Happy Birthday Lorena!

Today is Lorena’s birthday.  Grandma Sarah’s birthday is on the 18th.  I am truly amazed at how much Lorena and Grandma Sarah have in common personality-wise.  That is a compliment!  Lorena is now as old as I was when we got married.  The big difference is that she still has her hair.  It was one of the very best decisions of my life to ask her to marry me.

I have been thinking about business and entrepreneurship over the last little while and it made me want to study it some more.  My buddy Bryan called last night.  He is one of those serial entrepreneur guys.  He had a great idea (again) that he told me about.  Why does my mind not work like that?  I am surrounded by entrepreneurs.  I work for a venture capital start-up.  My dad started businesses at the drop of a hat his entire life–never running out of ideas.  Troy, a big fan of Warren Buffett’s ideas about value trading, is currently reading a Buffett biography.  In his blog post about the subject he brought up a book Youngin is reading called Outliers by the same author as the guy who wrote The Tipping Point.  Both those books talk about time, circumstance, personal characteristics, and all the things that contribute to exceptional achievement.  I have decided to put off starting on our The Electronics of Radio book so I can read a business book titled The Knack by Norm Brodsky and some other guy.  It is about practical entrepreneurship and I am going to read it aloud to the kids.  When I am finished, Troy and I are going to trade, so I can read the Buffett book and he can read the Brodsky book.

In all this, I think a person has to decide what they want out of life.  I do not think I would be willing to trade lifestyles with the bulk of the entrepreneurs I have known.  At the same time, during my growing up years treated entrepreneurship like sports.  I enjoyed hearing about the efforts to make a sale, a purchase, a new business idea, or a machine to make stuff than I enjoyed talking about Oregon State Beaver sports.  And, at that time, I LOVED the Beavers.  While I currently own part of a small business, I still have it in my mind to start another one.  When I am ready, maybe after the kids are in college, I will look for an idea, weigh the chances of success, decide whether I can stomach the required lifestyle changes, and then, maybe, I will jump into it.

Update:  Something huge just happened in the world of open source software!  QT’s license just got changed from GPL to LGPL.  That was the biggest impediment to it being the GUI library of choice in the Linux world.  It is a cross platform library that will make KDE the desktop of choice in the future.  Christian, that means I want you to install KDevelop (and possibly KDE) on your computer and start using that as your IDE for working through C++ Primer Plus.  Woo-hoo!