Mickblog

You know what sucks about blogs? You can’t just say whatever you want because you’ll get sued or something. So I have to be careful what I say here.

There was a company general meeting today, at which the decision to effectively let this other company buy our shell was voted on. I didn’t atttend, mostly because I thought I would effectively have no voting power - the largest shareholder has (had) about 35%, and nobody else wanted to vote against him.

This is a BIG deal we’re talking about here - the “other company” owns technology which looks like it is going to make it possible to get oil out of oil shale. There is allegedly enough oil in shale deposits to keep the world running on fossil fuels for another few centuries. And this company could get royalties off anyone that they license this technology to.

Turns out the biggest shareholder didn’t vote - he’s apparently too busy with things bigger even than this. If I had attented the meeting I would have had full voting power.

Damn I’m sorry I missed that.

I would likely have abstained anyway. I could have voted to keep the business going with just utbox for a bit longer, but then I would be in the same position I am in now (all the responsibility and none of the power), and I wouldn’t have made many friends. I could have blown the other company’s plans out of the water (the will likely play a big part in accelerating the greenhouse effect), but they would likely have just found another way to achieve their aims.

But at least I could have held that decision in my hands for a while, and maybe given certain interested parties a fright while I callously tossed it about in the air while I decided what to do with it.

So now I have essentially no financial stake in the business I’m working in. The way things seem to be headnig, the future for utbox is not one I am going to want to be a part of, so I’ll be handing the job of running it over to its owners, whoever they may be at the time. Don’t panic if you’re a customer - it’s not going to be wound up, I’m sure of that much. Regardless, I’m back to square one, in a sense. But, I have more interesting plans for my next big adventure. Stay tuned.

Has anyone else ever done this besides me?

sloccount is the program used to come up with that estimate of the “cost” of the linux kernel, that made some noise on slashdot way back when.

I have been running it on a few of my projects, to attempt to get an idea of what my programming time is worth. Now I know the figures given by that program include a whole bunch of cruft like documentation and administrative overhead and the like, but even if I multiply by fractional factors to account for these, the results are, um, interesting.

Rather than post the results I got, I’ll show what I’ve been working with:

• leechnews.pl, a perl usenet binary leecher, is about 70 hours of work.
• ray is a simple raytracer I wrote. There’s about 50 hours of work in this. (here is a tarball)

I’ve also been using stuff from work but I can’t show you that :)

I’d be interested to see other people’s projects and respective sloccount numbers, if you’re proud/brave enough.

As of yesterday I now own two Nintendo DS’s, one standard and one of the new
DS Lites.

It’s been out here for, what, 3 days now? I got it because I will anyway, and also because I have a few multi-player DS games which I’d like to try.

Funnily enough it seems to have been released in Australia before the US or Europe. Weird. Here’s a short review for those that care.

It’s not a huge improvement on the size of the original, but it looks nice. GBA cartridges jut out a bit, compared to the original where they fit entirely into the unit. There was no thumbstrap thingy in the box, but it had the hook for one so you can grab one from an original DS or whatever and use that. The sound from the speakers is a little more tinny. The screens have different ideal viewing angles so they can sometimes look a bit washed out compared to the original, depending on how you use it. On the plus side the screen brightness can be increased from the startup menu to something like 4 times that of the original. The start and select buttons feel a bit mushy and hard to press. The battery is the same, but (once again) the charger has its own special plug specially for the DS Lite (different even from the GB micro).

I sure have enough to complain about don’t I? :) All in all it’s fine, but don’t get one unless (1) size and weight is a big deal to you, (2) looks are a big deal to you, or (3) you are a consumer whore like me, and must have every console Nintendo ever produce.

In other news, My internet connection is shaped, so sorry to those who are finding it unresponsive. I’m working on getting it fixed (by replacing the ISP) but apparently it’s going to be a bit of a ride - I am with iiNet and although I could churn to them ~3 years ago, they have sinced moved me over to their own DSLAM and I can’t churn back out. So I have to apply for a new connection as usual.

Lastly, I am considering making posts that attempt to give quick overviews of what I have learned about various aspects of starting/running/growing a business. To help me decide, if you are interested in reading this sort of thing, or especially uninterested, post a comment. I may, at least, post to my blog but withhold it from planet SLUG.

Okay, so to complement that last post I’ll let everyone know where the hell I’ve been the past few months.

Mostly I’ve been buried in my work, in an effort to make it both lucrative and enjoyable. So far I’m not doing too well on either account, but things are going to change very soon. Check out ASX announcements for BLE. Whatever happens, I am going to make sure I come out of the mayhem with some measure of personal freedom. I’m sick of living like this.

In Jan I got a car. ONE MONTH LATER I was involved in a crash that was not at all my fault. Nothing serious, but I didn’t have insurance. The other car had comprehensive but the insurance company seems set on trying to get the money out of me, or at least not having to pay me anything. Luckily there was a witness who was willing to help out, but the insurance company is still trying to bluff its way out. I would pursue it but I just don’t have the time. I can fit the bill for my car, it won’t kill me. I have bigger issues. The car is repaired now and looks like new.

A few weeks ago binks, my beloved server of everything but the kitchen sink, started misbehaving. One of the hard drives decided to freeze up. I checked it out and both its drives were VERY hot. Silly me disconnected the fans in the mobile HDD racks because the were making noise (”they’ll be alright, they passed the 1 hour test!”). So I got fancy new aluminium HDD enclosures with DOUBLE BALL BEARING FANS, and also purchased a new drive to replace the one that was misbehaving, just to be safe. So after shutting down the machine about 5 times in total in the process of getting the new stuff in, the OTHER drive, the one that showed no signs of being near death, suddenly and completely died.

Thank $deity for raid1. Well, I didn’t have the ENTIRE drives mirrored, but all the important stuff was.

Oh yes, and I’m an uncle, again. Kimberley Brandt, born 6:00 on 02/06/06. I gotta get to the US, soon.

I’ll try and get into the habit of making slightly more regular posts so everyone remembers I exist.

As a result of past events and my abhorrence to working for the man, it looks like I am turning into a businessman. An Entrepreneur. A mover ‘n’ shaker. A PHB!

That last one is what would likely pop into the heads of most people that are likely to be reading this. That, or something less polite :)

Whether or not I become a successful businessman remains to be seen. This is one of the reasons I’m writing this and future entries on my journey into this world. I want to take the opportunity to treat it like a kind of experiment. My story will act as inspiration, or as a warning, to those who are considering a similar leap.

Also I will get to act as a kind of ambassador, to give all the self-confessed anti-corporate-machine geeks reading this the view of one who has experienced it all from the other side. The same may go for the other way around, in time.

Until relatively recently (2-3 years ago) I used to be all anti-commercial and so on, but a few realisations I have made over the past couple of years have changed that.

First, after running what I consider to be a real business for a couple of years now, I have realised that a business can be a process of creation, rather than one of control or theft or whatever it is most people think of it as. I’ll talk about that more in a later post. For now, the business I run provides a service that enables any business to save a significant amount of money, time and hassle. This is a positive thing I’m doing. I’m not saving the world or anything, but I’m doing something.

Second, I have become confortable with the idea of being, uh, “financially abundant”. Oh fuck it, rich.

There seems to be a pretty strong belief, among the working class at least, that having money is only for nasty evil people. Or they would like to have money but this belief still stirs in the back of their mind and it holds them back. I used to think like this myself, until I made the first realisation I just mentioned, and also because hey, there are an awful lot of people with lots of money out there that are less deserving of it than me. This really hit me when I was one day properly confronted with the concept of having the kind of money that I has previously assumed only came into the hands of the Elite. My first reaction to the idea was essentially one of fear - it’s not me, I’d become the thing I hate, I wouldn’t know what to do with it etc. But I pondered for a while about what I could do with a serious amount of money, and ideas started to come to me like, I could help bring my family closer together (a significant portion of it is in the US at the moment). I could give a friend food and a place to stay for as long as he/she needs. I could make really significant contributions to charities. I could start a charity! or a linux distribution! and so on. All these ideas pretty much blew away any inhibitions I had for letting money come my way.

I have already passed the hurdle of thinking I can’t start a business. I essentially already have - there is little left of the business I’m running now that is not my own work. It’s getting regular income, and growing steadily. A similar realistion to the evil-rich-guy belief came to me too - there are a lot of idiot managers and such out there, that somehow manage to hold $200k jobs. What can they do that I can’t? Being a businessman is not a birthright, not in the free world. There are courses you can take or, hell, you can just borrow books from the local library. Shit, there are a whole bunch of people at the top - I mean the very top - that didn’t even go to uni.

So as I go along I am going to write about my observations and insights into how the business world works, both in principle and in reality.