Internal Mono(b)log

The oilspill that’s currently gushing into the gulf of Mexico is a terrible horrible environmental catastrophe and BP definitely holds a great deal of responsibility for that damage. They earned it by cutting corners, using (not) good enough short-cuts and (probably) poorly trained staff.

But! BP alone should not hold the blame for this.

WE (you and I) are as much of the problem here as BP is. WE drive cars. WE rely on trucking to get food to our groceries. WE rely on petroleum based fertilizers to nourish our crops, that we either eat or worse feed to animals that we then slaughter and eat. WE live in a land where we demand such excess that food rots on grocery shelves. A land where it’s somehow acceptable to transport WATER from an island in the middle of the Pacific ocean to hour grocery and variety store shelves so that we can drink the same stuff that comes out of the ground all around us at designer prices in fancy bottles (made of plastic aka petroleum products). WTF!

Did you make a lot of noise to try to stop drilling in the Gulf of Mexico? It’s likely been happening since before you were born. Been protesting much? How about the Alaskan oilfields or the tar sands? Do anything about that? Hmm?? Sell the car yet or just complain about the price of gas? Add better insulation to your home, replace the windows/doors or just complain about how much it costs to heat/cool your abode? Switch over to Bullfrog Power or some other green power supplier? Buying carbon offsets from CarbonZero.ca or others? I thought not. It’s too easy to be complacent until an event like this smacks us around.

BP’s just been doing what we’ve demanded of them: get us oil cheaply. We don’t really care how (until something goes wrong)! Just give us our fix now, we’ll worry about the next hit in the future.

Sure BP’s hands are covered in death and oil in the gulf. But so are ours! So don’t be too quick to pickup and throw that oil-covered stone. It may just hit you in the head!

Some friends of mine are working on a startup. It’s a shift-sharing site called workflip.com.

I think it’s a great idea and they’re approaching it in a really strong way. I think they’ll do really well. They’re almost ready to start taking names for their beta. If you’re a shift worker, keep an eye on this one.

Last night I went to a talk by Chase Jarvis. He’s a very good speaker, very personable and passionate about creating. He introduced a philosophy that he’s spoken about before:
* create
* share
* sustain
* (repeat)

Sharing and sustaining, for me, are the easy part. He spoke about sharing through social media, blogs, websites, etc. and sustaining by doing the stuff you need to do to make money and cover your bills so that you can do the stuff you want to do: create.

Awesome, inspirational, and so true.

When he was talking about creating, he kept coming back to the statements “Shoot what you’re passionate about” and “Shoot with your personal style/background in the images”. The 2nd one is not so bad: don’t clone other people’s work (except maybe as an exercise), shoot from your creativity and your heart and the images will sing.

On the topic of “Shoot what you’re passionate about” he started asking people in the audience what they were passionate about and I found myself shrinking away from the question. Squirming in my seat. Thinking “Oh Gods, don’t pick me.” I thought, “If he picks me I could say ‘diving’ because I used to be passionate about that…”! This has started a bit of an introspective process for me.

Where has my passion gone? Have I ever had any? It certainly seems to be missing.

It seems, in thinking about it, there is nothing I’m passionate about these days. My work is enjoyable, but not my passion. My home, is comfortable. My wife, I love and she’s my best friend. My pets are great. My hobbies are there. New tech is interesting. But nothing really excites me. Nothing wakes me up in the morning with a “What a great day, today I get to do X!”.

In the past, I’ve had goals. I think those goals, self-set, were things that highlighted my passion of the time. Become a scuba instructor, learn something new, build something, etc. These have all disappeared without new ones to take their places. So far, attempts at new ones, have no sticking power.

My world has no bright colours, just a monotone of gray. How boring and WTF! I’ve started to feel, somehow, cheated. Stuck in a rut of my own creating and not really sure how to break out.

Is this what causes mid-life crisis?

Technorati Profile

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 :/