07:
“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” –Albert Einstein
Lately, this quote has a made a lot of sense to me. Striving for success is such an ambiguous task, but it’s fairly easy to determine whether your actions are producing a value–taking the raw elements around you and building something useful. Unfortunately, I think that this idea is largely forgotten in the States. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of innovative spirit here. Just look at all the startups out there that are attempting to produce something valuable to their users. Most of them fail, but they usually do so when they don’t produce a value. In the long run, these guys stick around when their users find them too useful to let go. As long as you consistently enrich everything you’re involved with, you needn’t worry whether you’ll succeed in the end.
Let’s hear the ‘financial engineers’ of today explain what value, exactly, they are adding to our financial system. You’d think after the subprime mortgage catastrophe, we’d be more wary of bundling a bunch of questionable investments, slicing them up and reselling them, yet that’s exactly what we’re faced with again. I’m no financial expert and I’m not going to try to explain the current problem of toxic investments. You can ask Google about that, as cleverly use this to foray into my topic-in-mind:
I’ve been learning a lot these days, among other things, about how search engine optimization works and how the people behind it think. There’s supposedly some rift between us developers and SEO people, but I’ve never been one to jump on any side of a fight. Instead I’ve decided to analyze the situation through the lens of value. Optimizing your content to be better indexed is excellent. In fact, I often go to unreasonable length to ensure my HTML adheres to proper semantics, that is, making sure any tabular data is in a table, any lists are actually lists, each section, article, item, etc is properly classified rather than just wrapping everything in a DIV. My belief is that any smart indexing agent (Google) out there ought to be able to make sense of the content and do with it accordingly.
However, there’s another face to SEO, which I wouldn’t really consider “search engine optimization” anymore than I’d consider door-to-door evangelizing “gospel reception optimization.” Optimizing your content is all well and good and if you have something that is of value to your visitors, it will naturally earn it’s place among search results. Not very far beyond that, I’d consider it nothing more than Google gaming. Of course, companies are always going to pay to get an edge on their competitors, but it becomes very problematic when there’s a potential for the game itself to benefits from the dirty play.
There’s a lot of hubbub about the poor quality of Google search results due to scrapers redistributing content (that is freely available elsewhere) with the addition of a hefty helping of ads. That’s SEO at it’s worst. These guys have done absolutely nothing to add value to the internet. They may try to argue that they’re making the content easier to find for users that are looking for it, but that’s clearly not the case when searching for a specific Apache error message returns you two identical results, one from Server Fault and one from eFreedom.
It seems like it would be child’s play for Google to allow users to ban specific sites from their results or even have a “downvote” system to denote what one is not looking for. There’s plenty of plugins and add-ons to do the job, but for me at least, modifying my web pages client side is a very dirty hack. But let’s consider Google’s stake in this situation. These scraper sites that game their search ranking are serving up, you guessed it, AdSense ads. I don’t want to be all tinfoil hat here, but there’s at least something to consider here. If they added a social ranking mechanism, they could potentially lose revenue.
So, at best, we have a search company that needs to re-think its ranking algorithm and at the very worst, we have a self-feeding search monster that takes advantage of our confidence in its ability to produce us with the content we seek. Google needs to seriously reconsider how it can best provide value to it’s users in this regard, because we can’t expect the leeches that game their rankings up to do so. It’s too easy for them to make big money just be re-appropriating free content.
14:
So, I’ve obviously missed my posting schedule by two days, but I have a good reason. I swear! I’ve been working on a startup with my friend Flip Stewart. Saturday night, my friend and I opened alpha registration for Osmoar. We’ve been working really hard on this project for our Alpha launch of January 1st. Osmoar is a social network for suggestions. Think Last.FM, but for everything. Kind of. You’ll be able to inventory your belongings, which are themselves tagged with other things, creating a free-form association hierarchy. From that, we calculate your interests. E.g., you add For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and The Importance of being Earnest and you have indirectly expressed an interest in books, as presumably all three of those would be tagged with “Book”.
This data will give us a number of interesting ways to interpret it. We can suggest more things to you, based on the things you already have and the things people like you have, but that’s not too exciting. We’ll also be making note of activities (think status updates) that those items are involved in. From that, we can start to suggest things you might like to do based on what you already own. E.g., if you have a bike in your inventory you may receive a suggestion to ride Critical Mass around the last Friday of the month. That’s a pretty basic suggestion, but as we’ve seen in any user-driven site, everything ends up getting thought of. Having specific combinations of items will garner you different suggestions, and hopefully users will be trying new things they never thought to do.
This gets even more interesting when you throw geo-location location in there. This opens up the possibility for users to create specific events. E.g., the Halloween Critical Mass in Atlanta. Then users who have a bike in their inventory (and maybe a costume!) and have indicated they are in Atlanta via status update, or any other feature that updates their location may get a suggestion that they attend.
The previous example is one angle to vie the ‘associator engine’ at work. A very broad usage. However, we’re hoping to produce very personalized content. Another user might have a very niche interest in our network: recipes. One could post a recipe as a note, tagging all the necessary ingredients, as well as ethnicity, “spicy”, etc. Then, if another user were to have a similar interest in the site and were to inventory the contents of their pantry, and amongst the things in it are the ingredients to the first user’s recipe, they may receive a suggestion for it.
Anyway, I’ve got lots of work to do in order to keep caught up with work and this project, so I must wrap this post up. If my quick description sounded interesting, go register and invite a friend, follow us on Twitter, and check out our Facebook. I appreciate it.
06:
Comic from xkcd
Anyone who has ever spent their time trying to come up with a business idea has definitely run into this before. You have a genius invention–pure inspiration! A quick Google search later, and you find that someone else already had this idea and is making millions. It doesn’t seem quite fair. You didn’t copy their idea. You came up with it on your own, yet you don’t get to cash in on it.
Elisha Gray got the raw end of the deal when he invented the telephone independent of Alexander Graham Bell, who ultimately won the rights to it. There’s a lot of controversy in this case, concerning who actually invented it first versus who filed for a patent first (Bell). Whatever the case, Bell got exclusive rights to what Gray felt he had equally created. This is a famous case, but I’ve been there too. Once, right after I got done detailing my awesome invention of a wireless router which made it possible for any connected device to stream music to your home entertainment system, my friend said, “You mean an AirPort?” Wow. Time to use Apple hardware, huh?
It’s kind of disheartening to feel that your great idea has already been done, and that you’ll never get the chance to realize your inspiration, but that’s only if you consider your inspiration to be a random occurrence–an idea as a drifting chunk of information that just happened upon your brain. If you do that, you’re robbing yourself of a lot of credit. Your idea was the result of your diligence of thought. The odd dummy might occasionally have a eureka moment and make something that’s wildly successful, but usually, great ideas come from lots of hard work.
Someone else creating something doesn’t limit the possibilities of great inventions you could make. Each invention broadens them. The invention of residential electricity (for more inventor controversy, see Nikola Tesla) might have swept someone’s great idea right out from under them, but it also opened up the floodgates for the invention of home appliances, air conditioning, personal computers, the list goes on.
Every new invention creates the possibility of countless more inventions. In this regard, it helps to be on the cutting edge of what’s out there, and think of how you can synthesize them into the creations of tomorrow. I guess my point here is to not feel bitter when someone is already getting rich off your idea. Instead, be glad that you’re smart enough to come up with an idea that has potential for success, and then apply those brains to making something else!
P.S. For an interesting talk, check out Matt Ridley’s When Ideas Have Sex at TED.
30:
It’s that ridiculous time of the season where I’m expected to drop everything and focus all my attention upon some (mostly irrelevant) tasks. That’s right–finals. I haven’t really had time to come up with a topic for this week, but I wanted to get a little blurb out here anyway.
A friend and I have come up with a pretty exciting startup idea for a new web service. We’re in the process of fleshing out the plan and deciding if it’s worth pursuing at the moment, and I’m doing a little preliminary development for it on top of my framework. When we get the idea more solidified and moving towards a proposal I’ll start sharing some details.
Until next week!
22:
While there’s still a little more than a month left of it, I’d like to look back at the goals I set for the year and how I did on them. In hindsight, I could have set the bar a little higher. In light of that, I’ll also evaluate some achievements that I didn’t particularly set as goals for the year.
On December 23, 2009, I wrote the following in my notebook:
Things to do in 2010
- Pay off my credit card
- Nurture a profitable skill
- Find and practice a pleasurable talent [hobby]
- Get my own place
For a couple pages, I expounded on each a little further, but for the most part, they are pretty cut and dry. The first one I took care of pretty quickly. It wasn’t a huge balance, and I had it paid off in a couple of months. However, I was in a car accident not to long after and even though it wasn’t my fault, I ended up incurring another balance. I soon paid that off though, and as of today have a zero-balance.
The second I feel like I accomplished my goal and then some. I began to pick up PHP after having not programmed for several years. I got it back quickly and began to learn more and more material throughout the spring and summer. I also started to brush up my other web dev skills, learning HTML5 and getting familiar with jQuery. During the summer, I set another goal for myself: to get a job using it by the end of the summer. The week before school started, I had a successful interview with the president of a creative agency in town and landed a paid internship doing web development.
The third goal, I’m trying to look at in two ways. I enjoy doing web development so much, that when I’m working on my own projects (e.g. Trestle), it’s fun. However, it’s also a work-related skill, and I think I was intending more of a hobby-for-hobby’s-sake type talent. I probably could have done a little better to achieve this goal to the letter, but I no longer feel the void of fun or happiness that I was trying to fill, so one way or another, in spirit I think I achieved this one.
Getting my own place didn’t take very long. I had my own apartment by the end of the winter. It was pretty nice to live alone. I found it easier to concentrate and be productive than I had when living with roommates. That didn’t last too long though. My brother and my girlfriend have moved in with me, and I’m sharing my living space again. This time it’s not such a problem though. Space is a little cramped, but there’s no roommate drama. Consequently, I’m enjoying company, lower rent and am still able to concentrate and be productive.
Me and Lainey under the Bean
Something that I didn’t really set as a goal (but really should have) was to go on a vacation. Being stationary in Atlanta after traveling abroad for a few years was more painful than I can describe. I one tried to leave in 2009 only to have my plans fall through. However, this year I got to go on a trip to Chicago with my girlfriend for three days. It’s wasn’t quite a month backpacking Europe, but after being stuck here for three years, it was a tsunami of fresh air.
All-in-all, this year has been great. The best I’ve had since crash landing back home from Ecuador. Especially scoring the web development gig. After delivering pizza for over two years, and doing even worse work before that, using the skills I’ve spent time and effort learning feels great. I finally have a sense of work satisfaction and the promise of rewards from self-improvement. Let’s face it, you can’t really hope to augment your income delivering pizza by watching webcasts or reading a book. The potential to improve my living conditions just by soaking up knowledge is exciting to me.
I’ll be spending some time before January picking my battles for 2011. I think the lesson learned here is that I can definitely set some loftier goals, especially since I have more momentum than I had last year.
15:
This weekend has been the first one I’ve had to myself in over two years. I finally quit my job delivering pizza and am doing web development full time. I consider this a landmark achievement in my career, as I’m finally doing the work I’ve chosen for myself and learned to do. This semester still has my schedule quite slammed, but I’ve freed a large chunk of my time and energy. Consequently, I’m now setting myself a rigid posting schedule of every Sunday. I’ve tried to set quotas for myself like at least one post per week, but without the definite time, I put it off and end up never posting. One post per week is not much, but it’s certainly doable with my schedule, and I’ll consider doing more after this semester is over.
I’ve also been thinking about the scope of this blog. I’m still trying to develop my voice, and I’m beginning to think that it will be markedly more techie than many of my peers. I’ve no experience in affiliate marketing, and I no practically nothing about writing and selling a successful book. I write code. Developing that skill and sharing it with others excites me. I also care immensely about traveling. Ergo, I’ll be carving out my niche with a combination of these. I think from now on, I won’t hesitate to include more tech-related content here. We’ll see who finds it relevant.
As my first code-related mention, a project I’ve been working on lately is on GitHub. It’s a PHP framework I call Trestle. It’s not very far along, but I’m making progress. I’m keeping it open source, and I’m hoping that it will become useful enough to use for developing some valuable tools later on. I’ve got a few ideas in mind for it.
13:
Photo by F Delventhal
Too often, I find myself stressing out over whether I’ve done things well enough. I find myself considering tiny details, and under the microscope of scrutiny, uncertainty rears its head. “Is this what my professor expects from this paper? Will I be able to support myself if I make this job decision? Can I wear this shirt with these shoes?”
I start to reason with the uncertainty, evaluating the potential outcomes of various decisions and finally make the best choice I can come up with. However, the fact that there were other choices available that I was aware of often leaves me insecure. It’s easy to get carried away following tangents involved in decisions, and before I know it, I realize that there’s just too many variables involved in any given decision to ever be 100% certain. Sometimes I begin to wish I would have just made a coin-toss decision without having pondered on the details so much, figuring that I’d probably have just as favorable an outcome.
If you’re like me, you understand how it feels to follow so many tunnels of possibility connected to one decision until you feel like there’s just too much involved to make an informed decision. However, fear not the uncertainty! My experience has show me time and again, despite the exponential uncertainty that I become aware of, I usually do make better decisions as a result of pondering the details that others might gloss over. Oddly enough they often feel more secure about their choices, but only as an effect of being less aware of the uncertainty at hand.
Think of your knowledge or informed-ness as a sphere of light surrounded by darkness. The larger the sphere grows, the more surface area contacts the darkness. Likewise, as you become more enlightened, you are more aware of the unknown. Next time you are stressing over how much you are uncertain of a subject, be comforted that you know enough to know that you don’t know so much.
25:
Humans have historically done a wonderful job of ignoring the temporary nature of all things–especially themselves. At first it may seem gloomy to be well aware that you’ll be gone a few decades from today, but really, is putting it out of your head just giving you more room for apathy today?
When you start to think of every day as a portion of one of the most precious and limited resources you have available–time in the universe as a living being–you lose all excuses not to use them to their fullest! I highly recommend anyone feeling like they may be putting off their dreams, trading them for hold-me-over entertainment and idle weekends that recharge you just enough to go back to the weekly grind, spend some time reflecting on your own temporary nature. Get in touch with your inner ephemerality. While you’re at it, consider how temporary many things are. Good friends, your grandparents, relationships. Nothing escapes temporariness (all due respect to the laws of thermodynamics, but for the most part, we’re interested in the organization matter, and not it’s continuity.) Are you cherishing every moment of them? Are you really making the most of every day?
This isn’t a new concept, but I feel that too often, it gets skewed with a”if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do” attitude that I want to be careful to avoid. If I, for one, lived every day like it was my last, they either a) would be soon enough, or b) would be wholly unfulfilling after I reflected on a few years of life. One of the best things about time (like any limited resource) is that it can be invested. This takes confidence that you have some time to work with, certainly not the sort of thing you’d do with your last day. However, a few years spent doing something you’re not particularly excited about may be well worth it when it yields you more happiness than it cost you a few years later. To quote the famous Lorem Ipsum, “Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”
On a personal note, I recently made a bit of a jump in my personal journey towards location independence and earning the living I want. I have a paid internship with a web development firm and I’ve cut my pizza deliver hours back to a minimal two days a week. One giant step closer to my dreams! Look forward to some stories of my past travels and maybe a few city guides in the next couple of days. I want to dissect some of my old travel journal entries and mix in some photos, so it should produce some interesting material.
Also, if you haven’t heard, Sean Ogle finally released his Overcoming the Fear of Uncertainty this week. I purchased a subscription, but haven’t dug into it yet. I’ll be doing so right away, and I’ll give my review soon.
12:
First off, I want to apologize for the long gap since my last post. I missed one week and fell into a rut that got harder and harder to get out of with every passing day. However, I’ve decided to finish this series and then make a commitment to publish at least once a week from now on.
This is the last part in my series on sudden unemployment with no backup plan. It deals with personal development and morale maintenance. If you haven’t read the first two parts, I suggest you start at the beginning.
You’ve stopped your free fall and you’re out looking for work. You should feel better already, secure that you can get by like this for a bit of time, but don’t get too comfortable or it might become a habit, and you’ll be that mooch friend that every hates. However, it is important to relax a bit and keep your spirits up. You can’t be out looking for a job 12 hours a day. Job hunting can take a psychological toll, as you unavoidably face repeated rejection. If you keep it up for too long, you’ll drain yourself and produce less results than if you stopped, recharged and headed out the next morning. Try to find a comfortable number in between five and ten attempts per day and then stop. It’s just as important to make sure you don’t become a nervous wreck as it is to be getting those applications out there.
So, somewhere around 4:00pm, you’ve done your job hunting for the day and you need to pay attention to yourself. Be constructive with this time. You can probably finish a few books during your vacation, learn an instrument, learn a new programming language, learn to cook, the possibilities are endless. Once you’re working again, you’ll kick yourself for wasting all the free time you had before if you don’t use it well. You may be able to elevate your station in life right now. Learn to do something valuable, like design webpages, and your next job could be one you enjoy vastly more than the job you just lost. Check out this list of 77 amazing things to do for starers.
Another great thing to do if the weather is nice is to explore your surroundings. With tons of time on my hands, I spent most of my free time finding hidden nooks and crannies in my city that I would have otherwise never noticed. Ride a bike around, go for a walk, find a place to swim, just do something to keep yourself relaxed and stimulated.
Just as many as the things to do, are the things to beware. Be careful how much you partake of alcohol (or whatever your thing is) even if friends are buying. If your friends want you to go out with them, and say they’ll buy your drinks, it’s still not a free night. It might be alright occasionally, and I don’t discourage you from it, just use your best judgement. You must keep in mind the toll it will take on you the next day. Will you be as enthusiastic and presentable on your job hunt the next morning? Another thing to beware is that it is (of course) habit forming. I don’t mean to suggest that you’ll become a homeless, raving alcoholic in one summer, flat. If you’re reading this article, I’ll assume you’re a cut above that. However, if you’re out with your friends a few nights in a row at their treat, it may become routine, and while you’re friends may be happy to have you out for a while, eventually, they’re going to realize that buying drinks for two is costing them too much.
Keep the nonconstructive recreation and leisure to a minimum and focus on things that help you flourish.
This concludes my Job Loss on the Slim series. I hope someone in such a situation can learn from some of my experience. I survived several months on the slim before getting back on my feet, so I know it’s possible. Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions about how I dealt with something specific, please post a comment!
16:
Being debt free is an important component to my vision of the Carry On Life. Being burdened with payments severely limits my options. I can’t decide to take off and backpack for a couple months when my lease is up, career change is more difficult, being sick for a week is hardly an option, the list goes on and on. Basically, I have no choice but to make sure I am able to make my payments every month, and every impediment to drawing income can become a crisis if I’m unable to pay. This adds a lot of weight to my proverbial backpack. Not to mention, it’s not only draining me of my current resources and energy; with interest, it’s already siphoning away at my future.
The Problem
My relationship with debt started just before going on a trip to Europe in the fall of ’06. I had attended two classes during the summer semester and then decided not to continue school at the time. I failed to pay my tuition and flouted bills they kept sending that grew more and more stern each time. When I got home the following winter, my mom told me that a collection agency had been calling for me. This was the first time I’d ever actually dealt with owing anyone a large amount of money. And worse, I had no job.
For a couple months, I kept the collection calls at bay. When I finally got a job, I cracked and let the setup an automatic bank draft, sparing myself from any credit damage. It was anything but a pleasant experience. I worked, and made sure to keep enough cash in my account to cover the automatic drafts until the tuition bill of almost $1,000 was paid off and then took off for another trip, this time to Ecuador in the fall of ’07.
The Credit Card
I managed to not acquire any debt since my college bill until the Spring of ’08, when I found myself out of work (the inspiration for Job Loss on the Slim). I had a credit card with a $500 spending limit that I’d had since I was 18 and had never carried a balance on it. Up until then, I’d used it like a debit card and then transfered funds to it every week to pay it off entirely. I just thought it was a good way to show I can use credit and build a good score. However, when the income stopped, that $500 became tempting to use at very stressed points. I’m not sure where all of it went, some was reasonable (gas for getting to a job interview) some was wasteful. Regardless, by the time I found work, edging into fall, I had maxed it out and missed at least two month’s worth of payments.
It took me a while once I was working to get it paid down, but I did eventually do it. However, I failed to keep it that way. The same credit card that has plagued me since ’08 presently has a balance of $321.42, which I accumulated in relation to a wreck I was in a few months ago. The rental agency wanted a major card on file, so I warily pulled it from my wallet and handed it over, saying goodbye to my $0 balance. However, I expected to be reimbursed in full by the other driver’s insurance agency, so I wasn’t too worried. Ahh, in a perfect world… Long story short, they did not fully cover my rental costs, and the car I rented came back with a small ding in the top of the trunk that seemed to be caused by a rogue golfball, tacking on an unexpected $250!
The Car
I’m almost embarrassed to talk about the car. I’ve heard it over and over, “buying a car on a loan was the worst thing I’ve ever done!’ and it’s true. I’ve bought plenty of cars from individuals (we’re talking somewhere around 5-7 beater cars I’ve been through), and it’s almost a pleasure each time: negotiating a price in a neighborly manner, when the amount in question is only going to fluctuate a couple hundred either way. Car dealers are f’ing sharks. Not to offend any sharks reading, but it’s true. You get sized up the second you walk in. They do it for a living, and are thus expert at estimating your knowledge of price, interest, even how well you’ll negotiate.
I was in a bad spot. I was desperate to get a car, as my last beater had just died and I had pizza to deliver that week. I went to a buy-here-pay-here rip off lot without a thorough plan or anything. The most preparation I put into it was looking up the car in question’s Kelly Blue Book value via iPhone. Even after that, I blundered horribly. I had planned to talk tough and squeeze the price down and all that, but when it came time to talk, I somehow found myself feeling like the dealer was doing me a huge favor by giving me a chance even with my lack of credit history and modest income. My instinct was to not push my luck by bargaining. Looking back now I wonder how I was enchanted so severely that I agreed to a 25.9% APR loan for five years! I’m absolutely ashamed that I did such a thing, and it hurts to admit it publicly.
However, I’ve blundered and it’s a fact of the past that can’t be changed, only corrected from this point onward.
The Solution
As it stands, I have the above mentioned $321.42 on my credit card with an APR of 22.9% and today I called my auto loan people and asked the exact payoff amount, which is $11,514.66 at 25.9% (cringe) and $5,566 in student loans. Most of that is deferred until I graduate, however I have racked up $66 worth of interest on them in the past year.
The smartest way to tackle this would be to pay them one by one, highest interest loan first. That would result in saving the most money. However, I’m going to take J.D. from Get Rich Slowly’s advice. He suggests the debt snowball approach, attack debts in order of balance, smallest to greatest. The reason behind doing it this way is to give yourself the psychological boost every time you conquer another debt. However, considering I only have three sources of debt, I’m going to compromise between the two.
I’m going to tackle the credit card first, which would be J.D.’s way, just to give myself that quick boost. Not to mention, it’s not going to really take any time at all. I already have an automatic payment set to dump the entire $321.42 on it on the 20th. No more credit card. This leaves me with my student loan and my car.
I’m opting to pay off the car before the student loans. The student loans are mostly subsidized, and at this rate I’ll probably have racked up less than $600 of interest by the time I graduate. My car however, I’ve made $350 monthly payments for almost a year and have chiseled a mere $959.47 off the principal! Holy crap! Not to mention, the $218.33 per month full coverage insurance required per my loan terms makes this debt all the more costly.
Oh yeah, another thing before anyone starts to make suggestions: I’ve already considered selling the car, taking the loss and paying the rest of the loan off. A week after I stared to seriously think about doing this, someone pulled out in front of me causing more damage than the car is worth. Their insurance fixed it, but the resale value is kaput.
Using some calculators I found online, a few spreadsheet templates, etc., I’ve estimated that about $1060 per month on the car would have it paid off by next summer. I’m going to look at refinancing next month, because I’ll have made a year of faithful payments and I think my credit should be good enough to get me a decent loan now, but either way, it’s getting paid off. This is a lofty goal If I limit my spending very carefully and continue to seek out better income, I can definitely do it. So here’s my goal. By the time fall semester 2011 starts, I want to be free of my car loan by any means necessary.
So, here goes a fun year of slinging all my cash at debt and living cheap.
rss feed