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That is the question isn’t it. One of the single most difficult professional decisions anyone will make is, do I stay comfortable as a master code slinger, or do I step into the world of management?
For me it always seems to be the other way around. I never got into hard-core programming until I was a one man shop or in a managerial/lead role. And I truly love to write software applications, I find it to be such a rewarding activity. Specially when others are using, and better yet, making money using the software you have developed.
Though time and time again I am pulled to lead instead of producer. Maybe I am just slow and sucky and nobody has the heart to tell me? It’s possible, sure.
Fact is, I am there again at my current job and this time I am really, really OK with it. I am managing Information Systems again, which I seem to always have a bear of a time with aystem admin’s ( I think it’s because I spent 8 years as one myself). So that isn’t the highlight here, but a necessity of the corporation. What I am heading up is Information Security, and that has me really charged up. I have always worked with security, at both a technical and managerial level. It is a really important step in my corporation’s life and I am going to bring them to that level while at the same time, bring myself up a few levels too. It is exciting, scary, overwhelming and challenging. What else can I ask for out of job?
I have made the hard and firm decision to obtain my CISSP certification. My goal is to sit for it in October; kind of a birthday gift to myself. I have looked at this certification for years and shied away from it. Not this time, I will complete it. I know at least three of our clients have asked if we have a CISSP certified member on staff in the last year. It’s a logical supported next step, and having support from senior management is always a big plus.
Now here is the other exciting side to this. I will not be coding much at all at work. Why is this exciting to me? Simple, I will not be tired of coding and I can work on my own projects! There is nothing I like better than coding stuff I want to. I would guess most core developers think this way. I have lent a hand to some open source project and developed some of my own crazy stuff. My current one, which I personally find very useful is BD File Hash. A Windows Forms base file hashing and hash compare tool. Hey someday ask me what the BD stands for.
So as you can see I am hitting the best of both worlds here. I am greatly improving my professional aptitude and still able to do the things I really enjoy doing. On top of it, I work two miles from my house, so I am not a complete stranger to my family.
Don’t worry, I”ll always remain your IT Slug!
Happy Summer! The kids are out of school and already bored. My oldest son though is really into reading this year, I mean REALLY into it. He has probably read 10 books already on summer break.
His school has a degree program for reading books during the summer. Basically the students get a star for each day they read more than twenty minutes. My son has been doing much more than that I thought it would be great to keep track of it. I am sure looking back at the list at the end of the Summer he would be pretty impressed by the list too.
My first thought is that I would set him up with a blog, and he could type in the books he read on any given day. He and I have done some basic web page building together, so I thought he may get a kick out of this.
So I added a new blog to my account here at WordPress and picked a theme I hoped he didn’t think sucked. When I went to add his as a contributor to the blog I discovered he needed an email address to that. Hmm….
Well I have thought about setting him up with an email address in the past, but never did it as there was really no reason and he is only eight. So I went to Comcast to set him up with a family account. The didn’t have the name I wanted, damn. Well I found one close enough and went with that. At least Comcast has some parental controls, I’ll have to look deeper into that.
I set him up with a WordPress account and when there to log him in. When I logged in with his account to verify everything I was greeted with a page of many, many blogs. Well this is not good, he doesn’t need to be exposed to to this, too young yet, too dangerous.
Going to the next level
As I pondered this in a background processes it hit me, what about setting up a new domain and hosting the stuff myself!? I checked at GoDaddy and shit, the domain is available, excellent.
$10.67 / year for the domain, not so bad. $9.99 for privacy, what! that’s a bit outside. Then it hit me again, Dreamhost. Dreamhost has a free domain with a paid subscription and I never used it, perfect. Off to Dreamhost…
I was able to create and host the the domain on my current account and loaded up a WordPress blog in about 10 seconds. Added an email address and we are ready to go in a more “controlled” environment.
So a simple idea has bloomed into a fully hosted domain with private emails and sites, all for an eight year-old. I am the Tim Allen of the Internet!
So my son and I went over some of the stuff I put together and he is pretty interested in it all. As expected he is a bit overwhelmed. That’s OK, we’ll take it a step at a time in what ever direction interests him most.
I back at it and nothing is safe this year. I can’t take the clutter, it’s just too much for one person to bear. If my wife gets in my way she may be surprised when ‘stuff’ just starts vanishing. Hey, you don’t want to clean, than I am making a decision on that ‘thing’ that has been on the dining room floor for two years.
In boxes, empty; receipt stacks, gone; toys, age appropriate only otherwise, GONE. We could open our own toy store, I swear. Actually we will be, in the form of a garage sale this Summer. Come one by and buy our stuff, we don’t want it anymore.
PURGE
I feel better already.
For the record, I started the humongo pile in the corner of the office tonight. Already have my first bag of trash for the landfill.
If you actually read this far you are probably thinking I am crazy, and you are half right, but you really need to try this, it is such great therapy. Try this for size; you open your most used email client and there are zero emails in the inbox. Everything you need is in a folder, everything else is GONE. Honestly, how many times do you look at those 2312 emails in your inbox now, really? Probably only the first time you read it.
I will let you in on a little secret for all those emails that you can’t get rid of. You can’t leave them in your inbox, that’s just clutter and stressful. Create one folder named archive and stick all that clutter email that you just can’t do without in there. That simple move can clear up any email you ‘just not sure about deleting.’
Everything else DELETE!
If you are more anal, like I am , create a few folders and organize your emails more. Google nailed on the head when they went with the search model of Gmail. Absolute brilliance.
Another little tip. If you are replying to an email with a question and the original doesn’t really matter, then DELETE it. Why keep it, you will get it back with your next round of emails.
PURGE
Can’t wait to start in the freak’n garage. I want my garage back!
Yeah the tax season is almost done for 2010. What excites me about this the most is that our house will go back to some normalcy. My wife is a tax professional (or something like that) for one of those big named tax houses (A meat market for tax personnel). Its seasonal work and she is done on April 15th.
I know I am not the first one to bring this up by any means, but it’s really bugging me. I have done OK this year with my freelancing. It hasn’t been too much work where I am enslaved completely, but enough to help with the bills around the house. Supporting a stay-at-home mom and two kids burns money faster than I could ever imagine. So most of what I have made has been burned away, and nothing has been paid toward taxes. I know it will be a lot, but how much? A headline caught my eye (Extremely Important Tax Rules for Designers in the United States, at In The Woods [an rss I watch]) and basically kicked me in the butt to look into this before I am sitting down filling out my 1040.
With the year winding down, I am thinking about my tax return for this year and how my added freelance-earned money may effect it. Well as I have read into it, it will effect it a lot! One helpful article I found on the matter is, Taxes and Freelancing at About.com. This article coverd much of the basics and has some good pointers on getting organized and what information you will want for filling out Schedule C on your tax return. The article supplied better information the the In The Woods one.
So, sure that is a bit of a pain, a lot more to organize and keep track of, but one of the biggest part of the pain is Self-Employment Tax. What is Self-Employment tax, well in a nutshell its the Social Security and Medicare taxes you pay on any net profits you have.
The Self-Employment tax is 15.3% — Social Security Tax is 6.2% and Medicare Tax is 1.45%. Wait you say, that only comes to 7.65%, and you are correct, though since you are self employed, you must pay the employee and employer portion of the tax. 7.65% times two is 15.3%. For those of you who are a bit curious yes, if you are a W2 employee you pay 7.65% in Social Security and Medicare taxes. Please note, in 2009 Social Security tax is only paid on the first $102,000 subject to Social Security tax. I am sure this will play into your Self-Employment tax number too, though I don’t know for sure. I can speak more to this once I go through it next February and if I make it over that amount
Please realize, I am not a tax accountant or CPA nor do I play one on TV. The information written here is solely based on my readings and limited experience. Consume it at your own risk.
It feels a bit strange seeing the one plus terabyte drives roll out to the market. It reminds me a lot of when the one plus gigabyte drives came out. It all really seems the same: sizes, pricing, amazement.
I look at some drives sitting around my desk; removed some time ago do the the plowing of a machine (I prefer a new hdd over erasing a current one). I look at a drive, 80GB hmm, that seems small. Really, did I just think that–yes I did. Simply because the 500GB drive I have installed now has plenty of space on it. This is no different than when it was 80MB drive and I had that first 720 MB drive in my main machine. This all really has the same smell.
Funny, even though I balked at that 80GB drive, I plugged it in to load up my Windows 7 beta. You know what, there was more than enough room for Win7, VS2010, Office 2007, etc.
What are we doing with all this extra space we have on these drives?
Take control of your social network, don’t let your social network take control of you!
I remember spending much of my pre-teen and teen years flipping and drooling in the once defacto electronics guide, The Radio Shack Catalog. No always the best products, but it sure had everything.
I have been introduced to a website archiving all of these great catalogs, and it’s been fun looking at all those products again. I am amazed at how many I still have; which still work!
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/
The TRS-80, one of the first computers I fiddled with. STA-7 stereo receiver, which is still in use today. Liner tracking turntable. Chronomatic 248 clock radio (introduced in the 1986 catalog).
What items do you still have and use? What items do you remember the most?
Can’t believe I just turned 40.
That was quick
I Really hate chain eMails, I really do…
You know what I am going to say next, “but this one…”
Well your correct, not sure where the guy got 85B from, but it sure would pump some money back into the system. The only problem with it is that most Americans, unfortunately, are not responsible enough to pay off their debts. They would think they were rich and fall further into debt. You see this happen all the time with lottery winners. How great will it be if it really did happen?!?
I would love to pay of my house and purchase a new motorcycle. You know, I wouldn’t pressure my employer for such a large raise anymore either. Without my mortgage, my family will be able to build our wealth again without raising costs on my employer. Hmmm
By the way, if you know who originally wrote this, please let me know so I may give credit where it’s due!
OK, I really do hate chain eMails, I really do, and still do. I should of never posted this without checking at least the numbers. Pfft, I am ashamed.
So 85,000,000,000 / 200,000,000 = 425; not 425,000. So $425 per person is more like the current administrations attempt to spark the economy, which basically I used to buy groceries.
This idea sounds just crazy enough to possibly work, so naturally it won’t
be given serious consideration. How great is our government??
Hi Pals,
I’m against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG.
Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a We Deserve
It Dividend.
To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bona-fide U.S.
Citizens 18+.
Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child.
So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..
So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion that equals $425,000.00.
My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a We Deserve It Dividend.
Of course, it would NOT be tax free.
So let’s assume a tax rate of 30%.
Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes.
That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam.
But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket.
A husband and wife has $595,000.00.
What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?
Pay off your mortgage – housing crisis solved.
Repay college loans – what a great boost to new grads
Put away money for college – it’ll be there
Save in a bank – create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
Buy a new car – create jobs
Invest in the market – capital drives growth
Pay for your parent’s medical insurance – health care improves
Enable Dead-beat Dads to come clean – or else
Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks who
lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is cutting
back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.
If we’re going to re-distribute wealth let’s really do it…instead of
trickling out a puny $1,000.00 ( ‘vote buy’ ) economic incentive that is
being proposed
by one of our candidates for President.
If we’re going to do an $85 billion bailout, let’s bail out every adult U S
Citizen 18+!
As for AIG – liquidate it.
Sell off its parts.
Let American General go back to being American General.
Sell off the real estate.
Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.
Here’s my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn’t.
Sure it’s a crazy idea that can ‘never work.’
But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party!
How do you spell “Economic Boom”?
I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion.
We Deserve It Dividend more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington
DC.
And remember, The Birk plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5
Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.
Can you imagine what might happen if the bailout, $700 billion was given as
a We Deserve It Dividend?
