The key to finding something is knowing how to look for it
126 days ago Every man dies. But not every man truly lives.
139 days ago
140 days ago
So I’m sitting at work a few days ago rebuilding a PC and someone calls me and says they have an exciting new career possibility for me, and asked if I’d be interested about hearing more?
I’m like “yeah sure, knock yourself out.”
Fast forward two weeks to today, and here I am cleaning out my cubicle.
Turns out this exciting new career possibility was exactly just that. A 40 person startup named Vitrue that just landed 2nd round funding was insourcing (ya know… the strange, rarely seen opposite of outsourcing) their development team and needed a couple positions filled. The guys over at Revelation Partners somehow found my bad-ass mojo on the internet and thought I’d be a good fit. Turns out I am. Went in for a 3 hour interview and left with an offer that I couldn’t refuse.
It’s strange, my perception and attitude towards ‘work’ has always been that its just a job. Other people put pictures of their kids all up in their office, personalize everything… I just sit at my computer and do my job. My job isn’t my life, you know? My life starts at 5 pm, the job is just something people do to kill time during the day. It’s a strange dance of probability about who you get stuck next to or working with, and I guess I should be thankful that I’ve never even considered the fact that who I work with would be a contributing factor to wanting to leave.
I went to GT and got a couple of degrees and paid them $35k for the opportunity to do so. Then I turned around and worked there for a couple years and let them pay me three times that in retribution, so all in all, no complaints.
It’s going to be nice to just be an alumni now. Go Tech, but go on Marta!
147 days ago
So Lauren emails this to me today. Someone needs to get to work and stop tomfoolin around here.
151 days ago
A friend of mine got a Voyager yesterday. Jealousy ensues.
I got to play with it, and as I suspected, its everything the iPhone is, plus better.
In normal operation its a full touch screen phone just like the iphone — but then it flips open to have another screen and a full *real* qwerty keyboard. The web browser was also right up there with the iPhone’s, certainly blowing away anything thats on a blackberry or windows mobile device. And the voyager supports flash too! The only thing the iPhone has that the voyager doesn’t, is wifi support — and I’m sorry, but if I’m somewhere that there’s wifi, i’m going to be using a real computer. The Voyager’s 3G certainly kills the iPhone’s EDGE.
Oh and the voyager has GPS built in.
So, anyone looking to get what the iPhone SHOULD have been — get a voyager.
153 days ago
So I was in the bahamas this one time, on vacation. It was great, just relaxing at the beach and going out at night.
One of the days we decided to hit up the straw market — this huge flea market type thing with straw roofs over everything. Mostly chlocking cheap tourist crap to tourists, tshirts, shot glasses, beach towels, that kind of junk. The word was, they were BIG on haggling. They loved haggling, and the whole fun of the market was to go in and haggle your self some good prices. Having never really done anything like that and being accustomed to simply paying the price that came up on the barscanner, we figured we’d give it a shot. Also, I was plastered drunk by 2pm.
So we walk around and around, trying to pick out my target. Do I want an airbrushed Jimi Hendrix Tshirt? A little sailboat made out of coconut shells? How about a nice hula skirt made out of sawgrass? I’m devising complex formulas in my head for how the negotiations are going to go. Should I ask for their asking price first and then counter? Should I low ball them out of the gate, say at 20% discount of what their competitor is selling the same product for? I considered doing random polls of prices from the other side of the market and then using it as leverage for the booths I hadn’t hit. Judging by the boxes of unopened stock people had, and based on the crowd numbers there that day that I approximated by taking random 40sq ft population samples as well as the actual ratio of purchases to failed bids, I began doing supply/demand calculations to determine the optimal strategy for getting the lowest price. I estimated I’d need at least 3, maybe 4 rounds of bidding. I’d start with a 15% price drop over what they say, let them counter with a 5% price drop, then I’d pretend to walk away and then come back and offer 20% price drop — this would scare them into thinking I might not buy, they’d offer 10%, then I’d offer my original 15% and they’d cave. Victory!
Plan in hand, I marked my target and made a line for her wares. I spotted this fantastic little miniature catamaran thing made out of bamboo, that had a series of shot glasses as its cargo, looked quite handmade. I eye it carefully, but with an aloof demeanor. I pretend I am a millionaire businessman, casually shopping for something I could buy 1000 of if I so chose. Off hand, as if I don’t care, I ask, “How much?” She says, “$60 dollars”.
Then out of nowhere, I just blurt out “I’ll give you a dollar for it.”
What the fuck? Why the hell did I just say that? Well, too late now, I had to go with it. I give her the evil eye to show I mean business and that I’m dead serious with my offer. Hopefully she’ll counter with $58 and I can slink out of here without anyone knowing.
She just looks at me and says “No, go away. Get out of here!” I’m like, seriously? Freaking make me an offer back, I’m haggling here! Next thing I know I’m getting run out of the whole market by an old bahamian woman.
Haggling sucks.
155 days ago
So a couple days ago I went down to publix to buy myself a Jimmy Deans Sausage & Egg bowl, and also to pick up some food for hobbes.
I came back upstairs and gave him breakfast and plopped my bowl of deliciousness in the microwave. After a couple minutes, I realized — hobbes wasn’t eating his.
Now, hobbes not eating his breakfast is highly, highly irregular. Normally he has cat sonar for when food is even a remote possibility. So I walk around the apartment, calling him. Nothing.
I search around for a good 5 minutes and then start to get worried. Did he run out the front door while I wasn’t looking? Impossible.
So, fearing the worse, I walk out onto our balcony, which we always leave open when its nice weather. Sometimes he chills out there in the sun.
I look down… and 50 feet below me, down in the bushes, there’s his ass just chilling under the bushes. I’m like HOBBES!!! and he looks up and goes “rawr?” and i’m like what the fuck, cat, what the fuck are you doing 5 stories south of where you’re supposed to be? So I go running out the door, thinking, its finally happened. We always knew this was how it was going to end, didn’t we? With your constant obsession with jumping up ON the railing, walking on the OUTSIDE of the railing on the balcony, almost falling how many times but saving yourself at the last second?
I got down there expecting to bone and blood everywhere, but nah. He just strolls out of the bushes like “Oh hi, whats up? Nothing strange about me being 5 stories down here, nothing at all. Perfectly cool. How are you?” and i’m like OMG WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU
So I feel him all over and somehow, I can’t find any broken bones. No blood. No kitty brains splattered anywhere. I bring him back up and he walks up the stairs by himself, perfectly fine. We walk back in the door and he’s like “Oh sweet, breakfast!” and just starts eating. I’m just standing there rubbing my head, wondering what the hell I’m doing with my life.
Well, fast forward to now, and he’s developed a limp on his front right leg. Either I didn’t notice it at first or he just had adrenaline blocking the pain, but he has a definite limp now. It doesn’t seem to stop him from doing anything — he still runs around and jumps up on crap, he just does so with a limp. So what the hell, cat? If it hurts, why are you running around? If it doesn’t hurt, why are you limping?
Either way I am going to take him to the vet now… and if they say he needs $5k in surgery, well, looks like that 5 story fall is what killed you after all, in a round about way. Dumb ass cat, what the hell?
155 days ago
Since writing Part 1, I’ve been talking with friends about this whole issue even more. Whats startling is that despite the sound argument I made in the previous entry, I still find myself looking at the MetroBrokers real estate site and specifically at condos in Plaza Midtown, Spire, Etc. A couple friends of mine are also looking and we’ve joked how fun it would be to all get them in the same building, which it would.
Then a couple weeks ago, we resigned our lease on our apartment, and surprise, they jacked up our rent $100. Awesome.
So its getting to the point where you really have to look at it again. Every case is different, from the specific property, to the specific market it’s in, but also while taking into account macro market trends and forces.
Really all along my primary problem with buying, I think, is the whole idea of taking on such a massive amount of debt. I learned my lesson with credit cards and worked to get them all paid off, and have been credit card debt free for 3 or 4 years now. The whole idea is to build wealth, not pay some bank interest on $300,000 for 30 years, right?
The only saving grace to all of that, from what I can tell, is the appreciation on the property. If the house appreciates in worth faster than inflation and also compensates for the 5% or 6% interest you’re paying on that huge loan, then thats the inflection point at which it probably becomes a good idea.
Then there’s also the point that once you pay off the house, now you have no more housing costs. Well thats nice, if you can live in one place for freaking 30 years. Who does that these days? I have serious doubts that this country will even be a sovereign nation in 30 years, let alone whether a 1bdrm condo will be still standing. So, if you have a house, and you want to move, there’s some 11% or so of your house’s worth gone to real estate agents. Thats quite a freakin fee, anytime you simply want to move.
Along the same train of thought, its been asked of me - “What happens when you’re 40 or 50? You’re still going to be paying rent while everyone else is living in a paid off house”. Really? Cause I thought the whole point that I made about renting was that it was vastly cheaper, per month, than owning. What do you think I did with all that extra money each month for 30 years? Thats right, put it in an interest bearing account. By the time I’m 40 or 50 the idea there would then be able to simply purchase a home with cash. Again it all comes back to not taking on massive loads of debt.
On one hand you can pay interest to a bank for 30 years and end up with a house, or you can have a bank pay you interest for 30 years and end up with a house. It’s just intuition but I’d think the latter is what would result in a bigger additional lump of wealth waiting on me in addition to that house.
Or, hell, fuck it - maybe Ill just move back in with mom and live for free. Now *thats* a wise financial decision.
160 days ago
I received this gem in my inbox yesterday.
To: Brian Culler
From: Steve Reick
Subject: Salutations from the House of Rieck and Lu!
‘Tis that time betwixt the week wherein we partake in victuals in fellowship of our friends.
The Right Honorable Masters Rieck and Lu cordially invite ye and yon wenches to a dinner of a most olde tradition. We shall feast on the quaint farming man’s favourite dish, Shepard’s Pie. Also upon our table ye shall find chicken legs most fowl!! Aha Aha, please pardon my jocularity! These dishes will be cooked by our most respectible guest from the Orient, Master Lu. Bring thy mead and thy wenches to our humble estate as the sun sets to the horizon.
With all due Sincerity,
Lord Stephen Rieck del Collier
166 days ago
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