The first armchair and sofa I bought, for my first apartment, took me six months to pick out, and then an astonishing six months to arrive. In the interim, the store where I bought them filed for bankruptcy (and eventually went out of business). In fact I was already in my second apartment when they were finally delivered.

My old armchair looking swank in my Carrboro apartment

Two years later I loaded the armchair and sofa into a trailer for my move to California. They arrived almost unscathed—except for the hole that my bike pedal tore through the upholstery in the back of the sofa (thankfully out of sight when set against a wall). A little over a year later, Stephanie and I moved to San Francisco together, and of course my armchair and sofa came with.

My old sofa in our Pine Street apartment in San Francisco

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Back in July, Andy Baio posted a link about these virtual South Korean grocery stores where people can shop by scanning QR Codes next to photos of the items (while waiting for the subway).

Tesco’s virtual grocery store in South Korea

Well, apparently they’re also making a splash in Chile. I just hope they stock up on lots of tasty Justinsomnia!

Screenshot of Jumbo Mobile in Chile showing off my QR Code

Wait. Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org?

Over the last several weeks, an idea has crystallized in my mind—something I’ve known for a while, but just never put words to. Usually I keep these kind of things to myself but since it’s not something I can do by myself, this is an attempt to plant some seeds, solicit feedback, and hold myself accountable.

I have long known that I am not the stereotypical lone genius programmer (no matter how much I might delude myself into wishing that were the case). That’s not news. At best I see myself as a tenacious problem solver, a skill which up till now I’ve been able to employ gainfully in the art of coding. However, I am starting to wonder if being good with computers has become a crutch that’s preventing me from taking some bigger risks.

The fact is that I have these other hard-to-quantify, non-technical skills that I enjoy exercising. I know how to talk to both engineers and non-engineers (and translate between them). I actually enjoy meetings. I find that I frequently ask (what I think are) dumb, obvious questions (that no one else is asking, to my surprise), and watch them unlock a discussion. I like making order out of chaos, simplicity out of complexity. I love documenting standards and processes and systems in a way that makes it easier for the next person to absorb what I puzzled over. I like email and wikis and IRC. I really enjoy working with people. I get bored and distracted when I’m all by myself. I hate working from home. Collaboration tends to bring out the best in me—I’m amazed at what I’m able to accomplish when I’m working with others. I find it essential to know that someone depends on something I’m doing.

So here’s my idea, my realization: I want to start a company. But I can’t do it alone. No, more important than that: I don’t want to do it alone. My dream is to gather a small group of like-minded people with complementary skillsets and start a company together. I’m not looking for a big payday or expecting to change the world. I just want to work on something that makes me happy every day. I want to have control over quality. I want to have more freedom and flexibility over the types of things I work on. Heck, it could be something online or off. The “what” is almost immaterial, as long as I go home happy and look forward to working every day.

This, I think, is one of the first effects I’ve recognized to come out of the year I spent traveling. I’m no longer afraid of failure. In fact I find lately that I’m easily bored unless I’m taking a risk. Returning to San Francisco and buying a condo and assuming a mountain of debt was one exciting expression of that.

Ok, next…

After discovering that someone had made a bold preemptive offer on one of the coolest condos in San Francisco we’d seen, our real estate agents’ advice was to wait and see. Occasionally people make impulsive decisions and back out once they’ve had a chance to think it through. Miraculously, they were right. We discovered a few days later that the preemptive offer had been withdrawn. The sellers were still accepting offers—and expecting them to be submitted less than a week after the open house.

On Friday, November 4th we learned that 5 offers had been made, including ours, and that the sellers were going to do a multiple counteroffer to all parties. We were still in this game! Though we tried not to get our hopes up, we eagerly awaited the counteroffer. The night passed with no counteroffer. The weekend passed, no counteroffer. The more time that passed, the more our idle minds couldn’t help but imagine making it our home.

By midday on Monday, the belated counter finally arrived. It was a single page document requesting the purchase price be raised over our initial offer. And since it was a multiple counteroffer, we had no idea what the other offers had been, or what their counteroffers looked like. And we had to respond by 9pm the same day. This put us in an interesting position as we’d already made an offer at the top of our price range (not to mention over list price). Our real estate agents advised that if we really loved the place, we should consider responding with an offer over their counteroffer—to separate ourselves from the pack.

It’s easy to start down the slippery slope of “what’s another 10k?”, but if the purchase price went up, so would our down payment (which effectively acted as the upper bound on what we could afford). So we decided to split the difference, and made a counter-counteroffer slightly higher than our original offer but lower than their counteroffer. It was a funny moment, I felt good about sticking to our budget and countering their counter, but also wistful, figuring that we were effectively throwing in the towel (surely someone else would pony up).

So you can imagine our surprise the next day when our real estate agents called and said “We have some potentially very good news for you.” This was not the call we were expecting. They basically said that if we were willing to adjust one of the non-financial terms of our counter-counteroffer, the place was ours. OMG!!! Yes, yes of course we’ll do that. That night, November 8th, we were officially “in contract” on the coolest condo we’d ever seen, a mere month after starting our search. We were agog at our good fortune. We were in a complete state of disbelief.

Our condo will be the top unit of this cute two-unit building

The living room has a bay window and a wood-burning stove

Without a doubt, this is the coolest kitchen I’ve ever seen

The dining nook/sunroom opens out to mini-deck

Instead of plain, ol’ turkey for Thanksgiving, Danny and Claudine treated us to a gourmet turducken, procured from 4505 Meats. This franken-turducken was half turkey on one side and half chicken on the other, with duck sausage and cornbread stuffing in the middle. It arrived pre-cooked sous-vide, so all they had to do was stick it in the oven to heat it through. It was very tasty. Thanks to Claudine for the photos!

Turducken Junior: Before

Turducken Junior: After

Turducken Junior: Inside

Why might you want to do this?

• To access your posts while you’re away from the internet (long flights, container ships, developing countries, etc.)
• To compose posts with WordPress’ native editing and preview tools, rather than client blogging apps
• To speed up the process of editing posts, because the internet where you are is very slow or very costly
• Or perhaps some combination of the above…

This is how I managed to keep my blog up to date while I was “on the road” over the last year, even when I didn’t have access to the internet. As long as I had power (which was not always a given), I was able to compose drafts (usually in a text editor), edit photos (in GIMP), and then layout/revise posts (in my local copy of WordPress). When I was ready to publish, and had access to the internet, it was a trivial process of uploading the photos (via SSH), copy-and-pasting the text over, and pressing “Publish”.

In fact I found it so much faster to compose and revise posts locally, that I’ve continued to use this set up even after returning to fast internet connections. Think about how many times you’ve hit that “Save Draft” button and waited for WordPress to “return” so you could reload the post preview tab—and you probably understand what I mean.

The steps I describe are based on my past experience of setting up a local web development environment on my laptop. Of course I ran into a few gotchas along the way, so I documented the process here for future reference. I don’t necessarily recommend this approach for everyone, but I figured it might offer some interesting insight into how I do things.

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Last week Kiva moved from their longtime location in the Mission to a brand new office at 875 Howard in SOMA. The core services engineering team is off in the corner, so this picture doesn’t even begin to capture the spirit of the place. But that’s where I sit. The window looks out over Tehama Street.

My desk at Kiva (still perfecting my hardware setup)

UC Davis Police Lieutenant John Pike uses pepper spray against peaceful Occupy UC Davis protesters (photo by Wayne Tilcock)

The latest: UC Davis launches probe after pepper spray video (more commentary on Boing Boing). That Defending Against Tear Gas poster is starting to seem all the more prescient.

Update: The photo above, taken by Wayne Tilcock, was just so instantly iconic, I promoted this neatlink to a proper post.

Update: Must watch: Andy Baio’s Viewing the UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles (if this doesn’t make your blood boil, nothing will). Methinks a certain Mr. John Pike is going to have a rough road to walk ahead. Godspeed sir. Life as you knew it is over.

Update: To Kamran Loghman, who helped develop pepper spray into a weapons-grade material with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1980s, the incident at Davis violated his original intent.

“I have never seen such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents,” Mr. Loghman said in an interview.