Wiglaf

It is an amazing time we live in for a person who wants to start their own business. Your technical infrastructure costs have damn near plummeted to zero cost in many regards. Here is what I mean:

1. Web presence can be done using Squarespace. It is all point and click, drag and drop to get a decent website.
2. Phone Service is even more amazing. Between Skype and Google Voice you can have a phone setup that rivals many medium sized businesses. Then add into this that cellular service has gotten damn cheap and friggin amazing.
3. Mobile connectivity is broken out from Phone Service since you no longer need to use your cell phone just for calling. Now that smartphones communicate to the web and have a shit ton of processing power you really can be out of the office and still handling business. Take Sprint’s Evo. Its more powerful then some laptops from a few years ago. And oh wait, you usually don’t do any actual processing on the phone itself instead you use its data connectivity to interface with a host of remote servers.
4. Free or pay as you go internet services. Back up you documents to the cloud. Use the cloud for heavy duty computations. Not only do you not have to pay the infrastructure cost for this but you can ramp up or down how much you use these services as your budget allows.
5. Open source collabrative software. Git, subversion, Drupal, wikipedia, eGroupware, etc, etc…
6. Free office tools. Openoffice, googledocs,KOffice, etc, etc…
7. Free operating systems for your hardware. Ubuntu, Android, etc, etc… (And yes Ubuntu is easy enough for anyone to use and install.)
8. Free Customer Relation Management software to track your customer interactions.

Literally for a minimal cost you can get a professional grade infrastructure in place for your business. And what kills me about this is I can’t think of a side business to start for the life of me. Here I sit with a college degree, a familarity with technology that would allow me to lower my startup cost and a wife that would help me find the time to do this. And not one damn idea comes to mind. Note that all those things can be used for ANY type of small business. Not just tech related.

Hell, our landscaper who is fixing up our backyard could lower her operating cost by implementing some of them. She lives off of her phone calling and interacting with customers and then writes down notes on whatever piece of paper is handy. This has caused a bit of delay on two occasions. (Both times were understandable.) But with a little training she could be keying in conversation recaps into some free CRM software to track customer conversations. Could be using one of the free office suites to save money. Could use her iphone to snap before and after pictures of our yard and then use one of the many photo sharing sites to display them to potential customers. On and on I could go.

And I wish I was in her shoes. I wish I had a viable business that I was running. But not a damn idea has come to me in the past two years that I have been actively pondering it. The best I had was opening up a sandwich wrap place that also sells smoothies. The location would need to be near enough for the Wal-mart lunch crowd and for the afternoon soccer mom crowd with their kids. But the upfront cost are just too much for me to risk. The other one was a suite of tools for Churches to use. Hosted website, custom smartphone app/mobile interface for communications, automated desktop publishing to the website for announcements, a/v infrastructure for a daily homily to be broadcast, webcam integration for day care facilities, etc, etc… All of these are existing components that just need to be tied together. Turns out that has been done. @#$%@!!!

Aargh!!! My kingdom for a business plan muse.

Chad Work

So I have moved teams at work since I was getting kinda bored on my old one. Its not that the work wasn’t challenging, its just that it wasn’t challenging in the way I wanted it to be. Instead of being “Here’s a technical problem to work through” it was becoming “Here’s a project management headache to fix while dealing with other’s egos” type of work.

Both are problems that are in my day to day job. The second one is the one I deal with so I can have fun with the first. It amazes me watching how some people are able to interact with others and magically come out with what they need from the other person without having to get frustrated. I feel like those kinds of situations would be easier if I had a giant pugel stick and could demand trial by combat. That would be freakin sweet.

“Uh Joe, you were supposed to have that server online today.”

“Well I had some stuff come up and its going to be a few days.”

“That does it! We are taking this to the Octagon.”

And by the way, all trials by combat should be done in octagon fighting arenas.

But enough kvetching. Good news is the stuff I am now doing is new enough to me that it’ll be a while before I am up to par where I can relax. Kinda sucks that the area where I sit is so warm that it makes me sleepy in the afternoon. All I need is to fall asleep face first into my keyboard. Qwerty face is a hard thing to hide.

So the technical problem I am facing right now is the common dilemma to all fields. How much effort do you put into something? Enough to meet the requirements? Enough to give the customer a heart attack when they see all the new bells and whistles? Its the age old question. When does done arrive? The report I am fixing is a report that has been broken for some time and people have lived with it. The fix was pretty much already designed and just needed some tweaks to finish it. But how it integrates into the overall flow is still horrible broken. Its the same story you always see. One time process gets written, becomes a bit more permanent, gets some new features bolted on, grows and morphs into this ungainly piece of junk. Looking back at the history of the program I could easily spend some time redesigning the whole thing and have a better solution. But if the report is so easily ignored that a whole country just made do with not getting the report does it really warrant a rewrite?

So I sit at work tweaking it more and more but at some point I just need to let it go. (Could have probably declared victory over it about 3 weeks ago.) Even while I know I could do a better job on this report the long term payback isn’t there. There are other projects that I need to move on to that have a greater ROI. But it is so hard to let it go since I know I can deliver an amazing report given the time. At least this is the biggest complaint about my job. I really do understand and acknowledge that things could be much, much worse. So many of my classmates don’t have jobs right now and sometimes I wonder how have I been so lucky. Sure if you are a hard worker you lessen the odds of being laid off but that is not a guarantee that you won’t get laid off. Far from it as has been demonstrated in my field.

Chad Work