Quiet, Busy, the House…

Some of what we’ve been up to for the last four months or so…

Been awfully quiet here in the past few months, with my last active posting going on in February. That was when we started the painting project for the bedroom, which we did eventually mostly almost finish. Our original intent was to move onto the parlor and office, which are connected through pocket doors that are nearly always open.

We didn’t do that. Instead, we decided that we couldn’t take the various stains on the light blue-gray carpet that covered half the house. (Two years ago we got rid of the other half, by putting in hardwood floors, which we are still in love with.) Time for new carpet.

Rochelle and David had already spent months finding just the right pattern and color, so when Rochelle’s twice-yearly ESPP kicked out a chunk of change, we decided to go for it. This involved moving everything out of three rooms (including, once again, the bedroom) for a day. And because of the noise and the strangers in the house during the installation, the cats liked this less than the painting. Let’s just say that Billie didn’t stop at puking this time.

But the carpet was fast, in no small measure because we weren’t the ones installing it. We were moving furniture back into all three rooms by the end of the day. We got a lot of the big stuff, but three months later, we still haven’t moved everything back to where it should go.

This is because we’ve decided not to move anything until we’ve decided where it really belongs. Which means we’re throwing out crap, giving away crap, selling off crap, taking crap down to the basement, etc.

To go with the lovely new carpet, we also bought all new furniture for the office. It’s all from IKEA, so it was reasonably cheap. Two bookcases, a three-level horizontal filing cabinet, and two huuuuge new desks for probably less than a grand, and the office is far more usable. And if we ever actually paint the office, it’s going to look really fabulous, too. Which will be good for me, since it looks like I will continue to be self-employed (gainfully, really) for a while. It’s almost to the point to where I could have clients visit!

In the last few weekends, we’ve moved a bunch of stuff to the basement, taken a bunch of stuff from the basement and either thrown it out or taken it to Goodwill, and generally spent a good 30+ hours working on house organization. It’s starting to feel good!

We also had a friend, who is a professional contractor, come and paint, stain, and varnish our brand new back door, which is really beautiful, with small glass panels framed in wood, and lets far more light into the house. The new door framing and brand new weather stripping mean it seals far better than the old door; in spite of being glass, the kitchen is actually 10 degrees warmer than it was before. This is going to be great this coming Winter.

Anyway, all of this is to catch up, and explain a little bit about why no posting. We’ve been really, really busy!

Working Again, Kinda

My unemployment benefits ran out in mid-February. Not entirely coincidentally, I’ve found some medium-term work (sub-contracting for a small consulting company), that I hope to be able to continue doing for the foreseeable future.

My unemployment benefits ran out in mid-February. Not entirely coincidentally, I’ve found some medium-term work (sub-contracting for a small consulting company), that I hope to be able to continue doing for the foreseeable future.

It’s not full-time or permanent, so I make less and will have to pay self-employment taxes, etc. But for now, it gives me a lot of flexibility. And while I pays less than I was making in my last job, it pays way more than unemployment benefits.

Anyway, it’s going to have something that gets me up and out of the house most days, and pays some bills.

The Next Big Thing

Just read an inspirational editorial on Tim Oren’s Due Diligence weblog, which ends with a great quotation.

Just read an inspirational editorial on Tim Oren’s Due Diligence weblog, which ends with this great quotation:

Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda. That’s what a Next Big Thing is like. Footprints from your ass to the top of your head. Keep it in mind the next time the Valley Grail Quest gets trotted out by the punditocracy. There will eventually be a Valley 4.0, but the odds of any of the [experts] calling it in advance aren’t very wonderful. Most likely, it will hit rudely from behind, when least expected. So find something that solves problems for real people, gets you up in the morning, and lets you work with good folks, and dig in. That’s the way the Valley actually rejuvenates itself.

Food for thought, given that I don’t really know what I want to do next. These are three important things to look for, not necessarily to find the Next Big Thing, but to find a comfortable seat from which to watch for it.

BTW, I strongly recommend Due Diligence, an insightful, technology-focused blog written by a venture capitalist.

Rochelle. Lays. Down. The Law.

It would appear that my wife has decided I’m not doing enough with my time off, to clean up the house and otherwise work on useful projects (with “useful” being a word _she_ gets to define). She’s decided that I need to get up with her in the morning, take a bath with her, and have coffee with her before she goes off to her job. All of this to ensure that my day at least starts early enough to accomplish something.

It would appear that my wife has decided I’m not doing enough with my time off, to clean up the house and otherwise work on useful projects (with “useful” being a word she gets to define). She’s decided that I need to get up with her in the morning, take a bath with her, and have coffee with her before she goes off to her job. All of this to ensure that my day at least starts early enough to accomplish something.

I suppose this could have something to do with idolizing Sarah Hepola’s life in a previous post. Or that I can never remember everything, or much of anything, I did with the day while she was at work. Or that she’s usually waking me up from a nap when she calls home. Or that the stack of BeBox husks is as huge as ever.

At any rate, I now have to be much more productive and accountable. Expect me to blog more, so I can at least point to the posts as something I accomplished.

OK, Enough Goofing Off

Ok, it’s been two weeks of sleeping in and doing nothing (much) more than web surfing in my underwear. I should start doing some real work. So today I’m putting together a weekly schedule for myself.

Ok, it’s been two weeks of sleeping in and doing nothing (much) more than web surfing in my underwear. I suppose I should start doing some real work.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been unemployed. Rochelle and I both left our jobs about two and a half years ago. It was a coincidence, Rochelle taking a planned leave of absence to find her dream job (which she’s now doing), and my dot.bomb suddenly going under. That time we spent our days together, doing cheap stuff around San Francisco, and taking cat-sponsored naps every afternoon. For three months we basically spent all of our time together, and had terrific fun.

This time Rochelle is still employed, thank god. It’s not possible to stay afloat in SF on unemployment insurance payments, which are $370 a week, before taxes. (Yes, you pay taxes on unemployment. Tax cuts on stock dividends, paid for by the unemployed. That’s an economic plan that makes sense!) With Rochelle in a good job, we can tread water almost indefinitely.

Getting laid off is “winning the time lottery.” All of a sudden, I have time to work on the literally dozens of projects that have been building up around me. But in two weeks, I’ve accomplished nothing on any of them. Everything I’ve read or heard about being unemployed in today’s economy says that you have to come up with a routine, something to keep you on track, driving forward to the next job, or at least keeping busy and not frittering the time away. Certainly, when I took the job at Persistence after three months with Rochelle, I looked back and decided I hadn’t accomplished much with that time beyond improving my relationship with my wife. No small thing, that, but still…

I need this time to be different, in no small measure because I don’t want to do marketing in my next job. I’m planning to go back to hands-on technical work, probably software development, and that means rebuilding a number of skills that have gone fallow, as well as acquiring skills for the technologies that matter today. I have a lot of work to do!

So today I’m starting to put together a weekly schedule for myself. I need dedicated, scheduled slots for networking, job hunting, exercise, e-mail, socializing outside my house, technical development, home clean-up, blogging, bathing, naps, reading for both pleasure and research, web surfing, cat petting, going to the movies (matinees only), etc.

Some of these need to be done every day, but it’s impossible to do all of them in a single day. So I need a weekly, or even a bi-weekly schedule of activities. I’m sure I won’t get it right the first time, but with the economy the way it is in SF, I’m sure I’ll have time to perfect things. In any case, look for my first schedule draft on Monday.

All Good Things…

Today was my last day at work; I was laid off, along with a few other folks. I worked at Persistence for 27 months, all told, at a time when many people were struggling to find work. It was a good job, with good people, and I’ll miss it.

Today was my last day at work; I was laid off, along with a few other folks, in what I hope is the last downsizing needed to get back on track. I worked at Persistence for 27 months, all told, at a time when many people were struggling to find work. It was a good job, with good people, and I’ll miss it.

I know folks who have been out of work for more than a year. Scary thought. In spite of that, I’m looking forward to the time off while I look for work, to re-sharpen technical skills I haven’t used much in the last two years. I don’t want to take on another marketing job, at least not right now. I’ve been wanting to go back to technical work, and make the transition from web developer to full-time software developer.

So I have a long list of technical projects for the coming weeks or months. Rochelle has a long list for me, too, which starts with “clean the house” and continues with dinner ready for her when she gets home from work. At least for the next couple weeks, she’ll be lucky if I’m out of bed and dressed when she gets home, as I intend to “pay down” my sleep deficit.

At any rate, I’ll be signing up for unemployment tomorrow. Updating the resume. Visiting the various online job sites. Etc. There’s a lot of work to do, for being out of work!

Channel-Specific RSS Feeds

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds.

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds:

Life Tech
Self
Rochelle
Food
Travel
The Cats
The House
The Job
Haightlife
I Like
Politics & Law
Media
Miscellaneous
  Mac OS X
Anti-Spam
Technology
About This Site

Keynote

I just finished installing my new copy of Keynote, Apple’s new presentation program. It’s _so beautiful,_ I am imagining that I will borrow a Mac to be able to give a presentation using Keynote during our sales kickoff, next week.

I just finished installing my new copy of Keynote, Apple’s new presentation program, and spent a few minutes playing around with it. It’s so beautiful, I am imagining that I will borrow a Mac to be able to give a presentation using Keynote during our sales kickoff, next week.

But then I look through the available presentation themes…and none of them are professional in the way I’d like to present to the sales team. They are all beautiful, and they certainly have character. Indeed, that might be the problem. I want the gorgeous Quartz transitions and imaging, but I actually want to use a more “boring” theme.

The themes page says that it’s possible to create new themes using tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, and there are (somewhat brief) instructions in the manual, so this is probably a temporary issue. I hope that lots of people will buy Keynote, and that designers will create new themes for it. I might even be willing to pay for a themes pack. Might be nice if Apple offered such a thing as a reward to early Keynote buyers…

More Anti-Spam Tools

At the recommendation of a new co-worker, I recently installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet add-in for Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail client I’m using at Persistence. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook on Windows (as I have to at work), this tool should be a no-brainer.

Note: I no longer recommend SpamNet, having found more effective tools. See my Personal Survey of Anti-Spam Tools for more details and recommendations.

At the recommendation of a new co-worker, I recently installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet add-in for Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail client I’m using at Persistence.

The plug-in adds new capabilities to Outlook, enabling it to scan each message as it’s downloaded, and determine if it’s spam or not. If it’s spam, it’s sent to your Spam mailbox, rather than your Inbox. This lets you review the caught spams at another time, to verify that only spam has been filed there.

The most interesting part of SpamNet is the way it detects spam. It plugs into a P2P (peer-to-peer) network of spam reporters. Everyone who’s part of the network reports spam when it gets through their filters. After a couple people have reported any given spam, the network “learns” what that spam looks like, and will filter it for everyone else. So SpamNet “learns” about spam from the collective experience of everyone using SpamNet (currently about 40,000 people). This makes SpamNet probably the most effective anti-spam tool out there. There’s more to it than that, but not much, and you can read all about it on the Cloudmark web site.

Oh, yeah, the price tag. SpamNet is free for individual use. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook on Windows (as I have to at work), this tool should be a no-brainer.

But, there’s the catch. Today SpamNet supports only Outlook on Windows. If you use Outlook Express, you’ll be supported soon. If you’re using Netscape, or Eudora, or a Macintosh, you’re SOL at the moment.

Anniversary

Today is, I can hardly believe it, my one year anniversary of working at Persistence Software. I am thankful to have what is by any measure a very good job.

Today is, I can hardly believe it, my one year anniversary of working at Persistence Software. I am thankful to have what is by any measure a very good job.

I was pulled in almost against my will in May of 2001, as a contractor, and the second person into a brand-new Marketing department. I liked the folks there, they liked me, and in August we made it official.

What’s funny, the friend who pulled me in left shortly thereafter (she’s a consultant permanently, rather than to fill in a dot.bomb gap on her resume), so I’m the “old timer” in Marketing. Scary thought!

Persistence is doing well. We actually made our first profit as a public company this last quarter, and the signs are favorable that we will continue to do so. This despite the worst recession the software industry has ever seen. So we must be doing something right.

Investment Advice

If you had bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49. If you had bought $1000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then traded in the cans at a redemption center for the nickel deposit, you would have $107.

Rochelle recently found this on another web site:

If you had bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49. If you had bought $1000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then traded in the cans at a redemption center for the nickel deposit, you would have $107.

The blurb concludes that, considering the current economy, the best possible investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

Which is pretty funny. But what I don’t understand is why Rochelle was at the Betty Meets Boris web site…