As much as I’m loathe to admit it, I’ve bitten off a bit more than I think I can chew with the AI-Coder project.

Why the sudden change of heart?

I’ve been doing my homework.

(more…)

As an artist, I’ve often started a new drawing or painting right in the medium, dipping a paintbrush into my palette and splashing something preliminary onto the canvas. Some of my favorite drawings have started with pen on paper, having no idea what the hell I was working toward, but just enjoying the process.

In many cases, those first few haphazard strokes set a tone and texture that guides the rest of the creative process.

While the paint is still wet, and the figure is still mostly unformed, I’ll step back from the canvas and look at what I’ve done so far, asking myself “What is this? I like what I’ve got so far, but how can I turn it into something worthwhile?”

The decisions made during that post-improvisational stage often determine whether the painting gets hung on my wall or tossed into the dumpster.

I feel the same way right now, at the beginning of the AI-Coder project.

(more…)

My deepest apologies for being somewhat incommunicado lately.

At times like these, I should remind my readers that–in addition to my entrepreneurial ambitions–I’m still happily (and busily) employed in the software business. And sometimes that means I’ve got to focus on projects for the people who actually pay my salary.

In today’s blog post, first I’ll talk a little bit about what I’ve been doing at work lately. And then I’ll grumble a little bit about last week’s lost-blog-post snafu. And then, I’ll talk about a little bit about the final five business ideas in my 30-days-30-ideas project, culminating with an announcement of which idea I’ll be pursuing. (!!!)

Here we go…

(more…)

After losing a significant amount of writing work earlier tonight due to some WordPress bug (or maybe user error; who knows), I decided that all of my posts should be versioned.

I save my work constantly, so it’s dumb that accidentally saving a truncated post should wipe out hours and hours of work.

So I searched around on the internet and found the WordPress Versioning Plugin, which I downloaded and immediately installed.

Unfortunately, the plugin didn’t work.

So I’ve been tinkering around with it for a few hours, and I’ve fixed it.

(more…)

I don’t know if this has happened to anyone else…

I just finished writing a blog post that I’ve been working on for the last three days (total time writing and editing: about 3.5 hours).

As an afterthought, I decided to paste a funny image into the body of the post, so I uploaded the image using the controls on the ‘post.php’ page. After clicking on the thumbnail and choosing ‘Send to Editor’, the image was pasted into the text, and I published the article.

I was redirected to the publicly-viewable page containing the new article, only to discover that the last 75% of the text in my message had completely disappeared.

Ugh.

I tried clicking the BACK button in FireFox to retrieve any previous version of my post, but despite FireFox’s current memory consumption (236,340 KB of RAM, ostensibly used for caching of pages in the HISTORY), all of the historic versions of my post had been replaced with the new truncated version.

Shit.

Now there’s nothing left for me to do but re-write.

Maybe I’ll get to it tomorrow. Maybe not.

In the mean time, I think I’ll install the WordPress Versioning Plugin, so that in the future, when this inevitably happens again, I can just perform a rollback.

In last Monday’s post, I narrowed my list of twenty-eight business ideas down to only eight remaining contenders. By the end of this week, I hope to arrive at a final decision.

At this point, I have a certain affection for each of the eight surviving business ideas. But if I don’t eliminate seven of those ideas, I’ll never get started on the really satisfying work of designing software, writing code, developing a marketing plan, and ultimately earning ridiculous sums of money.

So it’s time to make a few more cuts.

(more…)

As you all know, a few weeks after I posted my Budget Buddy software idea, a software developer named Phil announced the release of his own web-based BudgetSimple product. Clearly, Phil’s software was developed as a direct response to my publicly-posted idea, and he managed to sneak his product onto the market before I could develop my own version of it.

(Just kidding, Phil :)

Now, I’ve discovered that the same thing has happened again.

(more…)