What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?
RobGR: I'm surprised no one threw out some crap about the Four Hour Work Week.I have at various times applied for work at movie theaters, Kinko's, video rental places, etc.  I have not yet ended up working a side job, but I have done contracting work (programming and sys admin) that I ordinarily would not take (windows stuff) when desparate.  My impression is that these types of side jobs are harder to get than you think, because employers like someone whose main focus is this job, who is likely to stick around, and who cares enough about the job to try hard not to get fired.As a result, at one time I thought hard for a while about how to make jobs that were more suited to my needs.  Rather than be able to work on my stuff at work, which I suspected would not work, I tried to think of a way I could make rent plus ramen money working one long 12 hour day per week.The useful result of that exercise is that I thought long and hard about how much money I really, really needed to survive, and cut down my expenses considerably.The more entertaining result was that I came up with a number of crazy "part-time business" ideas.  The one which I partly did and made money on was finding old books at garage sales to sell online.  (Very little money.)  The one which people like to talk about is my "human powered lawn care" idea: Every Saturday, I and 4 or more one-day-a-weekers would meet up, ride on bikes to our rich green-freak hippy clients, and mow their lawn in a "carbon neutral" fasion, with reel push mowers and other hand-powered implements.  I had this pretty well figured out, from the hauling of implements with bike trailers to having one bike with generator you put the back wheel on, to power a single weed-wacker (weed-wackers being indispensible tools of modern lawn care).  People like to talk about that idea, but no one wanted to do it with me.Another strategy would be to seek out a job that is by it's nature part-time, and thus maybe undesireable to the people who would normally do it -- such as assisting in managing a farmer's market stand, which would limited to one day a week.  If you severly limit your expenses, you can survive and then invest the rest of your time in your startup idea.