1. There’s whether or not you’ve gotten enough of the vitamin and mineral nutrients that your body needs.
2. There’s whether or not you’re getting your calories in the right ratio of proteins, carbs, and fat.
3. There’s whether or not you got a complete set of proteins during the day.
4. There’s whether or not you are spiking your blood glucose levels too much during the day.
5. There’s whether or not you’re causing inflammation.
6. There’s whether or not you’re getting too many calories (getting fatter), or restricting the number of calories (losing weight).
7. There’s whether or not you feel good after you eat.
8. There’s whether or not you’ve got a special health condition than needs special attention and whether or not you’re addressing its needs.

Of course, this is too much to keep track of by ourselves. That’s why the brain immediately looks for a “just ____ and it will all work out okay”.  Hence the success of the dieting industry.

I’ve been on a nutrition crash course this weekend.  I’ve fallen in love with whfoods.org and nutritiondata.com.  I hand-entered nutritional data for about 200 different whole foods, and it was a great exercise in paying attention to the specifics of something that I usually just skim over.  Nutritional information is information overkill, and it’s tough to find the mind trick that helps me just “get it”.  I think if I just keep immersing myself in the data, some general understanding or instinct will emerge to help combine it all in my memory for me.

• Nutrient density: this is the amount of nutrients divided by the number of calories.  Basically, it will favor foods that are high in nutrients and low in calories.  Which is a big part of what provides our bodies with the building blocks to fight illness, build up the immune system, reduce risk of cancer, have healthy organs, and digest well.
• Glycemic index: basically a measure of how much impact the food will have on your blood glucose level.  It’s not healthy to have huge spikes in glucose, as it leads to weight gain, heart disease, high cholesterol, and possibly diabetes.  You can lower the glycemic index of a food by eating it with other things that have lower glycemic indexes.  I still don’t completely understand how this works… so forgive me if I got it a little wrong.
• pH: your stomach needs a certain level of acidity to properly digest food.  If your stomach has to work too hard to raise the pH, all kinds of discomforts ensue.  That’s why it’s good to add a little vinegar to your salad, or drink a glass of red wine with your meal.  Water also helps digestion move along smoothly.

What am I missing here?

A point is 1 dimension.

A line, a collection of points, is 2 dimensions.

An atom, a collection of wavy lines, is 3 dimensions.

Time, somehow linked to a photon of light traveling through space, bouncing off atoms one unit of time at a time, is 4 dimensions.

A conscious mind, which collects light and atoms and gives them meaning, is 5 dimensions.

In a sense we are each collections of space and time, unique universes unto ourselves.

I’m not even high. This is what my brain comes up with when I go running after skipping it for a while.

And as I ran I saw each other person as particles of alternate universes bouncing along our separate paths.

The 6th dimension collects us.

If you’re interested, you can now sign up here.

A couple stipulations:

1. The site’s not done yet.  So I’m really only looking for people who are okay with an unfinished product and don’t mind submitting feedback and bugs when things aren’t working quite right.
2. There are only a limited number of sponsorship chips (ways to play for free) that I’m going to give out this month.  Everyone who played last month also has 10 sponsorship chips, so if you know one of them that might make it easier.

I’m excited to see how this month goes.  Last month was a lot of fun, but I’ve added a bunch more rules that go beyond just healthy eating.  You can see a full list of them, along with some stats, here.

This is also the first month where we can begin to learn from our own behaviors.  I’ve been working on a stats page that gives you information about which kinds of rules work best for you.  Are you more responsive to DO rules or DON’T rules?  Are you more responsive to going cold turkey or whole hog, or are you better at finding a level of moderation?  Are you more responsive to rules that are easy or that you find to be difficult?  It’s just the beginning of a very interesting path, I think.  To be able to learn from our own behavior, and to use that information to help improve our behavior over time.

Anyway, if you want to see what I’ve been working on (coming up on day 70 of my 90 day challenge), this is it.

• Brightly colored vegetables have cartenoids and flavenoids that help prevent cancer, heart trouble, strokes, etc.
• To absorb cartenoids in bright vegetables, eat with some oil.
• Above-ground portions of veggies have fiber, slow-release energy, and no fat.
• Whole grains, salt, lack of vitamin D all interfere with calcium absorption.
• Calcium needs magnesium to work right.

Et cetera.  I’m positive that there are a bunch more that we all know about briefly before forgetting about them again.  If anyone can point me to any other resources that talk about things like this, let me know!

But how do we let go of such a self-reinforced worldview?  As long as we rely on others to take care of ourselves, we continue to need others to take care of ourselves.  Hence the rocky adjustment period of college, give or take a decade or so depending on your personal circumstances.

The circumstances of the shift in worldview, however, have consequences of their own.  They may leave you feeling burned–distrustful of ever again placing any dependence on anyone.  Or, it may merely be a symbolic change that hides the fact that you’re still dependent on the care of others.

It might also leave certain areas of life woefully vulnerable.  We may be independent in spirit, but be terrible at managing our own money.  Or we may not have what it takes to keep a living space livable.  Or it might leave some social skills highly unrefined.  And we have two options: improve those skills, or continue to adjust our worldview to account for our weaknesses.  Maybe we don’t feel like learning how to keep a clean living space, and instead learn to take pride in it.  Or maybe we haven’t learned how to be in a relationship, and decide that we’re jaded and cynical about the state of coupling.

Being in charge of ourselves leaves us with a huge responsibility to come up with strategies to either fix, or cover up, weak spots.

It’s even easier to see when you think about this in others.  For example, our parents, teachers, and bosses.  The default authority figures.  They have the same challenges, after all.  And they excel at their “being-in-chargedness” to the extent that they are able to manage their weak spots without trying to cover them up or justify them with worldview shifts.

As soon as we can see these faults in others, we must turn on ourselves and examine how we ourselves are managing our weaknesses.  How are we doing at being in charge of ourselves?  How are we doing at being in charge of others (to the extent that we’re authority figures of our own right).

I think a lot of grief in social situations can be examined in this context.

• Is someone in charge of something that they don’t want to be in charge of?
• Is someone not in charge of something that they want to be in charge of?
• Is there confusion about who is in charge of something?
• Are you and others managing the weak spots of their in charge areas with competence?
• Is someone feeling under-appreciated for the effort required to be in charge of something?

“What’s the best way to be healthy?”

Is it to count calories?  Is it to come up with some physical weight goal?  Is it to join a support group?  Is it to monitor protein, carbs, and fat?  Is it to seek a certain level of moderation?

It actually comes down to what works.  While some people lack information about how to be healthy, and all of us have gaps in our knowledge, it’s more about motivation and habit-creation than about simple information acquisition. Right?

That’s a little crazy though, isn’t it?  We live in a society that holds knowledge on a pedestal.  We figure that if we know the right thing to do, that we will do it.

Of course, brands and advertisers know this isn’t true, and have come up with a million and one gimmicks that are designed to “trick” you (or at least the uncontrollable urges part of your brain) into being healthy. We are in cahoots with them because we too want to trick ourselves.

Comparing different health strategies turns into a comparison of tricks rather than a comparison of information or health facts.  And choosing the right strategy is all about finding that strategy whose tricks work best.

Which, I guess, is just a realization that all of us knew already.  The part that I keep spinning on is whether or not the tricks can be simplified.  In the quest for tricks that are resilient to our subconscious’s ability to adapt and disable any but the most tricky of tricks, we create ever more complicated tricks. The trick-war with the subconscious, it seems, is probably futile.

What if we took the complexity out of tricks (so that the Catch-22 of needing enough motivation to, say, count calories hides the fact that you could have used that motivation to put any other health plan into motion) and went back to the core principles of health:

1. Eat healthy food
2. Exercise regularly
3. Repeat

The strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or tricky… we just need to figure out what motivates us.  What excites us, what gives us the energy to put will into action.  There are other ways to make something unboring, and there are other ways to bootstrap motivation.  There are other ways to trick the brain that have nothing to do with complicated and investment-requiring tasks (like counting calories) and instead tap into the things that we find intrinsically motivating and rewarding in the first place: support from friends, the feeling of making progress, recognition of hard work, etc.

I’m trying to wire it up that way, but the proof will be in the pudding (or some clever pun on that).

Now I have 45 days to make it something that people would really like to use without me begging them. 

I made a list of features that still need to be done:

1. game manual / dictionary
2. Twitter/Facebook posting (and fruit)
3. Facebook liking of things
4. buying sponsorship chips
5. Amazon payments
6. design the daily emails
7. show everyone who’s playing during a given month
8. profile pages
9. track your meals
10. mobile version
11. import and display recent tweets from previous day to help you remember what you did
12. import local weather
13. get user’s location
14. post game report
15. sponsored invites
16. make healings and other events trigger notes on the game wall
17. more illustrations

Of those, I think mostly #1 (game manual) and #8 (profile pages) need to be done.  So that’s what I’m going to be working on these next 2 days.  I’ll be emailing people that signed up on healthmonth.com in 3 days hopefully.  If you’re particularly interested and capable of playing this game in August, say so in the comments (you can also re-submit the email address with additional notes if you want).

http://healthmonth.com

It’s been fun hearing a few reactions.  It’s all just words though… the real test will be the implementation, which is slowly but surely coming along.

The part of building websites that I dread, account management, sign in, log in, authentication, etc, has gotten a lot more interesting in the last few years.  Mostly because of all of the options for logging in via other site credentials.  OAuth, Open ID, Facebook Connect, etc.  I’ve done Open ID and Facebook Connect before, but this time around I thought that OAuth might be the best suited.  Because, even though being able to log in without creating a new account is pretty interesting, I’m more interested in getting data from the other sites than in just simplifying log in.  OAuth is good because it often gives you access to the APIs of these sites in addition to being a method of authentication.

It took me a while to wrap my head around the basics, but once I got it working for Twitter, Tumblr was no problem.  And even though Facebook has its own implementation of “OAuth 2.0″, that proved to be the most elegant implementation I’ve yet seen, and was actually a lot easier than the others.  I’m so glad I gave up on the Javascript API that Facebook offers.  It’s meant to make things simpler, but I think it’s actually a lot more fragile and complicated than the OAuth authentication options.

I also implemented Foursquare pretty easily.  And Google Contacts… but then I disabled it because I think that’s not quite the same as the rest.

Even though Flickr doesn’t use OAuth, they use something that works pretty similar, so even though I’ve had trouble getting their authentication system to work in the past, this time it was really no problem.  I think the whole series of steps of requesting a token, getting another token, and then verifying that token makes sense to me now.  Only took me about 5 years to click.

I am not just adding these sites for kicks.  There are actually a few things that I think can be improved in the whole “connect your sites up” world, which I’m excited to implement.  One thing, for example, that I don’t see many sites doing is allowing you to “auto-follow” people that you have added over time.  Or, at least, letting you know that another of your friends has joined the site since you imported Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

I’ve got another big part of the site to figure out today.  The game wall.  After you fill in your day’s work, the primary next step is to see stats and charts about your progress in the game and in the month, and the secondary step is to see how you are doing compared to others.  The secondary step is what I’m going to start working on today.

Somehow, in our brains, we know exactly how much good will we have towards any number of things.  Our wife, our baby, our job, people who walk slow, rain, people who are always late, people who drive you to the airport, people who hang out with you with no notice, our parents, our computer, AT&T, etc.

It would be interesting to investigate just how we are able to have completely different amounts of good will towards all of these things without it seeming contradictory to ourselves.  How is it possible to have so little good will for a long line at the post office while having so much good will for the person who saves our spot for us while we run to get a coffee?  It goes deep into our old brains’ sense of fairness, justice, manners, and what’s right and wrong.  An early feature of our cerebral cortex, most likely.

Progress report.

1. I’ve fallen in love with heroku.com, and think that I’ll be using them to host the site once it launches.
2. My sleeping patterns are still a little out of wonk. Yesterday for example, I just couldn’t seem to shake that “I need a nap” feeling.  And combine that with some difficult problems I’m trying to solve and my brain sort of feels like a stale rubber band.  I think it’s more work-related than baby-related, strangely.
3. I’ve also fallen in love with highcharts.com when it comes to making pretty charts.  I might still use jqplots as well, but I think highcharts is actually quite a bit more powerful.
4. I’ve sort of solidified my idea pattern for now
   1. A game every month
   2. Minimal design, but colorful
   3. Not necessarily free
   4. Choose your own adventure beforehand
      1. Bet yourself, punish yourself
   5. Play with others
   6. Be sorted onto a semi-arbitrary “team” of people like you
   7. A day is 1 turn
   8. Minimal amount of “work” per turn
   9. Points awarded daily
   10. Points not entirely explained, or based on a semi-complex algorithm
   11. Pretty charts and stats as a reward for daily participation
   12. Semi-frivolous award system for good behavior
   13. Streaks are a central part of the game’s motivation
   14. Some sense of a “meta” game that spans months
5. I’d say I’m about 1/2 way done with the core functionality of the site.  Maybe a little more.  But there are always a lot of little things at the end that need to be figured out.  I’m looking forward to those too.
6. Sometimes I do have that fear, “what if this flops?”  Luckily it’s not an all-or-nothing kind of proposition.  But I’m still not sure that my basic premise is compelling enough to really make a splash.  One comfort is that the basic premise unlocks more premises that I can build on if the primary one isn’t enough by itself.
7. I’ve got to figure out a way to balance home life, work life, and health.  I’ve got a way to get about 4-5 hours of work in a day, which is pretty good if I can make it all productive work, but it has come at the cost of me doing any sort of exercise.  And I can feel my body sort of wasting away and creating pools of unused physical energy that then make me restless and feel gross.  I’m going to go on a run today, instead of working.  It is the weekend after all.

Health and fitness, dieting, and that whole market is not quite as sketchy as the self-help market, but I think it’s definitely related. There are about 3.8 billion diet plans, ways to lose weight fast, ways to be healthy without actually being healthy, etc. There are a few nice and simple health and diet plans out there, like the Hacker’s Diet and the Primal Blueprint, but even they sort of alienate a lot of their audience by trying to appeal too much to a certain smaller audience. Which, I guess I wouldn’t notice as much if I was actually in their target audience.  And, most likely, anything I create will be yet another small audience kind of deal, but as far as I know there isn’t one for people like me, people who are sort of into Nike+ and sometimes into weird fasting diets and sometimes into extreme rule-making for short periods of time and sometimes into giving up something for Lent, but really pretty unmotivated to go much beyond that.  Even though I do intellectually know that health is a fairly important thing.

What motivates me?  Competitions, social connections, challenges, easy things, pretty things, simple things, cheap things, things without a ton of ads, things that are easy to understand, things that don’t make me shiver with sketchiness, things that work with technology, things that my friends like, things that don’t seem like a scam, things that have some scientific and common-sense backing.

When it comes down to it, health is easy.  Michael Pollan’s Food Rules sum it up, mostly.  They really aren’t rules as much as anecdotes about food.  Eat real food, exercise, don’t get too stressed out.

The problem, of course, isn’t knowing the rules, it’s following them.  It’s motivation.  And that’s where I think I can help, because the Internet, and social games, provide nothing if not a ton of motivation to do things.  Most of the time, we’re motivated to do things that have no bearing on our health, or that harm it.  But what if you applied the same addicting methods that make us check our Twitter and Facebook feeds 982 times a day to eating real food, exercising, and not getting stressed out?

Anyway, that’s what my brain sounds like lately.

I’ve now got the basic structure of the health game figured out.  And the rules.  And the signup page.  And the part where you make bets and promises with yourself.  And the part where you can sponsor people.  And the part where you can learn something about yourself based on the kind of rules you chose and how difficult you think they are and how important you think they are.  And there are spirit animals involved that help you along the way, well 3 spirit animals and one sort of anti-spirit animal sort of modeled after Steven Pressfield’s Resistance.  The Lizard Brain.  And there are wild cards, and ways to track your progress, and share your progress, and now I just need to get working on the Encyclopedia.  After that, I’ve got to work on the actual game itself.  How you play it once the game starts.  That’s going to be a big chunk of my remaining work and I’m excited about it.

I’m really excited about it.

I’m just gonna keep working on it.

I’ve been starting to practice copying icons (this one’s taken from 750words.com, it’s the badge you get for writing your 750 words pretty quickly many days in a row):

The left side is my vector-made version, and the right side is of course the blown up original.

Here’s how mine looks in Illustrator’s pixel preview:

Not quite as good, but not too bad, right?

I got a small Wacom tablet on loan from a friend, too. Though, I think it needs some calibration because it’s all loosey-goosey with its lines right now. In any case, I’m super stoked and motivated to make a few of my own illustrations and icons for this new site I’m planning.

For anyone who is interested, I’m reading the Adobe “Adobe Illustrator CS4: Classroom in a Book” and watching all the tutorial videos on this page.

In the meantime, I’m officially out of the starting gates on the development of my website.

Here’s what I’ve been working on the last couple days:

• Made a few more changes to the data model, added a bit more of a wild card element to the “game”.
• Am reading “A Theory of Fun”.  Loving the amateurish drawings that go along with the writing.  Sometimes unpolished is full of charm.  This book was recommended to me by 3 out of the 4 people who responded to my original question about game-design books.  So far, it’s living up to the hype.
• Found a few ways to super-simplify the idea.
• I am prototyping the interaction and design for what will be the first major action on the site after signing up.  I think this is the heart of the site, and I think it’s good to start at the heart.
• Realized my mantra: seek out complicated, ugly, tedious, and useful parts of the world and make them simple, pretty, and fun.
• Have been drawing lots of pictures and going on lots of walks.

Tomorrow is the end of week 1, and I was hoping to have a bit more done by then, but I’ve been exhausted the last couple days (I think 5 weeks of wacky sleep patterns is finally catching up to me).  I got a lot of good sleep last night and am still exhausted today.  I’m hoping that my body either adapts or more sleep eventually fixes the problem.  Can’t really think creatively and embark on huge tasks of design without a fully rested mind.

I’m excited about that.  New skill!

When I woke up this morning (well one of the times, since there are now about 3-4 separate wakings up to have new ideas from) I started thinking more about the multidisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship, especially when you’re a 1-person company and want to do as much of it yourself.  Of course, I realize that this is sort of a “bad idea” amongst some entrepreneurial thinking.  Almost all VCs and other entrepreneurs recommend having a 2-person team, at least.  Personally, I think that that applies mostly when your “idea person” is not technical, or isn’t technical enough.  My strength has always been the ability to be creative and technical at the same time.  My weaknesses have always been design, completing that last 10% of polish, promoting completed products, and scaling successful ideas.  I’ve made a pretty conscious decision to try harder at the last 10% of polish by having smaller projects, promoting projects (this blog is one attempt at that) in the last year or so.  And scaling, has mostly been taken care of by the improvements in cloud computing hosting services.  That just leaves design.  And I’m on it!  I also have found a couple great designers that I like working with… I just feel bad asking them to work for little pay, as it’s always at the beginning of a project that I most need their help and have the least resources to compensate with.

Here’s a quick list I put together of skills, and the types of people that are generally expected to have those skills.  Some of them are “nice to haves” but all of them (I think) can play a crucial role in the success or failure of the project if they are absent.

What’s missing from this list? Everyone has these skills to a certain extent, but many of them must not only be trained over time, but also simply embraced as skills worth having. So often I hear ideas from people who are almost proud of having no technical ability. Is drafting technical people a fun pasttime? Why not just spend a week or two with a book and a good technical friend willing to answer questions and knock that skill out? It really doesn’t take much more than that. I’ve come to believe that skills are mostly personality decisions. We often decide to write off certain skills as a way of defining ourselves.

Learn a new skill. It will save your project a lot of time and money in the long run. Life is long.

I did have one setback. There is a company out there named Esha, which aggregates nutritional data from a bunch of sources and licenses it back out. Some popular iPhone apps use them. I wrote to them the other day asking for a price quote. Get this. $35,000 one-time fee with a $15,000 yearly fee to get the information updated. That’s crazy, right? They’ve been around 25 years, though, so it must mean that people are paying for this. I guess it’s just shocking to me because I’m one person, and most people who want this data are probably big businesses. Still. It just feels like this is a company that the internet is going to destroy. That information should be free, because it’s nothing that people wouldn’t be willing to aggregate and share in this new world.

On the other hand, the USDA publishes their nutrient database every year for free, and it’s what most of the iPhone apps use.  It has 7,000 foods in it instead of 40,000, and in my comparisons I’ve been a little disappointed by some of its omissions (no pesto, for example, and no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches), focusing more on ingredients than staple foods, but sites like dailyburn.com have APIs that include an exponential number of foods, all user-submitted, to even Esha.  Esha, watch your rearview mirror!  Okay, enough poking at Esha… I just couldn’t believe it when they wrote to me with that quote.

I’ve also decided to take my drawing skills to the next level, and learn how to import drawings into Illustrator and work on them from there.  I’ve been sort of afraid of learning these skills, even though my drawing skills aren’t bad, and I’ve used Photoshop for many many years.  What’s to be afraid of, really?

Being able to work on my own icons and images would free me from being tied to a designer.  I’m not saying that I won’t enlist the expert help of some designers, because they’re years ahead of me on skill level, but I have just never felt comfortable relying on them entirely.  What if I need a single icon and they’re on vacation, or slammed with another project?  I want to be able to knock one out, and not break out in hives.  You know what I’m saying?

If anyone has any tutorials or books to recommend me, that would be very helpful.  I have figured out that autotrace might be useful in converting drawings into vector graphics.  Let me know if that’s the wrong path to go down.  I’m thinking that I’ll draw things on paper in black in, scan them in, autotrace them, clean them up, and color them in Illustrator (I have CS4, if that matters at all).

There’s so much freedom and power in being able to not only think up an idea, but build it, and design it, especially in the early stages.  It’s not about having the best skills in the world, but being willing to pick up new skills.  So, to all of you “idea people” out there who are afraid of learning how to actually build your ideas, I say pick up a book, ask a few questions, and build it.  It will be so much easier to pitch your idea or move from prototype to final product if you aren’t relying on someone else to implement or design your ideas.  There’s nothing to be afraid of.

Maybe I’ll post some of my creations here as I go along as proof that you don’t have to be great in order to make serious progress.

What is my 90 day challenge’s measure of success?  I’ve been working with goals and challenges long enough to know that it’s pointless to make goals that you can’t verify success or failure from.  So, I came up with what I think “success” would be for this project, by September 16th.

• Launched
• Making $3,000 a month
• The work is meaningful and the result is fulfilling

I say $3,000 a month because I thought my original hope of $5,000 a month was probably not going to be possible.  Can an idea go from zero to $60,000/year run rate in 90 days?  My Locavore iPhone app did, last year.  It took 2 years for 43 Things to become profitable, but when it did it was profitable on a much larger scale than $3,000/day.  All of the other sites we made, however, had more difficulty getting to that milestone.  So, it depends on the ideas.  Some ideas make money quickly but don’t have much growth potential.  Others take longer and grow bigger.  Others burn a  lot of money and either fizzle out or get bought up.  I don’t have the luxury of a long runway.  The 2 years of 43 Things seemed short at the time, but 90 days is pretty much ridiculous.  I’ll need a lot of luck, I guess I know that, and might as well admit it publicly.

Ways to make $3,000/month that I’m considering:

1. Sell 1,428 iPhone apps at $3 each, or ~47/day
2. Get 600 people to subscribe to a service at $5/month
3. Some combination of the two

Because of my personal strengths and what I think works best with my set of ideas, I’m probably going to go with #2, and then transition to #3.  I don’t think I’ll be able to do all of that in 90 days, but who knows.  Locavore took about 3 months to make, but I was only working on it in evenings and weekends at the time.  It did take about a month or two to get any momentum in sales though, and without big press-worthy news on a daily basis, and Apple’s help marketing, it hasn’t been possible to maintain that rate of sales over the year (which is another reason why I’ve decided not to put all my eggs in the #1 basket… it relies a little too heavily on the good will of powers outside my control).

Anyway, those are my zombie-like thoughts of the day.

After waking up at 6am with Niko, I decided to start writing some notes to myself (on 750words.com) about this 90 day challenge with myself.  What kind of business do I plan on building?  How will it sustain not only itself, but also me and my family?

I’m going to stick to my strengths.  This means, currently, Rails websites and iPhone apps.  Since I’m stronger on the Rails front than the iPhone front, I’m going to run with an idea I’ve been playing around with in the back of my head for a while.  Something somewhere in between Locavore and 750 Words and 43 Things and McLeod Residence and also inspired by other current faves in the world like Foursquare.

So, what have I done today?  Here are a couple things:

1. Decided to build a website that exists somewhere between free and subscription service.
2. Made a list of big problems that I’m going to have to solve.
3. Drew out some very basic sketches for what I think might be the most important part of the UI to begin with.
4. Started a new Rails app, set it up with Compass, jQuery, my default layouts, blah blah blah.
5. Set up subversion.
6. Looked into Heroku for hosting… didn’t quite figure it out but will have to return to it later.  If anyone has a great cloud-based Rails host to recommend that doesn’t require a ton of sysadmin knowledge (I hate doing that stuff), let me know.  I see that Rackspace has something new along those lines.  Has anyone tried it?
7. Built up the User model with signup, login, logout, forgotten passwords, email verification, and edit (using this old tutorial that I always end up going back to reference).  Decided not to go with just OpenID like 750 Words since that has actually turned out to be a bit of a pain, and confuses people.  This is another step of building websites that I hate.  It’s boring and yet complicated and you have to get it absolutely right or else you’re going to pay for it later.

Now, I’m going to take a walk, get a coffee, and think about the ideas that are spinning together in slow mucky motion.  I LOVE this part of the project.

Ah, day one.  Such a crisp feeling.  If only every day was going to be as simple and clean as day one.

And in a bit, it’s the weekend, and I’m going to enjoy it, and come back for day two on Monday.

Yesterday, we decided not to launch it.

It’s not that we don’t think we built something amazing.  I think it’s probably the slickest thing I’ve ever built, actually.  I put in a ton of work, and addressed some amazing problems with simple solutions that things like the web can now solve easily for businesses that are a bit behind the times, technology-wise.

Mostly, for me, it came down to a few frustrating technical problems (one of our data-suppliers decided to bail on us at the last minute), and the fact that selling new technology to non-tech companies is sort of difficult.  It reminds of the feeling I had when (as a hopeful young novelist) I had to start pitching manuscripts to agents and publishers.  The joy of writing and the joy of selling pull from two completely different springs.  One spring is bountiful in my soul, the other, not so much.

And then there’s the issue of opportunity cost.  Doing anything costs exactly as much as the price of not doing something else.  Sometimes it’s not enough to have a good idea, or a good business, or even big success… we should all be striving to find the success that best suits us, that ties our passions up with our work, that sustains our sense of purpose, that justifies this one chance on this planet that we have to do anything we want.

One of the benefits of small companies and few business partners is that we can make swift changes.  We can “fail” early.  We haven’t made any giant bets that we can’t take back.  There is not an irrecoverable amount of sunk cost.

So, without much further ado, we’re freezing the project, stepping back for a bit, and re-assessing.  Sure, it sounds suspiciously like The Dip, or The Resistance, speaking here, but I’m almost certain that we’re all doing the right thing (after a night’s sleep).  In fact, I think it’s mostly fear and uncertainty that would keep us on the project, rather than take us away from it.  Leaving the project is what I’m afraid of.  Especially since it means that I’ll be losing 66% of my monthly salary (which was already down 50% from The Robot Co-op), and we’ll be living on life support until something fills the gap.  Also, strangely, I was on their payroll as a means to secure a home loan originally (one that never went through since we didn’t sell our house before Niko was born, and now we’re off the market until next year) so that might become an issue again when we decide to move if I still don’t have an “official job”.  But whatever, right?

Talking with Kellianne last night about it, I think I’m going to give myself 90 days to either come up with, build, and become profitable on a new idea and business, or strongly consider re-joining the gainfully employed people of the world.  Which, back in the day, I thought I’d never be able to do because I was too spoiled by the luxuries of self-employment, but it turns out that luxuries also mask dangers and anxieties that taunt us in the night.

90 days.  That puts me at September 16th.  New profitable business or bust.  Now that I’m 100% above ground again, I’ll be posting here more.  Wish me luck!