Month: June 2009

I am renting a host slice at slicehost.com. I decided to use these guys instead of one of the millions of places like hostgator or site5 because I end up with a web host that’s entirely under my control and I can use Apache’s multi-site thing to host several low-volume sites on there without it becoming expensive, plus have somewhere clients can go see what I can do. I also have total control of the slice and if it starts to squeak I can easily upgrade it or move the database to another slice without any hassle. A 256MB slice costs $20/mo with an extra $5/mo for a daily and weekly backup.

They have lots of tutorials telling you how to set up your machine once you’ve bought it.  Start here. Very useful if you’ve installed Ubuntu server anyway and want to get it all hardened and safe.

Colin also recommended these guys for fixed assets like images and so on to take the load off your machine. Cheap as chips and he has’t managed to use up the introductory $15 even though he owns a high traffic site.

I’ve been learning how to set up company email using google apps standard. So there’s now a mail on pharmarketeer.com for me and Rosie. Need to spend some pennies on cheapo business cards for when I go to networking events. Pharmarketeer has a lighthouse as its logo, and I have’t the dosh to pay someone who can do logos yet, so will go for Staples basic stuff for now.

But it all works, I’m not scared any more. I’ve done what I can – I am talking to people and showing what I can do.

Working with Mike on krowdbuy (watch this space – still very early days) and very excited about that too.

Also had a good time at the Kagu Ling opening yesterday and really looking forward to the Karmapa’s visit to Manchester at the end of July. 

Having a meeting tomorrow about some contract work that will keep the wolf at bay so that’s cool too.

I’m the happiest I’ve been in years even though I’m broke and facing a ton of work to sort it out. Humans are weird.

I’ve still not been paid and must now be owed the best part of £10k. The company I still nominally work for is bust but has’t been wound up yet so I can’t get a P45 and the redundancy £. Bizarrely,  if I resign I will lose it and become just another creditor. I wo’t have a P45 and can’t sign on so my mortgage protection wo’t kick in because I made myself “intentionally unemployed”.

So I’m stuck until the company is wound up or I find another job and write the present nonsense off to experience. Hopefully get the redundancy dosh from the government eventually. This amounts to less than a third of what I’m actually owed if it ever arrives, in ever-decreasing proportions because it’s based on 8 weeks at a nominal amount.

The client we did the work for are willing to take us on as contractors and that means there should be something coming in, but it wo’t fix the hole, just let me start slowly paying my debts off again. The rate is much lower than the usual commercial rate too but that may change once the cashflow starts (another 8-12 weeks though). Or it might not (cynic, moi?). This is’t starting until the 1st July anyway.

The upside of this is that I have started to think like a business owner again and have started up my own company.  This is why I’ve published my novel and am starting to get my other stuff together – I want lots of small-to-medium income streams rather than one reasonable-but-unreliable one.

I had a moment this morning when I got up and I was in despair. I said that I could see us losing the house and all the things we’ve worked so hard for over the last 20 years. Rosie’s response was oh no we’re not. If Rosie says it it must be true, she’s much taller than me and I have to do what I’m told! Never cross a six-foot red head.

The Buddhist in me knows that impermanence is the lot of us all and you can’t fight having to lose stuff eventually. But I’d rather hang on until I’m losing it because I die of old age or give it away because I don’t need it any more, rather than some self-deception on the part of my former (but he is’t, yet!) boss.

If you need a Ruby on Rails programmer with 2 years’ Rails experience and 20 years of systems analysis and whatnot, contact me on francis AT francisfish.com.  Here is my CV  francis_fish_short_cv.doc

Onward and upward.

Finally!

The direct url is here.

Here is the blurb from the back cover.

We find ourselves at some time in the future “After the Revolutio”, following the trials and tribulations of Jay, an adjuster/investigator for WorldNet. Jay tries to solve the mystery of a priest drowned in his font and is pursued by the shadowy figure of Kervas. Before the Revolution Odine was trying to understand her place in the world. The interweaving of the fragments of her life and Jay’s help Jay to find out who and what he is. Odine was made by germ line manipulation and follows the Buddha in her own way.

Go on, buy one, you know you want to!

I redid the text based on my proof copy and am now pretty pleased with the result.

I created a new version of the book and have ordered 5 copies to see what they look like.

After that I will start o  promoting the book here and other places and see if people will buy it.

Quite excited.

I’ve just set it up so the primary domain here is www.francisfish.com.

Remarkably painless, I set up email using google apps a while ago so now my vanity project is complete. The old domain will still work. I have lots of google goodness I don’t want to lose.

The next thing to do here is put some links up to my books so (hopefully) people will start buying them, or at least reading them. I’m going to spend a bit of time on that now.

I got the first proof copy of Archive Fragments from lulu a couple of days ago and have just about finished realising what fonts work a’ stuff. I chose the Royal book size which is slightly bigger than A5 and it does’t work, the pages are too big. You can revise your project until you’re happy so that’s what I will do. I got the cover image of the bloody hand from istockphoto and like it. I thought it was a left hand until I had a d’oh moment and realised that it was the print of a right one.

I’m a little scared of publishing AF because it does’t do a lot of compromising and might offend some people as it is quite violent in places. I feel we have the right to be offensive and censorship in principle is bad, people have the right to their views and weird prelidictions but no right to ram them down someone else’s throat – the off switch is a good switch. But then someone talks to me about young teens accessing violent porn on t’interweb and I’m thrown into confusion.

There is’t an easy answer. I think all us adults need to think it through and decide what we’re comfortable with, regardless of what the tabloid papers think.

And I still have’t been paid…