Money's on my mind again because Unforeseen Events caused the business to skid a little in May, and due to the latency of the billing cycle I'm weathering the financial sting of it right now. It's not like the newbie mistake I made a couple of years ago that left me with no business at all for a while, but it still smarts.
Lately, when money matters of any size injure me, I start obsessing about money and feeling bummed about how cash-poor I have often found myself. Since stepping out on my own four years ago, I seem to get into these areas a little too frequently: barely treading water, and laughing at the idea of saving. Listen: A bunch of new and nifty five-dollar computer games have recently appeared on my radar, and I haven't bought any of them, because I can't justify a five-dollar game purchase right now. That my friends is chilling.
There is a small but resolute part of me that permanently holds the position that I've had my fun, but it's time to return to the safety of the salaried life, where I can get all the five-dollar games I want and also a 401(k). It knows it's always going to get outvoted, so it doesn't press the issue. But it does make sure to clear its throat every time a situation like this comes up, and it points out the most recent six-figure recruiter email I have received. "Just putting this out there," it says. "I know you're not asking for my advice. Take it as you will. Something to consider, is all." It makes humble and placating gestures.
Meanwhile, back in the world that exists outside of my skull, June 2009 has been the accounts-receivabliest month in Appleseed's history. This was in part due to a new partnership which has worked out very well so far, and I'm fighting (but not yet struggling) through a workload logjam in order to get a regular stream of new work going in that direction. So that's good.
Today I started casting out some lines looking for more work to better suit (and allow me to keep!) this increased work-capacity. I also attended a game-lunch at a friend's workplace that somewhat unexpectedly morphed into a miniature networking thing (hi guys), and it make me think that I ought to start going to more networking events outside the games bubble, or even the (somewhat larger) software bubble. Attend the sorts of events where I can hand out my Appleseed card and really mean it, see...
As for managing my money, I hope that I have finally found a way to say goodbye to the useless pile that is Quicken. I have created an account on yodlee.com, and filled it up with all my bank, credit card, investment and personal-loan information. I'm impressed with how well it's already categorized my existing spending history. I look forward to using it for a month, after which I'll see if I can't make a more realistic budget this time. And maybe not blow $100 in overdraft fees in one week...
And, yes, as a result, I sit there sighing, rather than playing the goddamn game!
I've been playing a lot of role-playing games lately. I hosted a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach a couple of weekends ago, and yesterday I helped
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classicaljunkie host a play-through of The Immortal Murders to celebrate her birthday. In both cases I found that I'm capable of playing storytelling RPGs, but also found it a draining activity rather than an energizing one. However, I'm not sure how much of that was due to the act of playing and how much was from the additional stress of hosting.I prefer narrating to literal role-playing, and it was interesting to discover the difference between the two. (Roach, a tabletop game, allows both styles. Immortal Murders is more like a LARP, so either you're role-playing or you're not playing at all.) With both styles, though, I felt on-edge and tense the whole time my character was on the scene, like I need to be ready to jump in at any moment. After only a couple of hours of this, I was pretty exhausted. Compare to a board game, with its regular cycle of high and low periods that I can ride for many hours (if the game is compelling enough). It could be that I'm just not playing right.
The Gameshelf shoot went great, even though I'm currently having a frustrating time importing the footage. I didn't think to clean the tape heads of the borrowed SCAT cameras - which many people use - before using them. As a result, the tapes have some schmutz on them, and every time Final Cut encounters such a blotch, it throws up its hands (as well as a modal dialog box) and saves the import-so-far to a file. There's nothing to do at this point except fast forward the tape a bit and pick it up from there, hoping that nothing juicy got skipped over. It also results in lots of smaller files to comb through versus a few long ones. This makes an already time-consumig task even longer. But I'll get through it.
This will be a fanatstic episode, but I think it's destined to be an anomaly among Gameshelfs... a "special" that I wanted to do specifically because it's so radically different than anything we've done so far, and it seemed like exactly what I personally needed to tackle in order to get into the show again. After this, we have to start getting disciplined about the show's format, enough so that planning, shooting and editing the episodes can maybe happen with some goddamn regularity for once. I have come to the conclusion the the show will never be really popular if it only comes out a couple times a year (if that).
I hope to open the jmac.org video store this week, where I will sell DVDs of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade. I have high hopes for this. Even a handful of sales would help cover my materials costs of recent Gameshelf-related adventures. It would also serve as a huge encouragement to me to produce more of both, and in theory would also serve to promote the shows to a wider audience. The presence of the DVDs will probably get me to promote the shows more aggressively, at any rate. We'll see.
I'm rather buried in Appleseed work. I lost the subcontractor I was working with just as I picked up a new small job in May, leaving me with four tasks all on my own plate. This is too many. I've been dealing with these best as I can, and this includes starting the process of bringing in new help. I am hopeful about this.
I love running the business. For all my crazy project ideas it's still the only enterprise of mine that brings in revenues, so I shouldn't shy away from the idea of letting it grow. Honestly, a large part of me is reluctant to invest much energy into growing Appleseed beyond just-me. This is the part that considers it my "day job", with a scoff. It's the same part that fuels my eagerness to work on my nuttier entrepreneurial projects, which I spent most of last year and the start of this year chasing at full throttle, and it's not used to being told to shut up for a bit.
I owe myself another period of reckoning. 2007's four-pillar system worked well and it's time to take stock and see what I really want to be doing now. The answer, I suspect, will be different from last year, or the year before that. I can only hope that the answer will fit better than it has in the past.
I can't complain about my life too much when stress-relief means doing billable work.
(Also, I enjoy the chance to work with graphics, instead of just text. At the end of a work-phase the accumulated think-through doodles in my notebook look cooler.)
While I do almost all of my work - and maybe a little too much of my play - on a MacBook laptop, I keep an older desktop computer in my office for tasks that are better left to sessile machines. I seldom use it interactively, though, and its display - balanced on the back edge of my desk - usually shows only whichever screensaver has most recently caught my fancy. (Was running SurveillanceSaver for a long time, but lately have favored HAL-9000.)
Recently, I discovered, quite by accident, a new use for this arrangement that may permanently improve the way I work. For a project I'm working on, I had reason to comb through some video footage that existed only on one of this machine's two hard drives. It was a time-consuming task, so inevitably the usual forest of Twitter clients and Gmail windows and RSS feed-readers and such sprouted up as I worked. (How strange, yes, as if by magic.) Presently I completed by task and switched back to my laptop, but decided that I liked how all the happy little info-stream windows looked on the larger display, so left them there.
After getting back to work, I quickly realized that the constant Bing! New email and Bong! new tweets and Doink! new news articles interruptions I had going on my laptop were now entirely redundant, as these same activities were also evident on the screen in the background. My background in physical space, recall, running on a separate computer.
Experimentally, I turned off all my laptop's many new-event notifiers. I found myself in a new place: the streams were still present, and I continued to stay current with the outside world, but the sense of constant interruption had vanished.
Now, when I need a micro-break, I need only cast my eyes up at my other display and see what's changed. I do this often enough that I never fall behind; the crucial bit is that I decide when I'm ready to take another sip from my personal external-info fountain, rather than have it splash me in the face while I'm in the middle of a thought.
I realize this exact solution isn't something that everyone can implement, since not everyone happens to have the same computing setup I do. But I do recommend that fellow information workers who share the need to be continuously plugged in, but also feel the constant low-level stress of continuous, clangorous interruptions, re-invent this solution in whatever way works for them. I'm hopeful that, in a small but crucial way, it's changed my life for the better.
If I know who you are, and if this sounds interesting to you, send me an email / comment / IM / wev.
- I have some rather inspired Gameshelf post ideas that are just waiting for me to realize. I really will do them, once i work up the gumption for it.
- Project X's IP holder wrote me, confirming that the project maintains is month-long heartbeat frequency while in hibernation. I'm not actually worried that it may be otherwise, but it's nice to hear anyway.
- Had a great meeting with a new client yesterday, and another client has been coming by daily to dump a wheelbarrow of new tasks onto my lawn. Mmm, smells like fresh peat.
Bad:
My sleep cycle is broken again. Most days I am waking up after 10am, no matter what I do the night before. This is unacceptable during winter, when I must be especially mindful to maximize the amount of sunlight coming into my eyes. Here it is noon, I am drinking my morning coffee, and there is like four hours of sun left. When such days end with me feeling like I accomplished nothing, it's an easy out to blame my waking up late, but it's not entirely incorrect, either.
"This ends here" growled I through my morning brain-syrup. Must prioritize changing the bedroom environment, starting with installing multiple alarm clocks, and leaving at least one of the heavy curtains open. (Which means installing blinds - work, bah. Still.)
So, if you happen to learn of some entity's need for some damn fine software consulting, you know where to direct them.
Why yes, I am somewhat concerned about doing this in the midst of the changing financial climate. I am not aware of all the ways it affects this sort of activity, but it's probably making it harder for other business to borrow money for new projects - and that's just enough to worry about. But, here I am anyway.
Hmm, I guess a "Now accepting new clients! Lucky you!!" post on the Appleseed blog wouldn't be untoward. I should make the latest blog post show up on the front page somehow, mumble mumble...
I have been semi-coasting with consulting work, spending the last two months doing only some maintenance and release-engineering work for a single client - no intensive new coding projects. This has been great for my schedule, and has helped advance my other projects, but I can't keep doing this if I want to avoid getting my head bit off again by tax penalties next year. So, yes, time to activate another client. That's fine.
My holdings in both money and debt are both small enough that these are the main ways I fear the global financial poop might hurt me:
1. Businesses experiencing new pain when performing their routine borrowing (for making payroll and such) become more conservative about hiring consultants
2. One of my big projects gets enough traction that I'm ready to consider taking out a business loan to let me focus on it exclusively, but the state of credit has become so poor that it's just not worth doing
We'll see what happens.
Really, all I've been doing since the housewarming is work on one project or another, occasionally shoving myself out the damn door to go do something that is not work. I've been doing an OK job of that, so I will tell you about these things first.
At the end of August,
radiotelescope and I attended Boston GameLoop. I failed to blog about that in a timely manner, but I did at least burp my transcribed notes at one of the organizers, and you can find them spread around that wiki. I especially enjoyed the sessions on discussing non-marketing ARGs, and on baking viral aspects into digital games. I networked a lot, and left feeling, perhaps for the first time, that I really was part of the games industry now. I still have rather complicated feelings about this.The weekend after that
cthulhia and I attended shatterstripes' gallery opening of her beautiful tarot deck art. I know the artist as an acquaintance from MUDs many years ago, but hadn't actually met her in person before, so it was fun to chat for a while about all that stuff. I look forward to being able to buy a mass-printed copy of the deck someday!Labor day weekend I sat inside and prototyped a new project, and then helped Joe with a SCAT shoot; it was nice seeing the Gameshelf crew again. Weekend after that, my parents spent Saturday with us. We took them to the Summer Shack.
Last weekend
classicaljunkie, dictator555, Nate and I went apple & berry picking. I wasn't that into it, but I really needed to go far outside my bubble and walk around outside for a while. It was also interesting being in an organic orchard - really ugly apples, covered with bugs! I considered this a feature.Some of you are aware that I've taken on yet another commercial project. This puts Project X on the back burner, while the Volity Network remains in the freezer. That feels like a joke at first - oh, look, jmac is unable to finish something again, so here he is, serially launching a new thing. Right?
However, the new thing has enough going for it that I decided to risk taking on this extra self-loathing in order to pursue it. It's a relatively small project, it primarily uses a web-based interface, and it re-uses various technologies I developed for Volity.
As such, it's now a project of Volity Games, the company, so I have my two partners there working with me on it. It will get done.
No no no, I'm not even gonna hint at a done-date. Don't worry, you wont miss it when it's ready. But, in the meantime, this is what's taking up all my work-time (besides the bread-n-butter stuff of Appleseed contracts).
Two more apt-lookers today. I couldn't escape the later of them due to the rain, and did a better job grinning and bearing their inevitable interview (while typing obscene invectives about my visitors via IM to
classicaljunkie). Every single person, without fail, wants to know to utility costs. I tell them in all honesty that I do not now. I even looked it up in Quicken, and I still can't figure it out, since I paid them in irregular lumps this past winter, and not always in full.I must have hosted, gosh, twenty-five of these unwanted visits over the J-months. Perhaps more. I feel I deserve commendation for only now starting to wish I could kill them with my mind, as opposed to a month ago.
To help calm down, I ordered a delicious fishy-fish dinner from Redbones, and paid well over $20 (incl tip). It was around five bucks more than the total based on the delivery menu on my fridge, which can't be more than a year or two old. The food, she has gotten expensive.
Drinking cold beer and taking long breaths now.
Was of two minds about splitting my most recent consulting period into two entries, with the formation of Appleseed as the split-point, but decided to go with a single entry and making it clear in the summary that I sell my expertise through the company now.
While I was in there I updated the jmac.org about page, which still had a lot of pre-millenial cruft on it. The opening paragraph used to suggest that my entire online presence was on jmac.org, when in fact it's been spread across a wide cloud of domains, just like with everyone else, for years now. I only use the domain for miscellany that doesn't fit anywhere else, now. So it says that now. Also admitted that I'm now using a commercial hosting service, after eight years of the server equivalent of couch-surfing.
Almost certainly no prototype by August 1, then, especially with the move coming up, but it was a good target to aim for anyway. If I'm especially industrious I'll be able to at least put it back on my workbench before then, and I really think I'll have a prototype about a month after that, so long as I can really focus on it.
But we can't have that, can we? So I have another damn new project idea in mind, a more passive one that ties into a topic I'm known to be interested in but haven't blogged about in a while. You'll see it when you see it.
(Of course, in a real sense I am in fact looking for work all the time, now. But there ends up being a world of difference between attracting customers and seeking employers, as far as their respective outcomes go. It has everything to do with who controls you.)
Part of me just wants to embrace this evolved sense of work completely, invest some spare cycles into the next potential leap forward (Project X), and just let go of everything else for now. But I don't wanna, so instead I just procrastinate, by putting more time into Appleseed or X. Well, that could be a lot worse.
And X is going fine, thanks for asking. I am a little bummed that both my career and my biggest sub-project both deal with computer programming right now; though the projects are quite different the overall context is kind of monotonous. X is finite, though; the software itself has well-defined goals, and then it will go through a pass/fail submission process, which I hope to hit in around ten more weeks. If it fails, it fails, and if it passes, everything will change. But let's deal with that when we come to it.
But then I finished that quest-line and still I kept playing, so I gave the disc to
classicaljunkie to hold in escrow until further notice. I have accomplished stuff since then using time that I know I woulda pissed away Oblivionating instead.My beard is fully grown in, by which I mean I've had to start trimming it. I really like it! My facial hair is thickest in the goatee area, and it matches my top-of-head hair nicely when so isolated. (And I feel like I can go longer without a haircut this way, too.) I'll have to hack it off for the next Gameshelf shoot (whenever that is) but it will come right back. afterwards.
I've been meeting my daily billable-hours goals well enough, and have been finding success cautiously looking for ways to slowly grow my business - I have enough experience, personal and vicarious, to convince me that any other way isn't worth doing. (Also, I have played many gams of Sim City in my day, and I know what happens if you build, say, 10 power plants just because you have $10,000 in the bank.) I'm still shy of seeing to Project X every day, but I've been attending to it maybe every other day, which isn't terrible.
My attention is cycled away from all other projects right now. I know myself too well to fret about this; the motivation will come 'round again. But some people are waiting on at least a modicum of a volity webclient release, and I have started to nudge that around again but i'm not exactly champing at the bit about it.
I'm going to take a long break from 'shelfing for a while after this, even though I haven't collected the complete footage for any future episode. Probably no more activity until May. I feel behind in just about everything else.
The website is pretty spare right now; there are at least two major sections, including a new blog, which aren't ready yet. But the remainder makes for a fine public web presence, and so up it goes today.
Yes, the domain name is a little fiddly, but what can you do? I also nabbed appleseedsc.com and appleseedsofwareconsulting.com, but I figure that the version with the hypen in it looks best in print. It's what's going on the business cards.
In short, I ran a business with no marketing and a single customer, who was under no obligation not to simply wander off when they felt done with me. Leaving me with no income and no plan to attract new customers. It turns out that customers aren't employers.
After six harrowing, empty-cupboard weeks of full-time, unpaid work I had some marketing in place and a small corral of active customers. That interim was really rough, but knowing that I pulled myself out of it through my own strength (with assists from my excellent friends) is awesome. My confidence in my ability to do business as well as sling code shot up tremendously, even before I started actually collecting money again, just from witnessing my own success at finding and connecting with new customers.
Gord willing, I now have a heightened awareness of pitfalls that I haven't fallen into yet. Not too long ago I was talking with some friends on the train. One, who had just landed a lucrative full-time job, said he was tempted by my stories of the independent life, but was also made quite wary by my little time of troubles. I said that I had learned my lesson from all of that, and I don't foresee any other terrible things happening to me. "Unless someone sues me," I mused. Suddenly, I felt very cold. "Yes, that would count," said my friend.
So that is why I am moving forward with this reorganization plan, primarily as armor against any future legal blows. (No, I'm not expecting anyone to sue me. And really, that's the point.)
I am seriously considering writing a book, or something bookish, about my experiences. There's a lot of spilled ink about becoming a consultant, and far more about embracing the freelance life in general. But I haven't encountered any works targeted specifically towards software professionals, coming to them with the message that there is another way and offering advice on how to break free and get started.
I discovered the lifestyle by accident, by way of launching an unrelated startup, and later looking for supplemental income without having to go back to a job. After a year of trial and error I finally have an idea how it works. And from this vantage point, I continue to feel surprise that I know tons of software people, but only one or two work for themselves. It's certainly not the life for everyone, but for me it is without a doubt the best job I've ever had. I probably could have started years before I actually did, had I only known it was possible. The message needs to get out more.
Some of my team (Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening, Attorneys at Law) gathered at MIT Saturday night to practice, breaking up into groups of four and then running through a shorter puzzle extravaganza. (It was this one, actually, by Dan Katz.) I was on fire, solving three puzzles alone, and helping to finish up a couple more. My puzzle-fu has never been stronger, and I was pleased when another group still finished well ahead of us, suggesting that our whole team is really well poised this year. (That group contained a hunt veteran who is joining our team this year, so that's exciting too.)
I hope that we at least make it into the endgame, which would be a first for IIF. I was last night reading the 2006 hosting team's description of that year's endgame, and filled with fear and desire.
My client is looking for Perl developers at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. If you are available for new projects and willing to relocate to PA please send your resume with contact details and rate/hr ASAP.
