VSIP application submitted!
Last week, I applied for Voluntary Seperation Insentive Pay (VSIP) at my day job. With the sequestration and looming furlough, they offered a stack o’ cash as a carrot to trim the work force. The program is a severance pay for people who voluntarily leave, with a handful of rules attached. If I were to rejoin the DoD or take on a “Personal Services” contract in the next 5 years, they would want me to pay the VSIP back.
What I’ve been up to
I’ve been reading the startup websites for years. I’ve spent some free time learning the technologies like Ruby on Rails, jQuery, NoSQL (Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc), OpenID, CSS, etc. There are even a handful of web experiments (Adage, Belter, funnyname, Kore0, notify, password generator, performance monitor) and an iPhone/iPad app for computing the cash payout if you win a lottery (Lottery Calculator). Quite a bit of effort in learning the basics of SEO and the basics of marketing, as well.
I’ve actally been planning on leaving ARL for a while, so this seems like a kick in the ass with some extra cash to extend my runway. The VSIP isn’t guaranteed, and I’ll probably still be at my day job until September, but one of those big steps has been made!
Tomorrow
Over the next six months, I’m planning on continuing to save like mad and work on learning the marketing and business side to being an entrepreneur. The financial prospects of the Lottery Calculator iPhone app are fairly grim, but it is useful as an educational tool. A little interface clean-up and the VCS Notification Service will be ready for “launch” and I hope to learn a lot more, and maybe even get lucky with a revenue stream. We’ll see where life takes me on this next adventure 🙂
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