Oh man, where do I start. I had my first kid when I was 21, to say it was unplanned is an understatement, but marriage soon followed and things have really worked out the last 6 years luckily. I now have 2 kids and I'm 27, I'm also a single income for my family. I've been working on my Bootstrapped Startup with four others guys for two years, while it does get painful sometimes what I end up doing the most to handle everything is put off sleep. I probably get 4-6 hours during the week and try to make up for it by getting 8-10 on the weekends, but that rarely works with children (It's hard to be mad when two little kids jump on your head to wake you up because they want to play). We have big updates coming in the future that will hopefully take the site into the limelight, but until then it's a daily struggle and I love it.
> try to make up for it by getting 8-10 on the weekends, but that rarely works with children (It's hard to be mad when two little kids jump on your head to wake you up because they want to play).
Are my parents the only ones that locked their door at night? My brother and I couldn't wake them in the morning, because we couldn't get in. We learned at a very early age to entertain ourselves until Mom and Dad got up.
I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, I'm just saying that it seems like no one thinks of this solution. :)
I see this complaint quite often about the kids being bothersome in the morning and when I tell people about the "door lock" it seems to blow their mind.
Not locking the door but had the discussion with the kids.
Also if you read your kids stories (and I highly recommend it) and you include a generous helping of stories about kids who are independent and loving it (Little Britches, the Boxcar Kids, etc) they too will look forward to being independent. All three of my kids got a checking account when they were 5 (USAA is great for this), they were doing their own laundry by the time they were 10 and making their own lunches. By the time they reached 13 we started a program where each night one person was responsible for dinner that night for all five of us, didn't matter what it was, just had to be reasonably nutritious. Spaghetti? Pretty easy. Mac-n-Cheese, whitesauce with cheeses and some boiled noodles. Croque Madam? Ham sandwhiches with an egg. Steamed vegetables? straight forward. Etc. The goal of my wife and I was that our kids when they hit 18 needed to be able to manage a checkbook, cook their own meals economically, and manage their own laundry/hygiene. When they went off to college that was going to be expected after all.
The benefit to the parents is of course that the kids require less "time critical" time (its really handy to be able to say, "I'm going to be late, you're on your own for dinner." and to know that they will be able to make themselves a nice dinner.) And to not worry about whether or not they have a healthy lunch for school or clean clothes to wear.
By the time they are 18 they pretty self sufficient and that is a huge win. The trick is realizing that kids are much more capable than we often give them credit for, and they feel better about themselves when they feel they are in control of their own lives.
Growing up I was one of five kids and my parents could do this if they wanted, as we were aged 4-16. I think I'm a few years from this being possible as my 5 year old daughter is in a jealousy stage with my 2 year old son, so any time together alone turns into an issue every time.
I'm not sure a tweet metric like that means much once you realize the news "Beyoncé Reveals Baby Bump" resulted in 8,868 tweets a second, which is about 10.6 million tweets every 20 minutes. Running some quick numbers, the debate averaged about 1,962 tweets a second over 90 minutes.
YC S12 company Boosted Boards (http://www.boostedboards.com/) is a similar concept. Boosted Boards appear to be more powerful, but they are also significantly more expensive and they are remote-controlled instead of weight-sensing.
Over a year ago we created a really simple iGoogle gadget connected to our site that for some reason picked up steam, I really hate to see this go since I know a lot of our users have it.
I currently run an entire startup in my garage, this includes routers, webserver, database servers, UPS's, etc, all hand built by the way. I work on it with 3 other guys who live 45 minutes to 4 hours away. We've bootstrapped this thing in a way that I'll have to write about once we're funded. I'm currently located in Virginia, and there is a mountain behind my house thats on fire about two miles away. I've been battling smoke for the last 48 hours. Operating out of your own house is amazingly convenient and a large undertaking at the same time. I both love and hate it, but most of all I've learned from it. Also, I'm running everything off of a Comcast Business Class connection, which was able to handle a LifeHacker post (10K visits in about 5 hours), so if Comcast frowns on my setup they haven't mentioned anything yet.
Awesome, I'm going to run it off of Comcast's network as well. I hope the fire shortly stops, mmx. Sounds like you're in a rock and a hard place right now. We just need Mother Nature's intervention.
Your other projects are impressive as well, are you a one man team for all of them? Also thanks for the insight, this info isn't commonly shared with other startups, I appreciate it.
This news couldn't come at a better time, we've been building a side effect database for almost 2 years using big data sets from several different sources. It's functional and a few people have picked it up but we only recently began talking about looking for outside funding. 2012 should be interesting for us and our competitors.
