Journal Entry: July 13, 2001

It’s Friday the 13th.  I’m happy to say that no more bad things have happened to me since my last entry. My ankle’s mostly healed.

I am officially unemployed now, and should be collecting unemployment insurance before long.  Jabber.com, the software startup where I’d been working for the past year, gave me an insultingly low severance pay of 2 weeks salary, which ran out last week.  I can’t really blame them for including me in their layoff; it’s hard to justify having a high paid customer support manager when you don’t have any customers.  Clearly, the original expectations of having a viable product in late 2000 and customers lining up at the door were grossly out of line.  But I do hope things turn around for them.  They’ve got the start of a great product and some good people.

Moving on to bigger and better things, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to do something I’ve been talking and thinking about for four years now - start my own consulting practice.  My new company is called Zang Spur Consulting.  It’s an independent consulting practice specializing in customer support and quality assurance consulting to software organizations.  Most of my time the past three weeks has gone to trying to learn how to set up a business like this - legal and financial concerns, finding clients, etc.

In personal news, I attended the wedding of my cousin Megan and her new husband J.J.  It was in Redstone, CO on July 1, and was a very nice ceremony.  I got to see both of my brothers (Matt and Kent) at the same time, which is rare.

Also, I’ve gone soaring a couple of times.  Earlier this week, I made my first solo takeoff without a “line boy”, meaning that I hooked up my own tow rope and launched without a wing runner.  That same flight was my first solo flight where I did any significant soaring, gaining a few hundred feet of altitude in a squirrelly thermal over east Boulder.