So, if you are ever in Miami, you can take a 45 minute drive down to their old facility at the edge of the Everglades in Homestead. Bring/rent a mountain bike because the last 2 miles are closed road. Great place to run.
Even cooler, there is still a test missile in a silo in one of the remaining structures. There is all sorts of interesting rusting hulks out there.
1. Incorporate - Create a name and make yourself a company. In the US, do your state incorporation papers (most are on-line) and get a TIN/EIN from the IRS, and open and fund a bank account in the company name. This allows you to do consulting work or even be called back by your former employer as a contractor, and it puts you in the right frame of mind for maintaining accounting and expenses while you are off work.
2. Meet people - Get out for networking events in your industry and visit a BNI chapter. Look for professional associations and groups in your area. Make networking your new job, even if you don't think you are good at it. Time to practice! The way to find better job opportunities is to be actively exploring the market. Sitting behind a screen mining the job boards is not a motivating exercise and does not make you visible.
3. Keep your schedule - There are work hours, and non-work hours, and don't let your typical work patterns fall out of sync. It's better for your brain and your emotional state.
4. Cut your expenses - Your revenues just went to 0, so time to get rid of subscriptions and habits that are costing you money. Cook at home and stop eating out, and make those rare times that you do eat out or grab a coffee be as an expense for your business.
5. Get fit - Join a gym, buy some running shoes, get out and restore your body. Fitness sharpens the mind, and a fit and trim individual finds work faster. Sad but true.
6. Keep a journal - Dump your thoughts. Capture your ideas. Get that stuff out of your head and make it real. You will find great catharsis in doing so, and some day you will re-read it from a very different perspective.
"In a press conference call, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said the commission had secured a $17.5 million settlement, but the company will only pay $1.6 million of that amount due to inability to pay."
So, the penalty was cut to 10%, thus yielding a 4-cent-per-customer slap on the wrist.
Hard to take FTC seriously at their mission to protect and inform the general customer. They have no teeth.
Forced adoption is a factor to be considered in their strategy. In the United States, 13 states and DC have standing laws forbidding the use of cell phones in "hand-held" mode while driving. [1] In other words, you can talk with it, but not on your ear.
To ensure compliance, most manufacturers include cheapy bud and microphone wired headset kits in their boxes.
By virtue of their control of 12% or so of the phone market, Apple is putting a lot of Lightning headsets into the stream, and making a bet that a lot of those people in the ecosystem will upgrade to the pods.
Relevant and coincidental personal anecdote:
10 years ago I caught my x-wife in an affair as she was using this same method the communicate with her lover. Her choice of email address for the shared account raised alarms on my firewall, so it was a simple matter to track to her machine. While she had gone to the similar trouble to delete all records on Yahoo (coincidentally), she had been browsing with IE which, due to some off-line setting, was cacheing locally all of the pages she had written. It was simply a matter of laying hands on her laptop and downloading all of that cache to expose the ruse.
I cannot find the article, but I believe this method of sharing access to one e-mail account to many parties was one of the comms methods employed by the 9/11 terrorists, pioneered by Columbian drug lords.
I am eternally grateful to a properly trained triathalon course observer who saw the signs and rescued me.
I was halfway through the swim portion (first segment) of a triathalon that required wetsuits. Coming from warmer climes, I didn't own one so I was fitted for a tri-suit at a pro shop two days before the event. I trained a few times with it in a gym pool to get used to it, and I thought everything was good for race day.
But it turned out it was slightly too tight, and I could not quite inhale sufficiently. Half-way across the Delaware river I remember remarking to myself that the waves were crashing over me; I was spending more time swimming under water than on the surface.
I wasn't terrified, I just felt really weird. It wouldn't make sense - all this training and I can't keep my head above the water?
I don't remember passing out, but an observer was watching me from a kayak, and he hauled me to a rescue launch. I hadn't inhaled any water, all they had to do was yank open the zipper on my suit.
I guess I turned from blue back to pink and everybody had a good laugh, but I couldn't thank that observer in the kayak enough.
I take a moment every now and then to thank those people who are trained and vigilant, standing station and ready to save us when we least expect it.
