blog

September - November

Posted: 19-11-11

Chickens, painting, fencing and coding. All part of day-to-day life on a modern-day New Zealand lifestyle block.

I took a week off work about a month back and made a concerted effort on the Chook-house out the back of the house. Outstanding you understand in that I'm quite pleased with the result, but more to the point it's been a year since I started the bugger when Olive was only days old and fresh out of the hospital (Note, she'll be one on November 30th!).

So from a design in a book I got for Christmas 2 years ago to a complete structure, with additional enclosed run and 2 ex-battery hens (Bernie and Bertha), even laying the occasional egg - is fantastic and we're well-pleased. Of course, in terms of land use and potential, getting chickens is the most lightweight thing one can do with a block, but I think a year and a half since we built the house and moved-in, with a one year old baby daughter and full-time jobs, we're not doing so badly.

Our neighbour lives down the road in Waikanae, but keeps two of his prize-winning cows in the neighbouring paddock. The actual prize winner "Kapiti Princess" has this calf. A cheeky wee bugger...actually not so wee, she's almost as big as her mum. She seems to think the grass is always greener and was barging through her fence, through our fence and into our block, munching everything in sight. It was getting ridiculous when I would arrive home from work at 5:30 to be faced with a large, somewhat obstinate quadraped, staring me down through the windscreen. She knew quite well where to run, to get back to her paddock but decided she knew better where she wanted to go - pretty much anywhere else. I got pretty adept and running a wide arc and shoe-ing her back through the fence.

The last time I had to chase her away, before I had a word with the nighbour about fixing up his fence, she ran back the wrong way and ended-up in the other neighbours field with all the dairy cows and followed them off for milking!

I've since replaced a load of rotten rounds and run an extra length of wire down the bottom so if the calf manages to get out of her paddock again, she'll have a little more trouble getting into ours.

As if being a dad, holding down a full time job, painting the house and all that weren't enough, I've gotten involved with a couple of mates in 2 different web tech-startups. A startup is basically what your dad used to call "starting a company" - but "startup" sounds so much more 1998 when everyone and his wife was vying for venture capital in the next web-company.

The stuff I'm working on is actually with 2 companies, one of which I'm writing code for and the other, due to time constraints, I'm only keeping tabs on trying to advise as best I can so that I can get involved 100% if/when time allows (!).

Of course, I am no fool, and I realise the kind of shitstorm I'm potentially letting myself in for, heaps of work, no time and a ton of stress all for potentially nowt. But the way I see it is that it's an investment - the time I'm spending in both that is. I've been reading Eric Reis's book "The Lean Startup" and I'm still absorbing its contents, but the basic tenets of measuring user-behaviour, a minimum viable product instead of a project with all the bells and whistles at the outset, each make 100% sense to me.

I don't see the world being in a fit state to support pensioners aged 65 (or 67 depending on where you are) and I really don't see myself working for a boss, at least full time, for the rest of my life, so these are a decent stab at an alternative way of earning enough money to pay the bills and build that solar array I've been banging-on about for 3 years.

It occurred to me again yesterday what led me to this conclusion about my immediate future. I've been thinking about this sort of thing since I was a kid, when my Dad was seemingly starting up a new company in the garage-cum-study every week (He was in Palto-Alto back in the day, vying for VC himself, but never quite got it. Even his back of the napkin pitches weren't up to the mark). More recently, Tasia and I visited an Alpaca farm in the Wairarapa where the farmers made money selling the wool off the Alpaca but where the steady income came from one of the owner's who had created a web-based software product for Alpaca management and provided tech-support, maintenance and new features for it 24-7.

I loved this idea, it rang some internal bells at just the right pitch. Run your day job on the one hand (An Alpaca farm in this case) and as a sideline, build a software product and sell it to a user-base you know very well. This is definitely the case with one of the guys I'm working with and as and when we release something, I'll be sure to let you all in on it.

Cheers for now
Russ