Archive for December, 2008

I should add some of my own pictures.

Posted on December 24, 2008

I use the thesis theme, we bought a developer licence a few months ago and I’ve used it as the basis for a few websites including this one and the goroam site. One thing I’ve been meaning to do with both was to start to move them away from the default thesis theme – not because the them is bad, in anyway just so this isn’t just another default thesis blog.

That’s been the plan for the last 4 months. In the new year I’m going to actually make some of the changes.

One of the first things I want to do is start to put some of my own pictures in the rotating box. Ideally I’d love to have it pull from my public flickr stream (incidentally, something else on my resolutions list for the new year is to start using flickr more). After that I’d like to do something with the design to make it more distinctive and more mine, lets see how it goes.

What am I doing here?

Posted on December 23, 2008

I’m going to need to act with a little more purpose in the new year, I’ve been at the crossroads for a number of weeks and been distracted. Job loss, Christmas and all the fall out of the two kind of had me standing still. I wasn’t actually standing still, but I wasn’t anywhere near as productive as I should have been or as I’m used to being. Other things just got in they way, not the least of which was my the pursuit of more than just “see-ya, best of luck!” from my previous employer; an ongoing process, but now out of my hands so I can refocus on what is actually important.  

As a family we’re in a position to stave off the wolves until at least March. It won’t be necessarily the most comfortable standard of living, but we won’t have to move and we certainly wont starve – we’ll just have to cut out some luxuries. I’m actively looking for any bits of work we might get to quote for in the new year.

I’m also polishing up my CV over the holidays and I’ll be sending that out anywhere that looks like a good opportunity. I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be to replace the 2 1/2 days a week I worked for my previous employer though. So full time offers might be a tough call, and they’d depend on the progress we’re making with goroam and the position and the opportunity it offers. I wouldn’t expect a prospective employer  to back me any less than 100%, so I couldn’t in good faith take a job unless I could give them the same. 

In the meantime I’m working on goroam’s newest project. A local search and exploration application, we’ve been working on the goals for a few months now (as I said above, I’ve been a bit distracted, so it’s been a lot of talk), and I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of where we’re going. I’ve enlisted the help of a friend a fellow coder to give me a hand getting it out the door with some evening and weekend work in his spare time. I’ve finished most of the user management stuff and started wireframimg up the core pages and they’re really coming together well.  I think I’m going to start posting details as they emerge and we’ll be running an open beta as soon as enough features come together for a release. 

Basically I’m doing everything I can to make sure I don’t run out of money in the new year, and everything I can to protect myself against the loss of earnings from loosing the major part of my income. If anyone out there knows of any work going, drop me a line: andrew[dot]mccall[at]goraom[dot]net – we do bespoke coding, maintenance and web projects in a number of languages from PHP, ASP to Java. 

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almost profitable

Posted on December 3, 2008

I had an interesting chat with a friend today about what it means to be almost profitable and businesses that are perpetually stuck, with profitability just out of reach. It seems to be a problem that some companies never manage to get away from.

The problem is I’ve seen a lot of companies where almost profitable is the status quo, sometimes for years. I’ve seen these companies increase staff, sales and turn over but still profitability is just out of reach because costs also go up. For them the only way out is to change something fundamental.

In times like these the first reaction is to restructure the business and let staff go, but this can backfire – lower the number of sales staff and you’ll likely cut your turnover, cut support staff and your customers might suffer directly, cut technical staff and can you keep up with the risk takers?

Unfortunately some of the businesses, and the ones I’m talking about need a more radical change. And something that fundamental can be difficult to swallow because it often involves someone admitting they were wrong. A very difficult conversation when you’ve been selling everyone jam tomorrow.

Hopefully some of the people in this position realise that, as other commenters are pointing out, now is possibly one of the best times to take risks. if you could change anything about your company, what would it be?

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a crossroads

Posted on December 1, 2008

In case you haven’t heard, didn’t know or are just joining me –

I used to work 2 1/2 days a week as an employee writing code for another company and the rest working for goroam. The problem was always that I had to put my job first and goroam second- obviously, since one paid and the other didn’t. That was up until this weekend, when I got a letter telling me I had don’t have a job anymore.

So I’ve got a stark choice the wrong side of this close to Christmas, work hard to turn out the product we’ve been building for the last couple of months, get investment and make something truly great of it. Or get a job.

You hear plenty of confident statements about downturns being the right time to start great companies, all the successful ones that began when it was logically wrong. To actually have to make the choice is a difficult position.

I wonder how it will work out, anyone with a comment either way – leave a comment!

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