chapter3

So in following the advice of Wu-Tang Financial Services to "diversify our bonds" and "protect our goddamn necks," Chapter Three LLC is launching its first offshoot business venture, which is naturally a boutique fixed-gear bike business: Mission Bicycle.

Today we (or mostly our bike-savvy partner John from Cincinatti) were interviewed by the influential Bike Snob NYC blog, where the snobs are sounding off (fwiw, the frame does not "cost $25 including shipping."). We're doing biz in the Bay, with no immediate plans for east-coast distribution, but this is still a good chance for us to define our brand and get our name out there.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

bq.. *This is a San Francisco-bred bike. It can be pretty wet there. How come no braze-ons or fender eyelets?*

It's a slippery slope. A fender eyelet here, a brake mount there, and pretty soon you'll end up with with 27 gears, lazy-boy geometry, and both of your Docker pant flaps pinned down by reflective yellow ankle bracelets. You can always toss a seat post mount or clip on fender if you're really in trouble.

...

*Will riding without a hooded sweatshirt, colored chain or top tube pad void the warranty?*

We are consulting with our legal team on this one. Likely we would probably need to know a little bit more about the musical tastes, coffee shop preferences, ironical abilities, and jean size of each rider before passing final judgement.

p. While my own disdain for hipsters is well-established, this is clearly a part of the market we're looking to hit once we've cleared our first and second-degree social connections. Don't hate the player, hate the game, etc.

I've made it down to my workaday summer outpost in the Dogpatch and my first home-away-from-home off in the Panhandle. Greeted by blue skies and sunshine. Initial city impressions:

• Wow there are a lot of pretty girls. On the streets, in cars (presumably bars) and freight elevators even.
• I've lost some of my nerve for fighting traffic on the bike. Those country roads and stationary machines have made me soft.
• Or maybe it's that I haven't really been riding all that much, because these hills are harder than I remember too.
• The living situation seems like it will work out great: nice unassuming roommate, wifi, extra-long twin bed (so my ankles don't even hang off).
• The office hasn't been progressing too much in terms of getting fixed up. It's basically the same as it was last time I was here two months ago. That's gonna change.

After last weekend's outlaw mountain trip, I started re-re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion, which is probably one of my top 5 books, and have been slowly digesting the potential of having one foot in the city and one foot in the woods.

It intuitively feels connected to my existential crisis-of-meaning du jour, reconciling these seemingly contradictory aspects of my life. What I want is some kind of grand Hegelian synthesis: a future where my biodiesel hybrid 4x4 pickup carries me from Silicon Valley to the peaks of Trinity County in carbon-neutral style, and there's someplace in-between called "home" where the dog stays while I'm down in the city.

Is that kind of thing really even possible? It feels like maybe... it also seems logically like a bacheloresque way to roll, all that movement, or at best (see point #1 above) a "girl in every port" type of situation; but the dream includes a family of course, which begs a huge and unanswerable sea of questions, variables out of my control, etc etc etc. Hrmmm.

It's been a pretty good week overall. Not without some troubles, but for the most part they are challenges which have been overcome. I'm starting to feel like I'm getting a good pace going. So, here's a step through where things are at:

Work
This has been the biggest weight on my mind lately. We're getting very close to having a truly stable business, but it's (as I've mentioned) a very two steps forward/one step back kind of affair. I've been struggling with my responsibilities. I handle a lot of the day-to-day organization and scheduling of the work that we do -- taskmaster stuff -- in addition to taking on the harder Drupal coding. I've also got more business experience than my partner, so I tend to have the skeptical/devil's advocate role in those discussions.

I'm not used to being in a position like this, and it's definitely a learning experience figuring out peer-leadership. It's good though, because that's the future.

It hasn't been helping that lately we've been under external pressures. Matt had a run-in with the muni track on his bike, and he's been laid up for the past couple weeks. Has a screw in his wrist. Luckily the man has his own health coverage; we're still about a month away from providing.

Then there was tax day, which is never fun, and at the beginning of the month we lost a big high-profile client before we managed to get started, which was a bummer. Things are picking up, but it's hard with a man down. These are a challenges I'm confident we'll overcome, but it definitely adds tension, and just as I'm coming to appreciate how important it is to keep a cool head.

Part of the fun of being a web application professional is bitching about crappy online services I'm stuck with on my work blog.

UPDATE: Wes schools me. B of A and MBNA ROCK!

UPDATE TWO: In the spirit of fairness, and because this blog post is apparently somewhat popular, I should mention that many of the points in my post have been addressed in terms of BofA's user experience.

So, I posted a little commercial-like video for my company extolling the virtues of Drupal using elements of my daily life in the State of Jefferson. Good times.

Here's that video:

One thing I want to call attention to is my facial expression in that last slot-machine shot:

That's about as sleazy as I get, what some affectionately call "crazy eyes." It's the epitome of why I'm feared by mothers and hated by fathers all across this great nation. In the final cut I wipe away from it pretty quick, but the original take is pretty interesting. You can see the acting!