Joel Hainley

I drove down to Santa Barbara today, and checked into the local Holiday Inn for a few days to do some work for a client down here. Unfortunately, I was a bit behind on a proposal I needed to get out so I walked over to the grocery store picked up some food and went back to the hotel room to spend the night working on the proposal and then trying to get to the bottom of a javascript bug that i’m having problems with.

I need to figure out a way to do proposals better/faster I have a helluva time getting them done in a brief enough period of time. ( well brief enough for my tastes ). I want them to be accurate and well thought out, but it’s hard sometimes to spend a lot of time on something that you know is going to be shopped around and end up being used to get some other guy to go cheaper.

It was kinda nice to spend some time just driving along looking at the sites, heading south looking at the ocean stopping to look at the water for a bit, having a leisurely lunch, getting into town towards the end of the workday and spending a couple of hours getting some work done.

Hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to say tomorrow..but don’t hold your breath

Along with going back to school, training for a double century, and a few other odds ‘n ends, I’ve come up with another way to challenge myself. I have gone back to being a contractor/consultant, shed the shackles of fulltime employment and jumped in with both feet.

It is going rather well, much better than the last time around, then again, the last time I tried this was in the middle of the “pop” sound being made by the .com bubble bursting. Things were falling down left and right as soon as I got a client they’d go out of business. etc.

The really great thing about all of this is that I am able to maintain my extravagant lifestyle ( ha ) yet free up some time for working on some of these other ideas that I have. I’m slowly putting together the final pieces of release 1 of Simply Alerts, and I’ve almost got the core logic done for a project I started this weekend that will eventually end up being a Ruby On Rails application.

I’m always on the lookout for more work so if you have any, know anyone who needs anything done, I can do it all, have them give me a call.

I’ve been damned busy recently I picked up a new hobby, but this one doesn’t cost me any money.

“How’s that?” you ask.

I’ve taken to doing contract/consulting work in my spare time, it’s been a good bit of fun thus far, I gave my new business a loan and built a new desktop so that I could get started. I had it paid off within the first month and i’ve been getting busier and busier. I am still working fulltime for a company and doing this on the side, hence, a hobby.

I have no intentions of going fulltime with this endeavor at the moment, I enjoy where I work, and like the people, there’s little if any politics, and the commute is good. So I’m just doing this to keep myself out of trouble, not even for the money, i’m making plenty where I work now, socking an embarassing amount of my salary into savings.

I was motivated to start doing this in the beginning because I got to work with a good friend again on some contract work he needed some help with, and also to put a little extra money in my pocket. However, I have quickly realized, that while doing work on the side does bring in a good amount of cash, it give you less of an opportunity to spend it. In fact, i’m saving even more out of my salary than I was before because I have less time to spend it.

I have noticed a shift in the last few weeks though, my focus has shifted from the money i’m making to ensuring that I hit my deadlines, my budgets, and make my customers extremely happy. This has proved far more rewarding than the extra cash, although i’m not complaining about that either, but then again, i’m just putting that in savings too. ( I can’t help it, it’s compulsive )

I have bought some books I never would have bought otherwise, i bought Knuth’s TAOCP boxset and a few other books. It’s amazingly difficult to find expenses when you do computer consulting/contracting, aside from a sirius subscription, a computer, a network connection, and a phone, you just don’t need much to make a go of it.

Since a lot of my contract work thus far has been .NET development, I might get an intel laptop ( all i have is my trusty 12″ powerbook g4 ) at some point just to give myself some options when i get into crunch mode on a project, the local Panera bakery provides freewifi so I can get out and do some work outside of my bedroom on occassion. We’ll see about that though. Ok enough for tonight, I’m gonna go read before I hit the hay.