Saturday, July 28, 2007

Home Office

Well I have spent the last three weeks since I was layed off from Micron building my home office and setting up some partnerships and contracting jobs, What a zoo.

I did learn some interesting things and finally came up with a configuration that I am happy with. First some notes on the home network.
  1. I bought two My Books for San storage. That brings me up to 2 TB of NAS on the home network. Cost me about $1000.
  2. I upgraded my switch to a 10 Port Gigabit Switch for my connected devices. Cost me about $50.
  3. I got a new HP 2840 as my All-in-one printer on my network. Nice color laser printer/fax/copy/scan device. Cost me about $1000 with a two year service contract.
  4. I got a new Dell Precision M90 for development. I plan on putting 64 bit Vista and 32 Vista on it for development OS's. Cost me about $2000 with the 3 year in home service contract. (http://outlet.dell.com/)
  5. I got a port replicator and Dual 24 inch Samsung Monitors. I got addicted to those dual monitors at Micron, but wanted to upgrade them a bit :-). Cost me about $500 a monitor.
  6. I got a new Dell Precision M65 for a Server. I plan on putting Windows 2004 Server 64 bit on it along with SQL Server, Oracle and any other database and server tools I want to play with. Cost me about $2000 with port replicators and 3 year at home service contract. (http://outlet.dell.com/)
  7. I also spent another $500 on a new chair and a APC battery back up system.
  8. Finally I upgraded my Internet Service Provider to the 5 megabit cable service. Micron's DSL will probably go away the beginning of August. The cable modem is wireless and wired so I can develop pretty much anywhere although the probability is when I am home I will be in the office. Cost me about $50 a month.
  9. I will keep my old corner desk and set it up as a office desk. That should allow me to have 3 different workstation areas. One for the M90 and the dual monitors. One for the M65 server and a space reserved for a dell laptop to run Linux. This will run about $1500.
  10. I also plan on picking up a new Fujitsu Stylistic at some point to take with me on customer calls. This will be about $4000.

So the total cost to set up a maxed out home office (for my needs) was a one time cost of $13,000. Should be all tax deductible for a cost of starting up the business. For now I am holding off on the Linux workstation and the new stylistic until I have money or contracts to warrant them. My current out of pocket expense are at $7000.

Most of this is highly portable and allows me to pick up the office network and take it with me if needed. The goal was to get a nice home office environment but still have something I could take with if needed.

Next I went after my Email and Document Servers. I decided to go with Google Apps for small business and bought the upgrade for my email. 10 Gig of email should do me since my other gmail account has never got close to using the 2 Gig I get for free. I will also use this for testing some new products I want to develop around the gdata API's.

The nice thing about Google Apps is it let me change around the settings for drcarver.com domain on WebHost4Life and point different cname and aname entries to a mix of google apps and WebHost4life services. I will use the sharepoint services on Webhost4life to create collaborative sites for different projects all hooked off my Sharepoint sites.

Finally I went with a hosted Subversion server. I did not want to have to back up everything at home and I wanted something that would be available on the net in case I was collaborating on a project with several others. I liked the integration of Trac with each repository, but now I have to figure out how to effectively use that and bugzilla.

So it looks like my yearly cost to run drcarver.com as a development/contracting service will be as follows:
  • Google Apps for domains $50
  • Web host for life basic services $120
  • Subversion hosting $120
  • Sharepoint sites - $20 per year per site
  • Cable Internet Services $600

Total yearly cost will be about $1000 with better connectivity then I got from Micron or that I paid for when I had my consulting company 10 years ago. Unreal.

So far my costs are about what I thought they would be. My monthly costs of living are pretty manageable so I should be able to survive for 5 months or so with no other income. I plan on working some contracting gigs over the next few months to replace the capital costs for the start up and fund the rest of the toys.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Unemployed...

Well I was layed off from Micron on July 9th. Ironically my 10th year anniversary with the the company.

I have decided to go back to contracting and consulting. No more working for the man. It should make for a interesting next few years until I retire :)