The story behind kirby alarm it goes like this (please forgive me if I bore you <grin>)
The street I live in runs a football tipping competition (I think some
countries it is referred to as Football Pools, but in Australia we
called it "footy tipping")
The person running the competition was doing it all by hand, so I decided to write a program to make it easier for her.
I called it "Kirby Footy" after the name of the street "Kirby Court". I
was going to call it "KFC" (kirby footy tipping comp) but decided
Kentucky Fried Chicken may not like that.
Well, the program turned
out pretty good even if I do say so myself and I decided to share it on
the net. I signed up for one of those free hosting sites at tripod and
to my surprise people started to download it.
A few months later I
thought it would be good if I could have a program that would
automatically close the round in the Kirby Footy to prevent people from
entering their tips after the game had started.
Then I thought hey, why not get it to play a sound like a cuckoo clock every hour for a bit of fun.
I called the program Kirby Alarm.
The ideas kept on flowing so I got it to do a few other things like sending emails, running programs, pop up notes.
I shared kirby alarm on the net too. I submitted it to a few freeware sites, and wow, now suddenly it was everywhere.
People around the would were actually starting to search for "Kirby
Alarm". Something I had created. I really excited and humbled me.
For the past 19 years I had been working as a programmer in a software house in Perth, Western Australia.
The work was interesting and varied, the people were friendly, the pay
was good, BUT I was getting more and more satisfaction from Kirby Alarm
and Kirby Footy.
Even though the program were free and I was
not making any money from them at all I could not help myself. I would
get up most days around 5am and work on kirby alarm before going to
work. I would spend my lunch hours working on the program.
Now I wonder where all this motivation came from and am pretty sure it was from God.
This thought kept going through my head "Do something good for someone else. You will both feel better"
On the 25 December 2003 I reluctantly went to church with my wife. She was a Christian but I was not.
Well half way through the service I just started to sob uncontrollably.
I could not help it. Nothing was wrong. It was Christmas day and I had
been happy before. It was God. From that day on my wife and kids have
been attending church worshiping Jesus.
We have never looked back.
Anyways, sorry for my digression. The free version of kirby alarm
turned out to be very popular. It is the most highly downloaded program
in it's category at download.com (see
http://www.download.com/sort/3150-2084_4-0-1-4.html?tag=dir)
and has over 35,000 registered users.
In January 2006 I decided it was not fair to anyone (including myself)
to stay where I was in a job I was not satisfied with. After discussion
with my very supportive wife and months of deliberation I left my
comfortable well paying job to venture out onto my own.
I thought
that if the free version of kirby alarm had been so popular then if I
had more time to develop it then people would be prepared to pay for an
even better version. Well I developed a better version and called it
Kirby Alarm Pro. I sent out an email to the 35,000 registered users,
and waited for the money to start flowing in. If just a very small
percentage purchased the pro version then I'd be rich.
Wow, was I
mistaken. Instead only a handful of people paid for the pro version AND
to make things worse my web site was shut down TWICE because they
thought I was a spammer. Things were not going to plan at all.
But God is good and has provided other sources of income.
Hopefully one day Kirby Alarm Pro will be enough to make a bit of money from.