Learning The Independent Lifestyle

I always wanted to be independent - I never, not once in my life, had the goal of working for someone else.  It's not in my genes.  In 2003 I founded Common Craft and in January of 2007 Sachi joined the company.  Since then, Sachi has been the real force driving our goal of having a truly independent lifestyle.

And it is ALL about lifestyle.  As I've written before, we make our lifestyle a huge priority.  Why choose to be independent if you can't create a job and schedule that works for you?  We've been trying to figure out what this means and I have a couple of examples.

Oh, THAT Kind of Video

The other day I was getting a haircut. Making small talk (it was a $15 haircut) she asks...

Barber: So are you going back to work after this?

Me: Sort of. I work from home.

Barber: Oh, that's cool. What do you do?

Me: Me and my wife make videos, in our basement. Well, I should say that we get paid to make videos.

Barber: <interested look>

Me: We have a little studio at home and we make short videos for businesses.

Barber: Oh, THAT kind of videos. I hear ya.<knowing nod of subversive respect>

Me: No, no, no. Not THAT kind I swear. Our videos are instructional.

...And We're Back

Phew. That was less of a vacation and more of a party. I need to sleep for about 28 hours to catch up. Good fun and lots of time with lifelong friends and family.

Photo: Lake Norman, NC, where I spent a lot of my childhood.

Sachi and I take our time off quite seriously and I was very inspired by a couple of posts by Hillel at Jackson Fish. It looks like they have a philosophy similar to ours regarding time away from work.

I Think This Internet Thing is for Real

Last night Sachiko and I were talking about monthly bills and what we could do without.

Cable/Satellite? Perhaps gladly.
Land line? Not a problem.
Cell phones? We could live.

Internet access? Never.

It was funny to me to think of the resources I grew up using and how, just over 7-8 years, Internet access has become one of the absolute must-haves. I could not imagine a world without it. Actually, I can barely imagine a world without wireless high speed access.

The Problem with Tabs in Firefox...

...Is that my brain hasn't quite caught up. The transition from IE was effortless in some ways, but I seem to be "challenged" by the tabbed interface. I exhibit great skill creating new tabs (ctrl + t), but when my intention is to go to another browser window, I still waste time looking at the bottom of the screen, like I would with IE.

I'm dedicated to changing this behavior because tabs are better and faster (like so many things with Firefox). I have been trained for years that new browser windows are located in the task bar and anything else simply goes against the natural order of things (or so my brain thinks). I'm thinking this is just a phase.