To run (or work at) such an establishment is what I want. But I want to do it now, or soon. If I knew I could do it, I would leave college and do so. But can I do it? It sounds feasible enough, but can I get the money? Can I jump through the hoops? Would I go bankrupt and be ruined for the rest of my life?

Working in pure geek nirvana like you're talking about is fun. I had the coolest gig a few years ago working at the Arizona Mac Users Group HQ in Phoenix. All geek, all Mac, all the time.

Seriously, though, a place you may want to check out for the kind of work environment you're looking for is a local ISP. They may be an endangered species, but I'm talking about the regional ISP's, not the megacorps like Earthlink and MSN. Go to yp.yahoo.com or switchboard.com and look up your local Internet providers. Tell them you're interested in working for them, have a CE background, and want to know if they're hiring.

You may want to consider working for an ISP part-time instead of jumping ship completely and leaving school outright. That way you can still get your degree ... and get to geek out.

Of course, depending on your skill and experience level, you may get stuck doing customer service or telephone tech support. Yiiich. It's thankless work, and trust me, you don't want it.

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If you're serious about starting your own small business, I would refer you to your nearest neighborhood Borders or Barnes and Noble. Check out their business section. There are tons of books on the subject - ranging from the Dummies series to titles only a Lawyer could love.

That said, you may want to check out the Nolo books while browsing. They are also online. Nolo is essentially Do It Yourself Law.

As for whether or not you should leave school to start your own business, it depends. You said you are a computer engineering major. Are you a programmer? Do you develop applications? What's your key skill that someone would want to hire you (or your firm) out to accomplish?

But the more I think about it, the less I want to study calculus and physics and the more I want to put the skills I have to work now, even if it is just working somewhere doing repairs. Which looks a bit more feasible than me getting a loan, the proper licenses, and all that other stuff. For now anyway. Right now I just don't *want* my degree. hrm...

As to skills, I was a competent system administrator at my old high school without training. When there was a problem with a domain server, or the student profiles needed to be set up just so, etc, I was usually the one to do the job. I can do some perl and know the C syntax, but I haven't yet put any focused effort into programming, mostly because I've got all this other stuff to worry about. In many cases I could probably do better than a standard cert if given a month to train in the appropriate skills.

So is Lex dropping out of college? Maybe. I'd like to take the fall semester off and try my hand at working. If that doesn't turn out well, then I'll just come back. I never saw anywhere that it said I had to attend every semester...

But it is highly unlikely that I could start my business any time soon. Not that I won't take a stab at it.