Monday, July 24, 2006

"Did you release the software yet?"

You know how kids can be: You're on a trip and—just after you leave your neighborhood—the question, "Are we there yet?" rings out from the back seat. I've pretty much trained my family to not do that when we are on the road. I think the threat was, "Ask that one more time and you can walk the rest of the way to find out just how far we are from done!"

Well the new question from my urchins is, "Did you release the software yet?" Now I can't really complain about this one. I was supposed to start beta testing it three weeks ago, but life keeps getting in the way. Besides the full-time job and the three teens to manage, I have commitments at my church and random chaos issues. One of those issues had to do with my web development.

I was using a nice, simple tool to put up a nice, simple website. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a control freak and the nice, simple tool was not letting me change certain things in either a nice or simple way. This caused me to research more annoying and complex ways to enhance the nice, simple tool so I could finish my nice, simple website. Long story short: the nice, simple tool is out and I'm back to using a big iron web publishing tool that lets me have full control.

Anyway, I have the site up and I'm nearly ready to pull the trigger on the beta. Introducing No Thirst Software.

The site is tiny and the content MIA, but I'll get back to that soon and start publishing articles I have wrote along with more details about Debt Quencher once the beta is in full swing. My goal is to have shipped the 1.0 product by mid-September. This should be very doable as long as I stay focused and on course.

So keep your seat belts on, quiet down and for heavens sake stop teasing your sister!!!

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

A Higher Purpose

My wife's a pretty smart lady: she certainly knows how to get me back on track with a few choice words.

All too often I exhaust myself with concerns about minutiae that don't matter. I can take a perfectly nice day and spin tiny incidents into major harbingers of pending disaster. I trip over a wrinkle in the carpeting and decide that the flawed flooring is a sign that buying this expensive house—that can't be sold for the mortgage owed—was a huge mistake and replacing the carpet is now impossible because I have zero excess cash flow and that is not going to change anytime soon, which means, I've failed to live a simple, virtuous life and now I'm a slave to material things that are ruining my quality of life instead of improving it, but I don't have any answers to get myself out of this so I'm doomed to eternal entrapment and suffering no matter how I try to wriggle free.

Yes, I am as nutty as a pecan tree in September. No, this really did not happen; but something pretty close to it did, and continues to happen on an all too often basis.

So how does Judy shift me back on the right course? Two simple words: higher purpose. It's not about what I've done wrong or my missed opportunities; and it's especially not about what I've done right. Regardless of my definition of "worthy," it's about continuing to move forward because what I do is meant for a higher purpose than I can know or understand. If that's true, then everything I do is designed to affect someone else. It's not about me (oh, poor me and my financial foul-ups) and it's not about how successful I am at delivering the next great software product. The software may not sell, the business may bust and I might fail financially, but someone may be saved from suffering because of my experiences. I just may never know if or when this happens. I have to keep getting back up and moving forward assuming that the higher purpose is being fulfilled.

So how's the company launch coming along? Actually, everything is pulling together rather nicely. I'm in the final stages of debugging my software, the feature set is complete, the company logo is done and so is most of the polish on the product. I just have to finish the web site and implement a purchase system for the software to complete the launch. You'd never know it by the way I'm behaving, but an objective observer would probably give me high marks for staying on schedule and focused. Captain Nuttree would tell you that everything is tearing apart at the seams, but why would anyone listen to a loon like him. Instead, just ask my wife, keeper of the Hoctor household sanity: She'll tell you that the higher purpose is being satisfied.