January 17, 2008

 

Thursday, January 17, 2008 6:00:49 AM

I didn’t get much sleep last night.  I think I slept from 7 or 8PM until 11PM after that I just laid in bed awake.  Lexie wasn’t sleeping either.  She read a book until about 5AM.  We didn’t talk much but just kind of laid next to each other.   I have no idea how I am going to handle work today.  I think I am going to go to my 8AM and 9AM meetings and then come home and go to sleep.  I’ll bring my work laptop with me in case I can get something done on it but I don’t really have any high expectations.  I wouldn’t exactly call myself sick but I am definitely not functional.  The problem I have with loading myself up on caffeine is that it will just make the problem of sleep deprivation worse later.  In the end the only cure I think will be to make it to Feb. 1st, have a good cry and then move on.  If the sleep doesn’t improve I will at least feel more comfortable about simply working through the night and then sleeping through the day in my new work situation.

This is an e-mail I just completed to Philippe Weamaes:

Hi Philippe,

I am glad to have a way to stay in contact with you.

I can relate to the need for a change and to try to balance life with the family.  What I am doing is indeed a very large change.  It may be more change than I really need but sometimes it is easier to make a larger change than a smaller one.  I am looking forward to the transition as an opportunity to address a lot of items not directly related to work such as my diet, exercise and journal writing habits.  I went through a quick point that I played with the idea of changing my name as well but I let that pass.  I have heard that a name change is a very powerful tool in generating a behavioral change.

I am not explicitly unhappy with who I am or what I am doing I am just extremely hungry to improve.  I don't think that will change at any level of performance I can achieve.

The part of my plans that I don't really like are that they end in a dark cloud about a year from now when I run out of money.   If my business is successful I will most likely want to buy land somewhere in Southeast Idaho and build a house with a design studio by it.  Actually I think I am going to build the design studio before the house.

If my business and travel is successful I may want to replace my suburban and trailer with something a little bigger and more comfortable.  My wife wants to travel back east and right now that is on the 2009 plan. It is a lot easier to travel in the west because there are more places to camp and things are generally less expensive.  Feb. 1st->May is when I plan to develop my first game in which time we will be traveling through California, Arizona and Utah.  My sister is expecting a baby and my son is being baptized (our church baptizes at 8 years old) in May so we want to be back in Idaho for that.

If I don't have a marketable game ready by May or some other entrepreneurial success that will be a red flag to start an active job hunt which will indeed start with ON Semiconductor.  If I have a marketable product I am going to give myself at least another 6 months for more marketing and development at which point I hope to have a fully sustainable income stream.  If I don't I will have some difficult choices to make.  A leading cause of start-up business failure I understand is under capitalization.  If after a year I believe that I have a sound product that just needs more time I can stretch one more year to do it after which I would need to turn to capital investment groups to continue.  I would like to fund as much as I can on my own because it keeps things simpler and keeps the motivation and reward potential higher.

Returning to the traveling question ... It really is quite open in our minds and dependent on information we don't have yet.  If I can indeed create a sustainable income from a remote location and get along in a confined living space we may not stop traveling for several years.  We would both really like to get back to Europe to see some more things there and do some cultural study.  I would like to go back to Asia for awhile but I know that would be a hard sell to my wife.  When we went to Korea together she was pregnant and the food didn't agree with her very well.  I'm sure we could get a quick trip in, again money pending.  I am very interested in North Korea and they are just now opening tourism to US citizens but it is very expensive.  I think it would be a lot of fun to clean up my Korean and tour North Korea (yet again another hard sell to the wife in as much as it carries the possibility of me getting myself landed in jail for my Yankee attitude).  I also have a strange fixation with Antarctica, well really the strange fixation is with ice.  It just so happens that Antarctica has a lot of it.  I used to be a tour guide for a helicopter company that would fly people to the glaciers in Alaska.  It was my job to help the people off the helicopters, get them outfitted with crampons and an ice axe, and then tour them around the glacier for about an hour and a half.  I spent a lot of time on that job fantasizing about a trip to Antarctica.  Anyway I think you get the point, big world, short life ...  Even with out money there are a lot of other interesting things to do.  For example I think it would be fun to live in a small Mexican village for a few months to learn Spanish.

Back to you, when is your end date at AMIS?  I can't help but think the change will be good for you.  I don't know very much about ST but I would guess it is very similar to AMIS and AMIS is a great company.  Getting closer to your house, getting your project slate wiped clean and getting back with some old colleagues should be quite refreshing.

Not knowing all of the details on your side but working off what you have written and then distorting it through my own paradigm I find it interesting that had AMIS improved their infrastructure toward enabling telecommuting it may have prevented the loss of either of us as employees.  Possibly not but I know that in my case I would be working for AMIS for at least another year if they would let me e-commute.  I would also be doing much better work for them.  In the end however if I can accomplish my dreams of starting a successful business and traveling the world I will have AMIS to thank for not letting me get too comfortable at the desk job.  On the other hand if I fail in business and find myself broke in a year I will have AMIS to thank for providing the money (through salary) for an amazing ride.

Dan Gordon

End of e-mail.

I really hope for the sake of my AMIS colleagues and possibly myself that AMIS changes their position about telecommuting after sacrificing two employees to the alter of “We are not setup to enable telecommuting”.   There is a generation clash over the issue.  I imagine that Dan Hegsted does not know that with Jeff and I sitting all but butt’s touching in back to back cubes if we are doing work we IM each other.  In general f we are complaining about AMIS or management we walk around the cube wall so we can enjoy each other expressions and not leave an e-trail.  My opinion is that almost no productive work happens “face to face”.  I am not saying that face to face time isn’t valuable I just don’t think it is productive.  I think an optimal schedule would mix time that was face to face with time that was locked down without interruptions.  I believe that a reasonable quality video conference can replace the need for a lot of the face to face time.  When I was visiting Belgium once a year and video conferencing with my co-workers there weekly I felt plenty of social connection to them.