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Moving the office.
Things have gotten iffy at the day job. If we were capable of holding on to clients for longer than eighteen months we'd be in much better shape than we are: that's about how long it takes our customers to figure out that - because we (and by "we", I mean dataGuy) can't effectively manage our time or their expectations - there are more things wrong than right more often than not. Couple that with general panic in the auto industry, and the fact that, come October, we will be about $60k in the hole if no more sales come in - and there's no reason to expect that they will - I may very well be jobless.
The other option the company will have is to seek investors to inject additional working capital. With CFO's contacts, that doable. That will dilute our present equity, but that equity only truly has value if the company sells at a profit, something it is unlikely to ever do. Losing what is essentially worthless equity to keep my job is, in my world at least, a perfectly reasonable idea.
There is resistance to that idea; you can guess, dear reader, where that's coming from. Cut off his nose to spite his face, that one. CFO and I have had a very frank discussion and we both agree: whatever it takes.
Ultimately, following the maxim that "it is wise to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst," I'm going to start shaking the bushes for additional side work, something I've avoided to date because - to be totally frank - it keeps the peace at home to not have me arrive home from work, eat dinner, and disappear into the basement office for four to six hours.
To improve that situation, I've moved my primary machine - with it's dual monitor support - upstairs, to the living room, where I will be visible and easily accessible. This has required a good deal of rearranging of other furniture and the investment of two new monitors, plus the means to create another network hookup so I can be reliably wired and a few other assorted comfort measures, expenses that we would have been better off without, though we can write them off come tax time.
As a side bit of amazement: prices of flat panel monitors - 22"-ers in this case - have dropped to half of what they were the last time we bought one. Holy crap.
I'll admit that it's nice to be out of the basement and up in the sunshine. The downside is that - unplugged from my mixer and hard drives, video work and audio recording is done for the foreseeable future unless I can replace my main box or hoof it downstairs whenever I want to record1. None of the other PCs - a geriatric Dell, built for Sprint and not at all expandable, and a ten year old box running Linux - can even begin to serve. Unfortunately, until Wine is actually everything its develops claim it is, I still need an XP box to do my work.
This weekend, I'll rewire the relevant portion of the wall, put down a rug to keep my chair from scarring the floor and rolling wherever-the-hell it wants. I am five sheets of drywall away from being able to repaint the living room, and I'm ready to start the job2. I'll also start retooling mapsedgemedia.com to more effectively advertise what I do3 and what my availability is. It takes time to build a customer base, and I've little time to do it.
On an emotional note, I'm used to rolling up my sleeves but I'm getting awfully tired of it.
1 Something I can do if I get really desperate, though it's not my first choice.
2 The porch, a massively expensive undertaking, will have to wait another year.
3 If you're interested: I write websites like this and this and this for auto dealers using Classic ASP and javascript. I make pretty heavy use of Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. I can also administer MS SQL Server and IIS. Graphics, too, and multimedia (light Flash, for instance, though I'm a little rusty.)
The other option the company will have is to seek investors to inject additional working capital. With CFO's contacts, that doable. That will dilute our present equity, but that equity only truly has value if the company sells at a profit, something it is unlikely to ever do. Losing what is essentially worthless equity to keep my job is, in my world at least, a perfectly reasonable idea.
There is resistance to that idea; you can guess, dear reader, where that's coming from. Cut off his nose to spite his face, that one. CFO and I have had a very frank discussion and we both agree: whatever it takes.
Ultimately, following the maxim that "it is wise to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst," I'm going to start shaking the bushes for additional side work, something I've avoided to date because - to be totally frank - it keeps the peace at home to not have me arrive home from work, eat dinner, and disappear into the basement office for four to six hours.
To improve that situation, I've moved my primary machine - with it's dual monitor support - upstairs, to the living room, where I will be visible and easily accessible. This has required a good deal of rearranging of other furniture and the investment of two new monitors, plus the means to create another network hookup so I can be reliably wired and a few other assorted comfort measures, expenses that we would have been better off without, though we can write them off come tax time.
As a side bit of amazement: prices of flat panel monitors - 22"-ers in this case - have dropped to half of what they were the last time we bought one. Holy crap.
I'll admit that it's nice to be out of the basement and up in the sunshine. The downside is that - unplugged from my mixer and hard drives, video work and audio recording is done for the foreseeable future unless I can replace my main box or hoof it downstairs whenever I want to record1. None of the other PCs - a geriatric Dell, built for Sprint and not at all expandable, and a ten year old box running Linux - can even begin to serve. Unfortunately, until Wine is actually everything its develops claim it is, I still need an XP box to do my work.
This weekend, I'll rewire the relevant portion of the wall, put down a rug to keep my chair from scarring the floor and rolling wherever-the-hell it wants. I am five sheets of drywall away from being able to repaint the living room, and I'm ready to start the job2. I'll also start retooling mapsedgemedia.com to more effectively advertise what I do3 and what my availability is. It takes time to build a customer base, and I've little time to do it.
On an emotional note, I'm used to rolling up my sleeves but I'm getting awfully tired of it.
1 Something I can do if I get really desperate, though it's not my first choice.
2 The porch, a massively expensive undertaking, will have to wait another year.
3 If you're interested: I write websites like this and this and this for auto dealers using Classic ASP and javascript. I make pretty heavy use of Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. I can also administer MS SQL Server and IIS. Graphics, too, and multimedia (light Flash, for instance, though I'm a little rusty.)