Self employment, six months later

Six months ago, I left my job to become self employed, again. The last time I became self employed was seven and a half years ago, when I mutually agreed to leave that job due to lack of work and due to my boredom. This time was a bit different as I made the decision completely by myself to leave. Last time, I was quite nervous the first couple of months as I wasn't guaranteed steady income and didn't know if I'd have enough work. This time, I was nervous the 2 weeks before I left my job because I didn't have any work lined up, but luckily all the pieces came together and I landed an ongoing monthly contract.

In my last few posts about being self employed, I mentioned that I was enjoying my work. Things haven't really changed, except I've been put on tougher projects which are quite trying. However, they're pretty short term and I'll move onto a new project soon. I'm working with really good people and the work is challenging; when I'm not challenged, I kind of go crazy.

Not only has my work been going well, I'm now consistently running 3 or 4 times a week and have changed my diet. In June, I decided to give up red meat after getting quite sick twice from beef. My wife has been quite supportive of this and has been cooking mostly vegetarian meals for us. It takes a lot of work for her to come up with different ideas and prepare the meals. Before June, I would never have imagined liking vegetarian faire, but it's pretty good. My diet change and running have helped me lose 15 pounds. I wasn't overweight, but my weight had increased a little bit in the last few years, something I wanted to reverse.

As I've written about numerous times, I've also picked up a hobby, something that I never really had before.

So, the last six months have probably been the best six months I've had in a long time. I'm enjoying my work, eating well, have a lot less stress, and feel good about myself. The change to becoming self employed again has treated me well. Many factors have lead to this and I have a new outlook on life that took a drastic change for me to see.

Excellent customer service

As it is probably apparent, I'm a bit addicted to my new hobby and bought another helicopter. This time it was a Blade mSR. I flew it a few times and it flies pretty well. However, after those flights, I started seeing a problem where the helicopter looked like it was periodically losing power during flight.

I read a post where others have experienced the same problem. I contacted Horizon Hobby support describing the problem and referencing the post. They promptly replied, asked for pictures of the motor and a copy of my receipt. The day after I replied with the information, I had a new tail rotor and new main rotor in my hands at no cost and they didn't require me to send the parts back!

I was quite pleased with the service and definitely will keep me buying Horizon Hobby products. It makes perfect sense for a company to provide excellent customer service to keep you coming back for more. However, so many companies don't quite understand this. In this case, I paid just over $105 for the helicopter and they sent me about $20 in parts without having to send anything back and with no down time. For someone addicted to a hobby, they just help me feed my habit.

Automator to the rescue

This past week, I finally upgraded my wife's MacBook to Snow Leopard (yes, I realize it is a year late). The upgrade went fine, but last night my wife told me that her DYMO Labelwriter 4XL wasn't properly printing PayPal shipping labels. I wrote a few months ago about printing labels on the DYMO. I'm not sure what happened to my wife's machine, but I had to solve this problem. I went down the path of scripting it and sending the label to DYMO's software. Unfortuantely DYMO's software is junk and threw exceptions when I used their demo AppleScripts. So, I had to find an alternative.

After a ton of work, I managed to hack together an Automator workflow that used Pixelmator, Preview, and some GUI scripting. It isn't really pretty, but amazingly it works.

While my script works, I can't guarantee it will work for everyone, but here it is in case anyone wants to use it as a basis for their own. Download the script

End of Microsoft Office on my Mac

Last week after a colleague ask a client to send a Word document as a PDF, I asked him how he got away without Office on his computer and he said he used iWork. I tried this route several years ago, but had to install Office when I started by job 2 years ago to use some wacky templates. It dawned on me that I no longer had a reason to keep Office on my machine.

I purchased a copy of iWork '09 (yeah, I realize that iWork '11 will be out before I know it) and received it today. I deleted Office and install iWork. I use a text editor for composing things, but every once in awhile I need to use a word processor and a spreadsheet. iWork should fit the bill quite well for this.

On the off change that someone sends me an Office document I can't read, I can ask for a PDF or try loading it into Google Docs. It feels so refreshing to get Office off my machine. I know that things have changed for Office 2011, but it seems like it just keeps getting more and more bloated. Freedom!