The Mind of Boz

A few weeks ago, I made public my intent to write here more often. I did it in public for a reason – to shame myself into doing it. I’ve heard and read a fair bit about the importance of creativity in life, and how writing is an excellent conduit for such things. And yet, it’s like pulling teeth to sit myself down and write.

So the question on the table today is, “is forcing creativity useful or simply masochism?”

On the one hand, creating creative habits seems like a good plan. Build a regimen wherein you sit and write once a day, or once a week, or whatever. Make it a regular part of your day, and good things will come of it. You’ll be calmer, more at peace with yourself, blah blah blah. I’ve certainly gone out of my way to make it easy on myself. I carry around a notebook most of the time. I have software so that I don’t need an internet connection to write (I know, they call it a text editor, but ecto is much nicer). I certainly have the time! So why have I posted here twice in 3 weeks???

Conversely, there’s the school of thought that says “if it doesn’t come easily, it wasn’t meant to be.” Which isn’t to say that you should quit something that you’re not instantly good at. However, if you find that you have to drag yourself, kicking and screaming, to the keyboard in order to write, perhaps writing is the wrong answer. Maybe try dance instead. Or knitting. Or glass blowing…

For now, I think I’m going to keep dragging myself. Maybe create a block of time for writing and try to stick with it. I will admit that once I get going, I definitely enjoy it. And no one that knows me would accuse me of having nothing to say! So expect to see more in this space.

No, really.

The name has changed, but everything else is the same.

The wireless was broken last week, but everything seems to be copacetic now.

It is, however, still really warm in here…

That’s right, I’m back on the dole! Today is my first official day without a care in the world. No girlfriend, no job, no car payment… I applied for unemployment yesterday and I should be getting enough to cover rent and beer, so I’m golden! Golden!

I got the call yesterday morning. “We’re having a company meeting this morning, can you make it ?” Normally, I am (was!) only in the office on Monday and Friday, so this was a bit of a surprise. Foolish me, I thought they wanted to see the bug tracker presentation I was supposed to give last week. Instead, I got “Matt, you’re a great guy, but your position has just been eliminated.”

Let me throw a little background out there, for those that haven’t heard me wax philosophical about my previous employer. It’s a good group of people – President, head of Marketing, head of Customer Support, and the engineering team (the CTO, a half time contractor, and myself). It’s a software startup with no income yet, being funded by friends and family. The product is reasonably solid, but they haven’t yet converted any trial users.

So from a business perspective, firing the expensive engineer and concentrating on selling a static product makes sense. Mostly. Until there’s a problem that the CTO doesn’t have time for, and the contract guy leaves because he found a full-time gig. Which may never happen, so I can’t really fault their judgement. But I can still laugh hysterically at being told that ‘my position has been eliminated’, since, in essence, that means they’re a software company without an engineering department. Awesome.

All of this comes at an entirely opportune moment for me, since I’m sitting on a wad of cash (what was going to be down payment on a house), I have no girlfriend, and my apartment is a month-to-month lease. For all of my far off friends and acquaintances, you may see me sooner than you had expected!

In addition, there are some conversations that are interesting in hindsight. Like that long talk I had the other night with B. about how I don’t see an inflection point on the horizon. That up until recently, I could always see the next big upheaval in my life (starting Tomo, paying off the car, old friend moving in, old friend moving out, leaving Tomo, going to Asia… there was always something right around the corner). In the last couple months though, I’d been settling in for a period of … peace? boredom? routine? And I wasn’t particularly excited about the prospect.

Well, that’s been cured now.

So what’s next? I don’t know. I’m sitting at one of my favorite cafe’s (used to refer to it as my office, can’t really say that anymore…), with a pad and pen. I’m going to list all the stuff I’d like to do for the next few weeks. Then I’m going to start doing those things.

One of them is to start writing here more consistently. Or at all, for that matter.

One of them is to learn Ruby and Rails, mostly because they’re cool.

One of them is contribute to an open source project, since I use them and evangelize them, but I’ve never really given anything back.

One of them is to update my resume and codetastic.com. I’m thinking the next job will likely be contract work.

One of them is to do some investigation of other countries and how to live/work there. Australia is high on that list. Then again, I could just as easily move to SF or NYC… or not go anywhere.

One thing is for sure – whatever happens, I don’t foresee boredom!

There’s a comedian – Brian Regan – that does a schtick about messing up rejoinders (i.e. “have a nice flight”, “you too!”).

This morning, as I was walking to Trader Joe’s to buy bananas for breakfast, I passed a guy on the footbridge :

“How are you?”
“Morning”

Say it out loud, it’s funny.

Rather than pollute the old (trip) blog with the new (exciting?) blog, I started fresh. And it's Ruby on Rails, which makes it at least twice as cool. The old trip blog is still available here Someday I'll fix the photo gallery link, but not today. Sorry.