@Les: Your wish is my command. Get ready for a long off-topic post then. :-)

I guess I should start 4 1/2 years back, when I first came to Australia. I'd been on temporary, academic positions since finishing my PhD in 1994, with no chance of ever becoming permanent faculty, and was a bit fed up with getting the boot and having to find a new job every couple of years or so for various reasons. What's worse, during my time in the US, my visa was actually tied to my position, adding extra spice to the general aroma of uncertainty. So, when I moved to the ACT, I was quite happy to take up non-academic work with the chance of continued employment and, eventually, permanent residency, while still working at a university and thus in close contact with the exciting world of science.

So, I got that permanent residency in January 2010, which is really nice, but my work situation didn't quite move into the direction I was hoping and expecting. I started doing some web programming, hoping to move towards more interesting - which to me means scientific, and particularly mathematical - things later on. Pretty much the opposite happened, and nowadays I tend to find myself somewhere in the no programmer's land between application development and system administration most of the time. As a grumpy old dude who tends to be quite oppinionated about things and generally way too educated for employers to be comfortable with - or at least that's what I'm suspecting - I decided that the best path for me would be to take the plunge and go freelance. So I'll be quitting my current job as of mid-January and try to earn my daily kangaroo (sorry, vegetarians!) with whatever jobs I can find that fit my talents and pay reasonably well.

I also decided that Canberra was too boring a place for me, and that Melbourne would not only be more pleasant to live in, but also provide more work opportunities. So I'll be moving here five weeks from now, and am in fact writing this from my future home. I have to confess that both decisions - quitting my job and moving - were made much easier by the fact that my new partner also lives here in Melbourne.

To close the loop and get slightly more on-topic: back when I spent a lot of my time fine-tuning Antonia and writing tools to make the job easier, such as the mesh tools mentioned a few posts back, I've been speculating whether either of these things - modelling and figure development or writing tools for modellers and figure developers - could be made a source of supplementary income. I don't think I'll make it the exclusive or even main source any time soon, but I might find myself inclined to spend more time on these things again some time in the future and maybe try to sell a few things here and there. So if any of you good folk have ideas on what you think might sell well - models, morphs, figure accessories, mesh-fiddling tools or general Poser-related hair-pulling-out-avoidance software - please don't be shy and let me know. :-)

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.