Its been almost 2 months since I was made redundant. Two weeks after The Day I flew off to Malaysia & Vietnam for almost 3 weeks and since then I've been bumming around at home.
I spent a couple of days wrestling with my real estate agent regarding their failure to inform me of a rental increase. They had sent out a letter back in April as required by s.45 of the Residential Tenancies Act 1987 but that had failed to arrive in my mail box. But whatever, mail occasionally, if infrequently, goes missing. The dumb part was that I continued to pay my old rent rate as I had no idea of the increase, and for 5 months they failed to informed me that I was under paying. Finally, in November, when I was in Vietnam, they SMSed me because they claimed I had fallen 1 week in arrears. Anyway after much to-ing and fro-ing (including one call where the agent put me on hold for 50 minutes, then when I hung up & rang back because I couldn't tell whether the line had dropped out as there was no hold music, she claimed that she'd put me on hold for only 15 minutes and that I had hung up!) I ended up contacting the owner directly as it was clear the agent I was dealing with was of less than average IQ, and we, like reasonable human adults, agreed to settle on a 50/50 split of the difference. The sad part was that the agent appears not to be penalised despite the mistake being theirs, though I am happy that I was able to inform the owner of their competency.
For the most part I've been watching TV, cooking, running, swimming, surfing, reading, and playing lots of games. Life is pretty much what I think it should be - stress free and filled with stuff I actually enjoy doing. In fact, Steam says I've played 34.1 hours of Team Fortress 2 in the past 2 weeks. It actually got as high at 38 hours but I was out yesterday so the rolling total dropped. That's pretty much equivalent to 1 week of full time work. :D If anyone's interested its only $10 on Steam.
When I'm not gaming I'm mostly reading stuff related to the sekret company Stephen & I are starting. Its been fun looking at all the services I largely ignored whilst working at Yahoo! - simple things like a decent bookmarking service and setting up a shared, hosted Wiki took us about 2 days of trialling various services. We eventually settled on ma.gnolia and pbwiki.
I was surprised to find very limited support for proper group behaviour amongst the milion bookmarking services out there. ma.gnolia was one of only two services we found that allows group members to add/edit/moderate bookmarks belonging to a group - everyone else makes a user own every bookmark, and thus if I add a bookmark to our group, Stephen can't edit it, and vice versa. Pretty dumb for collaborative bookmarking.
On the wiki front Yahoo! used TWiki, and it was pretty much the only wiki I had any real experience with. Thus I was pleasantly surprised by how easy pbwiki was to use in comparison, though I have to caveat that by saying our current wiki needs are very limited compared to Yahoo!. Still, I wonder if Yahoo! could save itself a lot of pain by using something more user friendly.
Away from the tools we're reading lots about small business, how to run companies and all that kind of stuff. I've been pleasantly surprised at the very good resources various government departments have put together for small business. I was going to link to the ATO which also has a good "starting a company" section but I got this:
I think their IT department needs to look up "decoupling", and "redundancy". (Despite this sad display I do think the ATO generally does provide good services. I've read a lot of the ATO website over the years, and I find their processes & systems are generally reliable.) However, it does remind me of a ^brilliant idea I had many moons ago - that websites should have fixed opening hours from 9-5pm, just like all the retail stores.
Anyway to wrap this up - everyone's been asking what our company will be doing and the short answer is that we're not 100% sure. Many of the entrepreneurial stories we've read suggest that folks often start off in one direction only to end up pursuing another (possibly related) track so we're still discussing various approaches. The other reason for being somewhat secretive is that vapourware hype is lame. When I joined Yahoo! back in 2001 one of the golden rules of PR was that we would never announce anything until it was live - the rationale being that when users hear about a service they should be able to jump on the service immediately and not have to wait weeks or months for it to be released. I still firmly believe in that.
