January 31st, 2007
I'm sure I'm not the only one to have noticed that jobs/projects never seem to come one at a time. They're like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park: when you stumble upon one out in the jungle somewhere, you can be sure there's more of them flanking you in the bushes just waiting to jump out and disembowel you. Only less bloody. Unless you're a hit man or mercenary or something I suppose... Anyway, my point is that it seems to be a Law of Business that you can never be only doing one thing at a time.
This law even seems to apply to freelancing. Having finished off some projects and being left with a little free time, the leads on new work were coming in slowly recently. Then, all of a sudden, a nice juicy lead pops up out of nowhere in the wilds of Craigslist. Had I thought of my dinosaur simile earlier, I wouldn't have been so surprised when, within a day, two more had surfaced. And this at a time when some of my side projects are starting to ramp up as well. Fortunately, unlike a velociraptor attack, this is good news. I was lucky enough to have a nice quiet period in terms of work while Jessi and I were moving into our new condo, and now that we're mostly finished with that I've got what's starting to look as though it may be a glut of work to help us start saving for the remodeled kitchen in our future. It's a good thing it didn't work out the other way around or I'd probably be pretty miserable right now.
So anyway, it looks like I've got some choice new projects coming up. There are, as usual, a few web things to do, but the biggest thing of note is that I may be taking steps towards pushing my consulting business in a new and exciting direction: IT strategy consulting. At my previous job in San Francisco I was used to filling pretty much every rung in the IT ladder. I did everything from helping people format their Word docs to designing the IT infrastructure for a new office and spending tens of thousands of dollars to contract for its implementation. So though I've been focusing more on the support and implementation roles in the work I've done so far, I definitely have some experience in doing more. I've now got a chance to do just that and hopefully establish myself a little further up that ladder. This has always been part of my plan, though I expected it to take a little longer to actually find an opportunity to try and move into that space.
Hopefully this will also provide the opportunity (and income) to take another step that's been part of my plan—and of which inklings of impending reality have lately been appearing—hiring employees. I've actually been approached in the past about hiring someone on, but never at a time when I could realistically think about doing it. If things go well in the next few weeks/months, I may be able to (need to, even) start thinking about actually doing that. This, of course, would be a huge step in many ways.
And, as I always knew to be the case, the most useful tool in getting to this point has been networking. Advertising will always bring in some work, but if you want to be proactive about it, there's no better way to go about it than to just get out there and meet people. Of course to do that you need to know where to go to meet the the sort of people that are actually likely to buy what you're selling. Fortunately, I just the other day met Mark Doerschlag who runs MarksGuide.com, a site dedicated to networking and networking events in Boston. He's pointed me towards a couple different events that I'll be checking out in the near future, including the web innovators group of Boston (which is, in name at least, quite reminiscent of the SFWIN events I often attended while I was in San Francisco (doesn't look like they're actually related though). So with luck this will help accelerate things even further.
In other news, this weekend marks my favorite event in the sporting year: the opening matches of the RBS 6 Nations rugby tournament. Making it an even better thing, now that I'm in Boston instead of San Francisco the first match of the day starts at 8:30 am instead of 5:30 am, so there's a change I might even wake up and drag myself down to the Phoenix Landing to watch it live (something I haven't been able to do since 2004 when I spent a week and a half in London)! So five of the next eight weekends should find me at the Phoenix, hopefully not surrounded by rabid Ireland fans who won't much appreciate my (much needed, but sadly not very effective) cheering of Scotland. At least Scotland are playing England on Saturday, so the Ireland fans will be on my side for that match...
All in all, it appears that good things are ahead (as behind).
January 26th, 2007
Yesterday I got a package from Verizon with our new DSL modem. Today our DSL gets turned on. Actually, it's already turned on, we just can't use it. Why? Because we don't know our phone number.
Since the line wasn't active when we moved in and we didn't bother getting phone service (What's the point when we both have cell phones?), we have no idea what the phone number—or dedicated data line number as the case may be—actually is. According to the Verizon DSL activation page, the only web page we can get to with our DSL right now, we should have gotten the number when we ordered our service. But we didn't. Nor was the number anywhere to be found on any of the documents that came in the package with the modem.
This seems like a bit of an oversight on Verizon's part. I guess I'll just have to call Verizon and see if I can get it from them that way. So I guess it's off to touch-tone menu land for me...
January 24th, 2007
Having just moved into our new condo, Jessi and I didn't really know what we were supposed to do with our trash, and we haven't really had a chance yet to meet our neighbors and ask them about it either.
Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have the misfortune of losing my internet access yesterday morning (still stealing from a neighbor until Friday) and so I was leaving the house early enough to notice that everyone had their trash cans out with trash in them. So I ran back upstairs and brought down our garbage just in time to see the garbage truck come around the corner to pick it up. That, I figured, was that. Trash day is on Tuesday.
Imagine my surprise when this morning I not only see a garbage truck coming down the street again, but, soon after, another one follows! Three garbage trucks in two days? What is the city of Somerville spending my tax money on? I suppose it may have had something to do with the fact that we're literally right on the line between Cambridge and Somerville (the other side of the street is in Cambridge), but I still don't see how that necessitates three garbage trucks.
Oh well. To paraphrase Lord Alfred Tennyson, ours is not to reason why.
January 22nd, 2007
As I mentioned in my last post I've just discovered Foodler.com. Foodler is basically a website that lets your order directly from local restaurants for pickup or delivery. This is hardly a new idea, I used to do it all the time with Food.com back before it became the Food Network's website, but, despite the lack of novelty, I was still very impressed by Foodler.
It not only does what you'd expect it to do, but it does it very well. It's all AJAXy, so the pages are dynamic and very smooth to use. But I think my favorite thing about it is that once you register an account and give it your address, it greets you with a list of places that will deliver to your address and are open. The main page shows you three categories: Open and delivering, Open for takeout, and Closed restaurants. This was an incredibly useful feature the other night when Jessi and I were trying to find a place that would deliver to our new condo at midnight. Once we put our address in it narrowed down the selections only to places that would deliver to our specific address (fewer than to our zip code) as well as to the places that were still open (there were about three total).
It also provides ratings, so we were able to easily choose between the two Chinese places that were available. The ratings appear to be pretty accurate, because the one we went with, Happy Garden was fantastic. Their service was quick, their prices were good, and their food was definitely the best I've had on the East Coast, and possibly the best I've had outside of China. For anyone in the Somerville area, I highly recommend you try it out. And if you're too lazy/busy to go there, just order your dinner online with Foodler. You won't be disappointed.
January 19th, 2007
Even though we officially started owning our new condo (and had the keys) last Friday, since I was away that weekend the plan has been to move in this coming weekend. Instead, I decided to surprise Jessi by moving the essentials (read: bed and Pigpen) yesterday so she could come home from work to our new condo. So, last night was our first night in our new home (where I'm also writing this post, stealing wi-fi from a neighbor). We also had our first dinner in our new dining room. Though, as the dining room table is still at the apartment, we had a 'picnic' dinner on a blanket on the floor, and, since all the pots and pans and food are also still at the apartment, we ordered Chinese through Foodler (which I'll definitely be writing about).
I have to say, it's a nice feeling to wake up in a place that's your own. There's still a lot to be done (Currently the only furniture we have here is the bed, a lawn chair that was on the deck when we moved in, and a tv dinner tray that Jessi brought over when she was doing some painting last weekend. The chair and tray are currently serving as my 'desk'.), but it feels good to finally be in our own place. If I have time, I'll probably bring some more stuff over today (last night we packed up suitcases full of clothes, so I'll probably empty them, go back, and refill them), but the bulk of the work will be tomorrow when we'll be bringing the remaining furniture over in a U-Haul and starting to actually make this place feel homey.
One other thing that we need to get done is internet. The essential utilities are already taken care of, but I don't really want to keep stealing my internet access from an unknown neighbor. The choices, basically, are Verizon DSL or Comcast cable. Eventually I want to be using Verizon FiOS, but it's not available here yet. In the meantime, I think we'll probably go with Verizon DSL. It's not as fast as cable—assuming we go with the cheaper option—and it's significantly cheaper at around $25/mo for a 768 Kb connection or $35 for a 3 Mb connection (w/ 'dry-loop' activation which means we don't also need to pay to activate a phone line we don't really need or want) as opposed to $60 w/o cable tv or $45 w/ cable tv that we don't really want (odd pricing structure, that). Jessi has left the Internet in my hands, so I just need to decide if it's worth $10/mo for an extra 2.25 Mb/sec. It probably is.
I'll probably be taking a ton of pictures, and have all sorts of more specific things I want to write about over the next couple of weeks, so look forward to that. (I insist!) For now, I think I'll say that's it for blogging this morning.
January 11th, 2007
It's been a while since my last post on the home buying process, so I figured I'd remedy that while I've got some free time this morning. I left off with the negotiations, a process that I actually found pretty enjoyable. As it was really just the two agents negotiating, we basically were just setting the negotiation strategy and letting Anne handle the tactics. That suited me just fine and, despite losing the first place we negotiated on, I think we proved to be fairly strong negotiators.
Having agreed to a price with the seller it was time to move on to the home inspection. When we were first talking with Anne about the buying process she had provided us with a list of inspectors and inspection companies in the area and given us some basic advice. Basically, once you have a list of inspectors you want to make sure you get someone who's got a lot of experience, but still not hugely expensive. After going through the list provided by RE/MAX, we had a price range from about $250 to about $600, and all the inspectors claimed to have years and years of experience. The inspector we ended up going with, Mark George, was actually towards the lower end of the price scale, but has about 25 years experience and when talking to him on the phone he just 'sounded right'. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but when I was talking to him on the phone he just sounded like you'd expect an experienced and honest home inspector to sound. In general that's probably not the best thing to base a decision on, but in this case it worked out because he was simply fantastic. Even Anne, who's obviously worked with a lot of home inspectors, was impressed and said he's probably the best she's worked with.
The home inspection involved much more than him just looking the place over and giving us a report. Instead he walked us through the entire process. He pointed everything out to us as he saw it and explained what it meant and why it was good or bad. He explained the process of maintaining everything that needs maintenance, from the water heater to the wooden gutters (apparently you need to treat wooden gutters with linseed oil every so often), and actually explained why you want to do this things rather than just telling us we need to. He was also just a fun guy who enjoyed joking around (his very heavy Boston accent didn't hurt either).
He even brought a ladder along and took us up on the roof to inspect that, something which, apparently, the buyers of the other two units in the building never bothered to do because when we got up there we discovered that the rubber roof, though in good condition, needed to be re-sealed as some of the seams had dried out and separated (something which proved quite useful to know). As a home inspector, Mark wasn't allowed to recommend a roofer to fix it, but he was able to give us an expected price range on the work so we were able to use it when re-negotiating after the inspection (a process which proved to be very painless as we had a less than perfect roof above our top-floor condo to use as leverage).
All in all, I'd say the inspection was one of the most enjoyable parts of the process. Not only was it incredibly useful, and helped to reassure Jessi and myself that we had found a great place, but we also learned a lot about the things we need to be aware of and be sure we take care of after we move in. As I've said many times before, I think it's extremely important to have good people supporting you when buying a home, and Mark George definitely fit the bill. As with everyone else I've worked with on this, I highly recommend him to anyone looking to buy a home in the area.
Next up, handing over uncomfortably large sums of money, more mortgage stuff, and actually taking ownership of our new condo (which happens tomorrow!).
January 6th, 2007
I've been pretty busy lately, and don't expect to stop being busy for the next couple of weeks, so posting will remain sporadic at best.
Anyway, spent a week in IL for Christmas and a weekend on the Cape for New Years as mentioned. Spent last week and will be spending this week getting everything back in order after the trips as well as preparing to move, because on Friday we're closing on the condo. Immediately after closing on the condo, I'm getting on a plane again... So it will continue to be a pretty busy time for both Jessi and I.
But the end is in sight! Come February we will be moved into our new condo, there will be no more impending travels (except, possibly, a trip to Ireland in March), and hopefully time to relax.
Anyway, related to the move, we need to find some people to take our place in the apartment. If anyone is interested in sub-letting two rooms in our apartment (one is about 10x11 and the other is about 11x12), please let me know. More info is available in this Craigslist ad.