Silicon Valley Redneck

Any year you walk away from

Is a good one, right?

This, for me, was meant to be the year to go big or go Galt.

Well.

I don't actually have the assets to go Galt; not around here, at any rate.

Going moderately big ought to have been easy.  Five years ago, expanding my consulting business beyond the back bedroom would have involved finding a few hundred square feet of bare-bones light-industrial space to rent for maybe 50 cents per square foot per month... which, back then, could be found within easy walking distance of home.

Alas, the nearby low-rent industrial park turned out to have been bulldozed.  Ditto anything else of a low-rent character.  Unless I could guarantee an extra $1000 or so a month in income from the theoretically-expanding business... and commit to a multi-year lease, subject to bulldozing at any time... expansion just wasn't on.  If you have neither big cash flow lined up, nor $10 million in venture capital, forget it.  (And don't even get me started on the complexities of trying to launch a small tech venture in California in compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, taxes, and such.  Looks like something one shouldn't even contemplate these days without a lawyer and an accountant on staff, and I don't have the budget for those, either.)

Meanwhile, a friend and business associate had big plans for expanding his business, in which he proposed to make me a partner (a notion which had been in the air for a few years).  Alas, halfway through the year he was diagnosed with lymphoma, which had gone unnoticed in the early (and curable) stages because he'd been watching Duck Dynasty*, decided Beards Are Cool**, and had grown one, which hid the lumpy lymph nodes.

Thus it came to pass that a large and ever-increasing portion of my work time went to trying to keep his business alive (mainly finishing up a project which had developed a case of Advanced Murphy), while the doctors tried to keep him alive.  Unsuccessfully, in both cases.  Now I'll be working with his family and another associate to wind down the business and see what we can salvage.  If you have a business and a family?  Make darn sure you keep good business records, that you keep them where they can be found, and that there's a doomsday file that your family can find, with all the account information, passwords, pointers to where you buried the pillowcase full of Bitcoins, and so on.

That, and my month and a half of incapacitation during the summer with nasty leg cramps, kind of put the kibosh on (a) fun, (b) following through on my collection of product ideas and prototypes, and (c) going walkabout in late summer.

Still, I did pick up a new client, who has no end of Cool Stuff for me to do, albeit funding for only a small subset of it at this point.

And so I come skidding to the end of the year, frazzled, exhausted, short of cash, and with a big stale number in Accounts Receivable looking heavily discounted, but still breathing.  And walking.

In 2014, though: definitely walkabout, without fail.  In spring.  Timing and itinerary uncertain, because, hey, walkabout!

And maybe - just maybe - I'll find an opportunity to go at least semi-Galt for a while.  Or go Oliver Wendell Douglas.  And, after I've had a chance to rest up, Big might be an option - just not in California.

 

* In the 24th and a Half Century!

** Said no time lord ever.

Pondering the predicament of others

So here I have this temporarily debilitating condition... if rest, ice, and OTC pills don't clear it up in a few weeks, there's the (eek!) surgical option.

The pain, when I try to move around to get to places where work is to be done (such as the next room; forget about the consulting-company lab) is such that by the time I get there I can't actually accomplish anything.

But, it's temporary.  Last time, it lasted about a month.  This time, I'm taking more care not to aggravate it... maybe it won't last as long.

There's a nontrivial percentage of the population with chronic pain, as bad as mine or worse, forever.  In order to be even remotely functional, these people need serious pain meds.

But!  We can't have them becoming dependent on those meds, can we?  Oh, no indeedy!  That would be as bad as letting terminal cancer patients have heroin, and perhaps become addicted in their final weeks of life!  We need ever-stricter laws on the dispensing of effective pain medication to protect these people from themselves.

And just what is the constitutional justification for the Harrison Act, anyway?

Another fine way to waste vast amounts of time on the Internet

Rule 34: if it exists, there is Internet porn of it.

Real estate exists.

Ergo, Internet real-estate porn exists.  At least for those of us packed like sardines in little ol' Silicon Valley.

A while back, I started pondering: What Comes After Silicon Valley?  I mean, what with the vanishing small-business ecosystem, complete lack of elbow room, hyper-regulation of everything, and insane cost of living... it's time to consider moving on, no?

First approximation: Arizona.  Phoenix has much to recommend it, but for those of us whose ancestry runs more to Viking than to desert rat, the low desert is Right Out.  The high desert, up around Prescott?  Plausible.  And, if I traded in my California crackerbox on a decent-sized house on a few acres there, I'd have enough cash left over to terraform half an acre.

Then, looking around... ever point Zillow at Appalachia?  Set the filter for, say, 3+ bedrooms, 1200+ square feet of nominal living space, and 3+ acres.  Go on.  I'll wait.

You may now commence drooling.

Like, if I traded in my little house for a property out there, I'd be looking at quite a nice house on 10+ acres of part-farm-part-forest, no terraforming required.  With a few outbuildings thrown in.  With enough left over to buy a big used pickup truck and some large-scale gardening equipment.  And enough left over after that to cover a few years' basic living expenses.

One of these years - by which I probably mean 2014 - I need to take a mini-sabbatical and go walkabout, and give a serious ponder to relocating.

Update: I'd been looking at Tennessee because Pretty (I was initially looking in that area because it's green on satellite view, and moderately textureful on terrain view, and the ground-level photos look very appealing indeed), and Affordable; clearly, further research is called for... but looky at this map.  See that orange area that's neither cryogenic nor inordinately tornado-ridden?  The one that's rated #3?  And note how California is rated #49?  I have got to become location-independent, and relocate.  But first: a slow tour through the area, next spring if I can possibly manage it.

And more: I just picked a plausible listing, and fed the Zip code and my info into ehealthinsurance.com.  Got 16 options listed, the most crazy-expensive of which costs about half what I'm paying now.  Looks like a decent one can be had for less than half of that, and the very cheapest is cheap indeed.  And this despite an apparent lack of competition (all the listed plans are from BCBS).

Silly addendum: I just looked at a listing for a nice-looking property in some place called "Wartburg"... and now I can't get the Festmarsch out of my head.

One year on...

Been a year (less a couple hours) since I saw the news that Lex had died.

The wheels of official investigation grinding slowly, we still don't know what happened, beyond the NTSB's brief preliminary report and some scattered informal accounts giving additional details which may be spurious.

And meanwhile, I've utterly failed to follow through on either of the inspirations that struck within a few days.

Inspiration #2: come up with an awesome technical solution to the problem of landing blind in a low-budget plane at a field that doesn't have all the right equipment.  I actually did come up with what seems an entirely plausible concept; mass-produced, it would cost a few hundred bucks (plus several times that for installation), and I figure it would improve an experienced carrier pilot's odds in that situation from basically zilch to better than 80%.  Trouble is: it would improve Joe Cessna's odds to maybe 20%... and probably be blamed for encouraging him to get into that situation in the fist place.  So, not likely to be a viable product.

Inspiration #1: become more Lex-like.  Not in the sense of flying jets, or embarking on a military career (you wouldn't believe how many waivers I'd need, and I don't think they even have one for members of the risk-averse community), but....

See, here's the thing about Lex.  Apart from the interesting stories, he was a rare sensible voice in a mad world.  And: he had a sort of Personal Decency Field that was reflected in his comments section.  It's easy to keep a civil comments section when you have few commenters, or you allow only like-minded voices.  But Lex had an active comments section, and while it was dominated by military types, random civilians, including lefties, could participate civilly.  (As it turns out, the most persistently irritating contrary voice was actually a conservative in liberal guise, there to challenge prevailing assumptions.  Sounds suspiciously like a training tactic, but it also helped keep things less unfriendly to those who actually held views outside the comment-section mainstream.)

Another thing I notice is that, despite an active career in which he interacted with a great many people and held positions of authority over some of them, it seems that he never made any personal enemies.  De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that, but I haven't heard anything negative about Lex in the past year, nor while he was alive either.  A possible clue: a rare post on something he regretted.  Once, as a young officer under a lot of pressure, he'd snapped at an enlisted man.  A momentary breach of professionalism and courtesy: this was his big nagging regret.

While it's true that I haven't accumulated much in the way of personal enemies, I've mainly achieved this by never being in a position of authority, not having a lot to do with people and their issues, and generally running away and hiding when things get personal or political.  This is the kind of stuff you can get away with when you're an engineer... but, if I'm to be an entrepreneur, I really need to develop the sort of people skills Lex had.

Inspiration #0, also not followed up on: do the analysis to support #1 in detail, and compose an epic post thereupon.  (Sort of the antithesis of Cosmo Lavish's obsession with the outward trappings of Vetinari-ness.)

It is better to be rich and healthy than to be poor and sick.

You've seen the three-option lists.  Quick, cheap, good: pick any two.  Things of that nature.

Then there are the sarcastic variants: Late, wrong, over-budget: pick any three.

Well, my desire to Do Cool Stuff keeps running into any combination of three constraints: time, money, and health.

But, come to think of it, that's not a choose-one or pick-any-two type of tradeoff.  The reality is: if you lack one, you'll end up lacking the others.

If I made more efficient use of my time, I'd have more money... and more available time... and I'd probably be healthier.

If I were in better health, I'd find it easier to put my time to productive and/or fun uses.

And, if I had more money, I could maybe take vacations, do fun stuff, and de-stress.

See how that works?

Well: effective this morning, I'm picking at the time and health sides.  I got through the morning routine in almost reasonable time, and got an early enough start on the day to get in a 5-mile hike.  By next Monday, I figure to be back on my proper schedule, i.e., up by 0430, out the door by 0630, and finish a 7-mile hike, with proper hills, around 0900.  Also: no sweets, unless in the middle of a hike or similar; cut back (again) on refined grain products; keep fresh fruit around for snacking on.  This afternoon, I reached a project milestone; what remains of the afternoon is cluttered with salesy stuff, but tomorrow I should reach a milestone on another project that's in the queue.

The money side... well, I need to start poking numbers into Turbot Ax real soon now.  If the answer comes up as expected, I'll need to pull a rabbit out of my hat before the 16th, what with last year's income having been more than it seemed like, and way too much of it having gone to unscheduled expenses not of my choosing.  Fortunately, I think I know where a wabbit may be found, and I should be able to buy myself some breathing room, at least, while the upstream cash flow gets itself sorted out (ah, life in the small-business lane).  And, by the end of this year, I really need to get my business status sorted out (having been kind of adrift, albeit sometimes lucratively so, since fall of '04).

Making a start on the resolutions. Ponderments to follow.

These past few weeks, I've been feeling a Big Important Post coming on, full of ponderments and resolutions.

Well, what with work, illness, distractions, and whatnot, that post isn't happening just yet.

I have, however, followed through on a couple of minor items.

Secondly, look over there on the right.  See, a whole new blogroll!  Now in alphabetical order!  Not much, true, but the old one was getting awfully long in the tooth, and some of those links had gone stale or even vanished altogether.  I probably dropped a few that didn't need dropping - this was a start-from-scratch list based on what I've been reading the last few days - so it'll be growing a bit.

Firstly, look over here, through my webcam.  Oh, that's right, I haven't got one.  Anyway: I got my spring haircut today.  From now on, I'll be keeping my hair at a reasonable length (which will disappoint Joy, who thinks I should have a ponytail).  Ergo, a cooler head, less grease, better efficiency.  And, with a cool head, I'll be more inclined to exercise more, and get in better shape (which is the biggest item on my list).

The next couple of weeks are likely to be a scramble, what with needing to do my taxes and come up with the cash to pay them.  So, Other Priorities get underfoot once again.

Anyway, there's a serious post to follow, eventually, and perhaps something of a change of direction.  Towards, maybe, having a direction?

Good advice, regardless.

Over at Lex's ongoing virtual wake, Jim Shawley linked to a post from a few years back on the importance of looking for the airplane that isn't there.  Just in case, on this occasion, it is.

A post that comes to mind from time to time, as circumstances crop up, and whose importance is by no means limited to aviation.

I've long been in the habit, sometimes laughed at by passengers, of looking for the car that isn't coming.  Looking to the right, for example, before turning left from Rengstorff onto Charleston in Mountain View, despite that fact that the westbound lane doesn't exist to the right of that location.

Well, there never has been unexpected traffic at that spot, but: the morning of this past Thanksgiving, I was headed off to Whole Foods in search of a pie, in my little Prius.  Down Mathilda (by whatever name) to Stevens Creek.  Light is red, so kinda coast toward the intersection in the right-turn lane.

Light turns green just before I reach the intersection.  Destination lane is clear to the right.  Reflexively stop anyway and look left for the car that isn't there...

...And a bloody great gravel truck comes barreling through the red light.

That pause cost me a couple of seconds, but I lived to have the pie.