Well it is my last day in employment and I can kiss goodbye to those nice regular monthly pay cheques. Now the fun officially starts such as having to get the business off the ground and finding new ways to make some money on the side, which should be interesting Well as I have said before I have some ideas in the pipeline and just need to get them in motion as well. Can I also take the opportunity to tell you all just how much I hate the bleeding tax man. If you saw how much they have taken out of my last pay you would cry, in fact I am crying just thinking about it

Well anyway, here is to the future business and the joys of doing it. Good news is that the posts should start to get more serious now and actually reflect the actual business problems that myself and John come across.

“You will never become a Great Programmer until you acknowledge that you will always be a Terrible Programmer” – Bruce Cockburn

I have just read this story on kickin’ the Darkness and find it quite funny and actually quite true to life as a programmer. Definitely worth a read once you get five minutes to spare.

Let me tell you that starting off your own business is no easy task. The amount of things you have to think about is unbelievable and the worst thing is, those that you do forget about end up biting you on your backside and cause you more trouble than they originally would have. I am lucky that I have my business partner John to hand to also think of things, and it is amazing how we each think of different stuff. This is where our two different backgrounds come in very useful, I always think from a tech point of view and John is always coming from the design side. This helps us a lot and saves us each having to worry about things which someone on their own could find extremely hard to accomplish. Working on the business full-time is quickly approaching and it is getting quite daunting that I will have no job soon so no regular income, but I find the challenge and potential reward far more enticing that a 9 till 5. If you like having hair then think a lot about the challenges you will face before starting your own business and see if that is exactly what you want.

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Well in a weeks time I will be free from my current job and able to start work on my own business. I am very much looking forward to it but not before my holiday to Tunisia in a few weeks, which will be a nice chance for me to relax before it all starts and I never get see daylight again for at least the next year I will also have my first online enterprise up and running within the next month (or two) so I look forward to posting about it later to give you all the details. I think that it will be interesting and provide something that has been available in the states for a while but has unfortunately been missing in the UK. I already know of a few people who use the similar services in America but have to pay extravagant postage and tax charges, so it will nice to be able to offer it to them for a better price and at their own convenience.

Oh yeah I almost forgot, I will also have a site up and running which will be for the girlie’s and hopefully end up saving them some money on things that usually cost a lot in the shops. I am interested to see which of my side businesses work out and will start to tweak them as and when the information comes in. But non of them will compare to our digital asset storage, process and procurement system though, which will be amazing and provide the print/media industry with what they have needed for a long time. We also have plans to spawn an amazing new public service based on the same technology which will change the way that you sell and manage your own digital creations with the world.

I look forward to giving you more information later when we have everything sorted out like copyrighting and patents that will allow us tell the world about our ideas! Well those that are interested in them anyway

What is it about people as a whole? Get a person on their own and you will find that most are quite logical, but get them in a group and you will get a whole heap of mess. What makes me sit here and write this is an article that I have just read on the BBC about the bank Northern Rock, and the fact that it had to get a loan from the Bank of England to cover its days trading. Now this is fair enough, in recent times I have heard that it is hard to get finance because of the current state of the markets – especially the US sub-prime market. What did surprise me was the fact that tons and tons of their customers have managed to rush to the bank and since last Friday have managed to withdraw £2billion (roughly $4billion). Why do people do this?? It amazes me that people can be so stupid. If they were scared that the bank were running out money do you really think that taking out £2billion is really going to help them out much?? Nope I don’t think so!

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Over the last week there has been a furore over the use of a new Firefox plug-in called Adblock which effectively removes ads from a web page that you are visiting. In particular focusing on Google Adwords. There is a particularly good article on The Register which has some comments which I thought most interesting.

First off I think that it is completely wrong to try to block adverts for a site that you visit. I was amazed that most of the comments left were in favor of ad blocking, which leads me to think that these people must be living in another world. They must not know how much money a website can take to run. First off the bandwidth required for just a modest website can be astronomical, let alone the time required by the owner to effectively keep the website ticking over and ensuring that the content is up-to-date. In the beginning almost everyone funds their own website, but at some point they will find it hard to do and have to go looking elsewhere for funding. And this opens up only two realistic options, start to charge for access to the site or place advertisements on the pages to keep it “free” to view.

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I came across this article titled “Programming can ruin your life” whilst browsing through reddit.com and found it quite interesting and very true to life. Anyone that enjoys and is good [or thinks they are good] at coding will find it a little bit too close for comfort, if you catch my drift. Considering the amount of coding that I have to complete in the next year it seems that I will become a complete social wreck, and no funny jokes from those that already know me

What is the catalyst that pretty much ruins good companies once they have grown beyond a certain size? I have some theories on this. Firstly, when a company starts out and money is tight the founders [usually] do a lot of work and a good job of ingraining their ideals on the first employees. Everyone has something in common and therefore the workplace is a fun place to be, and so it should as most workers during this period spend more time in the office than at their own houses.

In the beginning all team members know each other, usually trust each other immensely and know who makes what decision. During this time a lot of trust is placed on the employees to be “creative” and it really allows them to put their own personal stamp on the company, and people usually love the challenge and the feeling of having achieved something – I know that I do. If this is not the case for your company, then you have even bigger problems from the start!

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I was reading a blog on engadget this morning and came across this picture (which is from the Apple German website), which begs the question does the new iPod actually have bluetooth capabilities (check out the top right icon in the picture) even though it has not been officially announced.

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Well Ladies and gentlemen, I have now gone and done the crazy spontaneous thing that I said I wouldn’t do. After seeing the new iPod touch I couldn’t help myself, I just had to pre-order one. It is one lovely piece of kit but, I am sure that there will be loads of things that I will hate about it. Its just the technolust within myself that forces me to buy the latest Apple kit because it is always, well, so cool. Then there was the choice of which model to get, 8GB is just too small for what I already store on my iPod 30GB and 16GB is just about acceptable, so I had to get the bigger one of course Finally we have a wide screen iPod with wireless and a freaking browser. Just how cool is that? It is gorgeous, take a look:

UPDATE: I have now canceled my order. I just noticed that Steve Jobsy in all his wisdom has just reduced the iPhone by $200. What’s stopping him doing the same with the iPod? I really really want one but will wait for a month or so until the price comes down, which it will. Finally my brain has won my heart in battle – I never thought the day would come

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