My boss lives in the house that was built by Jack Webb, the star of Dragnet. There is a lake about a block away, and across the lake is a golf course. Apparantly in the thirties, Johnny Weismuller (Tarzan actor and former Olympic swimmer) would swim from his house on the lake across the lake to the golf course.

Anyway, you can learn more about Toluca Lake via Wikipedia.

After I left R&R, I ended up competing against the company that ran this external convention, so I guess they began to see me as an enemy rather than former friend. Well, with the announcement that R&R is closing they wrote a blog post with fond remembrences of their association with R&R. One of the odd things about this history is that they didn’t mention me, and not only didn’t they mention me, but they credited another person with integrating their convention with R&R rather than me. They literally rewrote history!

I guess it’s an honor when you are considered such a threat that a company does its best to make you an unperson and write you out of their history.

Link

Email

Both my home email address and business email are run off of web-based IMAP servers. I can easily send and receive email from any computer than can access the Internet. This was hugely helpful when I was stranded in Nashville without my computer.

Contact Information

Our company uses Plaxo to organize or contacts, and I can access Plaxo from any web-enabled computer.

Calendar

I use Google Calendar to handle all of my calendaring needs. It’s practically perfect. No–it is perfect.

Reminders/To-Dos

The amazing iwantsandy.com is what I use to handle my appointments. The metaphor of “Sandy” as your personal assistant works incredibly well. I also use Jott so that I can literally phone “Sandy” to set up an appointment or reminder. In addition, all my appointments are seamlessly imported into Google Calendar in real time. It’s perfect. It truly is like having your own personal live assistant to organize your life.

Project planning

A major part of my job is handling business development projects for a wide range of clients. I have unique need in this area and found the ideal solution Batchbook.com, which allows me to handle my projects anywhere.

Voicemail

I don’t even have to call my home office for voicemail. It is transcribed into text and emailed to me via Simulscribe. So even as I’m on a conference call and someone leaves me a message, I can receive it via email and literally reply via email immediately if need be–even if I’m on the phone.

Mailing list management

This was done formerly via a local client, but we now handle it online, which is much better considering that we can now process the documents from any location.

Word processing

I use Zoho Writer for small text projects, primarily those that I need to have on hand for projects. I tried to use it for a long document, and I lost it completely early in the development of Zoho Writer. That kind of soured me on online word processors. I am actually prepared to move to Buzzword (owned by Adobe). It is a very sleek word processor, but there is one problem: Where do I save my documents? The TOS of Buzzword says that they can’t guarantee their storage, and there is no way to save to other sites via the interface. You need to save your documents locally. If Buzzword were to have a more secure document saving system, I would give it a try and move it to the 100% category. It’s that great.

Spreadsheets

I actually use Zoho sheets quite a bit for collaborative spreadsheet work. I also have a document on Google Spreadsheets that I use with a client. I’m not sure why I haven’t moved 100% to online spreadsheets, but there just appears to be something that scares me about them–maybe it was my lost data experience with Zoho Writer.

Storage

I store quite a bit of stuff online, but I haven’t moved 100% online yet. This is probably just due to convenience–it’s easier to access a local hard drive than an online one. But I could see this changing in the near future.

Desktop Publishing

We use the open source Scribus program, which is a good start, but it is a locally run application. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point where we could produce a professional-looking document online, at least within the next year or so. Actually, I wonder if Buzzword could do this. Let me check.

Presentations

All of our company templates are built in Powerpoint. I could see us moving online within the next few years, but not anytime soon. For now, 100% of my presentation work is done offline.

Image editing

I just received entry to the Aviary beta program, so this may change, but as of now all of my image editing has been done via Photoshop or Irfanview offline.

I don’t know many people who can say that that have found their dream job. You all know the saying: If you enjoy your work, you’ll never work another day in your life. I feel like that. It makes me wonder how I got here.

When I was in high school, my dream was to be a writer. In fact, in my high school yearbook, I wrote that my goal was to be “a Pulitzer prize winning author.” So I went off to college and studied English.

However, after I gradutated college, I started spending time at a radio station in Pittsburgh while going to graduate school to further my writing aspirations. When my time in radio started to outweigh my time writing, I decided I had to make a decision. I chose radio.

I wish I could give you a brilliant explanation as to how this critical decision was made, but the bottom line is that I really just enjoyed radio more. Radio is challenging, but it is also a lot of fun. Challenging and fun? I’m there.

Of course I chucked radio two years later when a record company quadrupled my salary (yes, quadrupled) to do record company promotion in Dallas. This was an interesting decision for me. I just basically chased the cash and put everything else aside. Hell, my expense account alone was more than anyone I knew was making in a year. Luckily, my girlfriend decided to follow me to Dallas in the new role as my wife.

So I was having fun doing record promotion, but it was a total drag on my life: I was traveling a lot, and my job really was my life. It wasn’t fair to my wife, and it wasn’t really fair to me. Luckily enough, my company crashed and burned, and I was laid off from my job, a job that was most certainly not a dream job. Talk about good luck. Well, I consider it good luck now. Back then it was something between despair and terror. I mean, you kinda get used to weekly dinners at the Palm.

Typically for my wife and I, when confronted with a challenge, we just throw caution to the wind and follow our hearts. In this instance, I started my own business, publishing a fax publication for Alternative radio. My timing was good, and it went pretty well. In the spectrum of job satisfaction, this was a great job: I worked from home, I had my own hours, and I had a ton of flexibility. The financial end was rather dicey, but we roughly made it work.

I also faced a new job at this time: Dad. My first daughter was born right in the middle of this new self-employment kick. I did a lot of diaper changing, feeding, playing, and coaxing, soothing, and patting a little girl to sleep.

So I had two cool jobs, self-employment where I was a writer (wasn’t that my high school dream job?) and a new baby. Life was good.

Then a company called Radio & Records called. They wanted me to move to LA for double my old record company salary. You remember that job, right–the cash grab that was quadruple my radio salary? Well, this job was triple the pay of the record company job and I’d be a writer for a big-time trade publication. Talk about a short conversation: “Honey, would you like to make a six figure salary and live on the beach in Los Angeles?” I don’t even think my wife answered me. She was already packing her suitcase.

So we moved to Santa Monica. It was nice, but expensive. The job was good, but the company wasn’t. So we moved back to Dallas, somehow with me keeping the cushy salary and the job. Life was good again. Nice big house. Nice big salary. I worked from home again, and–surprise–we were blessed with another little girl.

So now I was kind of back to my previous Dallas spot: Cool writing job working from home and a new baby. There were two differences: Baby #1 was older and a bit more high maintenance, and the job wasn’t as fun. Actually, the job was fine, not great but fine, but the politics and everything really sucked. That said, it was nice to receive a big fat bi-weekly paycheck. So life was good. I also really liked spending time with two girls. Honestly, what’s better than one daughter? Two.

But then I got laid off again, and this time things weren’t as good. I started my publication over again but the business had changed and I was faced with a dramatic reduction in salary. I didn’t go all the way back to my radio salary from 1991…but it was close. The funny thing is, though, that I really had fun on this job. Daughter #3 was born at this time, and I got to have a blast with my wife and three girls, and–oh yeah–I worked a bit. If our financial situation wasn’t quickly slipping into oblivion, life would have been great.

Luckly, I got a new job and it was kind of like the culmination of all my other jobs: I am a radio consultant. I write a lot of reports, but they aren’t theoretical. They are hands on things that directly affect what people hear on the radio. In a sense, that job I abandoned my writing career for back in 1989 is the job I have now…only it has all of the positives and none of the negatives: I get to work from home, my bosses love me, they appreciate my creativity, and they pay me pretty well, to boot. This is the best of all possible worlds.

At the same time, I get to spend all my time with my three daughters, too. And this is where it all comes together. Talk about a dream job. What could be better than that?

So it’s funny. When I gradutated from high school I thought my dream job was to be a writer, sitting alone in the act of creation, and here it is almost twenty years later, and I’ve discovered what my real dream job is, and without realizing it, I’ve shoehorned all my career choices down a path that leads to this job choice, a choice that has nothing to do with being alone and everything to do with being a critical part of a developing group, a choice, by-the-way, which in the end wasn’t a choice at all.

So, here I am. Living my dream job, and it is awesome.

I wouldn’t trade the job of being the dad to three girls for anything in the world.