Being self-employed - review

For some time, I am now running my own company and working as freelancer. I blogged about the the beginning of all this already, but not a lot about how everything is going, what I am doing, etc., so it's time to change this:

The first thing to note is that it was the right decision to start standing on my own feet: Before I started Ambiera, I was working as normal employed software engineer. I wanted to have some more freedom and work a bit more in the games area again, so I decided to quit my job. The reason was not that I disliked my job - I didn't and actually, I am still doing some work for my last employer. But I also wanted to work on other projects, and have some more time for Irrlicht and related things.

Now, after some time, I am pretty happy with how everything worked out: I already worked on some computer games and similar projects for different companies from various countries. I did not only have a lot of fun, but additionally learned to use new technologies and was able improve my skills and knowledge - that's what I was missing a bit before, maybe. Furthermore, I was able to create and maintain two products - namely irrKlang and irrEdit which are now used by other developers - hobbists and professional developers, which also gets me a bit more into contact with the game industry and is quite interesting. So everything is going well, but of course there are some few things which are not that nice:
One problem is that although I have a lot of freedom now I don't have more free time, it's even quite the opposite: I'm working a lot more than previously. And I constantly have to make decisions: Which job should I do and which not? Currently, I have to reject a huge amount of possible jobs unfortunately, simply because of shortage of time, and it's not very easy to decide which one to do and which not.
Another issue is that the Euro/Dollar exchange rate currently is a joke. The dollar is now only worth 1.4 euros and still falling, and because a lot of my customers are from the U.S., my services are getting more expensive for them every day. That's really bad. Same for advertising: Google adsense is paying in Dollars, and every month, I get less money from it. And there is no other advertiser I could switch to, google has the monopoly. Great. And last but not least, the bureaucracy: It only works when they want money from you, but I guess that's nothing new. :)

But apart from these few glitches, until now, everything is running nice. And I hope it stays just like it is. :)