February 07, 2008

Thursday, February 07, 2008 6:29:41 AM

Well the trip has started. Sort of… At one point we had intend to leave directly from work last Friday. The weekend before however was so hectic we didn’t get everything organized in the trailer. Things were simply thrown in as we loaded things into the U-Haul. We decided that it would be better to get organized before we started out on the road especially in light of the fact that we knew we had more stuff with us than we would be able to take and also did not want to forget anything that we would want. I will be amazed if we have everything we want or need but we are in pretty good shape in general now.

Monday was spent shopping. I was pleased to find a lap desk at Staples that will work great for holding my keyboard. I also bought a track ball. I was alarmed at how much money all of the final necessities totaled to. I keep telling myself that we will be able to stop the spending soon. With that said it may be a good idea to implement a freeze of some kind soon. I know my tendency is to spend when I am under stress. It may be good to divert that tendency into freezing spending.

As much as I had been hoping my sleep issues would immediately resolve after leaving AMIS. I still have a way to go. Tuesday morning I woke at 2AM and laid in bed for two hours without being able to fall asleep. At 4AM I finally went out to the trailer to work on organizing the office. I was very pleased with the results I was able to achieve. The trailer office is now better organized than the home office was. The Velcro has turned out to be an amazing solution to our organization problems. I put the printer stand, printer, external hard drive, and external DVD writer on what used to be the top bunk. I drilled a hold between the bunk and the cabinet. Drilling that hole was its own little drama in as much as the trailer is brand new, I haven’t drilled many holes like that and I didn’t know how the trailer was wired. Oh yeah and the beginning of the drama is a 2 inch hole saw bit costs upwards $25. Since an entire set of 16 can be purchased for $45 I decided that would be the best thing to do. The good end to it all is that the hole came out perfectly. In the end I was able to set up the three devices on their own power strip and their own USB hub. That made it such that all I needed to run through the wall was a single power cord and a single USB cord. To connect to my office I simply lower the USB cord and plug it in. It was truly refreshing to have something work out so close to my original plan. Now that I think of it if there is such a critter as a USB to WiFi stub we could make it all the better …

The rest of Tuesday unsurprisingly enough was spent mostly walking in circles. I tried to get a nap but wasn’t very successful. I was able to get our external grill assembled. I feel a little like Noah building an Ark in the desert putting bikes on the suburban roof rack and assembling a barbeque grill in the middle of a snow storm. Reading the weather report of course requires a lot less faith than he needed.

At some point I believe it was Tuesday I picked up my copy of “What color is your Parachute?” from Brother Christensen. While I was waiting for my mom at Wal-Mart I took the two minutes I had to browse through the book. The section I opened to was about job interviewing. I came to realize that at this point I absolutely do not want a job. That is far from saying that I do not want work. I just don’t want a job. I want income opportunities. I want challenges of things to create that could produce residual income. The idea of a pre-defined responsibility set and pre-defined behavior requirements list sends shivers through me. It makes me think of being a human machine. This is exactly the way I imagine most people who design business processes think of people. Understanding my feelings of the present moment gave me some reassurance of my decision to venture into entrepreneurial life. I am sure my attitude can change. I have yet to identify exactly what it was that was “wrong” with AMIS however it definitely had something to do with bureaucracy. If I work for a company that I don’t own again I am sure it will be a smaller company than AMIS. If it is not a smaller company it will be in a well insulated business unit of a larger company.

Yesterday was emotionally a bit confusing because at one point on Tuesday we had pictured leaving first thing in the morning. We didn’t have things quite packed and so the plan changed to noon. Sometime mid morning I decided that the weather forecast was too bleak with a snow and wind advisory and accidents piling up on I-15. I decided that it would be better to wait out the storm here in as much as now that I have my office setup it doesn’t really matter where we are, one of the major points of my new lifestyle. Since it doesn’t matter where we are it especially doesn’t make sense to be plunging out on bad roads into a wind and snow storm. I think we will be waiting out today here in town for the second storm to pass.

Mindjump felt its first growing pains as a company without an IT department yesterday as I tried to get the Adobe software installed on my laptop with Windows Vista on it. I couldn’t believe how nasty the failures of a simple install were. In some ways it was reassuring to see that software is bad all over. By the end of the day after I had worked through most of what I could find on the internet I finally called technical support. The person at technical support suggested that I reformat the drive and reinstall Windows. Again I as a bit reassured that I wasn’t all the way crazy in that I had thought that I was getting very close to that step. I was delighted to find out that my license allows me to install the software on two computers. I was thinking I would need to uninstall it from my older laptop. Having the software on both laptops will allow the kids to learn some of the tools. Also once I expand I will be able to let my first employee or contractor use the license.

I had some trouble falling asleep yesterday but once I was asleep I pretty much slept until 6AM. I was really happy with that especially because I had done it without any pain pills. I am getting confident that the final piece to my sleep puzzle will be to get into a regular running routine. I have allowed myself the indulgence of waiting on the running routine until I am in warmer weather.