I was over at http://xkcd.com/, prompted by a link from a comment at a blog I follow, when I decided to catch up on the ones I haven’t seen yet. Many interesting ones, but this one stood out and prompted me to make this post:
The last week has been ‘interesting’. A week ago last Friday I got “the call” that told me that (presuming the powers-that-be honor that commitment) I have until the end of Oct to find a new job. The exciting life of a contractor! I have a couple of promising leads so far, but given the agency’s push back on our inflated salaries (if they would clear more people that problem would resolve itself automagically) it is mostly about how small a pay cut I am forced into rather than keeping the same pay or increasing it. That would be so much easier to deal with if we didn’t automatically increase our spending to match our income, but such is life, eh?
Regarding the greenhouse/pool, we are pretty much done with the framing and have the plumbing roughed in and now are starting on wiring. Regarding the plumbing, we have an interesting problem: when pressurized with air the system leaks in places we can’t identify (going from 85 PSI to nada overnight). Because the bubble test wasn’t locating the leak I put water in the lines (the system is currently isolated from the rest of our plumbing) to see if we could see a leak that way. Overnight, guess what? The pressure went from 85 all the way down to 84. It seems there really is a leak, but we can’t find any wet spots. When we left yesterday the pressure had dropped down to about 81.5 (hard to be precise as there is a bit of parallax when viewing the gauge), still no signs of leaking water. Next weekend should be interesting, but my real worry is we have zero pressure and no signs of water.
I have been considering crowd funding for my DNA research, but can’t get past the idea that this is the wrong time to publicize my efforts. It is well-known that if you generate too much enthusiasm for your product-to-be before you can sell your product you do more harm than good. If the posited customer base really is there then you reveal it to competitors (who generally have deeper pockets) who now are incentivized to move into the market. On the other hand, if you _fail_ to get the expected consumer interest, you now have made an even larger headache if you try to find investors later on. As such I am likely to drop that line of approach. Though I abhor the idea of promoting the idea publicly (I have nothing but a bad taste in my mouth from my last foray into publicly discussing my project ideas, maybe I will blog upon that some day), and this argument could be just massaging that prejudice, I do think in this case keeping my mouth shut might pay off going forward. I do, though, have a big company that is thinking about purchasing my IP, but that company moves in slow motion and will probably want to really low ball any offer. Unless they want to negotiate, I am not expecting to get anything meaningful from them when they finally do get around to making a decision.
Not much else going on (and not being grabbed by anything I read on line), hence the dearth of posting. Sorry to let all my reader down…
