Fellow Brisbane Developer on Techcrunch

I'd like to give a shout out to a fellow Brisbane developer who just got on the front of Techcrunch today with his parody of all the signing up to services we have had to do lately. He calls it 'useless account' where you can have 'unlimited account editing'. Unlimited! Now that's a good deal...

For those of you who are wondering - Touchstone will not require a signup to use. Just download and run. That's when we are out of private Beta of course. Until then you will need an invite so make sure all your friends are on the mailing list (that one to the left of the blog).

The Secret Life of an Entrepreneur

Life is hard enough for an entrepreneur, let alone a Internet Start-up Founder. I am incredibly fortunate in that I am surrounded by a loving wife, very passionate and focused (and supportive) partner(s) and surrounded by developers who are far more gifted programmers then even I could ever hope to be. Sometimes, these people are the only reason I can go on.

The Touchstone Team has a huge level of faith and determination and a growing level of enthusiasm from the community (even some of our very own "fanbois and girls") which only catalyses our efforts. All-in-all, Touchstone (even right from the beginning) seemes to be slightly blessed.

It is however, not all rosy. It strikes me today as I sit here programming and blogging between episodes of Mythbusters and Grey's Anatomy on my wedding anniversary pondering how I am going to push a few lines out tonight between courses at my step-father's 50th birthday party.

Families (esp extended ones), girlfriends, in-laws and the Tax Department for some reason just dont seem to be very supportive when I whip out my tablet shouting "Eureka! I just solved how to factor views over time over importance!". They also don't seem to appreciate how satisfying it can be solving memory leaks, or understand why slowly transforming into an albino Hunchback of Notre Dame with sever allergy to sunlight and fresh (non recycled) air is an acceptable means to an end!

I guess they just don't understand the 'space', which is weird considering they all happily use MySpace! Im not sure what it is that can make these people so counter-supportive. Maybe they think they're helping or that they are trying to help us see reason, and it's their attempt to protect us from failure.

but it doesnt work that way. As an Internet Start-up Entrepreneur, our brains seem wired differently to other people. Success is not permanent and failure is not fatal, we all understand that. Small sucesses are like a drug, and miss-steps only drive us to go harder still.

Through sheer determination and willpower we will topple mountains! And so it continues....