Life and the like

Busy as hell. Why? Life seems to be a major conglomeration of convoluted hassle, mixed feelings, bastardized emotions, and work.

I bring this up because ever more pressing are my needs to get my company further off the ground in Ohio, planning my first run for political office (U.S. House of Representatives - Ohio District 2), working full time for Trivantis, training myself further in a few new technologies (primarily software development languages), and constantly reviewing legal issues regarding starting a new political party.

On top of all that I am converting TIFF-based images of Joshua Reed Giddings’ speeches in Congress to something MUCH more legible and will be posting them up as PDFs as I complete them. The first one is already up.

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R.I.P. iMac G5. That’s right, Apple is replacing my iMac with a new shiny iMac CoreDuo! I’m pretty jazzed about this, except for the fact that the memory in the current G5 iMac will need to be replaced with a much newer style of memory and will cost me a few hundred dollars. However, getting a brand-new computer for only a couple hundred dollars is an awesome deal. Time to back up the data.

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Went and saw “V for Vendetta” today. It rocked. FINALLY got together with Jennifer Oberlag too. A friend from high school. She’s as much fun as I remembered. If she wasn’t fresh out of a relationship I would be completely up for asking her out! I could use someone in a supporting role, and who wouldn’t see me carrying around my camera everywhere as an oddity. :P Here’s to hopes for the future.

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Why do I get so drawn up over women? I see the good in everyone, and I see the beauty in every woman.

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I am making great strides with my progress with Ripple as well. We opened a couple of new bank accounts for the company. The business license and the EIN/TIN should be in any day now, to finalize the formation of the business. Then I have requested meetings to be set up for Tony and Kim to meet with Ernest (lawyer) on any matters of concern to be addressed.

I’ll be dropping a ton of cash into Ripple forthcoming. We need two new Mac mini’s ($1000/machine), a new iBook ($1400), AppleCare for each of those machines ($249 iBook, $149/mini), licenses for iWork ($79/license) for each, I need a new Windows PC with XP Pro ($800). Tony and I need licenses for Visual Studio 2005 ($1800) rather than VS6 (cir. 1998.) I need to buy two licenses of either QuickBooks Pro or MYOB AccountEdge ($299/license) for Kim and I, CRM software licenses for Kim and I ($200/license), I need $2500 to open Ripple’s new savings account (min required by the bank), legal fees are expected to be around another $2000, memory for the iMac will be about $250, backup hard disks for everyone will run around $200/drive, letterhead will run about $400 for the amount needed, and I’m certain we’re missing some things.

I can’t fund this operation all on my own. We need outside help. And I’m not talking about PayPal donations here. We’re looking at raising no less than $175,000 by this time next year. This will be done by selling shares in the company. There are 375 shares available for purchase, each at a cost of $1500. Selling all of them would raise $565,500, plenty for our needs. Nonetheless, the startup costs between now and August will be around $11,132. This dollar amount doesn’t include salary costs, only the items listed in the above paragraph and two KVM switches I forgot to mention. This doesn’t include standard fees for things like high-speed internet access, phone costs, or travel expenses. And all of this looks to be coming from my pocket at the moment. :\ Time to do some fundraising. Interested in a share of my company?

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I don’t have a lot of time to rest anymore. So much time is being spent on Ripple-related projects. I’ve averaged around four to six hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks, and it doesn’t look to get any better. During that time I became ill and probably could have used some rest. Alas, nothing of the sort will be parring my way anytime soon.

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The Trivantis user conference in Orlando starts on the 28th. I’ll be down there for the duration and hope to enjoy it, get in some photos, and knock Orlando off my list of cities I haven’t visited yet... though I did stay just north of Orlando for Brian’s wedding last May.

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I FINALLY got my paperwork from Jean Schmidt’s office. WTF, “CRS cannot provide information on the voting records of individual members of Congress to constituents.” I’m hoping there’s some odd way around this because, seriously, I thought these guys worked for us! I’m totally crazy here, aren’t I?

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It seems to be taking me a while between posts on here. I apologize for that. I have been so busy and crazy involved with stuff that I can’t muster anything else.

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I plan on beginning a volunteer career as well. I want to volunteer one Saturday a month to be a Big Brother for Big Brothers/Big Sisters. I also plan to devote a few hours every other Thursday to the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Sight Impaired to make audio recordings of news articles from the paper, magazines, etc. Just a few hours now and then is no big deal.

That’s it for now. Signing off.