Year of the Startup

Working at home, as I do 2-3 days a week, is a little more complicated now that my family is at home.  They are noisy!  They may drive me to go to the office more often!

They had visited my office late last week, and my son noticed that I had the exact same two-screen setup (with docking station) at both places.  Yes – I did that on purpose.  My eyes get used to looking in certain places for certain things.  And now that I have this massive 24” HD screen in front of me, I would sort of like to add another 20” screen on my right side to match the one on my left (a three screen solution!).  I don’t really need it, but my setup seems so asymmetrical these days.

I know that somebody somewhere is already using three screens – maybe more!  Just think: it was about 8 years ago that I demanded to get a second monitor (to solve a simple problem: for my job, I look at schematics to create a layout, and with a single screen, I had to flip between the two, or print out the schematics to do the layout.  This seemed inefficient to me.), and my work thought I was crazy.  Within a year of that, most of my fellow layout friends in the industry were on two screens, and within another year, almost 100% of the company was on two screens.  Will there be a three-screen trend?  I think maybe yes.  I know that my neck swivels in one direction so much better than in the other direction simply because I have one screen on my left, but none on my right.  I have no reason to look on my right.

My family also got to watch Transformers: Dark of the Moon today.  Some projectionist left us in the dark (movie not running) for several minutes until my wife found someone to start things up.  I guess he or she pressed some button and left; not really checking if the movie was running.  When they tried a second time, things didn’t go much better.  We were still in the dark for a while, but we also knew that someone was working on it.  After maybe 20 minutes, the show began, but we had missed all the previews.  Man, that show is long – just about three hours – but it was entertaining.

The evening time event will be more of “The Stand” or “Firefly.”  We’re in the middle of both series right now.

Mood: Long day.  It’s hot in this home office!

My day started with cleaning a lot of egg off of my car.  It got targeted last night’s festivities.  Good thing I had that built-in layer of dirt and pollen already on the car.  It probably saved me from a lot of scrubbing.  I certainly had to get it off before the 90 degree afternoon baked it on permanently.

We sent a third of our workforce to China today.  They’ll be there for two weeks to meet customers and to sell parts.  I stayed in the office, battling gnats for much of the day.  The people who own the place like plants, but along with the plants come gnats.  To combat this, there are bug strips hanging all over the place from the ceiling.  It doesn’t really make the place ring of professionalism, but we also don’t get much foot traffic here either.  Sometimes I wonder why I even put a collared shirt on, when probably a tank top and shorts would do.

The early evening was spent doing call committee stuff.  I am so excited that Pastor Matt (Pastor 2 of 3) will be here this weekend!

Late night, my family started watching “The Stand,” a mini-series from 1994 based on Stephen King’s best book (the one I like best anyway).  When I recorded it on VHS so many years ago, I kept the commercials.  Now 16 years later, my kids love the commercials almost as much as the mini-series.  My wife and I liked looking at the promos for upcoming shows that are now long-dead.  I hadn’t seen some of those actors and actresses in years!  I guess those shows killed their careers!

Mood: moderately happy.

The Fourth of July was a long, slow day, which is just fine with me.  On occasion, I don’t mind a slow day.

The day started very early with Tour of France.  This is a month-long bicycle racing event that I watch every year.  It starts at 5AM on the West Coast!  It’s like watching a very slow chess match with a gorgeous backdrop of ever-changing scenery.  I just love France; it’s so romantic – all those castles, cathedrals and villages!  The whole place is steeped in history… and these bicyclists ride right through it!

When that was over, I put in half a day of work to get to a point where I was satisfied with my progress.

I began to get sleepy after that, realizing that I hadn’t eaten anything all day (living on coffee!), so I had a late lunch then watched a couple of not so good action movies on Hulu.  I would have watched TV, except that my son was on an all-day marathon of Mass Effect (a video game).  He completed the game today and then started over.  The game has some role-playing elements in it (or a dichotomous story, or several if-then statements, depending on your point of view).  The first go around, he played nice; choosing all the good responses.  Now he’s going to choose all the “jerk” responses and see if it gets him killed.

From what I understand (and I may be wrong on this), there is no live band at the community fireworks event tonight.  I usually go for the band, and to hang out with my church/band friends.  This year some friends of ours have a room at the Embassy Suites, which overlooks the fireworks.  We’ll watch from there tonight.  This will probably also make it easier for us to get home afterwords as well.

Mood: Lazy.

Well, I had hoped to spend one year being self-employed, or unemployed, or whatever you call it as I searched for whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing for the next 20 years of my life, but God had other plans.  Technically I guess, I’m still self-employed, and still sort of a contractor, but I am now working (for free) at a start-up.  This is quite a risk, but the people here are good, and they are motivated to succeed.  It’s also sort of nice to be an “owner” of a company rather than a worker.

OK, I’m not really the owner – that privilege goes to the two brothers who started this thing – but I am a partner and the forth person to join the team.  As this company grows, hopefully we’ll make some money and have a lot of fun in the process.

Since we’re all working for free right now, I sort of had to curtail any grand “around the world” travel plans that I had envisioned for my one year off, but I do get to go to my parent’s house on a lake in a couple of weeks from now, and that ain’t bad.  Hopefully, I’ll soon be back on the world travel circuit with cash in hand; our company having succeeded beyond all expectations.  If we succeed wildly, who knows, maybe I could retire and become a tour guide!

Mood: Looking forward to my new “calling.”