Three Weeks In

It's been roughly 3 weeks since I landed in LA and began working on the new business with Jeff.

Interestingly, I feel a lot like I did when I started my new job at Microsoft, and when I started other exciting new jobs before that. One of the fun aspects of having kept this blog is the ability to look back over my posts from June/July of 2005 and see that same spark of enthusiasm for starting something new then.

As with all of the challenging jobs I've started in the past, when the end of the day comes (or night as the case may be), I find myself feeling pretty exhausted. We've been working from roughly 8:30am until any time between 11pm-1am, 6-7 days a week, with relatively few breaks. Most days, I find myself eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in front of my computer. Today, however, I escaped to eat a bowl of chili for dinner in front of the TV while watching 10 minutes of COPS 2.0 on G4, and now I'm taking a second break to write this blog post. One upside on the work/life balance front is that my parents have an awesome hot tub, which we use to wind down 4 or 5 nights a week. Not so bad.

Besides a single visit to an LA geek dinner, and a night out roughly once a week, I feel like I've more or less put my social life on hold. I've also tabled my Mandarin lessons because even with my ChinesePod loaded iPhone, I don't seem to have free time to listen. I'm trying hard not to give up the gym, though we've only ended up making it once or twice a week so far.

I don't expect too much to change over the next several months while we try hard to get something up and running, and as a result, my posts here will likely continue to dwindle. Rather than sharing random thoughts on a wide range of subjects as I have in the past, I'll likely move towards juts posting sporadic personal updates from time to time.

That said, Jeff and I have started blogging about our experiences from day zero in building a new technology company. We call it fluxcapacity (the blog, not the company). If you're interested in such things (topics will range broadly from technology to business), and would like to follow our progress, I invite you to subscribe.

Hello iPhone.

Ten reasons buying an iPhone was a sound financial decision:

10. It was $300 less expensive than the first Smartphone I imported in 2004.

9. I just recently signed a new 2 year at&t contract anyway.

8. With Visual Voicemail, I'll actually save money I would've otherwise spent having to make a call to listen to messages.

7. Since it has an iPod built in, I'll save money and time by not buying, charging, and syncing a 2nd mp3 player device in the future.

6. Jeff and I will need to test our own UI on many devices and platforms.

5. As a technology entrepreneur, it's critical that I investigate and understand various advances in technology (and thus, one of these is obviously next).

4. It was really fun to play with today at Mind Camp (like band camp, for nerds!)

3. My last phone's LCD cracked then died after dropping it one too many times over the weekend (i.e. the real catalyst for it all).

2. After dropping my last phone again when pulling it out of my pocket in the Apple store, I was able to secure a rugged iPhone case to protect my investment for only an additional $30.

1. Simply put, it really fucking rocks. Get one. Really.