Working for the man

My last day at Rackspace was April 2. As of the 6th I'm officially the co-founder of a Delaware C-corp, Riptano.

On the one hand, I'm a lot more nervous about this than I've ever been looking for a job. Partly because, with one exception -- two if you count the company that didn't pay me for my last 3 months of working for them -- I've always found a new job before quitting the old one. Riptano doesn't have funding yet, and if and when it does, my co-founder and I have agreed to pay ourselves far below market rate to leave more to hire other people. But I think more because with job interviews, if you don't get an offer, there's always other places to try. If Riptano fails, it's going to be a lot more public.

On the other hand, it's only been a week and I already have trouble imagining going back to working for someone else. (This could be problematic in that public failure scenario!)

We don't have offices yet; we're just working from home so far. In my case I am literally working out of a closet. It is actually a nice large closet, and I will post pictures if I ever clean it up a little more. It has an air vent, so when I need to close the door to keep out marauding one-year-olds I don't bake to death. All it needs now is a mini-fridge.

View from my office

View from my office
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Kidding. But only mostly -- it's fiesta week and there are chairs lining the riverwalk that I can see my wifi from.

Come to think of it though it's a private section of the walk and I don't see any reason anyone would kick me off any normal day, either.

This is what $5000 looks like

This is what $5000 looks like
Originally uploaded by jbellis

We're adding 4 of these 160GB SSD cards to our database servers, for a total of $20,000 each.

It's sort of impressive for how unimpressive it looks.

Reminds me of the time I was an assistant sysadmin at BYU, and one of the memory boards in the combustion simulation lab's most expensive machine went bad. This was one of 8 256MB boards in the machine, each slightly larger in area than a sheet of paper, giving it 2GB of ram. This was when Windows 98 was new and a typical desktop had 32MB. And of course this was proprietary SGI memory which meant it was even more expensive. $15,000? It was enough to freak me out when I was handling the new one lest a freak static discharge ruin it.

How to tell when it's no longer an employees' market

How to tell when it's no longer an employees' market
Originally uploaded by jbellis

The free snack closet isn't is replenished for weeks, and then one of
these appears instead.

Frontier justice

Frontier justice
Originally uploaded by jbellis

This appeared on the wall of the mens' room at work.