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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The time has come, my friends.

It’s been fun lollygagging around, lazily daydreaming about business ideas. But now it’s time to start throwing the dumb, unworkable ideas into the fire.

I won’t quiiiite make a final decision today, but I am going to narrow down my choices significantly, crossing twenty of the twenty-eight ideas off my list. In doing so, I’ll provide some broad reasons why I’m eliminating various groups of ideas.

And when all the eliminated ideas have been laid out on the table, we’ll take a brief look at the eight remaining ideas. And then I’ll try to clear my head, preparing myself for the increasingly difficult task of killing my remaining babies, until only the winning idea remains.

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I’ve noticed something remarkable over the last month or so:

Ideas breed more ideas.

Thinking about these ideas, and writing about them, is addictive in a way that reminds me a lot about playing Tetris. (Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll get back to work in a few minutes. I just want to finish up this one level first.)

Once I started brainstorming at the beginning of the 30-days-30-ideas project, it was difficult to turn off the spigot. The ideas came to me faster than I could write about them. So, in addition to the nineteen ideas that I’ve actually published here over the last month or so, I’ve also jotted down a set of notes for an additional dozen or so software and business ideas.

The only reason these ideas didn’t also get published here is because I spent so much time doing the analysis and writing the blog posts for each idea.

At this point, I’m not willing to let the idea-generation process further delay the decision-making process. I’m anxious to start designing some software. So, tomorrow, I’ll start crossing ideas off the list, either because I think the marketing obstacles or the technical challenges or just too high. Or maybe because I’m not very passionate about a particular idea.

But before I dive into the decision making process, I’ll publish my notes for some of those other dozen or so ideas. Let me give you fair warning, though: some of the ideas are only half-baked. I haven’t devoted nearly the same amount of time analyzing these ideas as I did with the other nineteen.

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I live in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

I love the city. I love the people. I love having the mountains just a stone’s throw away. During the winter months, I go snowboarding every week with six or seven people from my office. We manage to get a solid half-day in on the slopes, and still get back to our desks by 1 PM to finish off the rest of the work day.

But living in Utah has its down-sides. For starters, I consider myself pretty politically liberal, so living in the most conservative of all the fifty states often makes me feel like I’m not really participating in the political process. I have a solid track record, during every single election, of picking the losers.

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Wouldn’t it be cool if your computer could keep detailed information about all the music you listen to? Then, you could compare your listening profile to the profiles of other people on the internet, finding other people whose musical tastes are similar to your own, and scanning through their playlists for new music that you might like.

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