a lot going on
I am going to try and keep it short tonight as I don't have too much time (time is a luxury anymore). I struggle to balance my personal ambitions with my MANY responsibilities. Sometimes I think I am insane for taking on so much, but even so, I still refrain from pursuing a large number of other personal ambitions.We are getting the paperwork for the land purchase together and we close a week from tomorrow (finally!). The budget's tight, but it's workable as long as we are diligent about watching our spending (and it's only for three years). I think I may also pick up a Donato's route on a couple of days for a little extra income. That would help and we could use the extra money to help pay down our debts more aggressively. It'll be nice when Becky is out of school and can bring in a second income. We're setting all our bills up for auto-payment so we don't have to worry about them any more.
I have been busy lately revising technical specifications for the test/drill application I have been working on. I had a bit of an epiphany the other day as I was thinking about the application and whether I should adopt a desktop model or a Software as a Service model for developing it. My line of thinking merged with the adage, "It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit". I realized that part of my target audience was students, many of whom might be lucky to even have a computer, never mind a broadband connection. They would never be able to afford the software that I would make available. Given that, I came up with a hybrid model that incorporates open source software (that takes care of development) with a Software as a Service model for hosting files created using the open source software. The target audience for hosting services would be school systems and businesses that can more easily afford those services and would have the resources to take advantage of them. The authoring software would be given for free and I could charge for hosting the tests and providing additional integration and reporting functionality.
I also was able to consolidate what was three applications into one with a fairly small design modification. I am going to pitch the software to the OpenOffice.org consortium as a value added means of distinguishing their office suite from other office suites and doing it in such a fashion that it facilitates rapid adoption in the education industry, which in turn can segue OO.o adoption in other areas outside of education. Since I will be open sourcing the software, I am making the design specifications available here on my blog. You can access them on the sidebar under Flip Specs. I know that it's a Microsoft Word doc and I am fully aware that this does not make for good impressions on the OO.o crowd, but these specifications are many years old (I actually started designing this back in 1993) and were written looooong before I ever heard of OO.o. They seem like a reasonable bunch that can hopefully overlook this single faux pas. I can ensure that related documentation from this point forward is in their preferred format.
I will still need to develop a hosting site, but this buys me some time and allows me to network with the talent that can help me establish an online business of that sort. Hopefully, by making design and other contributions, I can establish myself as a valuable person with whom others would like to establish a business.
posted by bylaw @ 8:45 PM
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