Q4 Prospectus
INFORMATIONAL OBJECTIVE
The web log (blog) is an informational posting whose purpose is to inform friends of the web log author (blogger) of the status and previous activities of said blogger. There can be no assurance that the blog will achieve its informational objective. Please note that the blog's past performance is not an indicator of how the blog will perform in the future.
Yesterday I was reading prospecti (prospectuses?) for various IRA and other investment thingies out of curiosity to see what all was involved in letting somebody else play with your money for fun and profit. This could be especially useful to me now, because I'm self employed so the tax man will be coming down extra hard on me this year, so I might want to go hide some of the blings for the future. But dang is that a long time from now, waiting till you're 60 to be able to access what you put in those funds. I don't know if I have enough confidence in our system remaining stable that long, so maybe I should just spend it all on hookers and blow and be guaranteed of getting some use of the monies.
Really that's just a minor diversion, though. Part of that is more relevant, though, which is that I have a new job. When I got back from my trip, I procrastinated a bit, then returned to the microsoul/microsuck/m$ to make a bit o dolla to pay off the trip and keep myself out of trouble (read going on more trips) for some more of the summer. Actually, as part of the procrastinating, I went on a week-long trip to the Olympic Hot Springs with a couple then-housemates and friendly folks. Pretty good trip, though riding with several others is definately different than touring on your own. It has its good and bad aspects. I think towards the end of the trip, my companions had figured out how to improve their planning on stops and other things which made it go smoother, but even then some things will always take longer with more people (going to the bathroom, for example).
The mini trip was a good echo back to and unwind from my big trip, which I never really made any updates on here about to let people know that I was back. But in fact I've been back since late June, when I took the train up from Santa Barbara after hanging out with my friend Alex there for a long weekend. I still have my notebooks that one day should get typed up and put on crazyguyonabike.com so that folks can benefit from my experiences, or at least be inspired by them a bit. This will already be plenty long enough of an update, so I won't go so far back as into my trip and leave that to those who care to talk to me in person.
So I went on the mini (a week an a few hundred miles was mini comparatively), and returned to the old job. I really wasn't certain that I wanted it, in fact I really didn't. But a part of me figured I should so that way I could have more flexibility later on, and maybe I could save the extra money from this summer for spending and travelling next summer. The clincher, though, was when I went in to talk with folks and see if anything had changed and it was any better to work there. Of course, hardly anything had changed in the whole time I was gone, but things had calmed down considerably, to the point that folks I talked to and worked with seemed basically bored with what they were doing. This seemed like just what I didn't want to do (waste my time at work doing nothing), so I talked with my manager, and we agreed that I could work part-time and do some at-home work, so I wouldn't be stuck in the office all the time. It was hard to argue with this, so I took them up on it and worked a month or so before getting an offer for a new job. I was planning on leaving sometime in September anyways, because that's when they were planning on downsizing, but since the new job sounded good and they wanted somebody right away, I went for it.
I had been sort of looking at other jobs while working the old one, getting prepared to see what was out there, but not looking too seriously. I found one posting on craigslist for helping a small startup learn about linux, and that sounded cool, but then I found my friend Mitchell already had an interview with them and was taking the job. 2 weeks or so after that, he tells me I should apply for for another job they're looking for, so I send in my resume, and by the end of the day I've already had an interview and scheduled a trial day to see how they work. That turned out well, so I put in my 2 weeks with volt, and away I went. Giving notice at the old job was actually pretty easy. The manager seemed to agree that it was a good idea because of how the project was looking, and then afterwards actually said something about thinking about leaving himself.
The new job is significantly better. Instead of bussing across Lake Washington, I now bike half an hour (though it's getting slightly faster) to the Smith Tower downtown, no busses necessary. The work is significantly more interesting, as I'm actually helping to create a real system which we expect will be useful and desirable for people. The development environment is very sane, lots of perl, but mostly whatever is reasonable and works. The architecture is good, lot of small interconnecting, independent modules. Oh, and did I mention that it's actually for a system which will be useful unlike that last piece of shit? The only drawback is that I'm now a self-employed contractor, hence the interest in finding ways of minimizing taxes and making my own savings plan.
Mixed into all this work stuff, I've managed to be quite busy with other things this summer, too. Actually, since both jobs have been part timey, I've been able to do a lot of things I wanted to, not just work the 9-5 grind. I hope I can avoid working 40 hours in the future as well. Sure you make more cash, but it's so much harder to spend it doing anything fun.
One of the big things this summer has been weddings. It started with my friends from aikido in the spring, and continued with 3 more that I went to since my trip. Most recently, just last Saturday, I went down to Tacoma for my friends Ed and Melanie's wedding. Being down in Tacoma, I had to figure out how to get there, but this time that was helped by just recently signing up for Flexcar. When my parents were looking to renew their auto insurance for the year, they asked me if it was really worth the $600 to keep me on their insurance. Since I've only driven a couple times in the last year (probably can count the times on 1 hand), I told them not to bother, and that I would look at signing up for Flexcar for the times I do need to drive. At $9/hr, I could go 60+ hours and still have it be cheaper. I'm sure I won't get anywhere near that much in the next year.
I have already used the Flexcar twice now, though. In addition to the wedding, I also used a flexcar truck the other day to haul a bunch of junk from a big house cleaning this last weekend. We've had a lot of people moving in/out in the last month or two, so it seemed like a good time to identify the junk and get it out of here. With only two people having carried over from the beginning of the summer, it's much easier to identify what doesn't belong to anybody and either claim it as house, as your own, or purge it as the trash it really is. Some of this junk has been building probably for years, so it feels really good to get it out, and reclaim the space that it's been taking up in the closets and shelves and everywhere else. In the kitchen it's especially nice, since it's so small in there you can really use any increase in space. Also a lot of the old stuff in the kitchen is strange foodish items which have gone totally bad and really need to go. Hopefully cleaning out the old foodstuffs will help some with the moths problem, too. If nothing else, it'll get rid of the current sources and identify which containers are suceptible.
Taking the flexcar to the wedding was a bit pricey, since it just sat around for most of the time I had it, but it was worth it in the end. Of all the weddings so far, this one was definately the best I've been to. I knew almost everybody in the wedding party, and a significant number of people in all. The toasts and vows were all well done, and everybody seemed genuinely happy for them, and knew that it is going to be a marriage that works. The setting was pretty nice, too, in the old town in Tacoma, at the Mountaineer's hall.
This contrasts to my cousin's wedding a couple weeks beforehand. That one was in the electrical workers union hall, which is a plain white room. There was no preparation, the toasts and vows weren't particularly special, and the whole act of marriage was really more of a way to make the couple stay together and take some responsibility for themselves and their kids. The best part of that one was seeing some of my relatives I haven't seen for a while. Also, when I was at my parents house, I got my mom to show me the basics of knitting, so that as it becomes fall I can make myself some arm warmers for biking in the cold. I haven't started them yet, since I don't have needles or yarn, but it was good to see the basics, so that next time I go down there, I can go to our friend's yarn shop and get going right away.
The day after that wedding and the knitting lesson, I decided it would be a good idea to bike up to Mowich Lake on Mt Rainier, from my parents' house. Well, I made it, but about halfway there, the pavement ended, and halfway through the unpaved area, the dirt road turned to gravel, which made it difficult to control my bicycle, or keep any sort of speed up the hill. I did eventually make it up the 30 miles and 4500 vertical feet to the lake. There I decided not to go for a hike, but instead try to recuperate, eat my food I brought, drink my water, and go for a little dip in the lake. The way down wasn't significantly faster for the first part, because the thick gravel forced me to go about as slow as when I went up, otherwise I would lose control. On top of this, I was having a problem with the freewheel, so that as the bike shook and I coasted, the chain would slide up to the top run from the bottom and almost dangle into the wheel. This was rather disconcerting, and kept me pedalling though a number of places I rather would have coasted. Turns out it was just a broken pie-plate causing some friction, but it was certainly disconcerting at the time. By the time I got home, I was so exhausted from the ride that I was actually nauseous and couldn't eat any of the dinner my parents had made. The heat and dust and strain on the shoulders from riding in the gravel, all were just too much. Next time I decide to ride up a mountain, I think I'll pick a paved route.
The last wedding this summer (chronologically the first in the summer) was my old high school friends Sara and Nathan. This one was pretty good, too, and I even have some pictures of it up on the same website as where I have all my photos from the bike trip. There I got to see another group of friends I haven't seen all together for quite a while, and hang out with many of them before and after the ceremony. The scenery was beautiful out in the gardens at Pt Defiance, and the ceremony went well, with music by friends/bandmates of the groom.
But I think now I'm going to end this and go to sleep. Or maybe I'll distract myself from sleep by reading some of this intro Hindi coursebook I just bought this afternoon. One of my housemates is going to India in a few months, another said he was starting to learn before getting his last job, and I've been getting the itch to learn a language again, so I'm trying to get a Hindi study session going on in the house. Anybody else want to join, let us know, we're still figuring out how we want to do this, since nobody has any background in the language. I know the alphabet from when I did Sanskrit, but that's about all we have to work with. Should be fun...
The web log (blog) is an informational posting whose purpose is to inform friends of the web log author (blogger) of the status and previous activities of said blogger. There can be no assurance that the blog will achieve its informational objective. Please note that the blog's past performance is not an indicator of how the blog will perform in the future.
Yesterday I was reading prospecti (prospectuses?) for various IRA and other investment thingies out of curiosity to see what all was involved in letting somebody else play with your money for fun and profit. This could be especially useful to me now, because I'm self employed so the tax man will be coming down extra hard on me this year, so I might want to go hide some of the blings for the future. But dang is that a long time from now, waiting till you're 60 to be able to access what you put in those funds. I don't know if I have enough confidence in our system remaining stable that long, so maybe I should just spend it all on hookers and blow and be guaranteed of getting some use of the monies.
Really that's just a minor diversion, though. Part of that is more relevant, though, which is that I have a new job. When I got back from my trip, I procrastinated a bit, then returned to the microsoul/microsuck/m$ to make a bit o dolla to pay off the trip and keep myself out of trouble (read going on more trips) for some more of the summer. Actually, as part of the procrastinating, I went on a week-long trip to the Olympic Hot Springs with a couple then-housemates and friendly folks. Pretty good trip, though riding with several others is definately different than touring on your own. It has its good and bad aspects. I think towards the end of the trip, my companions had figured out how to improve their planning on stops and other things which made it go smoother, but even then some things will always take longer with more people (going to the bathroom, for example).
The mini trip was a good echo back to and unwind from my big trip, which I never really made any updates on here about to let people know that I was back. But in fact I've been back since late June, when I took the train up from Santa Barbara after hanging out with my friend Alex there for a long weekend. I still have my notebooks that one day should get typed up and put on crazyguyonabike.com so that folks can benefit from my experiences, or at least be inspired by them a bit. This will already be plenty long enough of an update, so I won't go so far back as into my trip and leave that to those who care to talk to me in person.
So I went on the mini (a week an a few hundred miles was mini comparatively), and returned to the old job. I really wasn't certain that I wanted it, in fact I really didn't. But a part of me figured I should so that way I could have more flexibility later on, and maybe I could save the extra money from this summer for spending and travelling next summer. The clincher, though, was when I went in to talk with folks and see if anything had changed and it was any better to work there. Of course, hardly anything had changed in the whole time I was gone, but things had calmed down considerably, to the point that folks I talked to and worked with seemed basically bored with what they were doing. This seemed like just what I didn't want to do (waste my time at work doing nothing), so I talked with my manager, and we agreed that I could work part-time and do some at-home work, so I wouldn't be stuck in the office all the time. It was hard to argue with this, so I took them up on it and worked a month or so before getting an offer for a new job. I was planning on leaving sometime in September anyways, because that's when they were planning on downsizing, but since the new job sounded good and they wanted somebody right away, I went for it.
I had been sort of looking at other jobs while working the old one, getting prepared to see what was out there, but not looking too seriously. I found one posting on craigslist for helping a small startup learn about linux, and that sounded cool, but then I found my friend Mitchell already had an interview with them and was taking the job. 2 weeks or so after that, he tells me I should apply for for another job they're looking for, so I send in my resume, and by the end of the day I've already had an interview and scheduled a trial day to see how they work. That turned out well, so I put in my 2 weeks with volt, and away I went. Giving notice at the old job was actually pretty easy. The manager seemed to agree that it was a good idea because of how the project was looking, and then afterwards actually said something about thinking about leaving himself.
The new job is significantly better. Instead of bussing across Lake Washington, I now bike half an hour (though it's getting slightly faster) to the Smith Tower downtown, no busses necessary. The work is significantly more interesting, as I'm actually helping to create a real system which we expect will be useful and desirable for people. The development environment is very sane, lots of perl, but mostly whatever is reasonable and works. The architecture is good, lot of small interconnecting, independent modules. Oh, and did I mention that it's actually for a system which will be useful unlike that last piece of shit? The only drawback is that I'm now a self-employed contractor, hence the interest in finding ways of minimizing taxes and making my own savings plan.
Mixed into all this work stuff, I've managed to be quite busy with other things this summer, too. Actually, since both jobs have been part timey, I've been able to do a lot of things I wanted to, not just work the 9-5 grind. I hope I can avoid working 40 hours in the future as well. Sure you make more cash, but it's so much harder to spend it doing anything fun.
One of the big things this summer has been weddings. It started with my friends from aikido in the spring, and continued with 3 more that I went to since my trip. Most recently, just last Saturday, I went down to Tacoma for my friends Ed and Melanie's wedding. Being down in Tacoma, I had to figure out how to get there, but this time that was helped by just recently signing up for Flexcar. When my parents were looking to renew their auto insurance for the year, they asked me if it was really worth the $600 to keep me on their insurance. Since I've only driven a couple times in the last year (probably can count the times on 1 hand), I told them not to bother, and that I would look at signing up for Flexcar for the times I do need to drive. At $9/hr, I could go 60+ hours and still have it be cheaper. I'm sure I won't get anywhere near that much in the next year.
I have already used the Flexcar twice now, though. In addition to the wedding, I also used a flexcar truck the other day to haul a bunch of junk from a big house cleaning this last weekend. We've had a lot of people moving in/out in the last month or two, so it seemed like a good time to identify the junk and get it out of here. With only two people having carried over from the beginning of the summer, it's much easier to identify what doesn't belong to anybody and either claim it as house, as your own, or purge it as the trash it really is. Some of this junk has been building probably for years, so it feels really good to get it out, and reclaim the space that it's been taking up in the closets and shelves and everywhere else. In the kitchen it's especially nice, since it's so small in there you can really use any increase in space. Also a lot of the old stuff in the kitchen is strange foodish items which have gone totally bad and really need to go. Hopefully cleaning out the old foodstuffs will help some with the moths problem, too. If nothing else, it'll get rid of the current sources and identify which containers are suceptible.
Taking the flexcar to the wedding was a bit pricey, since it just sat around for most of the time I had it, but it was worth it in the end. Of all the weddings so far, this one was definately the best I've been to. I knew almost everybody in the wedding party, and a significant number of people in all. The toasts and vows were all well done, and everybody seemed genuinely happy for them, and knew that it is going to be a marriage that works. The setting was pretty nice, too, in the old town in Tacoma, at the Mountaineer's hall.
This contrasts to my cousin's wedding a couple weeks beforehand. That one was in the electrical workers union hall, which is a plain white room. There was no preparation, the toasts and vows weren't particularly special, and the whole act of marriage was really more of a way to make the couple stay together and take some responsibility for themselves and their kids. The best part of that one was seeing some of my relatives I haven't seen for a while. Also, when I was at my parents house, I got my mom to show me the basics of knitting, so that as it becomes fall I can make myself some arm warmers for biking in the cold. I haven't started them yet, since I don't have needles or yarn, but it was good to see the basics, so that next time I go down there, I can go to our friend's yarn shop and get going right away.
The day after that wedding and the knitting lesson, I decided it would be a good idea to bike up to Mowich Lake on Mt Rainier, from my parents' house. Well, I made it, but about halfway there, the pavement ended, and halfway through the unpaved area, the dirt road turned to gravel, which made it difficult to control my bicycle, or keep any sort of speed up the hill. I did eventually make it up the 30 miles and 4500 vertical feet to the lake. There I decided not to go for a hike, but instead try to recuperate, eat my food I brought, drink my water, and go for a little dip in the lake. The way down wasn't significantly faster for the first part, because the thick gravel forced me to go about as slow as when I went up, otherwise I would lose control. On top of this, I was having a problem with the freewheel, so that as the bike shook and I coasted, the chain would slide up to the top run from the bottom and almost dangle into the wheel. This was rather disconcerting, and kept me pedalling though a number of places I rather would have coasted. Turns out it was just a broken pie-plate causing some friction, but it was certainly disconcerting at the time. By the time I got home, I was so exhausted from the ride that I was actually nauseous and couldn't eat any of the dinner my parents had made. The heat and dust and strain on the shoulders from riding in the gravel, all were just too much. Next time I decide to ride up a mountain, I think I'll pick a paved route.
The last wedding this summer (chronologically the first in the summer) was my old high school friends Sara and Nathan. This one was pretty good, too, and I even have some pictures of it up on the same website as where I have all my photos from the bike trip. There I got to see another group of friends I haven't seen all together for quite a while, and hang out with many of them before and after the ceremony. The scenery was beautiful out in the gardens at Pt Defiance, and the ceremony went well, with music by friends/bandmates of the groom.
But I think now I'm going to end this and go to sleep. Or maybe I'll distract myself from sleep by reading some of this intro Hindi coursebook I just bought this afternoon. One of my housemates is going to India in a few months, another said he was starting to learn before getting his last job, and I've been getting the itch to learn a language again, so I'm trying to get a Hindi study session going on in the house. Anybody else want to join, let us know, we're still figuring out how we want to do this, since nobody has any background in the language. I know the alphabet from when I did Sanskrit, but that's about all we have to work with. Should be fun...