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Hi Blog! Haven’t seen you for a long time. Between twitter and facebook, there isn’t much left to be said.

Ah well, I’m here now. And I find myself of late dreaming of desiring a simpler time, a simpler life with fewer demands put upon me.

I don’t think I’m alone in this desire, but let me tell you where I’m coming from.

I work hard and have done professionally for about 25 years: I started as a developer and have worked my way up the food chain to Sr. Exec positions (CTO, VP Technology, etc.). I love technology and frequently enjoy working. I make good money, doing something that I enjoy; few people could be so lucky. Yet, many days, I can’t help but feel that the best part of my life has been “worked away” and now I work to sustain an ideal that I don’t really ascribe to and to try to pad my nest for my retirement.

RETIREMENT?! WTF… come on! Really?! It’s true. But more of that in a minute.

The Ideal
The North American Societal norm of “the ideal”: house, car, kid, dog, work 9-5, retire somewhere between 50 and 60, yada yada. Is a trap and a farce build to propagate itself. You get the job when you’re young and naive, you get credit and dig yourself a hole. You get an apartment, and start amassing stuff and grow out of the apartment into a bigger apartment. You meet someone and get married. The someone also has stuff, so now you need yet a bigger space. Renting doesn’t make sense, so you mortgage yourself to death to buy a house. Of course, your first house isn’t perfect and so you continue to dig the debt hole bigger as you renovate, repair, etc. If you’re lucky, all this time your income has been increasing. So you have more stuff, and expensive stuff. With the increased income comes increased responsibility, and the increased need to act and dress appropriately, drive a suitable car, live in a good enough neighborhood. All of these things, of course, cost more money… death spiral

No wonder so many people die young of stress related illnesses!

I’ve bought into the ideal for 25 years, and frankly, the shine has worn off.

Retirement?
Well, I’m 41. Kim’s a similar age Living comfortably without working implies at least one of a few truths:
- you’ve won a big lottery
- you have no expenses and no debt
- you have some sort of residual income to support your expenses and/or debts

While I’d love to win a big lottery ($2m would do), it’s unlikely. I had a small winfall when a previous company was bought by a larger company, and I’m still paying for it :(. And the chances of another startup lottary win are there, but certainly diminished in these trying times.

No expenses and no debt. 0 expenses would be pretty hard: food, utilities, etc. all cost something. It’s not impossible, but one would have to be creative.

That leaves residual income. My current plan is to have the house paid off and rented out to generate income. Seems like a good plan, but it drives a buy-in to the ideal, which I’d really like to loose.

*sigh*

So I find myself at a crux, a decision point. Do I continue to work, to pay into the ideal, to put in my time to execute against my current plan or do I trash the plan, shed the ideal like a pair of dirty coveralls and move in an entirely new direction. Net or no net. Wow. Not a decision to be taken lightly. Maybe it’s not even binary.. it’s probably easier if it’s binary… certainly simpler if it’s binary…

*sigh* (again)

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun’s CEO) has a great blog entry on the power of the brand:

I spent a good portion of a weekend a few weeks ago with a customer that was having a quality problem. There’s no point in going in to the nature of the customer or the problem, but suffice it to say it was a bad problem, and by far and away the most expensive kind: one that put the customer’s brand at risk. For those that deliver service via the network (or free software), brand is all you’ve got. It’s not an asset, it becomes the asset.

The whole blog entry is great and [available here](http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_service_means_to_me)

I had a thought today that I’ll share with you:

A decade ago if you went to buy headphones, your colour choices would have been simple: black, perhaps with some brushed aluminum. Perhaps at that point you would have found the Sony sport headphones in their stunning yellow and black. That was about it. Why were the colours so limited? I have no idea, someone somewhere probably lacked some creativity or thought that people didn’t like colour. Who knows, suffice it to say that a decision was made that lacked vision or foresight.

Today, there are a large variety of colours to choose from, and why not?! Plastic comes in any colour, right?

The thing that I find most notable about headphone colours today is that pretty much every headphone manufacturer now makes white headphones. Why? But of course, the ubiquitous Ipod. First Apple made white stylish, then it became an almost defacto standard. Give consumers a choice and they’ll select what fits their needs the best. Novel concept isn’t it?!

Kind of made me thing of a religious debate I had with one of our desktop support guys the other day. He was trying to convince me that adding Apple to our corporate standard was a bad thing. He, among other questionable stretches of logic, told me that a lot of our infrastructure was geared toward windows and that our standard didn’t include Apple. Of course, none of this made any sense to me since OSX is built upon open standards. His unwillingness to embrace change even in light of reduced TCO, improved employee productivity, and many other arguments too lengthy for this blog left me speechless. His inability to understand that our historical windows infrastructure was built just like the black and aluminum headphones of a decade ago astounded me.

Lets face it, the world has always wanted colour, all that’s been missing is creativity and foresight to make it happen.

Have you ever wished you could just step out of the rat race and start living a simpler, self-defined and more fulfilling life? It’s been a topic on my mind, on and off, for years now.

I envision a life “of the earth”: connected to my surroundings. Living in a low impact way, off the grid and in tune with nature. I’ve read homesteading websites, [Mother Earth News](http://www.motherearthnews.com), various books but nothing seems to tell you how to go from the typical North American norm (demanding job, good salary, mortgage and debt) to my ideal (job is living, almost no income, no mortgage and no debt).

Strikes me that without some large cash influx it’s a challenge that is almost insurmountable. Sure winning a lottery or coming into a large inheritance solves a lot of life’s challenges, but what if you want to make this change on your own power?

Looking at the numbers, it’s depressing:

• sale of house less mortgage (+300k)
• resolution of debts (-25k)
• good sized piece of land to homestead (-100k)
• build an eco-friendly, off grid house (-100k)
• remainder +75k

Assuming a family of 9 (2 adults and 2 dogs, 3 cats, 1 bird, 1 rat) can live, off the grid and with no debt, for $500 month and property taxes are $2500/year, that remaining next egg would last for 8 to 10 years depending on the interest earned on the egg.

Unfortunately $500 a month is probably unrealistic. Things not factored in there are car and home insurance, something I cannot imagine not having when all you have is invested in your homestead. A car/truck would be absolutely required. So maybe that $500/month is really closer to $1000/month. Nest egg now lasts 5 years.

You say garden to reduce your living expenses. Great idea! But if you can generate more than 10-20% of your food requirements for a year by gardening, I’d be VERY surprised. Especially if you’re in central Ontario. Perhaps if you’re in a warmer climate (say southern BC near the coast) you may have better luck.

So it strikes me that you need an income because you’ll have costs that are beyond your control.

I suppose that a small job can fit that bill - perhaps a few days/week unfortunately this is 100% at odds with the stated goal.
Catch .22 :/

Today Dr. Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered LSD is 101!!!

Happy Birthday! (and wow!)

Last night Kim and I went to Kensington Market for the Festival of Lights to celebrate the Solstice.

It was *really* nice. But more than that… it was really sincere.

While Kim and I were walking along in the parade along with the drummers, puppets, costumed folks, and other celebrants, I was almost overcome by the simplicity and sincerity of the event. There were no trappings, no ritual, no leadership (per se) - just a bunch of folks making noise and lighting the darkest night of the year.

*That’s* what it means (at least to me) to be Pagan.

Thanks

Thankfully, the OJ Simpson Special _If I Did It_ has [been cancelled](http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_320.html) by the exec’s over at newscorp.

When I first saw the promos for this I couldn’t believe my eyes. Talk about flaunting it in front of the American judiciary and public.

A study published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science makes a dire prediction for the world’s ocean life. According to researchers, there will be no seafood left to catch by 2048

WTF!!! So how dire does it have to get before people change their ways?

[Full story from "How Stuff Works" here](http://home.howstuffworks.com/ref/no-more-fish.htm)

Those of you who know me know that I’m somewhat of a geek, a ham radio operator, and definitely a lover of toys.

For my birthday, [Kim](www.eyecanseethat.com) got me a [RC Helicopter](http://www.e-fliterc.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=EFLH1300) and it’s great fun and a big challenge. I’ve only put about 3 hours on it trying to get a hover going in my dining room - suffice it to say, I’ve spent more time repairing the Heli than flying it due to my space restrictions. I’m either going to have to grow some patience or find a large indoor place to play.

Anyhow…

Found this on the net today: a great convergence of remote controlled aircraft, radio technology and virtual reality goggles.

Check out [this link](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9091545735215129742).