Mike received a phone call yesterday at work. From the conversation, I gathered the person on the other end of the line was looking for Drupal developers, and had been referred to our company.

The first call Mike pushed off: our time was booked, we couldn't take on another client at the moment. The second call was more insistent, but Mike still pushed them off. The third call started causing Mike stress. He looked at me and asked me if I wanted to take on another client.

I've been pushing off adding clients, in favor of actively reducing my client load. I've found the optimal number of clients for me is two. Any more than two and I start thrashing, spinning my wheels and accomplishing nothing. With my new insistence on transparency, my work on my own projects and on me, my time seems pretty full, but I thought, sure, I could help a bit.

I called the original recruiter. I talked to the company's CTO. I chatted with the company's lead developer, whom I had met a month ago for a different reason. The work sounds interesting.

But.

Always a but.

I don't really have time to take on more work. I could help them out. I could work for them for a week, a month, a few months. And after those weeks, months, I'd be a bit richer. Given the recent money issues, taking the work was tempting. Very tempting.

In the end, I couldn't do it. I'm saddened by the fact I'll be missing out on working with a lead Drupal developer (which was the biggest draw to the project, actually). But, I couldn't go into a project where it feels like everyone is already stressed, and pressed for time and in a near panic. I'm finally down to two clients, why add the stress by adding another one?

What are your personal memories of September 11th?

It's four in the morning, and I'm woken by the sound of someone outside, going through the trash bins in the neighborhood. Tuesday morning, a good four hours until I need to wake up and all I can think about is how annoyed I am at the sure to be homeless person who is rummaging through my recyclables, pulling out the ones with the California deposit.

This annoys me, and I call the police. The non-emergency line has a pleasant voice. I give my details, my address, what I'm hearing, yes, they will send a car out to talk to the person, do I know which direction he's heading?

I stumble back to bed.

Four hours later, the alarm goes off. Jumbled words blare from the speaker. Unintelligible words. Without thinking, without worry, Kris reaches over and smacks the snooze button. Nothing registers for him. I hear a few words.

Four minutes later, the second alarm goes off. It is silenced just as quickly as the first.

Five minutes later, the snooze ends and the first alarm and Kris reflexively reaches to end the noise again.

"Wait," I ask. "See what's going on. That's not normal talk."

He rolls over and looks at me. What wasn't normal about the alarm, his eyes question, but he rolls out of bed anyway, and stumbles to the livingroom to turn on CNN. We have cable because he needs his ESPN. We have a television because he needs his baseball. I wanted neither, but he prevailed on that topic.

Kris returns five minutes later.

"You need to get up. New York is on fire."

I ask him what he means, as I struggle to wake fully. What is on fire? What happened? What's going on?

He doesn't know. It's bad. It's in New York. I need to wake up now.

I wake up.

At the end of the day, I wonder what the homeless person with my cans and bottles is doing. Did he know the enormity of the day? How could I have been so small, calling the police on a person doing what he needed to survive? What a petty act of mine, having the police talk to someone for taking cans, when five thousand people died so horrifically.

The images of the jumpers.

The homeless person stealing cans and bottles.

Yeah, so there are a lot of blogging services out there. Mom and I tried Blogger three, maybe four years ago, but neither of us quite caught on. Eventually, I figured the whole blogging thing out. Clearly.

Recently, I signed up for the Vox service, mostly so that I could put Walt in my neighborhood (not that I'm stalking him or something). One of the neat features they do on Vox is the Question of the Day. Each day, a question is posted on the site, with an easy link to answer the question. Sometimes the questions really suck (what's your first name and what's the story behind it?), but some are interesting.

I need to figure out how to import those posts here.

Until then, I can copy the posts here:

What are your personal memories of September 11th?

It's four in the morning, and I'm woken by the sound of someone outside, going through the trash bins in the neighborhood.  Tuesday morning, a good four hours until I need to wake up and all I can think about is how annoyed I am at the sure to be homeless person who is rummaging through my recyclables, pulling out the ones with the California deposit.

This annoyed, and I call the police.  The non-emergency line has a pleasant voice.  I give my details, my address, what I'm hearing, yes, they will send a car out to talk to the person, do I know which direction he's heading?

I stumble back to bed.

Four hours later, the alarm goes off.  Jumbled words blare from the speaker.  Unintelligible words.  Without thinking, without worry, Kris reaches over than smacks the snooze button.  Nothing registers for him.  I hear a few words.

Four minutes later, the second alarm goes off.  It is silenced just as quickly as the first.

Five minutes later, the snooze ends and the first alarm and Kris reflexively reaches to end the noise again.

"Wait," I ask.  "See what's going on.  That's not normal talk."

He rolls over and looks at me.  What wasn't normal about the alarm, his eyes question, but he rolls out of bed anyway, and stumbles to the livingroom to turn on CNN.  We have cable because he needs his ESPN.  We have a television because he needs his baseball.  I wanted neither, but he prevailed on that topic.

Kris returns five minutes later.

"You need to get up.  New York is on fire."

I ask him what he means, as I struggle to wake fully.  What is on fire?  What happened?  What's going on?

He doesn't know.  It's bad.  It's in New York.  I need to wake up now.

I wake up.

At the end of the day, I wonder what the homeless person with my cans and bottles is doing.  Did he know the enormity of the day?  How could I have been so small, calling the police on a person doing what he   needed to survive?  What a petty act of mine, having the police talk to someone for taking cans, when five thousand people died so horrifically.

The images of the jumpers.

The homeless person stealing cans and bottles.

Leaving VA over two years ago was hard for reasons that should have never existed. Leaving was the correct thing to do, and working with Mike was best outcome of that decision. He has a good amount of experience running a company (which I lacked), a good amount of rock (term I use to describe Kris for his ability to not worry, not become emotional and not freak when things are scary) and a good amount of technical ability.

He also have more experience in the cash flow, money part of the business. Experience I sorely lack.

I was used to working forty hours a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes hard, sometimes hardly. Every week or two of that working, I'd receive a piece of paper which I could either exchange for yuppie food coupons or view that my bank account had been credited with the appropriate number of coupons. Once a year or so, I'd write up how I did in the previous year, also be too hard on myself (ah, yes, my own worst critic by a lot), and receive a few more coupons in my subsequent (bi-)weekly ticket receipt.

Owning a business means that doesn't happen any more. There are more things you need to do, like invoices, and deposits, and payroll, and forms, and paperwork, and fees, and taxes, and rent, and more forms, and, oh crap, do we need to hire another person, or have we hit famine?

I treated much of my first year working with Mike as I had my previous decade of working: a paycheck whenever is great. Here are my hours, let me know when you get the check from the client.

But, that doesn't really cut it. There isn't someone telling me, "Do the work this way." There isn't someone saying, "This is the project, we think it'll earn this much money, yes, you'll get paid at the end." There isn't someone that has all the answers anymore.

There really never was that someone, I just wanted to believe there was. I wanted to believe that I just needed to work hard and I'd be rewarded, that someone had the answer, I just needed to look hard enough to find it.

Sometimes I wish life were as simple as it seemed in 3rd grade.

We hired Katie a few months ago when it was obvious that my completely hands-off approach to "running" a business was putting too much stress on Mike on the invoicing/cash flow part of the day-to-day work. Katie's been absolutely wonderful, and I'm so happy she's working with us. She's recently run a few outstanding invoices reports for us to see what's going on with cashflow.

And here's where I learn another lesson in why it can suck to own your own business.

One client hasn't paid in over 90 days and it's unlikely we'll see that money. One client we had to discount a lot for various reasons. And another client is disputing one of our invoices. The total for all of these discounts and disputes is near the amount I've earned this year. If people paid, I'd be twice as rich as I am now.

I can't help but think, man, this just sucks. The amount of stress associated with this work just isn't worth it. The thought of going to work for another company feels like giving up, but, geez, does this need to be so hard?

I've changed the way I work with one client in response to the invoice issues. We have daily calls, which help with communication a lot: no surprises on what I'm working on, no arguments about what's the most important task of the day. I think we currently invoice every two weeks, I'll probably switch that to every week.

Kragen once asked me, how much stress would be reduced by a transparent task list? Based on my short experience with the new way of working with this client, I'd have to say about 95% of the stress.

I just wish I'd learned transparency two years ago.

Today is a day spent at Super Happy Dev House 12. I'm working on Project Decloakment™, which involves building a high profile website and ATTACH MY NAME TO IT. Details of PD™ later, as it's important to what's going on in my life right now, but not until I've laid the groundwork.

Now, about that high profile website.

Basically, I'm building out myCrap, so that I can use it to get rid of my crap. It'll work as both a TAKE my crap freecycle-done-right site and a BORROW my crap (so that I can track who has my Saving Private Ryan DVD or my Firefly DVDs) weblend site.

When the web server I'm working didn't update correctly on a Drupal update, I went to check the error log on the server. Near the bottom of the access log, which I looked at before I looked at the error log, was a blog feed read from rojo. In the feed, they reference my blog's RSS feed on their systems (I'm not really sure how I feel about my content displayed on other sites, but I did put a CC license on the site, so as long as the copy is Non-Commercial and attributed to me... hey, wait a second...), so I wandered over to the link to see what they had for me.

I found my blog's RSS there. It didn't display to me who is the single (ONE!) reader I have out there using rojo, but I hope I'm not too annoying to you, whoever you are!

As I'm wont to do, I started poking around with the site's URL. What did they use for their URL scheme? What if I subtract one number from the identifier for my blog's feed? Will I get another feed, or is the last number a checksum value of the other numbers? Eh, subtract one and look.

I ended up at Jamie Nuwer's LiveJournal blog. Jamie Nuwer? That name sounded familiar... How do I know that name? Reading further into her blog, I realized I know her name because she plays ultimate: women's ultimate in the Bay Area, on Skyline.

What are the chances that feeds for two Bay Area ultimate players are one apart? Now I'm really interested in who added me to their rojo list. Most likely an ultimate player, methinks.

BTW, I update more often than Jamie does. Yay, me!

Update: More poking around and the discover of Liz Gannes' Furl feed leads me to believe my reader from rojo is Mike N, Raphael or Liz herself. Cool! Hi, Liz, Mike or Raph!