Leaving VA over two years ago was hard for reasons that should have never existed. Leaving was the correct thing to do, and working with Mike was best outcome of that decision. He has a good amount of experience running a company (which I lacked), a good amount of rock (term I use to describe Kris for his ability to not worry, not become emotional and not freak when things are scary) and a good amount of technical ability.

He also have more experience in the cash flow, money part of the business. Experience I sorely lack.

I was used to working forty hours a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes hard, sometimes hardly. Every week or two of that working, I'd receive a piece of paper which I could either exchange for yuppie food coupons or view that my bank account had been credited with the appropriate number of coupons. Once a year or so, I'd write up how I did in the previous year, also be too hard on myself (ah, yes, my own worst critic by a lot), and receive a few more coupons in my subsequent (bi-)weekly ticket receipt.

Owning a business means that doesn't happen any more. There are more things you need to do, like invoices, and deposits, and payroll, and forms, and paperwork, and fees, and taxes, and rent, and more forms, and, oh crap, do we need to hire another person, or have we hit famine?

I treated much of my first year working with Mike as I had my previous decade of working: a paycheck whenever is great. Here are my hours, let me know when you get the check from the client.

But, that doesn't really cut it. There isn't someone telling me, "Do the work this way." There isn't someone saying, "This is the project, we think it'll earn this much money, yes, you'll get paid at the end." There isn't someone that has all the answers anymore.

There really never was that someone, I just wanted to believe there was. I wanted to believe that I just needed to work hard and I'd be rewarded, that someone had the answer, I just needed to look hard enough to find it.

Sometimes I wish life were as simple as it seemed in 3rd grade.

We hired Katie a few months ago when it was obvious that my completely hands-off approach to "running" a business was putting too much stress on Mike on the invoicing/cash flow part of the day-to-day work. Katie's been absolutely wonderful, and I'm so happy she's working with us. She's recently run a few outstanding invoices reports for us to see what's going on with cashflow.

And here's where I learn another lesson in why it can suck to own your own business.

One client hasn't paid in over 90 days and it's unlikely we'll see that money. One client we had to discount a lot for various reasons. And another client is disputing one of our invoices. The total for all of these discounts and disputes is near the amount I've earned this year. If people paid, I'd be twice as rich as I am now.

I can't help but think, man, this just sucks. The amount of stress associated with this work just isn't worth it. The thought of going to work for another company feels like giving up, but, geez, does this need to be so hard?

I've changed the way I work with one client in response to the invoice issues. We have daily calls, which help with communication a lot: no surprises on what I'm working on, no arguments about what's the most important task of the day. I think we currently invoice every two weeks, I'll probably switch that to every week.

Kragen once asked me, how much stress would be reduced by a transparent task list? Based on my short experience with the new way of working with this client, I'd have to say about 95% of the stress.

I just wish I'd learned transparency two years ago.

Today is a day spent at Super Happy Dev House 12. I'm working on Project Decloakment™, which involves building a high profile website and ATTACH MY NAME TO IT. Details of PD™ later, as it's important to what's going on in my life right now, but not until I've laid the groundwork.

Now, about that high profile website.

Basically, I'm building out myCrap, so that I can use it to get rid of my crap. It'll work as both a TAKE my crap freecycle-done-right site and a BORROW my crap (so that I can track who has my Saving Private Ryan DVD or my Firefly DVDs) weblend site.

When the web server I'm working didn't update correctly on a Drupal update, I went to check the error log on the server. Near the bottom of the access log, which I looked at before I looked at the error log, was a blog feed read from rojo. In the feed, they reference my blog's RSS feed on their systems (I'm not really sure how I feel about my content displayed on other sites, but I did put a CC license on the site, so as long as the copy is Non-Commercial and attributed to me... hey, wait a second...), so I wandered over to the link to see what they had for me.

I found my blog's RSS there. It didn't display to me who is the single (ONE!) reader I have out there using rojo, but I hope I'm not too annoying to you, whoever you are!

As I'm wont to do, I started poking around with the site's URL. What did they use for their URL scheme? What if I subtract one number from the identifier for my blog's feed? Will I get another feed, or is the last number a checksum value of the other numbers? Eh, subtract one and look.

I ended up at Jamie Nuwer's LiveJournal blog. Jamie Nuwer? That name sounded familiar... How do I know that name? Reading further into her blog, I realized I know her name because she plays ultimate: women's ultimate in the Bay Area, on Skyline.

What are the chances that feeds for two Bay Area ultimate players are one apart? Now I'm really interested in who added me to their rojo list. Most likely an ultimate player, methinks.

BTW, I update more often than Jamie does. Yay, me!

Update: More poking around and the discover of Liz Gannes' Furl feed leads me to believe my reader from rojo is Mike N, Raphael or Liz herself. Cool! Hi, Liz, Mike or Raph!

I spend a lot of time listening to NPR. I'm not sure when the switch from preferring music to preferring NPR happened, but I'd guess it happened during the years of the hour long commute each way when I lived in L.A. Very few stations played enough good, new music that listening every day for two hours wouldn't cause violent suicides in every other slow moving vehicle on the freeways (which would, of course, slow the I-can-run-faster-than-these-cars-are-moving traffic to a sloth-can-run-faster pace, thereby causing even more suicides, vicious circle that).

Talk radio was clearly the best mass-suicide-prevention option available.

Sometimes I listen to the radio, sometimes I have it on for just background noise. Today's background noise caught my attention:

"Americans went further into debt last month, but at the slowest rate in four months."

Whenever I hear comparisons to economic conditions from a week, month or a year ago, I roll my eyes, especially for the first two. A month is not long enough for any meaningful extrapolation of data. Economic data comparisons to a month ago are blips.

Looking at the numbers closer, however, still makes the supposed good news actually bad. Great, the rate of debt increase has slowed, but, uh, hello, it still increased. Collectively, Americans owe more than they did a month ago. What ever happened to saving up? Or delayed gratification? Or living within one's means?

Apparently completely gone in the face of increased conspicuous consumption.

I blame big media.

So, what are the real numbers?

Consumer credit, which doesn't include mortgages but does include credit cards and vehicle loans, is at $2.34 trillion dollars. That's $2,344,000,000,000. Yes, 12 zeroes. Estimate 295 million people in the United States and you're looking at a debt of $7926 per person.

Family of four? Yeah, that's $30000 in debt.

Want to look at just credit cards? That's a mere $2843 per person.

That $8k in debt at normal credit card interest rates means a person will actually owe $9600 at the end of the year. Where's the brilliance in that math?

Other than student loans and a mortgage, possibly a car loan, I can think of no reason why a person should be in debt.

I suspect that $2.344 trillion is not student loan debt.

Stop spending, people.

Last month, some time, maybe the previous month, Kris and I went to the movies with Heather and a bunch of other communal dinner people. I don't recall what we saw, maybe Kris or Heather will remind me. What I do remember, however, is going into the bathroom, into a stall and seeing piss on the seat.

This happens a lot for some reason. Women aren't willing to put a seat paper/cover on the seat, so they hover over the toilet and pee all over it. I find it annoying.

Sometimes, however, the liquid isn't from the previous stall occupant, but rather an over-ambitious flushing mechanism that sprays water up, turning the toliet into a poorman's fountain.

This particular trip to the movie's restroom reminded me of a my first trip to the restrooms at the Metreon. I went with Nancy Fenner to see a movie, one that was playing in a limited engagement or on IMAX or something similar.

As with any event that takes longer than 10 minutes, I needed to go to the restroom.

And, as with any event in a new popular venue, there was a line for the women's restroom.

After waiting in line, bladder near bursting because, of course, I waited until the last minute to even seek out a restroom (well before I wised up), I entered the next available stall, and was quickly annoyed: the previous woman had peed all over the seat. Grrrrr, I thought, wiping off the seat before putting a cover on it and doing my business.

As I was finishing up, and flushing the toliet, I noticed the mini toilet fountain from the super-sonic flushing mechanism, and watched as the seat was sprinkled with fresh toilet water. Ah, ha, what I wiped up earlier was not from the bladder of the previous woman. Well, that was good to know, and I left the stall.

As I left, another woman rushed into the stall. She opened the door, looked at the seat, and glared at me with such an intensity I should immediately melt to the floor in shame for peeing on the seat. Having just experienced my own toilet fountain revelation, I didn't say anything to the woman at the time. In retrospect, I wish I had.

To this day, I wish I had been standing outside the stall when she opened the door back up, and asked her, "Do you really think I'd piss on the seat and leave it for the next person?"

That, and glare right back at her. Maybe with one eyebrow raised.

Yeah, so why the random post? I had a note on one of my index cards to blog about that incident. At the same movie outing, I heard some not-good-looking guy make the comment, "Man, why are there so many ugly people here?" The irony was somewhat humourous to me at the time. Enough to write a note on that card to blog about it, even if the actually writing did take me six weeks to do.

What was the last game you played?

Ultimate, as in ultimate frisbee, being a mainstay in my life for the last 12+ years, should be not-a-surprise as the last game I've played, and also the most played game in my life. The sport has seen me through good times (met Kris through ultimate), and rough times (moving away from my friends, work and comfort zone of Southern to Northern California). It has provided me opportunities to travel places I would have never gone normally (can you say, "Perth?").

But most importantly, it has provided me with friends that I would have never found otherwise.

Ultimate as a community is small enough that there are few degrees of separation from the beginning pickup player to the elite super athlete. Yet, it is large enough that anywhere you go, you're nearly guaranteed a game and a ready-made circle of friends. The community is so close, and the sport inspires such passion, that dating non-ultimate players is often considered the death-knell of one's ultimate career.

Fortunately, I don't have that worry.

My worry is the accumulated injuries that are slowly catching up to me. Another 2nd degree ankle sprain this last Saturday has close to ended this season for me. I may have a chance to recover in time for Regionals early October, but I'm not betting on it.

Neither am I worried about it: there's a saying very common in the ultimate community. It goes something like, "Oh well. There's always next season."