• doing project management on tragically underfunded projects,
• participating in marathon executive meetings, and
• digging around a decade-old PHP/Oracle/ActionScript/Perl codebase that preferred to speak XML/XSLT to itself.

What was I doing? What should I be doing? How could I do it?

The following questions nagged at me. What was I doing? What should I be doing? And most importantly, how could I do it?

I also asked several of my close friends if they had work for me. Actually, I put it this way: find me a couple of months of work and I’ll quit my job. Two of the responded simultaneously; I suddenly had two full time gigs starting immediately. Oh boy, was I busy in Q4 2010. And one of those gigs kept going for the first two months of this year. It’s been thrilling.

Meanwhile, I took the advice of another friend to form a corporation (18INT) and build a real business. Why not? I’ve been doing the Internet consulting thing since 1997. Five years ago, I’d made it my aim to understand the operational part of the business. Having earned something like an MBA of hard knocks, I was ready to start something new.

The past five months have been relatively easy if I don’t think too hard about the intense weeks in November when I was working 10 hour days seven days a week. Now that the Facebook game I’ve been helping with is close to launch, I face perhaps my greatest challenge: signing the next big project.

This is a big challenge in a personal sense only. I’ve worked with plenty of people with a talent for selling. My personal style was to overachieve relentlessly and wait for people to ask me to work on something. I’ve learned that proactively asking how I can help works well, too. I just need to find the right part of me that delivers this request in a genuine and non-self-conscious way.

With less work in March than I prefer, I’m poised to ramp up my new business development skills. I hung out at GDC for half a day last week. I’ll be at Web 2.0 in a few weeks and at ad:tech after that. And I’ll continue to reconnect with my favorite colleagues of the past. Lastly, I hope to find the time to be more diligent in talking about what’s going on with me.

My goal is to sign enough work in 2011 that I must hire one or two full time employees. I know there’s more than enough work out there. So, how can I help you?

Today I present the Atkinson family’s 2010 Christmas card!

Handwritten cards? So last century. Photo cards ordered and sent from Shutterfly? So last decade. E-cards? Not good enough. This year I decided to create a big project for myself and it turned out pretty weird. Good and weird and funny (I hope).

I created the video above with

• the camera in my android phone,
• drawings in GIMP by the kids,
• a poem I found on Project Gutenberg,
• audacity to record the reading,
• music from an old 78 RPM record on archive.org,
• Kdenlive to author the video, and
• Ubuntu Linux (of course).

Hurrah! The days are getting longer! The sun will be brighter! May your life be filled with peace and joy!

Since October, I’ve been working two full time gigs while also making preparations for the launch of my new company, Eighteen Intelligence Corporation. For tax reasons, the paperwork won’t be filed until January. California makes all corporations pay a minimum of $800/year in taxes, so it makes sense to start a company early in the year. I’ve been trying to work about 10-12 hours/day 7 days/week for more than a month. I’ve had to take a day off here and there to prove to my family and myself that I still exist. I see light at the end of the tunnel now, as one of the two projects is going into the bug-checking phase and should launch in a couple of weeks.

I hope the other project wraps up mid-December and leaves me a couple of weeks to enjoy the holidays. I expect to available to you help you with projects in January. How can I help you? Thanks for asking! If you’ve worked with me, you know what I’m capable of. (Horrible, isn’t it?) I’m concentrating on building Internet applications, particularly those integrated with Facebook. I’d enjoy helping you start from a requirements specification and see the project all the way through launch. I can help in a CTO-ish way to set up best practices for your team, or I can be a really fast coder who helps you make an insane deadline.

You can read more blah-blah-blah marketing stuff at the 18int.com Web site. Please contact me about any opportunities for us to work together. Thanks! And since it is the season, I should also thank a few people who’ve helped me out recently. Thanks to the BTS folks for employing me. Thanks to John Szeder for sending leads and projects my way. Thanks to everyone who’s already asked about my availability. Thanks to Kathy Marshall for accounting advice. Thanks to Jenny and Mark for the projects that enabled me to launch this adventure. And of course, thanks to Vicky and Tre and Henry for putting up with me toiling in the basement office.

A curious thing happened the week I got it back. I got a letter from my insurance company, State Farm, telling me that I was more than 51% responsible. They had already paid for the repairs, so it didn’t make a lot of sense. I complained and the next Monday they got back to me and apologized for the mistake. My agent, Mark Woodard, called me to let me know and he followed up with the adjusters. A few days later, I got an apology in the mail. Also, this weekend I got another letter telling me they’d checked in to make sure I got the check from the other insurance company to cover my deductible.

So, all’s well that ends well. I just wanted to note publicly that while it was annoying to get the mistake letter, everything else about the service I got was great. The repairs were done by Haw’s Auto Body in Concord. They weren’t fast, but they were clearly working hard to get the best parts.

Vicky’s new(ish) laptop has bluetooth. I hit the function key and the little applet fired up. I told my phone to make itself visible for 3 minutes and paired it with the laptop. This is all painless and mostly automatic through the applet. I played around and could move files between the two, but contacts wouldn’t send. Then I discovered that you have to tell the applet that it’s OK for the phone to send it contacts. It’s a button under the list of known devices. The Lotus has a menu item for sending all contacts, and they came over quickly. Vicky’s lame Samsung SPH-M220 requires clicking on a contact, going through the whole process of connecting via bluetooth and then sending…for each contact. She’s going through her list right now.

Once again, it just works on Ubuntu.

How Long Must You Cry

How long must you cry before you wonder why your life’s filled with pain? How long must you cry?

How long must you weep, crying yourself to sleep? Tear-stained memory. How long must you weep?

I know why you cry. I know why you cry. It’s for me. It’s for me. It’s for me. You cry for me.

How deep must you age before you turn the page? Gone is yesterday. How deep must you age?

How wise must you grow before you will know. I’m beyond your reach. How wise must you grow?

I know why you cry. I know why you cry. It’s for me. It’s for me. It’s for me. You cry for me.

When I first wrote this, this was kind of a bitter warning to someone who foolishly spurned my offer of friendship. I didn’t take the song very seriously and thought of it as “you don’t know what you’re missing”. The language is kind of extreme for the actual situation, but it’s stylized.

Years later, I discovered that instead of it being me speaking to someone else, it was someone I’d lost speaking to me. I imagined my father asking me how long I was going to feel sad about him dying. I took it as a statement to myself to suck it up, to repress the bad feelings.

Today, I started thinking of this song as an ideal version of myself, a version of myself who I dreamed I’d be as a child, speaking to myself as I really am. And I’m curious: when will I give up comparing myself to that unattainable ideal? When will I cease entertaining the idea of having a chance to replay the past?

So in this sense, I’m not attacking myself for feeling sad. There’s a version of me that could have been. There were decisions I made that got me where I am, and there were circumstances beyond my control that probably had a greater influence. It’s legitimate to mourn the loss of what could have been. The mourning is a doorway back into daylight. So, I’m pleased to find the song is not a bitter rant, nor a vigorous self-attack. It’s simply a question about when the truth will be accepted.

I’ve learned so much about myself since becoming a father nearly six years ago. Constantly striving to serve these two little guys has helped me understand my own childhood. I am honored to be helping them through theirs. It just gives me so much pleasure to be around their joyful creativity. So, with Father’s Day around the corner, I hope all my fellow dads are having as much fun as I am.

For me, the most intense and immediate emotion I felt all weekend was something like sensory overload. My brain was getting so much new information, some visual and some analytical. Everyone looked a little different but were immediately recognizable. For people I hadn’t seen for at least 10 years, I had to reach through time and connect my memories of them then to how they were interacting with me now.

There were some people who I don’t think I said three words to in school, but I knew their faces and I knew their names (even if I couldn’t put them together at first). But conversation with them could hardly be more natural. It was a powerful realization that these were people who share a life experience that’s hard to capture elsewhere.

Part of me was feeling a bit sad at the end because I didn’t spend enough time with anyone, and some people I completely missed! I found myself aching for more time, or time alone with each of them.

It’s taken a bit for me to process the information and emotions of this past weekend, but I think I’ve figured it out. It’s love. It’s the feeling that these people are so valuable to me. That they exist simply makes me happy. The potential for good times with them is infinite. I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to be back in 1988, spending all day with these people again.

To me, love–as a feeling–is the identification of something you value most of all. But it implies action. I want all of my classmates to know that if you ever need help or you want to have a good time, come to me. Need help moving? Need someone to watch your kids? Just want to have dinner? We usually eat around 6:30. Don’t be a stranger, and let me know what I can do.

Angus was born August 28, 1993 in Bear River City, Utah. You might be thinking I’m putting you on, but I know this and remember it well. Angus was a purebred American Black and Tan Coonhound registered with the United Kennel Club. I was 23 and looking for a dog. I did a little research and settled on a coonhound for a couple of reasons. My first reason was that I prefer hounds. Growing up, my mom bred elkhounds, although there were plenty of other dogs around, too. Now, I can get along with just about any dog just like I can get along with just about any kind of person, but I always like how intelligent hounds seemed to be. My second reason came from the description of the bread I found in an ancient hunting dog book I found. The traits of this breed sounded like a hound to the extreme. And I’ve always been attracted to extremes.

My first dog was an elkhound who was tough as nails, a bitch named Pepper. It had been about three years since she had passed. Unfortunately for me, my mom put her down while I was away. Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for taking care of another dog after that, and it was convenient not to have to while I was dealing with college. But in the last year of college, suddenly I was ready.

Although you might think of Where the Red Fern Grows, and therefore the South, when you think of a Coonhound, there are plenty of enthusiasts everywhere, including Utah and California. The guy I bought Angus from used his dogs to hunt mountain lion and bear. I remember that day well. I had a 1979 GMC pickup with a V8 and a stick that we called Shannon. The girl I bought the truck from was a rodeo queen who included a dashmat with her name embroidered on it. The guy I bought Angus from had a whole litter to get rid of, and he had his stud in one pen and the bitch with the puppies in another. Both of them whined pretty loudly for each other.

I knew I wanted a male puppy, so that narrowed the choice down to three pups. We pulled them out on the grass and I picked the pup who was neither the smallest nor the largest. We took him inside to wash him off since the pups were all covered in mud. As he washed off Angus in the sink he asked me, “you aren’t going to make this dog a pet are you?” The implication was that it was a waste of a good hunting dog. Angus’s grandfather was a champion hunter. But the breeder clearly needed to get this litter out the door. I paid $100, put Gus in a box on the front seat and drove home.

He was talking to me in little puppy whines, probably missing him mom. I told him not to worry, that he was going to have a good life because he was with me now. His entire life I did everything I could to keep that promise. My wife recently wrote that she’s never known someone to love a dog more than I loved Gus. She’s right.

My last year of college, I lived in a little house in downtown Ogden with my childhood friend, Ricky. My senior year at Weber State University was low stress and included lots of free time. With few responsibilities and a low cost of living, there was ample time to loaf for both of us, and we enjoyed having the little dog running around. We called him a shark back then because he would run up to you and nip you, not hard though.

Taking care of Gus was a great learning experience. He was stubborn as hell. And for the first night I had him, I somehow thought he could sleep in the kitchen by himself. That was a miserable night! My mom gave me great advice on how to approach the problem. She explained that he’d just been taken from his mother, and he was probably used to cuddling up with the pack at night. Why not take him into bed with me, she asked. I did, and that solved the howling at night.

So, for most of his life, Gus was accustomed to sleeping on a human bed. At first, he slept on my neck, which wasn’t half bad during a Utah winter. He soon preferred the foot of the bed, probably to avoid being thrown around when I slept. Even after my wife and I were married, he continued to expect a spot on the bed, and we made room for him with a king size mattress.

Other than sleeping in the sun, there were a few things that Gus loved. He loved butter, coconut and chocolate. If he smelled any of those, he’d run faster than if he smelled meat. Yeah, I gave him chocolate to eat sometimes but not much in later life. They say it’s poisonous for dogs, but alcohol is poisonous to humans, too. If he was too wound up, it seemed to calm him down. He also loved running free. It seemed to be a great game for him to figure out how to get out of the house. He would dash through the front door if you gave him any opening. He would check the gates in the yard often to make sure they were latched, and he could get them open with his paw if they weren’t.

He didn’t care too much for cats, squirrels or raccoons. You can bet that until he got too old that any critters that came in the yard left quickly after his howling. He also didn’t like the taste of mint at all. It might have come from a time when I caught him eating cat shit and I brushed his teeth with human toothpaste. Sometimes I used to open up a bottle of methol rub to get his attention and to see his lips curl in a funny way.

When he was young, he like squeaking toys and tearing up carboard boxes. I used to empty a box of coke cans and stick it on his head. He’d toss the box in the air and eventually tear it to shreds. That was a lot of fun to watch. I also used to take him to open fields to watch him run. That was a thing of beauty, one thing his body was built for. There’s a Neil Young song called Long May You Run that’s about a car, but I used to sing it to Gus because that’s what I always wished for him.

There’s nothing a dog wants more than the attention of his master, and lots of it. It was rough for Gus to accept that when I met my wife, I wanted to spend a lot of time with her instead. It wasn’t long, though, that he started loving her as much as I do. Gus was big, 70 pounds and all muscle, but he insisted on jumping up on the couch to cuddle against your legs. After Vicky won him over with daily walks, he’d just as soon cuddle with her than me.

When my first son came home, Gus had another adjustment to accept. By that time he was getting a bit old, showing some gray on his jowls. He wasn’t interested in playing anymore, but he was always gentle and tolerant of the craziness a toddler can bring. Likewise, when Henry was born two years ago he had to tolerate a  baby all over again. Gus got progressively slower and sleepier, but he let the kids pull on his tail and never growled at them. He might walk off and let a boy flop on the floor. He never tried to hurt them.

Gus lived to be a little bit more than 15 years old. That’s probably more than I could have hoped for in a big dog. Moreover, he was more enjoyable and loving than I had any right to expect. It’s damn right I loved that dog because he loved me. And in those last days of his life, I stayed with him. I held him in my lap and told him it would be OK. There was literally nothing left for us except the end and a goodbye. The moment he passed wasn’t as hard as the anticipation or the grief afterward. I’m thankful that I was reminded that I had the courage to stay and that it was the right thing.

Long ago, I wrote a poem for Gus. It’s been here on the site forever, but I’ll stick it here again. These are my feelings about the dog, meaning both the species and a particular pal I called Angus.