Entrepreneurial self study Dug out the Tricky Nuts microfactory I created last year, unfortunately after Halloween. Last year after I prototyped it on a pound of Walnuts there were no longer whole wall nuts available in Coos County. All the retail outlets I checked were selling machine shelled walnuts incredibly cheap. So I packed the microfactory up and did not bother to document the buiness model. This year I negotiated a deal with my mom to shell out about 3 pounds of nuts for her cooking purposes. Hopefully once I complete this business cycle I can write it up along with digital photographs and post it as a suitable economic endeaver for children looking to make a few bucks or parents looking to allow children to earn those few bucks or allowances. Ideal for kids to small or young to safely run a lawn mower or legally bag groceries. Once I get the writeup done and posted to an FDL site somewhere ... probably bizplan/world.org .... actually I need to look that site over. It has been a year or two since I looked at it and you never know when someone might have sold out and the new owners subvert/corrupt the original business model and site goal from the perspective of some users with specific goals and limitations in mind.

Flea Market Sold a couple of open source Urquan Masters</b> disk (ported from $50 commercial Star Control II I played extensively about 5 years ago) for three dollars. One came back because kids already had it on their nintendo or something. Could have salvaged $.50 revenue by trading a $5.00 texas hold em set I assembled from prefabs but chose to insist on $4.00 rather than list of $5.00. Customer did not wish to spend $4.00 rather than $3.00. None of the other scrap games I had with me were suitable subs. I wanted $5 for old Command & Command, Age of Empires, etc. Finally lost the sale. Probably goofed, the customer did not go away happy. Should have earned the $.50 (I thought I had $3.00 into construction of Texas Hold Em disregarding my prototyping time .... however should have subtracted one deck of cards which was split out into a separate $1.00 item at 100% markup; and had a satisfied customer happily spreading word regarding my goods and services .... hopefully I will do better next time. I almost managed to trade him an alpha Virtual Airport Operations CD (my own product .... I may open source it in a few months to help establish a web site or I may finish it off and sell it to a toy company to market ... situation once again fraught with possibilities) but he wanted it for an XP system and I have not yet successfully got the compatibility wizard to run. Something is screwed up on my system and XP will not dedicate 3 MB of virtual memory to the Director Projector (main executable that calls and interpretes the Macromedia Source Movies and Multimedia pieces) so it will not operate.

Almost sold a VAP disk to another customer but he decided he wanted the clip art studio packaged with my Incredibles DVD instead. I guess I should have had it priced higher since it was unique in my stock and looked more commercial.

abiword Downloaded source and installation files for Abiword. This week I am creating an installation disk tested on win98, win95, and winxp so I can burn and sell CDs at the local flea market for $3.00ea. Found this link by chasing their sponsor's link from abiword's homepage. Lab on a Polymer Chip

Life</a>

Learning to play the keyboard. Turns out my mom had six years of piano lessons as a child. She wants me to fix her organ so I guess we could have some holiday jam sessions. Will not be the same as space jam with Brian (combat engineer down the street retired from managing the grounds of a UC campus .... died of an aneurism while I was in the mental hospital last time .... life. What happens or passes you by while you are stuck in a cage of your own devising. Stuck in neutral or park. Fuck forward, put it in reverse and back out of this hole. When I get some money I may buy a good guitar and carve Brian's initials in it. Or maybe I will buy some sheet music ... Brain's Song Theme Music ... Hopefully some of his other mentees are around somewhere and might be interested in life support or microecology hydroponics and control/management systems.

Found some robot parts, or at least materials for future parts, while strolling and picking up litter along the intergalactic bypass over our local sewage mitigation microecology.