Milestone Progress Leads to Documentary Chores

My various digital logs in various development areas on my machine are an effective way of capturing the progress. I've even put together a quick little Python routine to extract any use of the words "BUG" and "TODO" from those logs as a way of keeping up on things I need to fix. Not that I've done anything about those things but TODO: actually address some of the todo's and bugs.

Well, bugs have a natural way of prioritizing themselves. If they are onerous enough they get fixed. If they stand in the way of a coherent demonstration of the technology, they get fixed. If they are background things that I can easily avoid, they tend to sit and wait for my development team :)

I'm missing an overall log though. I guess my logbook at the home office was fulfilling that role, but now I keep leaving it there. I'm contemplating blogger as a means to capture that stuff. It would be senseless to anyone else, so wouldn't be public, but at least it would be quickly accessible everywhere. The other option is a Goog docs thing, but getting in and out of that is a bit more onerous, the interface is a bit more heavy, and format is less important in a log than it is in a word-processor-type of document.

Anyway, I've made my milestone of getting an end-to-end demo to work. It's not pretty, but at least I can move on to some other stuff, like documentation updates! Oh Joy.

Researchinator dons bathing attire and joins the typing pool...

Food and Wireless

A dusting of snow last night, makes walking a little less pleasant. This morning working on the server based version of my demo and getting a bit more progress. Still some debugging there for less well-behaved clients, but it was nice to successfully deliver media from something other than my laptop.

I'm sure I'll know way too much about Django installation and optimization sometime soon.

Just now I'm sitting in a restaurant below my office, and able to get wifi. How sweet is that. Too bad the prices are a bit steep here. The menu looks pretty good, and I can continue with productive activities which is pretty sweet.

Can't really hear any thumping from above, interestingly. Must be the music and the chatter in the room that helps.

Researchinator is sipping ginger beer...

Successive Approximation Approach to Start-Up Motivation

Our office doesn't have a sink, so there's this camping like feel to being here. I walk down the hall to the washroom where I fill up a campsite plastic water jug/dispenser a couple of times a week to keep the kettle filled up. As my clean cups get used up by visitors I similarly bring them down for a wash, though a rinse and a wipe keep them pretty much clean anyway. Discarded paper town in my garbage cans makes for a good dumping area for small amounts of liquid, and its evapouration probably adds a bit to the dry office environment.

How much longer will I be here, sharing with a massage therapist? Probably a couple of months total. The disruptiveness of karatechopping and bodies flying next door is tempered by the all inclusive rent and no lease. It's a hard balance to strike elsewhere. I'll keep my eyes open, but I suspect any move will be one of three, okay four situations. A) I get some funding, B) I give up C) The RMT's does well and want to get a third working D) I go off the deep end and need to get away from the ju jitsu-a-thon next door and find another good situation.

I seem to do this often in my life when thinking about change - enumerate the likely outcomes and add probabilities to each. Strangely, I've never gone back to find old estimates and scored my success. So who knows if I'm good at it. Anyway, right now I'd say probabilities are: A-20%, B-70%, C-20% D-15%.

That's the first pass, but that's the value in this process. Yes, you mathematical genius, it doesn't add up to 100%. The result is that we make another pass, and in that we see which numbers we feel most confident in. Aha, we've learned something then, haven't we. I think the C and D numbers are pretty good. The A number I'm really not too sure about. The B number seems likely, but maybe too pessimistic. So I revise it based on confidence levels to be:

A-15%, B-55%, C-15% D-10% which works out short, but my sense is then that C,D are getting better, but I'm could probably move my last 5% into A or B. So my final guess is then:

A-20%, B-55%, C-15% and D-10% And I feel pretty good about that. It makes me realize that in spite of the long haul, I still retain a fair bit of confidence about getting some funding. Whether it's well founded or not is beside the point. At this point, I'm mostly concerned about the fuel left in A to avoid B.

Researchinator gains a bit of energy towards finishing the day.

Morning With Other Humans

Morning meeting shortly. Walked thru a cold morning to get in, but alas the sunshine makes a difference, luckily. Productive brain this morning. Thought up a patentable idea for solving the IP address pool issue for home users - but unfortunately that was my old job :). I don't think I want to scrounge up the money to file this one, but maybe I'll prototype it some day if I get spare time ever again.

I cringe when the weather is poor, as the walk in is a fruitful brain time, and I hate to get in the car. There are no distractions, other than avoiding the incompetent drivers. Well sounds like my compatriot has arrived. Meeting begins now.

Researchinator gets ducks into row, no 'duck' tape required...

Server One is Up for Testing

Productive morning so far. The new Ubuntu based server has been very nicely behaved. This will be the first server for the company, and on it I will start to put stable, usable demos of my stuff.

Only issue with it, is it sounds like an idling jet, but it's snappy and was very easy to load and install things like Apache and Django etc. I'm happy that it's stable. I've also loaded SSH onto it, so I can leave it 'headless' and use my nice monitor at my other desk. Maybe from home eventually.

So now shifting back to my main task at hand, and about to walk home for lunch.

Monday today, so the lunch time banging around should start in earnest shortly. A few hours this aft and another day will be in the bag.

Researchinator notes that the time is flying by.

Avoiding Spambots Takes Some Time

My morning is off to a slow start. I did the walk in - yay. Cold but at least not insanely so, and the exercise is valuable to me. But slow getting started so far as some other blog stuff (Wordpress - drat) is causing me grief with the spam bots. My comments are moderated, and I can just turn off the moderation emails I suppose. But I wish Wordpress would offer the human detection that blogger does to better weed out the losers.

Anyway, I made good progress on the application side - both bugs and features yesterday. I really mean to get to server/AJAX side stuff today. Hope I can do so. It's Friday though, and I have to remember to finish on a tidy note so that I can pick up more effectively on Monday.

Meanwhile

Researchinator says casual day, no tuxedos required in the office today...

Stuff to Do...

A whole day ahead of me - what can I do with it? I have a lingering migraine, but I think I can work through it. Also, some snow has arrived and is still coming down - which means I didn't walk into the office, but rather drove. So with the car I could probably chase down a cheap and crappy monitor at lunch time if I'm eager enough. I want to be able to use the linux server more easily, and a dedicated monitor would help that.

I think I'll move onto end-to-end demo capability today. Not sure if I'll do it right off the bat though. Should still put a couple of other feature/bugs to bed.

The American Idol is coming to town today - yes their president Obama. I have to remember not to venture towards downtown at all. Twitter should be all a twitter with play-by-play.

Researchinator avoids the feeding frenzy...

Bug Squashage and Graphical Rewards

Oh drat - saw a little spike of interest in my competitors. Luckily they are on another continent, and I think they're making some fundamental mistakes. Still, while I enjoy having them make some mistakes as market tests for us, I fear that they can muddy the water before we have a chance to get in. Will others say, "oh yeah, these guys are like those other guys, who did the same thing - it's crap." "No!" I'll have to exclaim "We're very different" - but if I find myself in that argument it means we're not doing a good job of articulating our stuff.

I cracked that one bug that was dogging me for a couple of days. Now I am trying to reward myself by cleaning up another aspect of the design. Some visual eye-candy. Update splash screen data which is 4 months out of date, and add toolbar graphics. I really need to move on to end-to-end stuff again though. Time's a wasting.

Researchinator is blogging when coding would be more appropriate, but caution to the wind I say...

A Short Week, Let's Get Going

I wasn't planning on a short week, but with the holiday yesterday I didn't follow through on my thoughts of doing just a bit of work, and rather cleaned up some home related paperwork.

It would be a joy to walk into work on these nice sunshiny days if it weren't for the drivers who are incapable of driving on a sidewalk-less roadway. I even slapped one vehicle's sidepanel that nearly drove over my toes. Apparently the idea of pausing to wait for another vehicle to pass a parked car was out of the question, and killing a pedestrian seemed a better plan.

The office is delightfully quiet this morning. The odd thump from the gym next door, but almost none of that even. Of course that will all change in about an hour or so, so I'll get into my work heavily now.

Tea in hand, I'm ready to jump in. More debugging today, and making progress toward demonstrable results.

Probably need to squeeze in some volunteer time tomorrow aft.

Researchinator gettin' down to it...

Focus is Waning - Damn That Early Adoption Bug...

Slow to start this morning. My social media thing is on a bit of a binge lately. Best get some focus so I can at least do a decent hour or two before lunch on task!

So I'll keep it short and say I've squashed a few bugs, and will try to take care of one or two more before I shift to doing the end-to-end polishing that is overdue.

Researchinator sez heads down, open your books...

MultiDisciplinary Day

Worked on debugging some code all morning, then skipped off for lunch at home. No walking today, but rather drove to keep dry in the rain. Also, need to drive off to drop off a retainer for the patent lawyer who will hopefully bring the patent protection through to fruition for me.

So a toasted tuna salad with a cup of soup and I'm off to deliver the cheque. I guess I'll work from home for the afternoon rather than go over to Global HQ.

This afternoon, some more debugging. Man, I am eager to get to a stable position where I can switch to biz mode and documentation for a while.

Researchinator needs a second hat-rack for all the ones that get worn on the average day...

Mohammed? Mountain. Mountain? Mohammed.

Earl Grey morning, but a shifted one. I was a big slow getting out of the house, with unexpected furr-ball underfoot to get the day off to a miserable start. Anyway, the walk in was nice and warm and I enjoyed getting the 1800 steps that that entails.

There's so much to do, and so little resource help. But I will plod on towards a mid-summer decision point. I should nail something down a bit more than that. Perhaps July 1?

I'm almost at a second plateau of demonstrable stuff, and my patent quest has been launched more concretely now. I need to get some seriously on-the-job collaborators soon, and finish hitting up the low-hanging gov't funding options, then turn it up to the serious angels. Can I do all that in the next 5 months?

Researchinator tries not to look at the mountain, and just keeps one foot going in front of the other...

Progress With Gathering Weather

A threat hangs over the city as a freezing rain bout is expected. Not sure if that will happen though, as the radar doesn't look suitably busy. I left the HQ office early and am installed at home now. Kettle's on.

Worked through the other big bug I was dealing with, and things have thus progressed. Had my third visitor to the global headquarters today, and out for a shawarma afterwards. I also got my whiteboard hung successfully onto the wall while there was an extra pair of hands at the ready.

So, it's looking like a few weeks of straight through development are still ahead of me to get a polished demo in place, but at least there is still progress towards it. Meanwhile trying to connect with my patent guy remains a challenge. One good email exchange, then he's never around again. I wish I had more time to drum up a better option.

Anyway, a cat has arrived on my home desk so there goes my productivity.

Researchinator is getting statically charged...

Week Gets Started With Sunshine

I've been tardy in my updates due to churn. I think I'm reasonably stable now, in the office space. I would still like to get my bigass whiteboard up on the wall, but will wait till the office isn't occupied and then hoist it up and bang around as necessary. I have a couple of those metal expando drywall anchors in the wall and it should sit on those okay...

I've had a few visitors now, even one collaborator who spent a few hours to work on stuff here. Hope he perseveres and makes some progress. He's going to do some server side stuff - we'll see if that catches or not.

I had a nice walk in this am - only about -10C and sunny, so it's not too much of a chore. Was feeling a bit sluggish initially, so that's a good pick me up.

Need to do some debugging to get things going. And some pitch summary editing as well. Oh yeah, and I"m not happy with my presentation, so should push on that as well...

Researchinator is in the building...

Freezing Walk into the Office

First walk into the office this morning at -23C, but bright sunshine. I was pretty numb by the time I arrived, but hey that's 1800 extra steps to start off the morning. And the weater starts to moderate finally. This has been a cold couple of months, no where near our normal averages. At this rate we'll have to have a thaw for all of Feb, or the annual average will be way off.

Some successful coding at fixing an XML DOM handling thing, and I'm on my way to a productive day. Just have to remember to leave before 3:30 when the rug rats all arrive.

Researchinator gets back to it...

Looking Forward to Future Past

Installed myself in the new environment, and working away. As bad as the afternoon sparring sounds in my new office, next door to the martial arts place, I can only imagine that the restaurants below must have a hellish time getting anyone to spend time there! I'll have to bring in my headphones to get a bit of isolation. I wonder if they'll do anything for the low frequency stuff though, it's pretty much sub-audible I suspect, and I get as much through my chair as I do through the ears.

Anyway, I think I'm mostly functional. Even started up Eclipse and started doing some debugging. At least I didn't lose the whole week. Still a few things to do, but I could conceivably have two or three people here effectively.

I'll find some sort of schedule that will work here I suppose, and maybe it involves reduced hours with some more productive afternoon time at home, when I don't have some sort of meetings. But perhaps I need to keep my eyes open for another office in the coming 3 to 5 months. For the $200-$300 it would cost for the move, it might be worth it.

The great thing is that it will make for great stories in the distant future of the successful business. "Remember when our desks would shake during afternoon karate hour?"

Researchinator remembers the future old days...

The President is in and out of the Building

Spotty coverage lately, as I work on out of the office issues, actually mostly creating a new office. It's coming together. This is a pivotal week, this afternoon a pivotal period where I get enough furniture in place to start doing stuff.

But for now its off to lunch and this afternoon, hopefully, getting things cleaned up at the satellite office.

Researchinator says feed me Seymour...