photo credit: jurvetson

If you're seeing this, your DNS has propagated and you're using the new Wynia.org, hosted by Mosso.com. There are lots of reasons for the move and it's been sitting on my TODO list for more months than I feel like admitting in public.

At any rate, I also took this opportunity to prune the site a little bit, starting with a cleaner Wordpress install and holding back a bunch of cruft from being set up on the new account. I'll be watching the 404 logs and restoring or replacing functionality that actually gets used. However, there was a bunch of stuff that didn't need to be on the site and that stuff is gone.

If my deletion removed your favorite feature or you find something broken, let me know. I won't necessarily restore it, but at least I can tell you so directly.

At some point, you've probably found yourself hating your job, dreaming about your hobby and how great it would be if THAT was your job. If you voiced that desire to someone else, there's a pretty good chance that you heard one of the favorite lines of motivational speakers and self-help authors the world over: "Just do what you love".

The sentence is usually accompanied by anecdotes of riches-to-rags-to-riches stories of high power lawyers who quit their jobs to make a new form of jewelry that turns out to be the next big thing and ends up happy and even richer than before.

Unfortunately, that's the kind of advice that leads people to believe that they can turn their hobby directly into a business. Nevermind that it's extremely difficult to make a living directly doing most unmodified hobbies. Writing poetry, keeping fish, painting landscapes, taking still life photos, playing jazz piano, etc., etc., etc. are all things that people do, indeed, make a living at. However, there are hundreds of people who would LIKE to do those jobs for every one that actually does.

I've seen more than one person get all charged up by this and start drawing up plans to jump right into directly turning their hobby into a business or a career. That's because they didn't have all of the pieces necessary to make money doing something you love: Skills/Talent, Passion and Market.

Passion
This is the part most people start with: Stuff I Enjoy. If you're going to spend a large portion of your days and weeks in an activity, you have to actually enjoy it. Seems obvious, I know. However, it's something that more than a few miserable people ignore when picking a career or field. They see people making a bunch of money and jump in.

If there's an area of life that you already have a passion for, you're far more likely to have put in enough effort to have a pretty good foundation.

If I were starting from scratch and looking for a career, I might look, things that meet this criteria might be: writing software, watching movies, drawing, writing fiction, trivia, playing guitar, singing, photography, and reading.

Skills/Talent
In order to make decent money at anything, it needs to be in the set: Stuff I'm Good At. While there are some exceptions, people who make a living at something despite being below average at it, if you start out at least a little bit above average in your talent and skill, you won't be fighting a headwind.

If I look at my list of Stuff I Enjoy, it's clear that there's not a 100% overlap with Stuff I'm Good At. I'm a pretty good software developer and a decent photographer. However, at playing the guitar, singing, and trivia, I'm actually average at best and am not a very good movie critic at all.

Market
This dimension is probably the one that's least included in these discussions. In order to make any money at anything, it needs to be Stuff People Pay For. The market isn't exactly clamoring for another Great American Novel about the coming of age of an awkward teenager or a 32 year old guy who plays video games, or someone who reads all day. Neither is the market falling all over itself to buy my little experimental Flickr API client in C#.

The Sweet Spot
Now, there are plenty of things that overlap in 2 of the 3 circles. I was a decent technical writer and the market was there for it, but it turns out that I don't actually enjoy it. I enjoy photography and am pretty good at it, however except for wedding and high school senior portraits, there isn't a huge market and the market that DOES exist is much smaller than the supply of people who want to do it.

Whenever you don't have all 3, you're looking at a situation where you'll be fighting uphill the whole time. However, when you find something that lands in The Sweet Spot, you've got something that you can really run with.

In my case, developing custom business software is The Sweet Spot. I enjoy it, I'm good at it and there's a market. Now, of the software that I aim to write, business apps aren't what I'd write if money were no object. That stuff I write in my spare time. Because I know there's not much market demand, I don't try to push it.

The added benefit to specifically seeking out the sweet spot is that it's highly unlikely that the thing you enjoy the MOST is what will end up in that little patch. As such, your day job ends up being enjoyable, but the thing you really enjoy is saved from the destruction of your intrinsic motivation.

In short, if you're dreaming of a new career, and it doesn't land in The Sweet Spot, you might want to re-think your dream.

When Shelly and I lived in St. Paul (2000-2005), our house couldn't get DSL. So, we went with the only other high speed option: cable. Exactly what company was something that changed on us something like 4-5 times: MediaOne, RoadRunner, AT&T Broadband, Comcast, etc. They repeatedly took email addresses away (when the name changed), had screwups in billing, tons of unexplained outages, fried routers, etc.

In short, when we finally moved in 2005, my internet service provider of choice was AnythingButCable. Fortunately, a check with Speakeasy resulted in a DSL option that I've been more than happy with. The uptime has been better than my electricity and customer support actually knows what I'm talking about when I call and explain that the DNS servers must be down because I can connect to servers via IP address.

For TV, we followed the same policy and went with DirecTV. I won't pretend that the satellite TV is perfect, but I don't regret that decision either.

Along the way, we've gotten tons of mail from Comcast trying to get us to switch. Most of it is the kind of stuff that undoubtedly sent to everyone in the ZIP code who isn't already a customer. Lots of flyers offering the kind of tremendous deals for new customers that are nowhere in sight a couple of years later when you've been paying your bill regularly. You know the kind of stuff.

So, a couple of months ago (a full 3 years after we moved), I got a strange envelope from Comcast. It looked just like a bill. It even included a date that "auto" credit card billing would take place and a threat to my credit report if I don't pay on time. I read through it in confusion as it gradually became clear.

It was basically a bill, where if you pay it, they sign you up for new service. They're specifically hoping that you aren't paying close attention and just pay it. Completely disgusted, I threw the thing away.

I've since gotten 3 more. They all cite my previous balance as a NEGATIVE $7.43, meaning they owed me money. They follow that up with what is basically the activation fee and the same threat to my credit if I don't pay.

Not that I needed an additional reason, but this kind of sleazy advertising is the kind of scam that makes it abundantly clear that I'd rather go with over the air TV and dialup internet before EVER becoming a Comcast customer again.

I've scanned the one copy of this stuff that I didn't throw away, so you can take a peek at it.

Photo: Mark Freeman

Way back in the day, when I was doing mostly PHP web development, I bought an application called Serlient. The basic idea was to combine a task-built web server and a web browser into a desktop application. I used it for quite a few utilities that were quick to write in PHP, but didn't necessarily need to run on a server or were really suited to be running on a workstation.

It also made re-using existing web apps easy and worked really well for showing prototypes and demos or anywhere I felt like whipping up a web app that wasn't multi-user and really deployed in more of a desktop context.

Eventually, I moved into more of a .NET context and just kind of forgot about it. Then, a couple of months ago, I ran across a mention by Scott Hanselman as a minor part of his post of something called the "IIS7 Hostable Core". As soon as I saw it, I wondered if it could be used in a similar way for ASP.NET web apps.

I've been grooving on the ASP.NET MVC framework projects I've been messing with. Among them are several of these types of apps that are really only for my own purposes (i.e. single user), but make total sense as web apps. For instance, my sandbox for MVC has been my invoicing app, Uome.

So, I gave the IIS7 Hostable Core bits a try in building the browser/server chimera. Unfortunately, it seemed to really orient toward .NET 2.0. After a few hours of heading down a unsuccessful paths, more pressing matters took over and I set it down.

Early Friday morning, I came back to the idea and went looking for the hostable web server again. This time, I stumbled acros aspNETserve as well as the other approach. When the aspNETserve site specifically mentioned .NET 3.x, I thought I might be able to get quicker results with it. I was right.

In fairly short order, this weekend, I was able to write a very usable prototype desktop application hosting both the behind-the-scenes web server and a WebBrowser control that browses that site directly. Even better, it worked with the default empty ASP.NET MVC project out of the gate, without any needed retooling.

I code-named the app Jackalope, mostly because a jackalope is an unnatural combination of 2 things that don't belong together: a rabbit and an antelope/deer. Since this thing combines a web server and a web browser in order to bring web applications to the desktop, I figured the name made sense. Besides, you've got to name the project something in order to start working on it.

Further, as part of my first Wildcard Monday, I looked at my list of skills I want to improve and decided to try to get up to speed with Camtasia. So, I put together an overview screencast that describes the idea and does a quick code walkthrough. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it and want to push forward in using it more.

That video is below and the code itself is up on this page: Jackalope. I'm interested in what other people end up using this for. I've got some distinct ideas for a 1st round of changes to make it more usable by non-developers.

Jackalope: ASP.NET MVC Web Applications on the Desktop from J Wynia on Vimeo.

Photo: Tony

Because I do the mercenary geek-for-hire thing doing wholesale consulting, I've got lots of formulas for how many billable hours to plan for, how many I need in order to cover the bills, etc. For instance, I typically project an average of 156 billable hours per month.

That comes from:

(52 weeks x 40 hours) - (8 holidays x 8 hours) - (18 days of sick/vacation/personal days x 8 hours)

Tack on a few hours for doing paperwork and the like as well as the overhead time of unbillable travel to the client site, etc. and it ends up being a pretty busy schedule. However, take a month like June and the billable hours got out of hand. In order to keep all of my client projects moving forward, I racked up 215 billable hours for June.

While on vacation, I decided that this just plain has to stop. Sure, I made really good money for that month, but at what cost? I was too busy to do much of anything else but work. I was stressed out, constantly tired, missing days at the gym, etc.

Fortunately, in order to get their IT budget back on track for the rest of the year, my main client was also wanting me to cut back on hours, asking for a cap (rather than average) of 148 a month for the rest of the year.

That sounded great to me. The only trick was to figure out how exactly to make it work. See, I've *tried* to show up, put in 8 hours and leave. It just doesn't work. Stuff comes up and needs to be dealt with, people schedule meetings at the end of the day, etc. Combine that with the fact that Shelly and I are carpooling and she often works 9+ hours a day herself and a 9 hour day becomes the standard pretty quickly.

I had a couple of options. First, I could just take longer lunches to turn the day into only 8 of the hours being billable. I don't like that approach because I've never liked taking a long lunch. It breaks up my rhythm.

Second, I could just "punch out" at 4:00 and not work on their stuff. Unfortunately, because I'd still be on site, I know from watching it happen that if I'm busy just reading feeds, or writing for this site, even if I'm not billing the client, someone who doesn't know that (and won't bother asking) will complain to the higher-ups at the client that "one of the consultants is just browsing the web". That leads to questions of why they're paying me, etc. Best just to avoid it.

Third was to just embrace my "natural" 9 hour day and switch to a 4 day week. With a half hour tweak here and there, it'd come in right at 148 every month. And, I'd get an entire day every week to work on my own stuff. Believe me, I've got a LONG list of stuff to work on with that time.

When I suggested the 4 day week, everyone seemed OK with it and figured I'd just do Friday. However, I've never really minded coming into the office on Fridays. People are generally in a much better mood than any other day of the work week. Plus there's free donuts and bagels. If I'm going to be onsite 4 days a week, I didn't want to skip out on Fridays.

Mondays, on the other hand, I could do without. People constantly complain about Mondays. They're still "attached" to the weekend, which can let you keep going on something you started on Sunday afternoon and the week always seems shorter when you don't have to work on Monday.

So, for the rest of 2008, I'll be in my home office on Monday's, working on my personal projects. With no commute, I'll effectively have from the time I get up at 5:00am until about 6:00pm or so to charge through things.

Given that several of the things on my list will result in non-consulting cash flow if they are successful, I'm hoping to bootstrap this whole thing into a permanent cut in consulting hours. We'll see.