Business, Patents, Bridge, and Ice Cream

Every day for the past month I've been waiting for good news relating to a deal I've been working on for my company. Tomorrow, I'll be relieved to get a chance to review some related work that will help close the deal. I'm sorry to be so vague about it, but it's very significant and I don't want to blow it. And in case you are wondering, it's not an acquisition, but it could lead to significantly higher revenue this year. Stay tuned!

I also got my first patent action on a patent I filed for the company years ago. It's a standard rejection that I then have to refute by citing exactly why the invention is not obvious and sufficiently different from previous patents. Thankfully, my stepfather Bill is a retired patent lawyer. He put in a ton of time for my original patent, and recently put in a ton of time to prepare a response. In addition to the response he prepared, he also suggested that I get a declaration from an education outsider that more or less says that my technology is novel. Also, I will provide evidence of commercial success that demonstrates that MathScore.com fills a need that was previously unfulfilled.

This coming Thursday I'll be going to Berkeley to play bridge with my brother. There will 8 of us total (2 tables of 4) playing bridge together for about 3 hours. Eddie and I have been playing a fair amount of bridge together in the past year, so our partnership has improved, most notably in the area of bidding. We utilize a lot more bridge conventions together than ever before. Consequently, my interest in bridge has increased and I've been reading lots of bridge books. I've been on a binge reading books written by Terrence Reese, a British bridge master. His books have given me new ideas regarding declarer play and I'm itching to apply some advanced techniques. Unfortunately, the opportunity to apply advanced techniques is pretty rare because you can only expect to be the declarer 25% of the time, and on top of that, only a small percentage of hands are both makeable yet hard to make without great technique. However, if I can teach Eddie some of the defensive basics I've been reading from another book, perhaps we can apply some new techniques on a regular basis.

And last but not least, April 29th is 31 cent cone day at Baskin Robbins. We don't have a nearby Ben and Jerry's that participates in free cone day, so we're looking forward to getting cheap cones at Baskin Robbins.

First Post In A Long Time

I've completely neglected my blog so I'm trying to get started up again. On the downside, it took forever to get our house remodeling plans approved, then as we all know, the housing market tanked, the banks became conservative, and it became uber-difficult for us to qualify for an appropriate construction loan. If Pearlin and I had regular jobs, our income would have been very easy to verify and we would have qualified. Unfortunately, since I own my own business and Pearlin works for me, it's incredibly difficulty to qualify.

On the plus side, my business is doing very well, so if things continue, we might be able to qualify for the construction loan later this year. I have some very interesting business developments going on right now, but I can't announce anything until it's official.

On a bigger note, we're going to have a girl, and the due date is August 7!!!! Thankfully, we qualified for group health insurance. I pay Pearlin a measly salary, but it's an official salary that goes on a W-2 so as a 2-employee company, we qualified for group health insurance. We went with Anthem Blue Cross's Lumenos plan, a high-deductible HSA (Health Savings Account) plan. This plan enables tax deductions and has relatively low insurance premiums due to its high deductible status. However, because we are having a baby this year, we're going to come out ahead compared to the alternative of having crappy insurance. If the plan sounds good to you and you are an employee at a large company, don't get jealous. Chances are, your big company's health insurance is better than ours. However, since I actually pay for 100% of our health insurance premiums, the Lumenos plan happens to be extremely cost-effective, so I think small business owners in general ought to take a look.

Outside of that, I'm now playing ultimate frisbee twice a week and trying to get to the gym, but it's hard. However, I am making progress. When we first got gym membership a couple of years ago, I was only able to do 1 pullup. This week I did 6! To put things in perspective, the most I've ever done in my life was 7 pullups in junior high. My arms weren't big back then, but I didn't weigh much either. My "dream" amount would be 10 pullups. I only go to the gym maybe once per week, so every extra pullup is a huge victory for me. In fact, on any day that I beat my previous high, I immediately go to Pearlin with a big smile on my face and tell her the news.

We also got addicted to a computer game called "Jungle Quest". It's one of those "match 3" games where you swap tiles and form groups of 3 or more. The first game of its type that we ever played was Jewel Quest, which was quite fun. Jungle Quest happens to be way better than Jewel Quest because it features a wide diversity of levels as well as some special spells that make things extra interesting. We've gotten a little too good at the game. We've played the last level so many times (it's much harder than the rest) that I think we now play Jungle Quest on a world class level. If you've ever played it before, we can both earn silver medals on the last level. If the game weren't so buggy, I think by now I would have earned a gold medal. It has the unfortunate problem of crashing when I swap tiles that are about to explode. I've told Pearlin a handful of times that it's probably an invalid pointer reference causing a segmentation fault. The memory of a tile gets freed just before I do something with it, and then bang, the program dies. Oh well, it's still loads of fun!

Oh, you should check out our front lawn! It's comically funny. Due to the fact that one of our sprinklers broke and the fact that we thought we would have remodeled by now, we've very much neglected our yard. Nearly all of the grass in the front lawn has died. What makes it funny is that there are new weeds on the lawn that look somewhat similar to grass. There's so much of it that when I mowed the weeds, it looks kind of like I mowed a lawn, so at a glance, it now looks respectable. And heck, it's environmentally "green" due to the fact that it looks OK and I don't water it!