Well here are the pictures of my little working space as promised. As you can see it is a little cramped but it is also very comfortable

Well, after some time off messing with other aspects of starting your own company I have finally been able to get some good work done on the main application, which was the whole point for quiting our jobs for in the first place. It actually feels pretty good to get into some proper work again instead of all the mundane stuff involved with starting a business, and I never thought that I would say it but it is actually good to be coding something again meaning having to use my brain for more than an hour a day – those that know me will know that even this is a long time

I have managed to buy a printer come scanner come fax machine and it has a memory card reader on it meaning that I can finally get those photos up onto the site that some of you have been waiting for. For those that have no idea what I am talking about they are nothing special just pictures of my “office” space I will get these up once I get five minutes to myself tomorrow to work out how the damn thing works. So many buttons and options it is unbelievable. Since when did printers get complicated?

I came across this out take from one of Anita Roddick’s (founder of the body shop) presentations and it is funny that her biggest advice is to write a “diary” to track everything that you do in your early years, because it takes over and becomes such a big part of your life that you should have something to look over later on life. That is pretty much the exact reason why I am doing this blog to share the start-up story with other people to get their feedback and also to have something to look back on later in life. It could end up shining some light on decisions that I made that could have turned out to be right or wrong, which could allow others and myself to make better decisions in the future. Well thats the hope anyway

Well it is now done, I am officially a sole trader in the eyes of the law with a bank account provided from the good fellows at Barclays. I cannot recommend enough the very personal service that Barclays provide. They actually make you feel wanted instead of just another customer and provide you with everything that you need to get started including your very own business manager who is at hand on the other side of the phone whenever you need them, along with all the software that you need in an affordable monthly fee package. My very pleasant business manager is named Vicky Thompson who works for the Stafford business managing team. She was extremely nice and set up everything for me very fast and efficiently whilst being most courteous, even with me boring her to death with all my business details

I am now able to get stuff from the suppliers some time next week and then start trading officially. I pretty much have the systems set-up and ready to go, I just need the green light to start trading and my logo which John has very kindly agreed to do for me. That guy is an angel I swear (although he does want me to create him a customizable rails shopping cart sometime in the near future ).

I will post more information soon.

Landon.

P.S. For those that have requested a few pics of my little office space they will be coming soon

Well I am back from my Tunisia holiday and have now officially started work I am currently setting up the ancillary systems required for us to successfully manage the project such as Subversion, Apache (with svn module and wiki), bugzilla, MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBoss/SEAM and the cron jobs to automatically backup all the data. Its a good job that I have three machines available to run it all. I also managed to read a couple of books about SEAM whilst on holiday and am happy to announce that it is definitely the framework that we have decided to go with as it provides every feature that we could possibly hope for

I recently changed my broadband over to BE and was slightly surprised to find that they had activated earlier than their original date so found myself with no tinternet as I got back from my holiday. I have since managed to track down my new router/modem and have now managed to set it all up. It is amazing just how much faster it is than my old Virgin connection for which I was paying 10 GBP more a month for. Supposedly according to Virgin, the maximum speed of my line was just 1 MB, but having checked my new connection I am connecting at roughly 2-3 MB so it proves that Virgin is basically full of it.

One thing is for sure, you always underestimate just how long it takes to set-up all these ancillary systems. I have so far spent most of last night and all of this morning and have only managed to get half the systems kind of running. If I were to just run the systems locally on my network all would be fine, but because the systems must be visible to the outside world I have to make sure that they are all set-up securely and that is what causes the headaches. Well at least I am learning more about system administration than I knew last week which has to be a good thing.

Whilst I have been away John has been busy working on the taster website that will basically exist up until the product is actually released. It will be there to provide snippets of information about our progress and the features of the software and hopefully build up some support and free advertising so that we have somewhere to go once it is released. Here is a little screen shot of the homepage as it stands at the moment:

John has got some really good ideas for the site and it will be quite nice once we get it out there to start collecting information on some prospective future customers. We have to put our heads together either this week or next to work out what information that we want to display so I will keep you up-to-date on the progress of this as we do more.

Anyway, back to work. Got to get these services up and running so that we can start work properly.

Landon.

Well I would like to start by saying sorry for the absence of posts in recent times, but as you can imagine I have been rushed off my feet somewhat lately . The amount of stuff that I have had to remove from my room is unbelievable. It seems that my mother has been hording things in my absense (obviously thinking that I wouldn’t be coming back )

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