Where's startup mom???

If you are wondering where I've gone my blog has just moved:

http://startupmom.wordpress.com/

In Memory

I still remember the day like it was yesterday. We lived on the West Coast so we were still asleep when it happened. The phone rang and I grabbed it since no one normally calls us that early. It was my sister. I started walking down the stairs so I wouldn't wake up my husband. She goes, "I had to call someone. Mom didn't answer. It's so terrible." I'm terrified that something has happened to her and go, "What's wrong?" She goes "You don't know? Oh My God, Two planes crashed into the twin towers. They collapsed. There is nothing left."

For the first time in my life reality surpassed anything my imagination could think of. Thoughts of car crashes, sickness where totally erased by complete shock. I collapsed half way down the stairs and just sat there in shock. After that I don't remember a single word of the conversation. I know we consoled each other. I remember turning on the tv in disbelief and watching the pictures play. I remember my mother-in-law calling in a panic because my sister-in-law took the subway under the towers every morning. I remember finally reaching my sister-in-law hours later and finally breathing a sigh of relief.

Today is in memory of those who perished and those who's lives were touched. Today I think of my friend who didn't celebrate his birthday that year. Of my step mother-in-law who had to run from the cloud of dust as the towers collapsed. Of my grandfather who's retirement party was at the restaurant on top of the tower and who's heart was broken that day. Of skies that were eerily quiet. Of the shock when the first plane flew over my head again. Mostly I think of all those we lost and send them and their loved ones a prayer of support.

Monday Organizing

I've decided to dedicate Mondays to thinking about organizing life, house and business. For starters I've decided to come up with a short to do list. I used to make LONGGGGG ones and they were just depressing. I'm going to create a few categories and pick one item in each category to work on. Thank you to WAH Web Mommy for her link to "10 Easy Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Day" on Freelance Switch. It inspired me to create a shorter to do list for this week. One that is actually doable.

• Business - Work on the Ruby on Rails tutorial 1/2 hour day this week.
• Home - Get both cars emissions tested ASAP! (One is about to be overdue!)
• Personal - Do at least one thing relaxing just for me. Maybe reading in a nice bubble bath.
• Family - Pick out and order Claire's new bed & bedding so we can transition from the crib before she realizes she's tall enough to climb out. (ACK!)
• Family & Friends - Finish the photo book birthday gifts. Work on them 1/2 hour day. (Also very very late.)

For more organizing I'm going to start working on a set rotating menu schedule so I don't have to think so much about what's for dinner. It will be based on flexible categories so I can fill in the details based on what's available at the farmers market and store. I'm starting with breakfast:

• Monday - Hot cereal & Fruit
• Tuesday - Cold cereal, Yogurt & Fruit (Busy AM)
• Wednesday - Waffle or Pancakes & Fruit (Make or frozen)
• Thursday - Cold cereal, Yogurt & Fruit (Busy AM)
• Friday - Hot cereal & Fruit
• Saturday - Cold cereal, Yogurt & Fruit (Farmers Market Morning)
• Sunday - Something fancy, baked yogurt, dutch apple pancake, etc

Finally I'm going to start rebuilding my routines for dealing with stuff around the house. If you need help with household routines my favorite site by a million miles is Fly Lady. I admit that I protested against a lot of the stuff on her site at first but wow she knows her stuff. It's the first organizing system that has had a chance of working for me. For my daily routine I will:

• Get up showered and dressed first thing
• Wipe down the bathroom surfaces every morning
• Spend 15 minutes clean one cluttered are of the house
• Do one full load of laundry every day
• Pick up the toys right after my daughter goes to bed
• Finish kitchen clean up (dishes, sink, counters) before relaxing for the evening

For a weekly routine I've started to put tasks on some days:

• Monday - Errands (Supplement farmers market food from the co-op, dry cleaning, etc)
• Tuesday & Thursday - Work AM if Claire likes daycare again (Now that's another post), Garden & Play outside with Claire in the afternoon
• Saturday - Farmers Market Shopping AM, Family Time in the Afternoon
• Sunday - Relax, Check Calendar for the Week, Think about new goals

Ok, off to take that shower that should have been first. In my defense I was up most of the night with a sick child. There was no way I was risking a shower right next to her room waking her until she was ready!

If your computer crashed right now...

Where would your data be? I ask this as I sit at my computer ready to bang my head on the screen. I did a major update to my development system, rebooted and crash. I have a very nice doorstop. The good news is I've done some backup. The bad news is not enough. I forgot to sync my latest changes before the update. I also forgot to take a recent snapshot of my system so now I'll be reinstalling half the programs again. I really should have know better.

So what should you do in case your system dies?

1. Back up everything you care about, frequently. It should be to a separate medium not attached to your computer. Preferably in a separate building or even a separate state. Mandatory if you live somewhere prone to natural disasters.


2. Use source control for development. If you've never used it source control will keep track of your changes to a document over time. Every time you check in your changes it will save a snapshot of the documents current state. If you your computer crashes, you accidentally delete your document, or just decide you hate your latest changes you can revert back to an earlier version. If you set up your source control on a different computer then you have a backup of what ever project you are working on. This is useful for programming, web design, or any project where you will be making a lot of changes over time. I'm currently using cvs since it's free and I can store the main source repository on a computer I share with friends.


3. Create a system restore kit. If your system is dead the last thing you want to be doing is tearing through your office closet looking for your OS install disk. You should have collected in one spot everything you need to completely reinstall your system at a moments notice. In a best case scenario you have fancy (expensive) backup equipment that lets you take a complete snapshot of your system. System dies you take your last snapshot and restore it to working order. Since most of us can't afford corporate backup systems the next best thing is keeping all your install cds in one place. Create a backup cd of any software you downloaded off the net. You never know when the version you downloaded two years ago will no longer be available. Include your latest backup of data and finally write a list of all the steps you need to take for a full system restore. If you're not sure write as much as you can. Better to struggle with it now, then when you are trying to recover from a crisis.
4. Use VMware and its snapshot features. Do you wish you had the fancy corporate backup tools I just mentioned, the ability to restore a system by simply saying restore? How about a few extra test servers without paying for them? Does it sound to good to be true? Not with VMware Workstation. It's a program that creates virtual machines on an existing machine. At anytime you can create a snapshot of the virtual system and save it as an instant backup. I'm typing this blog on a windows box while my virtual linux machine is downloading updates in the background, one piece of hardware with two operating systems. I reinstalled it by restoring an old snapshot. If I'd had a recent one I wouldn't even need to download the updates. However there is a cost. The systems are sharing the same resources. My system is a few years old so it slows to a crawl if I start Outlook at the same time. I probably couldn't run more then one virtual machine at a time. However one is better then the 0 test systems I had before.
5. Follow Through! This is where I should follow my own advice. A backup is useless if you don't do two things. First, test your backup. I can remember at least one case of a fancy corporate backup system that recorded a whole bunch of nothing. This was discovered the first time someone needed the data. Second, keep your backup up to date. Let me repeat so I remember myself. Keep your backup up to date. Maybe I should make myself write that 20 times on a blackboard. Now excuse me while I go spend the next couple hours rebuilding a system that I could already have up and running.

One Step Forward, Twenty Steps Back

It pays to network. I definitely pays to talk to friends who have experience doing what you are working on. It really pays to listen to them before you get involved in your project. This is the second time I've discussed my web program with a friend and I've heard, "Have you checked out Ruby on Rails?" The first time I blew it off since I was already learning PHP/MySQL and didn't feel like starting over from scratch. This time I paid attention. Probably because of the following conversation:

Me: "Oh, I'll look but I just finished creating the user management system. I don't want to start from scratch again."

Friend: "This is going to sound insane, but Rails is so much better at that that it may very well actually be worth rewriting."

This particular friend is fairly practical. He's not the type to suggest rewriting just for the fad of the day. If he suggests it there's a reason so I decided to check it out. I did a quick scan of a tutorial. Oh my goodness! It's beautiful. It takes out all the mundane, annoying parts of web programming and makes them just happen while leaving you free to do the creative side of things. If it's as good as it looks I can throw away everything I've done except the database design and still save time in the long run. I just wish I'd listened to the first person who mentioned it to me. Starting tomorrow it's time to back up and restart. However I think I can make up most of the time in a week or two at most if it's as good as it looks!

Let's Try This Again

Mind set, You really have to be in the right mind set to work from home. I'm not sure where I was before but I wasn't there. I think I had to get over some feelings that were seriously getting in my way.

"What am I thinking??? I can't do this!" If you are mentally sabotaging yourself you will not be able to get anywhere. You need to have faith in yourself. Questioning is good but use it as a means of finding solutions, not beating down your idea. For a while every time I'd sit down to work on the program I'd think "What if I do it wrong? What if people think it is dumb? What if?" and then I'd barely get anything done. At some point it dawned on me that I had incredible confidence in myself when I was working for someone else. I knew I was doing a very good job. I'm doing similar work for myself. A little fear of the unknown shouldn't unnerve me. It should excite me. So now I have my confidence back. I know I can do this!

"I can do everything myself." Um... Yeah. I can keep a perfectly clean house. Care for a 2 year old 24x7. Cook yummy home cooked meals daily. Spend quality time with friends and family. Start a business. Oh yeah, and have a nervous breakdown if I even actually tried to make time for all that in one week. :) It's time to make trade offs. Either I pick them or they will be picked for me. As I've seen over the past months usually at the expense of getting anything done for the business. My first trade off was to arrange for a little free time. This week I started my daughter in a daycare/preschool program for 2 hours on Tuesday and Thursday. She's reached the age where she gets wildly excited to be around kids so I thought this would meet a need of hers and of mine. Today was the second day. She actually struggled to get out of my arms the moment we were in the door. She clung to me when I said I was leaving but was distracted away in about 5 seconds and was ignoring me when I walked out the door. I think this is harder on me then her! Four hours a week doesn't seem like much but I already see my stress level plummeting. Next on my list I'm finding a house cleaner!

"Schedule, who needs a schedule?" I do! I am notorious for being disorganized and winging it. Being able to wing it is a great skill but it doesn't help balance the 20 hours of stuff that needs to be fit in 10 hours of time. I need priorities and a plan for attacking the day so I can get the critical stuff done and still enjoy a walk to the playground with my 2 year old. I've updated my online calendar with events. I'm starting to rebuild my flylady (www.flylady.com) routines for the day and the week. Next I need to fit in some time for organizing work supplies and children's toys so Claire and I can both find stuff. Finally I'm going to start tracking my work hours so I see how much time I'm actually giving to business activities each week.

Well here we go again. Let's see if I can get serious this time!

Procrastination

I could tell you about everything that's been going on lately and it would make a great list of excuses. I've been telling them to myself for almost two weeks now. There's always a good reason each day why I don't have much time to work on the business. My child's teething. I've been up to late. There's too much to do around the house. We're hanging curtains this weekend. Etc, etc, etc. The problem is there will always be good excuses not to work on the business. I guarantee that unless you are independently wealthy with no family or friends your life will have things to keep it busy. I know mine sure always does. What it comes down to is I'm procrastinating and the excuses are what I tell myself to keep from feeling guilty.

Why am I procrastinating? I'm afraid of doing something wrong. It's a lot easier to do nothing than to do something and have to face the consequences. The only problem is you get what you give. Do nothing. Get nothing. I'm not getting anything. It's time to face up to the fact that it's better to try and fail then to not try and definitely fail. :) Now to give myself a kick and stop my latest form of procrastinating. Writing this blog post. I'm off to get something done.

What's In A Name

I'm stuck. I'm trying to think of a name for my business. Thinking of names is actually easy. Thinking of names that have a free web domain is hard! I've been using GoDaddy.com to test possible names since not only will it tell me if a name is taken but it will give suggestions of similar ones that aren't. However I'm still totally stuck. To add insult to injury the first name I thought of and loved turned out to be a porn site!!! Proving that if you can think of a word someone can relate it to porn. Here is my current criteria for a name:

• Available as a .com. I definitely don't have the capitol to buy a domain from someone just because it has a cool name.
  
• Easy to spell. If I have to pause for a second then my customers might as well. (I'm not a good speller so this is a very good test.)
• Creates an image in peoples minds of what my web site is all about. For example, www.onlinemoms.com (which I'm sure is already taken) is too generic. I want someone to see or hear the name and immediately form a picture in their head of what they will find there.

I'd share some of the names I'd ruled out but I'm not yet ready to give any more details on the sites content. Please wish me luck. Time to pull out a thesaurus.

Thank you google!

I'm making progress on the technical front. (On a side not I promise this entire Blog will not be technical... but in the beginning a web site needs a bunch of technical stuff.) My virtual test system is up and running. I've enabled Apache, PHP and MySQL. It was actually very, very easy. I did a google search on Fedora and MySQL and found a web site that told me exactly what to do step by step:

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/linux/install_apache.htm

Thank you google for making it so easy to learn from other people! Remember when ever you are stuck on something try a couple searches using different terms and see if someone else has already been down the same path. The only glitch I had was when MySQL didn't want to start because resolveip couldn't resolve my systems hostname and IP Address. Since my system gets it's IP dynamically using DHCP I never bothered to set a host name. To solve my problem I had to do the following (Time to return the favor and hope someone with the same problem will stumble on this in a search since they may not be convinently married to a networking expert):

• run 'ifconfig' to find the ip address
• run 'hostname ' to set a hostname
• edit /etc/hosts to add a new line with the ip address and hostname (I'll need to update this everytime I reboot or restart the network since it could change.)

Now my current todo list is:

• Find a name
• Set up source control using CVS so I can keep track of the code I write
  
• Fix my daughters bedtime... how in the world did I let it get so messed up she wasn't asleep until 9! It should be 7:30.
• Unpack the last couple of boxes (and the mess hidden behind them) in the corner of the living room.
• Cook and freeze the chicken and beef I bought for advanced meal planning. (Better do this before it goes bad.)

Sometimes You Just Feel Dumb

Ok... before starting brief inventory of the house:

• Daughter is currently taking a nap
• Dishes and toys are all picked up
• Dinner is planned and I just need to reheat and make the vegetable
• Laundry that was left to sit to long wet is being rewashed on hot with vinegar to get rid of the musty smell.
• Junk hot spots were worked on.
  
• Floor should be swept... but isn't that crunchy

Ok.. it looks like I have a few minutes to work on this business. Right now I'm in the middle of getting my technical environment running on my virtual test machine. So far I have VMware installed and Fedore Core 6 (linux) installed on a virtual machine. It was not as easy as I planned. I got the install finished and my test system wouldn't boot. I had to update my copy of VMware to fix a bug and try again. Finally after some hair pulling I had a working system... kind of.

After my install my virtual machine was crawling slow. I was ready to pull my hair out all over again and buy a real test system. I hadn't even started any of the software I needed so I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Luckily I off handedly mentioned the problem to my husband. This is the point where it really pays to talk to other people (preferably experts) about the problems you are having before you make any rash decisions. He glanced over at my computer for about 3 seconds and goes, "What's it worth to you to have your performance fixed?" At this point I paused... cause I could tell from the gleam in his eye he knew exactly what was going on... and I was going to feel really really dumb for not figuring it out. I finally push down my pride and go, "Ok, what's wrong?" Two minutes later I had a nice fast system.

Now what had I done wrong? I'd left my virtual test system running it's windows like environment. If you aren't technical think of it this way. My computer is a painter that is making a picture on the screen. By leaving that environment running on the test machine I was asking the painter to create two different pictures, one with each hand. No wonder it was swamped. All my husband had to do was switch the virtual system to a text environment and my performance issues were gone.

So what lesson did I learn today? Sometimes you will just feel dumb and that's ok. The smart thing to do is surround yourself with lots of other smart people you can ask for help. Even in areas where you think you know what you are doing you might still miss the obvious. (Especially if you've been up half the night with a sick toddler.) Make sure you have good sounding boards for your ideas and use them often.

Start Point

Having played with multiple business ideas over the past 6 months I believe I've finally found one worth spending some time on. I'm officially committing myself to the dual jobs of stay at home mom and part time web entrepreneur. My idea is a web site for moms... but for now I'm keeping the details secret. As a start point I'm taking stock of my strengths and weaknesses and creating a beginning to do list.

Strengths

• Programming background - I've got a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering and have been programming computers for over 9 years. To save money I'll be doing all my own design and development, at least until the site is up and running.
• Some management experience - It's not much but some is better than nothing. At my last job I was an engineer but I managed a small project from start to finish, negotiated contracts with vendors and trained support personnel. I also worked closely with other departments like marketing, support and operations so I at least have a feel for some of their issues.
• Market Knowledge - One piece of advice I read that always stuck with me is if you are going to start a business stick to areas you are knowledgeable. I guess I'm going to have to skip gourmet restaurants and wind surfing supply shops for now. (Please never, never, never ask my family about the time I tried wind surfing.) In this case I'm well versed in both the technical field and being a mom so it makes the perfect combo for me.
  
• Energy - Ok.. I admit that having spent the last 5 days taking care of a toddler with a cold leaves me lagging in the energy department. However I still count it as a strength. Have a year and a half out of the work force has left the working creative part of my brain ready to go. Plus while my current job is sometimes physically tiring emotionally it's left me overflowing. Unlike when I was working my migraine medicine is sitting on a high shelf gathering dust right now.
• Family and friends - I have a great network of supportive family and friends with a variety of interests. My husband has already been a great sport about answering my system administration questions. My dad manages a business and I've already gotten several good suggestions from him while I was considering different ideas.
  

Weaknesses

• Web Design - I'm technical. I can make a website but making a pretty web site is another matter entirely. I'm going to need to get some design advise from my more artistic family and friends and budget some money to pay for a web designer.
• Web Programming - I might be good at programming but I have almost no experience using MySQL and PHP. I've played with them before but not to a production level. I bought myself "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL" by O'Reilly to use as a tutorial and reference.
• Business experience - My degree is engineering and my experience is primarily engineering. I've never ran a business before. I've read lots about starting a business but that's not the same as hands on work. I've started reading to expand my knowledge base into other areas. My favorite so far is "Marketing to Moms" by Maria Bailey.
  
• Limited time - Will be working primarily in the evenings. I need to get my days more organized so I don't have a ton of house chores to do after Claire's asleep. Good thing she thinks chores are fun. (What 18 month old doesn't like playing with a sponge and a bucket of water.)
• Limited money - When I stopped working our income was cut in half. We were good at saving before and have cut back on spending but that leaves a lot less disposable income. I'm going to have to be very careful to keep start up costs at a minimum.
  

Action Items

• Setup source control on a shared machine. - Source control is where programmers store the programs they are working on to make sure they don't accidentally delete it. It also keeps track of changes so if you make a mistake you can go back to an earlier version. A bunch of college friends and I all shared the cost of a system for everyone to use a while a go so I'm going to make use of that resource. I can't use it for my testing since I'll need more control over the system then I can have for that. This is a lot cheaper then buying or running my own system.
  
• Setup virtual test machine using VMWare Workstation - This is a nice money saver. I need a test system that I can do what ever I want to and keep on my internal network. Instead of buying actual hardware I just buy this program. It pretends to be other computers running on my current computer. I can have as many test systems as I want for development. I can also backup copies of them so if I make a mistake I use a copy without having to reset up a system. I'll need real hardware if I test performance but for now this is perfect.
• Start a blog - I guess I can check that one off.
  
• Figure out a name - I had a great one. Right until I checked if the web site was available. Not only was it not available but to add insult to injury it was a porn site! This is going to take some work.
• Unpack the last couple of boxes (and the mess hidden behind them) in the corner of the living room.
  
• Cure the common cold and make teething pain free - Hmm... if I manage this one maybe I should forget about this business. :)