Moving innovations

Yesterday was another fabulous autumn day with loads of sunshine and a very agreeable temperature of ~18 degrees. Great weather to spend a day outdoors hiking. I had the NS Mookerheide walk on my desktop for some time already, so we hiked that route, although we shortened it a bit since no-one wanted to hike more than 25 km.

The hike proved to be wonderful, with a large variety in landscape ranging from moor to forest and from farmland to city parks. Since this area is on the edge where the ice came in the ice age, it is very hilly and the path had some surprisingly steep parts. My favorite picture of the trip is of some mushrooms we found, the perfect autumn picture. Large mushrooms. Very large, actually. On Flickr there is also a picture of the mushroom with someone standing next to it to give you some perspective.

Today I bought a new laptop in anticipation of using it at my new job. Oh, and because buying a new laptop is fun, obviously. In order to connect both my desktop and my laptop to internet I also had to make some changes to my network setup, including the installation of a new ADSL router. To make things a bit more interesting I also wanted to leave Win XP on the laptop, but make Gentoo Linux the main installation. I’m happy to see that I’m typing this on my old desktop which is still connected to the net (and in fact serving this blog to you), while my laptop is happily compiling some Gentoo packages in the meantime. Many things could have gone wrong this evening, but none did, and I’m happy.

Actually, today was not so much the big day as was last week Monday. I didn’t blog about it at that time, but that was the day that we secured our initial funding for the new company. While we had a quick celebration, feeling both dazed and elated, we also realized that now things were starting for real, one of the consequences being to turn in the resignation letter at my current job.

Actually my current company has everything on the HR side under control with Peoplesoft, so there is a convenient function on the intranet to announce your resignation. No need to write an official letter and sign it, just fill in a web form and off you go. You’ve got to wonder how often someone ‘resigns’ just because he left his terminal unlocked while stepping out for a moment. In a fit of humanity the form did suggest to talk to the manager first, but I already did so last week, so all that was left was to click on the button.

Which I did do this afternoon.

So now I’m out of a job on January 1st, with the promise to be able to work for my own company, which does not officially exist yet, based on a work contract that still needs drafting. It reminds me of my previous resignation, where I also quit without having much more than a verbal agreement with my next employer. Positive thinking is a great thing.

On the up side this whole development is great news, as we will be able to start the company in earnest! I’m really looking forward to it, and the idea of having your own company is already turning everything upside down. Just today I was talking to a co-worker about buying a laptop for the new company. His reaction was to simply buy it if I thought I’d need it, but it just isn’t that simple. Buying a laptop means cash leaves the company, and there in only so much to go around. Buying a laptop might mean there’s really no money to buy a good development machine/server, based on our current budgeting, so is the laptop really needed? Sure, it would be nice, but nice doesn’t cut it. Is it really needed, that is the question. No, really needed. Sigh. I haven’t decided yet, let alone what kind of laptop I should buy… Wonderful worries to have.

Last Sunday I finally got to test out my new hiking boots in earnest with a 22km hike from The Hague to Katwijk. It was my first hike on the recently renewed Hollands Kustpad. A very nice hike with a lot of variety in scenery, ranging from city parks to estates with English landscape style gardens, and from dense and hilly oak forests to the wide-open dunes along the coast.

Amazingly I only had a few drops of rain, fortunately not enough to warrant wearing my rain jacket. In fact, the weather was really nice as I was able to hike in just a t-shirt for most of the morning. It certainly doesn’t feel like October at the moment!

As usual pictures can be found on Flickr, but here’s my favorite from the trip:

One reason for not posting much in the last week or so is that my blog got broken by upgrading to a new version of ruby. If you think the sidebar looks a bit funny at the moment, then you’ve spotted the breakage. Since I don’t want to downgrade ruby I’m stuck with a somewhat broken blog until a new version if released. I can’t blame the people behind Typo as they were probably caught by surprise as much as I was, but this problem and the ones I had with Rails don’t reflect well on the Ruby release management process.

Social bookmarking is getting more and more popular. The social software weblog tipped me off on Socialmarks. It seems that the new things that Socialmarks will bring to the table is social bookmarking of RSS feeds, so it will actually be more like a feed reader with recommendations. While that is interesting, I have to wonder whether that will appeal to people who are not the internet-savvy web designer like people that a lot of these services seem to be designed for. One interesting thing on their website it the mention of automated trend discovery. There is a lot of potential there, but it is also very hard to do this right.

Getting Things Done is stirring more and more ideas and applications, it seems. MyTicklerFile is the latest I came across. It claims to be a companion for GTD, and is written in Rails. It’s focus is specifically on the concept of ticklers, reminders which you set for yourself for the future so that you are tickled at the right time to act on it.

The tickler file is one of the GTD things that I haven’t really integrated in my system yet. For some reason I don’t put many things in it, and consequently I don’t look much at the tickler file and eventually miss the tickle for those things that I did put in there. Getting alerts about it would be great, so perhaps the people at MyTicklerFile are on to something, because this is exactly what they do. The site can send email at the right time to tickle you about your items.

A few days ago I went into town to by some more GTD, only to realize that I forgot my wallet. In and by itself that’s not such an extraordinary thing, and certainly no harm came of it as I realized it while parking my bike. I was only ‘punished’ by having to bike back home and into town again on a beautiful sunny autumn afternoon. What stuck me was that I did have my mobile phone with me. Obviously I would not forget something as important as that. The whole thing also made me realize that the same thing happened twice already during the last weeks, both times at work. Mobile phone firmly in hand, but no wallet. Clearly I’m ready to pay stuff using my mobile phone, and I’m looking forward to the day when I just need to carry one artifact to handle all the little things in life.

There it is, the first post in my blog! It took a long time, considering the time I’ve been online. The main reason for starting now is an upcoming change in my life. Right now I’m still working for a Large Corporation. Blogging just doesn’t seem to fit very well with that, at least not for me. Many of the things that I would have liked to express an opinion about would be difficult in terms of competition or embarrassment. Getting formal agreement on a blog seemed an exercise in bureaucracy that I wasn’t willing to try. So, no blog, even though there has been a website for quite some time, rather crummy as it may be at the moment.

The upcoming change is to start a company with Rene and Mark. Both already have blogs, so clearly it is peer pressure that is driving me to create one as well. Or perhaps it will just be fun to be opinionated about all kinds of things.