for granted. I don't know when all this will end and I can get back onto my stuff.

Feeling pretty discouraged today. Don't know where this all leads really. Another month starts tomorrow, and my patent still isn't back in from the lawyer either. Another final-ish draft this afternoon. Man, can we file this think or what! And what's this all going to cost me. I feel like we're about 4months behind on that front.

Business is tough sometimes, and the value of a full team is not to be understated.


Researchinator is down in the dumps...

Shell Shocked Yet Struggling Forward.

I feel like I've just come back from a week at the front. Feeling a bit shell-shocked and out of sorts. The last 24hrs gave me the pleasure of the worst migraine I've ever had, or at least as bad a one as I've had. The whole previous week was wiped with the cold. This is not conducive to productivity. Meanwhile, Chelsea is playing Barcelona. Actually, that's just google bait. :)

I suppose I could mention swine flu -the big issue is that nobody knows how to tell the diff between the dreaded swine and a conventional cold. Could I have picked it up in the Newark airport, or walking the streets of NYC? Anything is possible I guess.

Today I had a call with a colleague in NYC. Not sure it added any value to my day, but it's good to talk to a friendly yet critical person about the venture and see if it moves things forwar.

A trip next week to Montreal, I guess. I'm still bummed over this lack of Patent progress. I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I can't get that to move along. I'll have to start looking for another guy to work on stuff for me. I guess I have a few names that I can pull out of the history bag.

Tomorrow I think I'll start the day with some chair shopping. For now, Lets call it quits. I wonder if I could get in 30min of sleep to make up for the lack of it last night.

Limping Along

Well into the office while the cold persists, but it seems last night we got a leg up on it finally. Bit of a cough and sniffle still, but I can at least think through the fuzzies now. I thought I was going to get into yet another day with the cold pounding on me. My expectations were low, so I'm pleasantly surprised to be reasonably functional. Not Susan Boyle surprised, just moderately positive.

Had to delay my new collaborator's arrival by a day, as I wasn't sure last night if I could hack it today. Just as well, I'm sure I'm not up to par today still.

But trying to get the day started reasonably well. While the 'swine flu' grips newspeople in a feeding frenzy, and the stock markets will likely take a beating today, it could be worse. So I'd best get onto task and see if I can succeed in spite of the low energy start to the day. I think I'll take a Mexico-style siesta this afternoon, and enjoy the hot weather that's come in out of nowhere. Not going to help my start-up productivity, but maybe will make me functional for my call tomorrow.

Researchinator thinks things could be better...

Where am I Who am I?

What a week this has been. Still suffering through this cold. I can feel how the virus has slowly worked its way deeper into my repiratory system. Initially a purely nasal thing, with a sore throat, it seems to colonize the nasal cavities, and gradually work its way into your chest as well. I guess it means that the primary entry point is probably the mouth.

Just goes to show the whole touch things and touching your mouth or food is the path to infection, and thus the hand-washing like crazy while travelling would be good. Almost makes you want to wear a surgical mask and gloves. Maybe a face sheild, separate oxygen supply and a carry a cattle prod to keep people at a distance.

Oh well, surely it won't last much longer. I will be happy to get back to productivity.

A good meeting in spite of my issues yesterday with a new collaborator on my project. Lets hope it goes forward the way it's looking now. We'll see over the space of the next week.

Researchinator looks forward to seeing the team actually grow in a real physical way...

Cost of Connections

One has to wonder if it was worth it. My 4th day with the cold, and I wonder if going to NY was a good bargain given the resulting impact. But then again, I could just as easily have picked up the cold here and been in the same boat without the perspective and contacts I gleaned from that trip.

So I'll take it.

Wandered into Global HQ early in the afternoon to get a bit done in prep for a meeting tomorrow morning with a prospective collaborator. A young new grad, but if he's got enthusiasm that might count for what experience he doesn't bring to the table.

I need to find the energy to continue the pushing forward. Colds really suck.

Researchinator is tired of sniffling and sneezing...

Playing Catchup

Returned from a couple of days in NYC, doing some networking, and attending a seminar event in my field of interest. Some good potential contacts - and I'll be following up on that this week. But of course, just to make things challenging, it's a repeat of roughly a year, or 14 months ago. No actually, it isn't. I got a cold upon returning home this time, luckily it wasn't en route.

I even had a reasonably nice few hours after returning, before the thing kicked in.

Damn viruses. Scourge of the earth - or of the airport. The risk is so high, I always try to take precautions, like lots of hand washing, eating tons of salads and fresh fruit, and taking vitamins and echinachea. Of course, to no avail this time. I probably could have done more of the salads though.

Anyway, I have to live with it, and try to get things done still in spite of it all

I did manage to further update some pro forma statements, and finished a first happy draft of my presentation in Apple 'Keynote' software. Thinking a bit about how to share a presentation remotely. I don't have that ugly pig Netmeeting, which could (awkwardly) get the job done. There are some other options I've heard about. Will look into WebHuddle perhaps - an open source app that's supposed to do that through javascript etc. I'm skeptical it will be able to do anything with animated presentations though.

Anyway, sorry for the hiatus while away, and sick, but I'm glad I was able to quickly do an update here, while working at the home office. A few hours left in the day, but perhaps I'll try and squeeze a nap in. This cold is wearing me down, man.

Researchinator says, hey, gimme a break already!

Preps Well Under Way

Into the thick of it now, with limited time. Blew off the afternoon yesterday with some woodworking for a friend, but hopefully it doesn't set me back much. Did print up more biz cards, and get my onepage summary updated. I have a networking thing tonight with programmer types, for which I did a bit of the organization... not that I really want to do much of that. Tomorrow interviewing a young new grad, like really new, finishing exams today.

Travel on Thursday...

Researchinator needs to go passport hunting at home...

Short Days Are Good

A nice short day today I expect. Well, short in the Global HQ. I have various things that will be easier at the home office - like printing new biz cards.

So I enjoyed a cool but sunny walk in this am. Going to work on logistics planning and a some collateral clean up and shift home for late lunch and more work there. So, short and sweet on the blogging today...

Researchinator sees a busy week ahead!

Making Some Early Moves

Still kicking. It's a busy time. Some networking yesterday eve that I still need to follow up on, and a contact who might be collaborative from other channels, need to meet next week or so.

Booked some travel to a seminar in NYC next week as well.

Researchinator is on the move...

The Road Ahead - Looks Bumpy

Spent sometime scanning for conferences and hob-nob events that I can attend to network. The balance between stealth and networking should be interesting. I'll do more of that today, both the scanning and the networking.

The need to get some cash in is rapidly becoming the important part of this venture. My small cadre of collaborators is a nice base, but loosely coupled at this point, and they have chains of limited length, due to their other commitments, so I can't get them really close yet. So I'll start to beat the bushes to scare up others.

Meanwhile I think I have a pretty workable demo. I need to do some run-throughs to ensure it speaks to my goals well and then start to take it on the road, and get beaten up a bit. I need to plan a way to manage the depression that comes with the constant skepticism of the audience a start-up needs to court. My sense from previous involvement in this area is that the audience is about 60% charlatans who cultivate the power of the critic without actually holding any potential value or useful ability, 35% gatekeeper types who are negative to any thing that comes their way, and 5% genuinely capable, open minded and in a position to be engaged in an opportunity.

The most deflating people to deal with are those without any experience, who are also unable to hold down a real job, but who position themselves as 'start-up gurus' They just repeat obvious platitudes that are perhaps fresh insights for a 20yr old, but for anyone else sound like they've just opened a business 101 textbook and are reading verbatim.

So while the initial crafting of a business is challenging, dealing with the pursuit of funding is the toughest of all.

I guess that's one of the reasons that immersing myself in some technical content has been fun on this project. Not only renewing that distant part of my skill set, but also because you can make progress without having to deal with difficult yet empowered people.

Still, I have had the pleasure of engaging with the odd visionary person who can ask the tough questions yet still embrace a good idea and run with it. That's a very rewarding experience, and one that I hope happens in the next couple of months before I make a decision about the future at the end of June.

Researchinator anticipates becoming more of a sellinator...

Week Kicks Off with Wintery Day

Snow in the air, rather aggressively this morning, so drove to avoid getting wet. I thought we put that away for the season. It's a bit invigourating though, a dramatic touch. We haven't had any really for well over a month I think.

Getting down to it. Need to start my mornings more aggressively. I clean up correspondence and contact stuff for the first hour, sometimes two each day. Would like to make that a bit more efficient.

Contact from the sickly Lawyer struggling with efficiency during major recovery. I will have a day of drawing updates at somepoint. Anyway, best jump into the main project work.

Researchinator tries to keep focussed...

Friday Challenge

What a Friday - this isn't a featureless day, but for the wrong reasons. First it appears our nice big chunky Koi is ill, so I'll have to get home a bit early and do some remedial work with him. He' seems to have some raised scales and is looking a bit bloated. If it's dropsy it probably means Koi-on-toast for breakfast this weekend.

Then one of the cats starts dispersing her pre-consumed food around the house. Probably just a hairball thing, but still. I really don't need the cleanup effort. With my mother in the hospital this morning too, where she'll be for a good week starting treatment, it doesn't help the atmosphere at all. My significant other is on plane returning from her biz trip to Germany, so at least there will be moral support around the house this weekend.

But on the biz front, I acheived some goals yesterday. Still a billion things to do, but at least I can share some of the stuff with the investors from afar. I should put together a video or something too - yeah like that's going to happen.

Today I'll work on some demo scripts and such before bailing to play fish doctor and generally clean up before the return of my SO, and await news on how my mom is doing.

Researchinator remembers simpler times... Like yesterday.

Deployment Process is a Necessary Evil

Just cleaned up some linked-in connections. Wasting my morning away I'm afraid. Oh well, the networking part of the biz is important too. Some connections there can enable connections elsewhere too.

Trying to keep all my server-side architecture in my head, and document it before it leaks out is tough. I think the process is coming along. Glad I've put the effort in keeping it as simple as I can, though there's probably still more that can be done in that direction.

Sunny change of weather makes it a nice walk today. Will I do the walk for lunch too, or will I find something around here. Love the economics of being able to walk home for lunch though.

Researchinator looks at getting somewhere before lunch time...

Focus Hours Established

Up too late last night reading and writing. But funny how much difference 30min of extra sleep in the morning can make. Turning off the alarm works well, as the cats won't let me sleep in anyway, so they are walking, complaining snooze alarms. Still made it in to work at the same time as usual, just less lay-around time.

Fighting with the differences between an ubuntu and a mac implementation of Apache2. Finding some files is a challenge on the latter. Been making steady progress, but my days are not as productive as they could be lately. Need to do some focussing for a few core hours every day. 10:30 to 12:00 with no email/twitter and maybe 2:00 to 3:30. Just that sustained effort should make a difference. Not that I don't work the other hours, it just means I'll limit the distractions during those 3 hours. I still work into the evenings regardless...

Shouldn't be hard, right? (Famous last words?)

Researchinator gives it the old university try...

Experience Schmexperience

Whew, what a slow morning this is. Between blog posts, twitter posts and tea making, I'm still not really underway. I'm still trying to remember what I'm working on, but given rainy weather, I didn't have the think-about-what-to-do opportunity that I normally have.

So it's on to some real work.

I was reminiscing elsewhere, though, about my earliest networked experiences, creating a chat-room experience in 1984 just on a whim while using a shared computer system at school, and creating a blog before the tools existed in the mid 90's; my first browser experiences were with NCSA Mosaic before graphics and colour were part of the experience circa 1993. Ah, grey, who could want more?

Anyway, on with the day and something constructive.

Researchinator hopes all this experience pays off someday...

Dangerous Office

Some twit in another office unit brings his pittbull in to his office, and the think tries to take a chomp at me this morning. I came into the office just behind them, but keeping my distance for just such a reason as this, and the thing was frothing to get at me. Nice training.

I hear it's kept tied up - that's a good thing. I'd hate to find it in the common spaces and have to fight it off.

Anyway, well into my morning and fighting with Django stuff. I wasn't up on the variable passing stuff but need to sort it out, and it's coming along. Seems, from other blogs I've read, that it's not the best implementation around in terms of the fact that template writing can break the website. Oh well, I just need stuff that works for now, and I can later hire a Django guru to make everything kosher and pretty.

But for now - I'm it, so learning way to much as usual.

Researchinator would rather apply some stuff rather than need to learn new stuff that will only have a short shelf life...