Well, it’s 3:15AM and I’m still awake. This is what happens when I drink caffeine. I played 9 songs on DDR just to work up a sweat and hopefully tire myself out, but it didn’t help. I did get a 120 combo on “Blow My Whistle” level 3 (my favorite DDR song), though.

“Blow my whistle, bitch!! Blow it like you mean it!” Haha, one day I was playing that song in my car (it’s on one of my infamous incredibly long and fun dance mix CDs) and willfe said “This is a great song! [long pause as he listens to the lyrics] Holy shit, are they talking about… in that song? I totally didn’t even get that!” I just died laughing. I had to rewind it and play it again for him. I will never forget that day. One of my all-time favorite moments. I imagine you are gettin’ plenty of whistle-blowin’ now! :P!!

As I expected, it’s been a tough week. With C leaving, Brandon and I have had to hurriedly interview candidates for our new open internship position. (Not that an intern will replace C, but like I said in my previous blog, it’s much more cost-effective that way for now.) We’re also preparing for some big changes at Simpli, which is why I’m getting ready to lease some phat Cisco equipment. I’m not quite ready to announce those changes yet since they haven’t been finalized, but I will announce them here once we sign everything and get all the details hammered out.

I’m still fighting off depression. It comes up and hits me in the face just about every hour. Right now my biggest worry is financial. Simpli is managing just fine, but it doesn’t allow me very much of a salary, and that’s really starting to get to me. Having so little money to myself is making me feel trapped. It got so bad earlier this month for me that I took some contract work. I did regret that (I just couldn’t work 12+ hours for Simpli and then do hours of contracts), so I’m no longer doing contract work. Again. Until I check my personal checking account balance and realize I have no money to spend, so I do another contract…

I’m also feeling trapped at Simpli in general. I’m coming up on my 4-year anniversary of starting Simpli, and while I do feel proud of how far we’ve come, I’m tired. I want to relax. I want to go out and have fun. I want to explore the world. I’ve been working full-time and then some since I was 17… doing contract work and then eventually moving to Simpli full-time.

Tonight I had to go to the datacenter when a customer had a server issue that required “eyes” (it was hung on boot), and as I badged myself in at 10:30PM, I started wondering if I was pushing it too hard. I know very few people who put in as many hours as I do on a regular basis. Even when I’m not available via IM, I’m on the phone with customers. I got awakened today at 7:30AM by a business call, for instance. Downtown San Jose was full of people having fun and relaxing with their friends, and that didn’t help my mood.

I need a break.

I realize that if I keep pushing myself so hard, eventually something’s going to snap. I’m trying desperately to put the brakes on before something really damaging happens (as it has for me in the past when I can no longer handle the stress.) Still, I feel like I’m endlessly speeding up; I’m going faster and faster, trapped in a collision course that I can do very little to prevent. I yearn to get in my car and just drive down the coast; to turn off the cell phone and actually sleep in without RIIIIING! waking me up. I wish I could actually take a shower without hearing the phone ringing and thinking “Oh, shit, I wonder if that’s a client calling.” (No, really. I can’t even take a 20-minute shower without the phone ringing. Sad but true.) I am so far behind with responding to emails that I wonder if I will ever catch up. Oh, Simpli is doing OK. But I feel like I’m being dragged behind a truck and my head is the one hitting the endless potholes.

Hopefully we will eventually find some investors (I’m behind on those emails too; sigh) or some big customers and that will help me pay myself what I deserve to be paid to manage this company. When I was working at Sun, I got paid about 60% of what the person sitting next to me doing the same job I was doing got paid due to a “fluke” in their system. (Long story.) I made less there than the BART driver whose train I took to work made. And Simpli pays even less than that job. Even though I can expense gas money, etc., I don’t have any more money than I did working at Sun, and I wasn’t making enough there to survive either.

I can only pray that it gets better soon, because I am definitely not motivated to keep working right now.

So many things have happened recently that I’m having trouble listing them all! Okay, here goes:

1) C is leaving Simpli (on good terms) to take another job. (We’ll announce this to Simpli customers soon.)
2) That job is in Santa Clara, so he’s moving out here in two weeks! Whoa! (Unexpected!)
3) So now Simpli is hiring. We’ll probably hire an intern here in San Jose to start… that will keep costs down and allow us to pay down some of the debt the company has (there’s not much debt to pay down, especially for a company Simpli’s size, but it’d be nice to have it paid off.) I’ll post a resume on craigslist here in a bit.
4) DW invited me to go to Tunisia with him in November to attend the World Summit on the Information Society. I decided to go!
5) And it looks like we might be going to Rome for a few days as part of that trip as well! YAY! So I’m looking for a travel agent to plan the whole thing. Anyone know one here in the Bay Area?
6) Another ex-bf has fallen in love with an older woman and he’s totally happy. Congratulations! You totally deserve to be happy! He’s gushing about her on IM to me right now. It’s really cute!
7) One of my friends, O, is driving his Miata out here from NYC and should be here in a couple weeks. It is weird to have the exact same car (model year, trim, colors, options, everything) as one of your best friends. I saw him in Indianapolis last weekend and had a great time.
8) I also met Jeff from Innovative Network Concepts while I was in Indiana, along with his co-worker/younger brother Cody. Jeff’s a router guru I’ve commissioned to help Simpli with our network. Jeff will become an integral part of our team in the next few months.
9) And I am leasing $20,000 worth of Cisco equipment to do our network right (with full redundancy) this time!

It’s only going to get crazier from here. The next few months (especially July) are going to be so busy! Lots of changes coming up; most of them at Simpli.

Stay tuned… the wild ride has just begun!

An era in my life has truly passed.

Tonight, I messaged FG on ICQ, a medium he and I have been chatting on for 7+ years. I noticed he was actually available and I wanted to commiserate with him about Indiana. (Refresher course: FG and I went to high school together, and he moved to California a few years ago. He knows how my mom can be and he knows how I feel about Indiana in general.)

I teased him about his upcoming trip to Europe, of which I am insanely jealous (I want a vacation!), and about the girl he was going there with. I reminded him that he definitely needed to get laid if he got the chance, which made him stick his tongue out at me (he’s so conservative… it’s hilarious.) Then he told me something I didn’t expect. He said, “Well, I guess I should tell you I’m seeing someone, and you know who it is.”

Of course, I knew immediately… he’s had a crush on another girl from his other high school, since before he even knew me. Although she turned him down a long time ago, apparently she’s finally come to her senses and they’re really in love. I knew immediately when he told me that there wouldn’t be anyone else for him… that in a couple of years, I’d go to their wedding, and all that. It all hit me like a bombshell and for some reason, I started crying.

I figured out pretty quickly why I was crying. First of all, I’m immensely happy for him. I love FG to death, and he completely deserves to be happy. But what was really welling up inside of me was regret. Regret that I couldn’t be that person for him. I know he’s going to be amazingly happy in this life; he’s going to get married and have kids and they’re going to have kids and he’s going to travel and buy some cute little house in the mountains somewhere next to a lake (that’s your second home, FG… the vacation home, yes? No, not in Canada. In the Pacific Northwest.) And he’s going to park his phat BMW out front and all the little redhead kiddies are going to hop out and he’s just going to grin like mad. And I’ll just have to sit back and laugh and say “I told you so,” because he’s had this future planned since high school, and probably really even before that.

I wanted to be a part of that future so badly, that even though I knew it wasn’t my true destiny, because it just sounded so damn happy. I mean, who wouldn’t want cute little kiddies and a nice house in the mountains? And who wouldn’t want to be married to one of the sweetest, nicest guys on this planet, who will love you with his whole heart, and who would do anything to make you happy as long as you commit the same thing to him? Who will look into your eyes and say “I love you,” and mean it so deeply that you can feel it reverberate through your whole soul? And that’s what had me crying, because it turned out he wasn’t right for me, and I wasn’t right for him, and yet I tasted that life and some part of me still wants that.

FG and I never would have made it, and I know this now, and I think I knew it way back in 1998 when we first broke up. I’m an entrepreneur and he doesn’t understand that lifestyle; his house and kiddies come at a price, and that price is that he is risk-averse. In 1998 I wrote this poem when we first broke up, and the last two verses still hold true… I’m looking for someone where life will be an adventure, and with FG you always know what you’re getting. Some part of me just couldn’t handle that, and while I still want kiddies and a nice comfy house, I also want more of a thrill ride than life with FG was ever going to be.

Still, I have to say, he saw me as a messed-up teenager and was one of the first people to see the beautiful woman inside. He brought that part out of me and it’s truly amazing. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today without his calming influence and his amazing ability to forgive me again and again as I struggled with right and wrong (and broke his heart several times in the process.) I owe him so much and yet I am completely unable to repay my debt to him–on purpose, I think, because I know he wants me to pay it forward and love others with as much compassion as he loves me. I will never be able to truly explain how thankful I am for everything he has done for me.

One day last year, he looked at me and said, “You know, I think I’m done here,” and I knew it was true. His mission in my life was to show me love and beauty so I could show it to others, and he did. Whenever he does decide to get married — and it’ll probably be a couple years yet — you’ll find me crying my eyes out in the audience, so unbelievably happy that someone who showed me so much love has finally found what he truly wanted.

God bless you, man. You deserve it.

I’m looking for something for my parents (and heck, I’d use one too.) What I’m looking for is a Tivo-like device that connects to a TV, but has the following features:

• A DVD drive where my dad can pop in a DVD and push a single button to rip it to the built-in hard drive;
• An easy, remote-controlled Tivo-like menu where we can access stored DVDs on the built-in hard drive, or play one directly from the DVD player;
• Easy connections to a TV and sound system, much like a typical DVD player;
• Doesn’t look like a computer.

Extra-special cruncho-spectacular options would include a SD/CompactFlash/MMC/whatever-else-there-is-now reader so my mom can do a photo slideshow on the TV or transfer photos to the hard drive.

Anything out there like this? Or am I going to have to find a crack team of geeks and build this one myself? 😉