Bright eyes

Here's Loyal Reader Number Twelve yet again. Now that's the look I like to see. Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five.

Good afternoon! I'm writing offline on the train today. The going-home train has no internet connectivity, which is really not much worse than the morning train, which has mainly-dysfunctional connectivity. Didn't ride the right morning train either, having gone to bed way too late last night.

I'm still working on the future software company. The latest idea, which is really just for fun and has no saleability to it at all, is for my own version of Wikipedia. The idea is to make my own Wikipedia with articles about myself, the Loyal Readers, and the Loyal Pets. Any queries on other topics would be passed through to the actual Wikipedia. I've downloaded MediaWiki and some documentation and am figuring out whether I can just configure it to pass unknown queries on to another website or whether I need to play with some code. Either way, I think it will be pretty simple. When I get it running, I'll let the Loyal Reader know so they can help me test it out.

Obviously, there's nothing to be sold here, but it does help me get my head into some code. Wish me luck.

Other pending projects: software that lets you scan your groceries in when you bring them home and out when you use them. It could be used for food storage or just for keeping track of what you have in the house. We could give the software away and charge for scanning hardware, or make a free version and a pay version with more functionality, such as the ability to print custom labels for home-canned food or other things that don't already have barcodes. I think there's some profit there, especially for keeping track of food storage.

Our best current project idea, though, is Loyal Reader Number One's program to log educational activities for homeschoolers. The great thing about it is that it's a web application with a server and a database. We could give it away to people who want to run their own server and database or sell server/database services to people who don't want to or can't set up their own system. We could do a little networking in our own school group and get a few beta testers. After that, it just might spread a little further.

I now have five people who have accepted my job offers, four of whom are pretty senior. I've started the ball rolling towards closing my remaining senior-level requisitions. I'm still looking for junior people, though. Strangely, my boss has no idea (link warning: very small bit of sound - also, this band has health insurance!) how many people she wants me to hire. How will I know when I'm done?

Time to watch some Blackadder the Third. See you tomorrow.