My day job is as a network acceleration expert at Citrix Systems, which is feeling the economic slowdown (as who isn't?). Wednesday afternoon they announced they were reducing their workforce by 10%. Thursday afternoon I learned that I was not going to be shown the door -- which meant that I still had to meet my horrendously difficult Friday deadlines!

I'm sure we all know people who have lost their jobs in this recession. I feel fortunate to have been through this before, having been given the old heave-ho at Activision in the Eighties and WEITEK in the Nineties when their respective wheels fell off. Plus some other gigs when I was a free-lance contractor. Once you've been through it a few times, the prospect is a nuisance rather than a terror. In fact, I've never left a job of my own free will. Gigs don't last, not in high tech, anyway.

So I'm still on the job at Citrix, which is good, since there are some cool things in the works that I want to help push out the door.

As for recession-proofing tips, I don't suppose that I have any special insights. The key is to keep your expenses well below your income and avoid debt so you can constantly build up savings for emergencies and retirement. In our case, we bought a farm that was within our means, never buy new cars (our newest vehicle is a '96 Toyota pickup), pay off our credit cards every month, and if our income goes up, we put most of the increase into savings. We fell off the wagon around 2000, running up considerable credit-card debt just before getting hammered by the recession that followed the dot-com bubble. That wasn't very smart of us. But we got back out of debt eventually and are in okay shape again.

My chicken coops have always had metal roofs, and now I'm trying out metal siding, on the grounds that I want anything I build to last 20 years without maintenance, and the exterior plywood I've been using doesn't deliver that.

People will tell you that metal siding sweats, because of condensation. This is true if the inside of the house is warmer than the outside, since moisture from the warm house will condense on the cold walls and ceiling. And it's true whether these are made of metal or not, though it's more visible with metal because it's 100% non-absorbent.

But you can dodge the problem with a fresh-air poultry house. If you add enough ventilation, the inside of the house is just as cold as the outside, and you get no condensation. My metal roofs don't have condensation unless there's snow on the roof and temperatures are above freezing. The rest of the time, the wide-open houses have dry ceilings and walls.

This is one of the main points of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the chicken-coop book I've republished (check out the sample chapter if you haven't already).

You can also prevent condensation with insulation, but I don't do that.

Back to the construction project. In keeping with my other rule of construction (never use a saw when you can buy stuff that's already the right size), I ignored my existing stock of 10-foot metal roofing and obtained some cheap 8-foot corrugated roofing from Home Depot. My chicken houses are 8x8 feet. Karen and I banged these sheets onto a couple of sides of a chicken house where the old OSB siding was falling off. We used roofing screws. These are hex drive screws with neoprene washers. We used to use roofing nails, but they pull loose too easily and we hate having roofing panels flapping loose in the breeze. And using power tools instead of a hammer keeps my shoulders and back from seizing up. I bang the screw in a short way with a hammer, then drive it home with a cordless drill.

These panels went on very quickly, and if they ever rust through (which they will, at the bottom edges anyway, if I allow chicken manure to pile up against them), I can take the screws out and replace them just as easily.

So far, so good. The shiny metal really brightens up the interior of the chicken house.

Plain old "ripple metal" (corrugated steel) is less rigid than V-channel roofing, and the house is no longer as stiff as it used to be. It may not be essential that a chicken house be as solid as a rock, but I like it that way. I plan to switch to the more expensive roofing on my next house to see what happens.

I have about a zillion patent applications filed with the Patent Office on behalf of my employer, Citrix Systems, where I'm something of a network acceleration guru.

Patents are weird, especially the way other people do it. My goal is always to write up the idea just as clearly and completely as I can, which is the least-weird (weirdless?) way of doing it. An alternate school of thought is that the patent should be lawyered up to increase its protection even at the expense of clarity (or comprehensibility). That's what happened to these two. Yet a third school is that the patent should be made incomprehensible on purpose, and even given a misleading title, so that only you know what it means. This theoretically gives you advantages in court, but I think it's too clever by half.

Both patents (patent 1 patent 2 have to do with fancy compression techiques like we use for the Citrix WANScaler network accelerator. Which is very cool stuff if you're into that sort of thing. I sure am.

Patents are a topsy-turvy world. They don't give your invention any direct protection -- there are no Patent Police -- they basically are just a license to sue infringers. Getting a patent is also a strange process, something only the federal government could come up with. It took nearly two years for these applications to thread the maze, and that's pretty quick! I have some applications that have been in the mill twice as long.

Also, frankly, just because an idea has been patented doesn't mean it's any good. Anybody who can cough up the filing fee and a lot of patience can get a worthless invention patented if it's worthless in the right way. Me, I don't see the point -- in the topsy-turvy world of patents, coming up with a good invention is the easy part -- but some people get a kick out of it.

I'm a fourth-generation back-to-the-lander. This means I've done the back-to-the-land thing twice: once when my parents moved from Los Angeles, where my dad was an aerospace engineer, to Northern California, where my parents built and ran a campground nestled into the redwoods. Then later I moved from Silicon Valley, where I managed a technical writing group, to Oregon's Coast Range, where I do the sort of thing you read about in this blog.

It's interesting watching other people embark (or at least talk about) their back-to-the-land journey, and to compare them to the folks who've been here for a while.

For example, take hygiene. Long-time rural residents want indoor plumbing, hot water, and flush toilets. These are non-negotiable. But there's a whole industry built around people who want to make their ablutions and bodily functions less convenient and more expensive. I shudder to think what Freud would have made of this.

The emphasis on inconvenience and unreliability mystifies me. Try this test on people: tell them your house is a geodesic dome. If they say, "Cool!" they're newbies. If they ask, "Does it leak?" they've been around a while.

I think the difference is that, once you achieve the lifestyle, you no longer need the toys. Toilets and roofs are no longer interesting: you have other fish to fry.

The other thing I notice is that newbies and wannabes talk a lot more about the wonderful rural lifestyle than long-time practitioners. If you read back-to-the-land literature, only a fraction of it was written by people who have been on the land for more than three or four years. Sadly, that's about the amount of time it takes for newcomers to become completely broke and move back to the city. The people you really want to listen to are the ones who've been on the land for five years or more, but they aren't so communicative.

I will close with a piece of rural old-timer wisdom: "Never do by hand something you can do with power equipment. You only get one spine, so make it last."

I like portable chicken houses. My henhouses are mostly simple little 8x8-foot houses that I move with a tractor. I don't put litter on the floor. The chickens don't spend much time on the floor anyway: they use the roosts.

I don't shovel manure, either. When the manure starts getting to be a bit much, I don't remove the manure from the houses, I remove the houses from the manure. I hook up a house to my tractor with a handy chain and drag it to a fresh patch of ground. Then I come back and use the rear scraper blade on my tractor to spread the manure over a long swath of grass. The grass soaks up the manure greedily.

We shuffled our houses around on Friday afternoon. Took about an hour.

For pastured broilers, we use lighter houses that are moved by hand, because the broilers are kept inside the houses at all times (broilers are so young and dumb that they don't know to come in out of the rain, so we keep them under a roof at all times). Hens are older and smarter, so they come and go as they please. In fact, only one of my houses has a door! They get out of the way when the tractor arrives and when their houses start to move around.

The big trick with henhouses is that, if you move them too far, the hens get confused and sleep on the ground where the house used to be. So don't move the houses too far. The first time you spring this on a group of chickens, ten or fifteen feet is plenty. Later you can move them as far as fifty feet or so.

The other trick is to move the houses as early in the day as you can manage, since that gives the chickens more time to get used to their changed landscape.

One of the problems with doing user manuals as part of my day job (the WANScaler group at Citrix Systems) is that the scheduling is always so wacky. You can't document the product precisely until it stops changing, and it doesn't do that until the last minute. Then the documentation has to be done in a rush. Good thing I like a challenge! So I'm in a tremendous rush to get everything done for a big software release.

There are some specific techniques for making this work. The most important one is to be a bona fide expert on the product, so you already know what it does, why it does it, and why the customer should care. You can't succeed at a last-minute rush if you're faced with big knowledge gaps. You just need to catch up on what the last-minute changes do.

The other technique that works for me is to never write a partial draft of anything. I try to write production-worthy copy in a single pass. By not leaving any gaps or guesses in my work, I don't have to keep track of them. Learn first, then write.

The beauty of this method is that it dovetails with the last-minute-ness that the schedule demands. I spend the early part of the project learning everything about it, testing it, lobbying for improvements, etc. When it's time to write up the new features, my research is all done and I can simply emit the text and diagrams. Pretty spiffy.

Also, writing is hard. Getting into the zone is painful. Once you're there, it's fun, but you need to stay in the zone. So doing your writing in big chunks is less painful than the alternatives.

Ah, New Year's Day. I love New Year's Day because of the New Year's resolution I made a few years ago: no more resolutions! It's the only one I've ever kept.

Thinking Like a Consumer

You know, I think that a lot of people are approaching the whole "green" issue wrong. They're thinking like consumers, and it ruins their chance to do anything meaningful. Being a consumer is like having an enormous flashing sign over your head that says, "SUCKER." Worse, you see the "SUCKER" signs over the heads of the people around you, and peer pressure kicks in and makes you want to do what they do.

A lot of the people I know show some warning signs of thinking like a consumer:

• They imagine that they can achieve a "green" lifestyle through buying stuff.
• They think that joining organizations and pooling their ignorance with others counts as "doing something."
• Their retirement fund and their kids' college funds are empty and their credit cards are full.

Thinking Like a Producer

All of these things are good for the kind of person who makes his money by selling to suckers, but it doesn't get the cows milked. If you want to make a difference to the environment, you should do it directly by taking care of a piece of land with your own hands. And turn a profit while you're at it, because the environment needs to be more than a hobby for the well-to-do.

As far as I can make out, this is very easy. Carbon abatement is a trivial exercise, for example. You take a piece of cropland or pastureland and plant trees on it, and in short order (and with little maintenance) you have a stand of timber that has fixed an enormous amount of carbon in the wood and the soil. Cut the trees when they are mature and repeat. Starker Forest Products land adjoins mine on two sides, and the Starker family has been making its living this way since the Thirties, and has donated millions of dollars to Oregon State University as well. You can do a lot worse than this and not regret your investment, and it can bring your carbon footprint down to zero, and provide you with peaceful surroundings, not to mention firewood.

In thirty or forty years I'll be able to tell you how it's worked out for me, since I'm letting a big chunk of my farm revert to forest naturally.

Nuts and Bolts

Thinking like a producer is useful, even if you don't act on it directly. The best course I ever took in college was Engineering Economics, which taught me the basics of cost-benefit analysis and the time value of money. This is ABC-level stuff, and should be a required course for all high school students, let alone college students, but it isn't.

You learn how to think about your purchases as they travel along their life cycle from "pile of money" to "valuable new purchase" to "worthless piece of junk." Or, in the case of production equipment, from "pile of money" to "valuable new purchase" to "big pile of money plus worthless piece of junk." The big pile of money comes from the things you produced with the help of the piece of equipment.

The difference between a producer and a consumer is that the producer is aiming for the big pile of money, while the consumer writes it off. Since consumers have a batting average of .000, it's not hard to do better than this.

Unfortunately, consumers, being new to the production game, tend to come up with justifications and rationalizations rather than actual plans, so it can take a while before you start hitting the ball. "Never bet the farm" is good advice, especially when you're starting out.

Even if you don't ever try your hand at the production side of the picture, just being aware of how quickly purchases lose their value can spell the difference between living in a gilded, credit-burdened cage and true affluence.

For example, new cars are for suckers. They lose most of their value in the first few years of ownership, but cars are so durable these days that people are practically giving them away when they still have most of their life still ahead of them.

(Which is not to say that you can't buy a new car if that's your passion, but make sure your retirement fund and the kids' college fund are topped off. First things first.)

Only an idiot judges others by the kind of car they drive. Driving an old or unfashionable car thus works as an idiot detector. If you get a hard time about your old car (from people who really mean it and aren't just ribbing you), then you're surrounded by Pod People and need to find a path back to the real world.

(Living in a non-snooty neighborhood will, in itself, save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the course of your working lifetime by removing the peer pressure to be as much of a sucker as your neighbors.)