roy

Woke up - worked out. Shoulder's been bugging me for a while - after I worked out, a bunch of trainers inflicted a significant amount of pain to release the shoulder. Feels great now.

Headed over to Pacific Beach for a rykorp launch strategy session. Brunch at the ever-delicious Zanzibar Cafe. Defined a solid launch plan moving forward. Beta in a week. 

Headed over to Mission Valley to find a birthday "gift" for my buddy's 30th. Spent a significant amount of time looking for tacky corduroy jeans (found them!). Picked up some Del Taco (starving) on the way back... then a cake from Ralph's. Headed over to Clairemont Mesa to my buddy's place for a birthday BBQ. Beautiful weather, great conversations, great food, overstimulated puppy, and fire pit. Life couldn't be better at that moment. Got my grilling urges out of the way for a bit. Came home (pretty early), curled up with a great book and fell asleep. 

Just woke up. I haven't slept that long uninterrupted in months. I'm disoriented. But I feel great. Today? 5 Fast 5 Furious (yeah, I suck). Then a solid work session to get caught up for the week. 

Life is wonderful. 

One of my favorite artists is Eva Cassidy. Read her wikipedia article if you wanna feel bummed out. 

I love it when you get to the point of a product release where you're cutting things out. The past two weeks, I've been cutting out UI components, features... it's great. Getting rid of the cruft is so much easier when the product is more tangible. Certain ideas just don't make the cut. 

The login screen for the new project was previously: 

The text logo was a placeholder. The top right navigation used to have "Create Account" too, but we moved away from a self-registration model once we figured out our user stories. The text also seemed a bit ... constrained. 

With our new logo, I tried something new:

Collapsed the header text into the header bar saved vertical space. Slightly larger text gave the site more breathing room. But the logo bothered me - seemed too much like a tramp stamp. 

Ahh, nice. Logo still stands out, but isn't the primary focus. I like the left/right balance it gives with the header text.  

roy

"The Obama administration has floated a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive." # And this is different in what way than taxing gas????

roy

Look where Google Latitude thinks I work:

Ugh. 5000+ comments I just had to wipe out - spammers were apparently running over the commenting filter. I've disabled guest commenting on Tabulas - given the crap that's posted versus the # of legitimate guest comments... totally not worth it. 

I'm not one to get embarassed very easily. 

I have two friends (Y and N) in town, and N has set it upon himself to "find me a woman." He thinks it's a shame that a guy with his own place and company (as small as it is) should be single all the time.

He's been giving me all sorts of helpful tips. For example, on our way down to Pinkberries, he goes "Tell that girl you want to see her Pink Berries!" (I'm not even sure that makes sense) 

N decides on a strategy: he's going to find a girl and start talking me up. 

When we were coming back, we followed a rather well-dressed girl back into the building. As he's walking behind, he looks backs at me and starts making pointing motions. Fear overcomes me on what's going to happen next. 

We're standing around waiting for the elevator and N starts saying things like: 

"Hey Roy, thanks for dinner. You're such a generous guy." 
"Hey Roy, what's the name of your company again?"
"Hey Roy, did you start Facebook?"
"Hey Roy, thanks for taking us sailing today. You're so great." 

I am blushing. This is pretty bad. The girl seems pretty unaware of it.

We get into the elevator, where she hits 2. Thank goodness it's only one floor.

To make things worse, Y, who has been quiet starts chiming in herself!

"Hey Roy, thanks for putting me in that movie!"
"Hey Roy, when's the movie coming out?"

I couldn't stop laughing the whole time - the girl musta thought we were crazy (or I was weird).

Such is my life.  

Can a couple survive on $250K a year? Looking at different cities, the answer is "no." While the article seems to fixate on the high cost of taxes, I'd say this couple is living beyond their means.

Their debt load is pretty high: nearly $700/month on car payments, $3600/month on their mortgage payments, and $500/month in student loans. 

In the more expensive cities, I'm sure the professional couple making $250k/year would be able to figure out that paying $3600/month for housing and nearly $1000/month on home maintenance is economically reckless. Rent a nice place for $2500/month and you save nearly $2000/month (maybe pay off that car and student loan faster, eh?)

The myth of home ownership... 

. . .

And here is my song of the day:

Saw this at Focus, but wanted to share it here:

If we look at SalesKB, we see:

• founded by 2 people
• supported by work/consulting
• spending about $300/month on hardware (outside the range)
• spending WAY more on resources than $500/month
• we are 4 months old (from the moment we started building the version 1)
• we are ready to start selling the product
• and i do guess we'll be break-even in 3-12 months

Although that number is weird: most startups spend $500/month but can't break-even? This shows the flaw: startup founders don't count what they need to pay themselves with the startup as a cost. I mean, if I took out all the money I pay myself from rykorp, it'd be hugely profitable!

As for problems? I feel with SalesKB (and I'm normally a pessimist!), things are going remarkably well. We delivered the v1 prototype (only cut out two "major" features, which turns out weren't major features at all) on budget (and relatively on-time), we have an excellent go-to-marketing plan, and we don't struggle much with time issues. 

It's actually been a really smooth ride so far (no drama, no unsurmountable roadblocks). Me and the other half of SalesKB have trusted each other with decisions, we've focused on the important part of the product, and we've had fun doing it. When SalesKB becomes super successful and they ask about the hardships of starting a company, I'm not sure I'll have a good story. Our hardest problem is usually deciding where to eat when we meet up. 

that's a 3 lbs dungeness crab right there!

i was told that if you bite your lower lip, you look hard. not quite sure it worked. 

I'm taking care of a friend's puppy while he's out of town. I had done this for a weekend previously, and it wasn't too big of a problem. But she's grown a bit since then, and things have gotten more ... difficult. 

But first, a picture of the cute little pooper:

I believe I have her for the next ten days, which will be a test to see how much of my stuff will survive. So far, Lilou has expressed disapproval towards:

1.) Bags of rice

2.) Modern Family (which I didn't even get to watch yet, sigh)

3.) LHow Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

She also disapproved of my Pottery Barn Natural Jute rug, but I was too traumatized to take a picture of it (I had to toss it today after a series of attacks on it, and some unfortunate "accidents" which were too much to clean up). 

I consider myself a pretty patient person, and she is testing it... every day.

I recently bought all of Chris Rock's stand-ups on DVD (I love Amazon's used DVD marketplace)... a great skit that helps me stay sane on crazy busy days:

Cause when you got a career, there ain't enough time in the day. Ain't enough time! You got a career - you look at your watch - time just flies: "Goddamn, whoa, it's 5:35! I gotta come in early tomorrow and work on my project!"

rykorp got verbal commitment on the largest contract to date, with great long-term upside potential. With it, i'll be more than 2/3 of the way towards my revenue goals for rykorp with only 1/3 of the year gone! Hopefully there will be continued acceleration in follow-on contracts and new clients acquisition...

There's a lot I need to do to clean up the business, though. Fortunately this project hit me as my other clients are winding down (and I expect their follow-on work to take a few weeks to materialize)... if it had hit me even two weeks ago, I would have hit a scaling point. Such is the problem right now with the services component: I'm the bottleneck.

I'm dissatisfied that I lost the momentum of development in a couple of my projects: they are moving forward, but it's very forced. Right now, the measuring stick is SalesKB - SalesKB has movement even when I'm out of the picture. Of course, it helps that I actually employ a developer full-time for that project instead of bringing on teams on-demand when necessary. 

. . .

Fortunately, I've gotten over my addiction to the paycheck. Not getting paid regularly used to give me anxiety: I'm totally over it now. 

My latest anxiety? The amount of "bills" I have every month. It used to be pretty simple: rent was the biggest thing, and I had some utilities to pay. Now my rent is about the 3rd or 4th on the list of monthly outflows - I got contractors to pay out, servers to pay for, and other random services. The amount of cash I churn through on a monthly basis gets pretty scary, and if I don't get my cashflow situation down right... I could be screwed pretty royally. 

. . .

Song of the day seems pretty fitting:

This song brings a smile to my face - the video is great, too!

If you visit the website for the upcoming Batman film "The Dark Night Rises," there's an audio that plays. The visualization of the audio shows this: 

That would be the Twitter hashtag; by using it, a Twitter account links you to a mosaic of an image of Bane, the bad guy in the new film. Insane. 

There's a beauty in the fragility of life - how small events can cascade into completely different outcomes. I look at the events that led to where I am today, and many of them were small decisions at the time. But it was when those small decisions like ingredients in a recipe, were mixed togehter that they led to my life as it is today. Missing even one of the decisions would have led me to a different life. It boggles my mind in so many ways how life works out like this. 

And sometimes those small decisions put you in a position to make a big decision. The ones that are pivot points in my life - the types of decision where I have no idea where I end up, but I definitely know it's a different path. It's exciting. Being faced with those big decisions are rare - they seem to come only once every few years. 

2011 is definitely the year of many of both big and small decisions for me. Can't wait to see what the future brings.

big sur

I'm finally getting around to writing more for rykorp:  Why you're stupid if you don’t use a web application framework. 

It's pretty clear my writing has gotten rusty. Will take me a few weeks before I feel comfortable writing again...

Let me know what you think!

Fresh off of a ridiculous article about whether verbing a brand is "a debate":

Jennifer: you know what word i like

Roy: what?

Jennifer: joombla (editor's note: she was talking about joomla)

Jennifer: i make a song out of it and sing it to sprout

Jennifer: JOOOMBLA DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN

Jennifer: joombla and druuuupal

Roy: i like the joomblas on that girl

Jennifer: funny words

Jennifer: awh his little wee wee is so sad

Jennifer: its a sad little drupal