I think baby Madeline has been sending secret encoded messages in the form of invisible pheromones to me. The major effect has been that I don’t sleep well through the night anymore. I get very anxious from 1AM through 5AM about a range of topics relating most often to work and the future of software.

Last night I found myself sending emails to Yuval in California at 3AM about the future of photo management and chatting with Aaron at 4AM. Yuval had sent me a link to Phanfare, a photo publishing tool that posts your photos automatically to a web site in the background from a taskbar tool. I thought it would be cool to avoid having to go through the manual work of publishing to my photo library with HTML editing etc. but since it overlaps rather than integrates with Picasa it looked less appealing. So I was trying to figure out if and when Picasa would finally create a public API/SDK to build these sorts of things and dreaming of creating a software application that would generate a similar feature set for people like me.

Among the areas I was losing sleep on was whether I could organize photos based on a clever algorithm included in a Picasa plugin to pick faces out of photos and learn from past filing which person was which. The basic user interface was going to be a gallery of faces that could be moved between buckets with the software trying to guess the right face match from prior experience and the user being able to correct it where necessary. I may be the only person who wants to organize my pictures by the people in them.

The sleep deprivation apparently will be good preparation for when the baby is born and she wakes-up every two hours for feeding during the first month or two. So my not sleeping through the night is going to be very likely in late October and November. Madeline has started to hiccup periodically and it is interesting to feel the rhythms of the hiccups through Sarah’s swollen belly. Sarah can barely fit a meal into her stomach with all of her insides squished, squashed, and moved around.

The insomnia could also be because I can see the world is moving very quickly in information technology with WinFS coming further along, lots of buzz about the extensions to the desktop search providers from their tool bars and side bars, and our need to make a business breakthrough into a vertical market. I get the feeling that I would sleep better if we had a Salesforce.com adapter both for connecting it into desktop search and into our product. But since we don’t have one I can only worry about items. I also worry about the complex issues of getting the business weaned off of good paying consulting engagements since they make me nervous in that they are inherently unstable. I don’t worry so much about job security but about company revenue security. If we don’t have a strong diversified revenue base from products and services then at any point in time everything can blow-up and require rebuilding. Right now the balance is on only a few clients for services and the product is growing from a revenue perspective at a snails pace. So I lose sleep on that every night and every hiccup that occurs in our consulting engagements.