Gone Indy - Vihho Technology

Change Google Chrome's default search to bing-vs-google

2009-07-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

The site www.bing-vs-google.com provides search results from both Bing and Google in a single webpage.

To make it the default browser search in Firefox and Internet Explorer, simply click "add to browser search" on the site's home page.

Changing Chrome's default search is not as simple, but can be done easily.

1. Right-click on the Chrome address bar, then click "Edit search engines..."

2. In the Search Engines pop-up window, click "Add"

3. In the Add Search Engine window, enter the following values, then click OK:

Name: bing-vs-google

Keyword: bing-vs-google.com

URL: http://www.bing-vs-google.com/?q=%s

4. Select the "bing-vs-google" entry in the Search Engines listing, then click "Make Default"

Now you can have the benefit of both search engine results.

Finding Clients in your network

2008-08-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

I'm fortunate to have met some great folks and maintained relationships throughout my career. My best advice is to never, ever burn a bridge when leaving a company. Former companies should be a source of job references and usually end up being future partners or clients. As an independent consultant, the strength of your network will directly translate into billable work.

Get the word out to the following networks that you are available for independent work:

Family
Friends
Previous employers (my first contract was with the old law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman I worked for several years back)
Social Networking websites: LinkedIn and FaceBook.
Job websites: Dice, Monster, CareerBuilder.
Recruiters

For social networking sites, it can be very useful to know that a friend of yours knows somebody at the company you are interviewing at for an insight or insider tips. Recruiters have often contacted me through my LinkedIn profile. Janak provide a great tip to list your technical skills in your profile summary or specialties - so you will appear when someone does a search for a particular skill.

On job websites, I have found it very helpful to set up daily search agents for the skillset keywords I'm most interested in. Not only does this provide leads on which companies or industries to start looking into, but the daily listing also provides a general indication of the matching opportunities and which way the market is trending. These daily emails were a major factor to determine that the move independent consulting could be a sustainable transition from full-time work. Do sign up for multiple jobs sites. Due to cost, most companies will not cross-post their openings on multiple sites.

If you've got a strong resume, you'll end up getting contacted by many recruiters. Keep in contact with just a handfulof recruiters that you have been able to establish a good relationship and feel very comfortable with. Most recruiters will do the bare minimum to make a match simply based on keyword matches on your profile without really understanding your goals or the clients' needs.

If you are in between clients and have some cycles to spare, volunteering or nonprofit work is a great way to network and heighten your overall karma. I'm helping a friend who started Connect the Dots (a nonprofit helping "green" nonprofits) by volunteering and providing technical advice.

Franchise Tax Board Address Verification Notice

2008-07-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

I was wondering what to do with the Franchise Tax Board Address Verification Notice (FTB 4729) that LegalZoom forwarded me today, since the cover letter had absolutely no information besides their general 800 number.

Dear Valued Customer:
We are forwarding the enclosed documents received on your behalf. If you have any questions regarding these documents, please contact us at (800) 773-0888. For a full list of additional services, please visit us at www.legalzoom.com

After calling their customer support line, it turns out I need to fill it out with my corporate address. If they had provided this guidance on the covering letter, it would have saved me 10 minutes of working through their automated call center and the time taken by two of their operators to relay this information.

On a side note, I signed up for Registered Agent service on my LegalZoom LLC package, so all legal documents are received and forwarded by LegalZoom.

Can anyone offer guidance if I really need a registered agent and if there is a better option than LegalZoom's $159/year fee?

State of California Annual LLC Tax

2008-07-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm snail mailing form FTB 3522 and payment to the State of California Franchise Tax Board today. It is the annual $800 tax for all LLCs doing business in Calfornia. Any new business must pay the fee by the 15th day of the 4th month, or by April 15, 2008 for an existing LLC.

This is a very simple process and one that could have been easily been done online, without having to print out a form, write a check, stuff and stamp an envelope and trudge to the nearest post box. Technology people, let's use it!

OCR an image with Microsoft Office

2008-07-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

As I went to scan in reference letters from my previous job at Enform, I wanted the ability to capture the text content as well. Several years ago, I recall Pillsbury Winthrop investing in high priced software to enable OCR (optical character recognition) of the Firm's copier scanned documents.

I was not very confident beginning my search for free OCR options. It turns out the Microsoft Office suite has a decent OCR application called Microsoft Office Document Imaging. I've had this little gem for years and not known about it. If you don't own the Microsoft Office suite, you might try this link for other alternatives.

A Jon Galloway blog entry outlines the steps to create an OCR Word doc from an image.

Source Control/Code Hosting

2008-07-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

With continuous tweaks to the Vihho website, some sort of source control as backup and versioning is becoming necessary. Not wanting to deal with the additional hardware and responsibility of configuring and maintaining my own source control server, I went out looking for a hosted solution.

My source control applications of choice are Subversion and VSTS/TFS. Subversion, along with TortoiseSVN is an open source favorite. VSTS/TFS is Microsoft's offering in the enterprise source control, a much bigger brother to Visual SourceSafe.

There are numerous Subversion options, but I finally decided on cvsdude for their great reviews and free hosting. Their other plans are also quite affordable:

Free Account: 2MB, 1 repository, 1 user
$5.99/month: 250 MB, 1 repository, 2 users

TFS hosting is extremely limited and expensive, with the lowest offering at TeamDevCentral at $1000/month and TFSNow at $995/month. Unfortunately the TFSNow website has not been responding the past few days. This offering appears to only be targeting large scale enterprises at the moment.

The only reasonable option for TFS hosting is to create an open source project on CodePlex. Of course, this means the entire world can peer at your source code, but at least there is no cost.

Microsoft Live Mesh

2008-07-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

Upon looking for (free) online storage options, I stumbled upon Microsoft's Live Mesh. It is only in tech preview, but the current functionality is already feature filled and its future vision is impressive.

Current functionality:

Free, but requires Live account
Online storage: 5 GB
Sharing and synchronizing directories/files between computers (no more emailing documents, or saving in Gmail like I've been doing for a while now)
Live Desktop provides remote access to connect to your home computer from work, or the reverse - similar to Remote Desktop

Some basic functionality is still missing: ability upload multiple files or deleting directories, but having used it for a few hours, I'm already a fan. Live Mesh only runs on Microsoft XP or Vista, so all others are out of luck.

Update: Ryan showed me the light and steered me away from the web client. The key is setting the sync settings to Synchronize files when the files are added. The Live Mesh client install will place an icon on your desktop to access your Mesh folders. Within explorer, it's the usual operations (drag & drop files or folders, delete, rename, etc) you get with the vanilla file system.

Business Cards

2008-07-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

There are numerous web sites that offer business cards for $5.99 or cheaper. At that price, they must make very little, or no money at all and likely just sell your information to the highest bidder. Who knows where and to whom your contact information will be sold to once they get your precious information.

If you're a DIYer, it is very easy to create your own business cards. A few requirements before you embark on this project:

1. Decent color inkjet/laser printer. I'm using a newly purchased Canon Pixma.
2. Your corporate logo. If you haven't got one, get even a basic one for now
3. Business card printing paper. Avery has the industry standard formats (8873) and paper. I decided to go with the Avery Linen Textured two-side printable clean-edge business cards.

Avery has free business card templates and software available on their site. Create your business card in the Word template and do a few test printouts in low-res, on regular paper. No need wasting ink and paper during design phase. Crack open the business paper, once you've finalized the design.

The final product was quite impressive. All who received the new business cards commented on the high quality and professional look and feel.

E-Fax

2008-06-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

To return the signed SS-4 back to LegalZoom, it could be mailed or faxed. This led down the path of researching online fax services, since I don't have a fax machine or combo-printer, nor did I want the added expense of another land line.

The following Internet fax service review sites were the basis of my decision to go with Faxage. Considering the minimal number of faxes anticipated to be sent or received, price was the ultimate deciding factor. $3.49 a month for a toll-free number to send and receive faxes!

Logo and Website Design

2008-06-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, I'm a software engineer and although I can make a sensible UI that follows the main presentation patterns, my abilities fall way short of producing a polished and professional look. There are many companies that provide logo and website services, including those affiliated with some of the other services I've already used: LegalZoom, GoDaddy.

I'm fortunate to have a few graphics designers as friends. I was fortunate to get my buddy Jay Jimenea to carve out time from his family and kids to create a logo for the company and give me a hand with the website. He was quickly able to translate my vision to a really cool logo. Jay has yet to work on the website but I can't wait to see what he comes up with!

You can see the evolution of the website for yourself:

Stage 1: Initial website by a software engineer; heck ya, check out that AJAX!
Stage 2: Logo, color and fonts by a graphics designer applied
Stage 3: Website massaged with the magic wand of a graphics designer (in progress)

Domain Registration and Website Hosting

2008-06-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

I probably should have done a little more research to determine if there are any new or better offerings than the ones we used when building our wedding website, but there have been complaints thus far.

GoDaddy provides one of the lowest cost domain registration services at around $10/year. I decided to snap up vihho.net in addition to vihho.com, to prevent domain squatting.

For website hosting, discount ASP.net supports the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies: ASP.NET 3.5, LINQ, AJAX, SQL Server 2005. I've also heard good things from Ryan about ORCS Web, which has hosted some Microsoft sites and partners with many of his ASP Insider buddies.

Accounting Software

2008-06-17T19:57:00.002-07:00

Every small business needs to keep accurate books, separate from personal finances. Two popular choices are Microsoft Office Accounting or Intuit QuickBooks. I've used QuickBooks in the past as the treasurer of the 301 Gough HOA and it definitely is the market leader, so QuickBooks won despite my heavy Microsoft leanings.

I decided to go with the QuickBooks Pro version, which is the intermediate package in their business product offering. A little Googling lead me to a software discount site, that saved 20% off the list price of $199.95. Gotta love Google!

Business License

2008-06-17T19:57:00.001-07:00

There is an additional business licenses required for businesses in Novato. The first license is for all persons and business entities located or doing business in Novato. The second license is for any business occupied in a home. The goal/hope is for clients in San Francisco, but Vihho Technology's mailing address is our home in Novato, which also has the home office.

Business Bank Account

2008-06-17T19:22:00.001-07:00

You should never, ever mix personal with business finances. Set up a separate bank account for your business.

Bank of America and Washington Mutual were the two banks I looked at to open a small business account. I've had a personal account at B of A for several years and figured their small business offerings were worth a look. Being a personal account holder afforded certain fee exemptions and programs, but B of A has fees for almost everything: minimum daily balance, minimum monthly balance, transaction limits, and on and on and on.

Fortunately, WaMu is just across the street and offers a business account with no fees, online access, and a 1% cash back credit card. With the articles of incorporation, operating agreement, 2 pieces of ID, a deposit of at least $100, my separate business bank account was open in 30 minutes.

Setting up the Company

2008-06-17T19:21:00.001-07:00

I decided to use legalzoom to incorporate the company. As their website advertises, their services are a considerable savings compared with services through a law firm. Imran later indicated most of the forms could have been downloaded from the State of California website and completed for free.

The LLC kit was delivered today, 12 business days after submission. Supposedly there is a staff shortage at the California Secretary of State that contributed to a delay beyond the 10 business days advertised for the Express Gold package. The Federal Employment Identification Number is still in process.

Looking back, I have not regrets using legalzoom. The total price was non-trivial, but definitely a substantial savings over a lawyer. I also have better peace of mind, over doing it all on my own.

Find a good accountant

2008-06-17T19:12:00.000-07:00

Fortunately, I was referred to my accountant through a friend, Jim Hanck who does similar independent consulting.

Unless you have a thorough understanding of accounting methods, tax schedules, deductions, and general tax law, I would highly recommend finding yourself an accountant.

I am using James M. Brightman, CPA in downtown San Francisco. His website is here.

LLC or S-Corp

2008-06-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

Most folks going down the independent consulting road typically decide whether to form an LLC or S-Corp for tax benefits and reducing/limiting liability. There are many other options out there and I emphasis this blog is neither a source for legal or tax advice, so please consult a professional in those areas.

My decision to go with an LLC over an S-Corp was based on the corporate structure (only me) and the future option to move towards an S-Corp. An LLC is just so much simpler. No need for annual meetings, minutes, employee payroll, etc. in an LLC.

What's in a name

2008-06-17T18:09:00.000-07:00

The search for a company name wasn't as easy as one would think particularly now that we live in a global Internet age.

My initial idea was around a sun theme for its symbolism of life and positive energy. After a few quick Google searches, it soon became apparent that many others had the same idea, with essentially all synonyms and ancient mythological characters quickly snapped up.

Next strategy was to take parts of my first and last names and try different permutations, figuring a made up word would have a great chance of not being taken. Some combinations one would think to be totally nonsensical ended up being actual words in other languages and the related domain snatched up. Even with Katy and Megan's help, all paths lead to a dead end.

Not wanting to let go of the initial idea of sun, combined with some Taoism philosophy lead to the final result. The Latin root of "vit" represents life (sun), with the Taoism symbolism of water's strength and path of least resistence (H2O) => "vi" + "hho" => Vihho Technology. The two are the main elements in the logo.

Going Indy

2008-06-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

I've decided to leave Spleak and strike out on my own and give independent technology consulting a whirl. I'll post the trials and tribulations of the journey to go independent. Hopefully, other independents out there can share their wisdom and experience, along with my own postings.

Disclaimer: These posts share my own personal experiences. I am not a tax accountant, nor am I an attorney. You should take any information to an accountant or lawyer, to determine how it best suits your situation.