Money
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Jay: At Last! October 15 Carnival of the Capitalists is Here!
Has it really been four years? Yes. Yes it has. Here we are, on the 210th edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, celebrating the anniversary/start of a fifth year last week and this week, on the anniversaries of the first two weeks that Rob and I hosted.
CotC is now the oldest continuously running blog carnival, as the original carnival and inspiration for CotC, Carnival of the Vanities, has stumbled in a much expanded and niched world of blogging. We were the inspiration for subsequent niche carnivals, which in turn inspired others, to the point where sometimes I wonder why we persist in a world of so many carnivals… so little cachet. Still, it’s cool being senior, a pioneer, an inspiration, and seeing others come and go.
Sometime I regret never having found a way to turn a buck from CotC, or having not picked the obvious idea for a centralized home of blog carnivals off the floor, dusting it off, and running with it until that could make a buck.
This edition was supposed to feature a link to my resume and promote the fact that I am job hunting. Bear in mind that I have not created a resume to get into a company since 1994, and not created one for internal promotion since 1997. In some ways not much has changed, but in others it’s a whole new world. In 1994 I mailed resumes and nobody had heard of Craig, that Monster critter, Linking In, or any of that.
I am not done doing a fresh resume, so a resume in progress will have to do. Currently it is based on my 1994 resume, with jobs and a summary prepended, and for the web my address and phone removed. Feel free to return to that URL, as I will put the new resume up as I build it.
On that page, at least for now, I have also included my LinkedIn profile, which needs tweaking but was at least created recently. A while back I did a series of posts here on my experience, centered mainly on computers, programming, and especially software experience, cross-linking using an embedded Expression Engine template, and culminating with a resume-like employment and college post, and an initial attempt at listing out experiences and accomplishments.
Whatever I find for work, it cannot preclude running CotC, blogging, or doing work on the side. Obviously I’d love something that would make that last unnecessary. Hey, it could happen…
Oh right, you’re here for the entries. Guess I should get to them! In no particular order except more or less when they were received…
Gaizer.com looks at the factors prospective investors look at when evaluating the opportunity you present in Analyzing the Deal.
Sophispundit wrote a microeconmics paper, now presented as a post, analyzing the efficiency the newspaper business once fulfilled and what has changed to render Newspapers Relegated to the Dustbin of History.
Planning to have some software created or a similar project done for your business? Steve Lohrenz addresses a topic dear to me, where I’ve been on the wrong side of personal experience, as well as having read folks like Steve McConnell. Find out what are Characteristics of Freelance Projects That Get Done. I could add pages to his post, but it’s a good start.
Web Worker Daily is a favorite daily business/geek read of mine, which I found through Mike Gunderloy, whom I learned of originally because I read Note-It Posts, the original blog of his wife Dana. I can’t recommend the entire site enough, even if you are not a web or remote or code writing worker, but one post seemed meant for CotC, so I took the liberty of entering it. In the course of migrating halfway across the country, they encountered the famous Wall Drug, inspiring 4 Branding Lessons from Wall Drug.
What do Supreme Court justices know about securities and business? Professor Bainbridge notes the answer is not so much. That is Why the SCOTUS Gets Securities Cases Wrong so Often.
Business Opportunities and Ideas is frustrated with a company that can get away with overpromising due to barriers to entry, deriving good advice from the experience in We Solemnly Promise to Let You Down.
Jay Deragon believes that Business Uses of Social Technologies have barely begun to be realized.
This one seems borderline as far as being on-topic, but is a question that comes up periodically. In my actively Libertarian days circa the mid-eighties, I often felt guilty for attending a subsidized state college. Even before that, the first time I was ever on unemployment, when it was very much as described in the song Free Ride, I felt so bad about it I didn’t go back after the first four weeks. A Response to “Accept Help” is a post at rocket finance about government assistance in capitalistic societies, when and whether to use it, and the distinction between expecting and accepting help.
Small Business Buzz talks about Advertising Your Product on Stage. You knew product placement was big on TV and film, among huge companies, but there’s more to it than that…
The famous crash of 1929? Nope, 1907… surely you’ve heard of it? You have now. October 2007: The 100 Year anniversary of a 37% Market Crash is a book review at The Dough Roller, noting similarities between 1907 and today.
At Software Project Management it’s all about Money as a Motivator… or not? In management class you learn about the various motivations, and money is just one. I think of it as the base factor. We all need it, and will take some form of work to get it. From there, though, there are other factors that might impact exactly what we’ll do, how far we’ll strive, and how happily and willingly. If money weren’t the base factor, I wouldn’t be looking for a job, but rather doing exactly what I want and any money derived would be gravy.
Sox First notes the potential for differences in Personal values, organizational values, which can be the source of ethics scandals.
The Legislative Bias Against Savings borders, at least, on off-topic personal finance, but the government does indeed skew economic and financial priorities by promoting some forms of savings (and other things) over others, a point Queercents rightly gets us pondering.
Lenin and Goebels both spoke of turning a lie to truth through repetition. I recently pointed out an article about mistaken consensus, a form of cascading failure. Businesspundit reminded me of all that with Our Bias Towards BS and Lousy Decision Making. Good advice to improve your evaluation of facts and resulting decisions.
Daily Idea is a great site you should all visit regularly, and one of my favorites so far has been How to Avoid Meetings that Suck. If you don’t care to watch the video, the entire transcript is in the linked post. Still, it’s not very long, so I’d watch it, and when you’re done you might also check out How to Sleep Better and Become an Early Riser, an earlier Daily Idea video that made me laugh while conveying good information.
Weekend Pundit warns us to Prepare for the Upcoming Electronic Apocalypse, which apart from the sheer absurdity from an engineering and practical aspect, is a cautionary tale about “blunt instrument” regulation, and about the world’s economic interconnectedness allowing regulations in another part of the world to affect us more than you might expect.
The Digerati Life looks at the economic implications of strong versus weak dollars in Profit From The Weak U.S. Dolla With Currency Plays And Other Strategies.
Does anyone besides me and Rob Sama watch Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares? As I noted in my commentary about the first episode, it’s a business show, not a food show. Food merely happens to be the product, and not the important element in turning the troubled businesses around. Last week’s episode was the best yet from the perspective of multiple business problems, and is a cautionary tale about working with family and the deep seated influence parents can have on kids in or affecting a family business.
Do you play favorites with employees? Are you sure you don’t? How about the precedence given to employees with children, and their need to handle emergencies? It’s all too common for that not to be offset for the childless, causing resentment. That a more subtle form of favoritism, and the one that particularly struck me in Management mistakes: Playing favorites over at Blog Business World. The post also hit home in that I was once technical supervisor to people who had become close friends and, to the extent it mattered in my position, had to pointedly avoid favoring them. Of course, that worked the other way too, getting extra effort because I wasn’t just Joe Random Boss…
Econbrowser looks at Speculation and fundamentals in oil prices, examining the impact of the futures market and other factors.
Radiohead and… ancient Greece? Leitourgia isn’t the latest equatorial disease, or something that makes prisoners divulge information, or even the latest management fad. As explained in Leitourgia and Radiohead at voluntaryXchange, it was a common practice in ancient Greece, akin to Radiohead’s modern act of supplying a freely downloadable album.
Who Moved My Client Base is an excellent guess post from Small Business Trends, highlighting the use of social media to turn around and grow a struggling locally oriented business.
Wally Bock points out that retaining people is important, not just attracting them, in Great workplace programs aren’t enough.
And that’s another Carnival of the Capitalists. Next week’s host will be Blawg Review, home of the well known law blogging carnival inspired by CotC.
The following week is due to be hosted at a blog being started at PartnerUp, but after that we trail off, apart from a blogger or two I need to correspond with regarding the possibility of hosting. Feel free to see this page and volunteer.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Jay: Oh Well
I made absolutely amazing chicken stew with dumplings, but have ended up relegating today’s cleanout of the office to tomorrow. Sadie will just have to help me. Now I’m down to emptying the truck, going to Hannaford for milk and juice, and working on CotC if I can when I’m unable to see the screen clearly. It’s not entirely accurate, but imagine you’re reading or typing and the text looks something like:
I’m also trying to remember if we saw this week’s ANTM on its regular night, or need to watch the replay tonight. Not that it’s something I worry much about missing, but hey.
I also have to remember to print pictures of my hand for the doctor to see. Or I could have him look at the post here, but for all they are trying to go paperless, it’d probably work better handing him paper.
Speaking of medical expenses, what does it say about things that Deb sent me e-mail yesterday reporting the insurance is going up 19.3% and on the Blackberry I read it as 193% and actually thought that could be true, if panic-inducing. I took it to be yet another par for the course blow against us. Heck, 19.3% is that; it’s more normally about 4% instead. They must think they’re auto insurers back in the heyday of annual gouging the companies blamed on shops while starving the shops out of business.
Man it’s annoying not to be able to see what I’m typing properly!
Okay, off to the store and so forth…
And how do you keep kids from dismantling the baseboard heaters to use the metal pieces for car ramps?
Update from Deb: 19.3%. It’s 19.3%. Fixed a typo, there. I hate Mitt Romney.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Jay: Computer Science Pay Surge
Good salary news for my computer science major nephew. If you can start off at the low end of what I am likely to be offered after almost twenty years, which I may have to accept to be expedient even though it’s between 6k and 26k shy of supporting us, depending how you juggle, then that’s pretty cool.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Jay: “What Kind of Job Are You Looking for?”
Someone e-mailed me that question, which led to my discussing with Deb the perhaps silly difficulty I perceive myself as having; not being able to name a position or job title and a coherent, specific job target. I was thinking of writing a post on the topic - as well as a related topic of my pair of almost opposite work style comfort zones - but instead I think I’ll start with my moderately verbose reply, which helped me focus my thoughts.
That’s a really good question I’m still pondering the answer to myself. Which makes the expansive answer a set of what I’m qualified to do, and the narrower answer that list as modified by what I like best. Please forgive the fact that this is verbose/thinking aloud in nature, rather than a concise “I want to do thing X where I could Y” type of answer.
Software/computer support is what I have done forever, so it’s logical. You always have to learn newer stuff if you don’t know it, or specifics of a product, which is easy enough. It’s as much about being able to find out as about knowing, anyway. Like it or not, that’s my default and presumably speedy option.
Managing/supervising the above would probably be better. I’ve been there at a low, still technical level before.
Managing/supervising development project(s) would be appropriate, and I’d enjoy it. I couldn’t do programming myself as more than entry level (though I wouldn’t mind it, or user interface/usability design working with programmers, to pursue a pet interest), and am not up on newer stuff, but I make a good speaker to geeks as well as laymen, have done a modest bit of such work (though that is tough when it involves partners and there’s no way to enforce anything), and have read some of the literature avidly. Then again, the same ability to interpret between geek speak and plain language is an asset in support.
If I could make a living blogging, or enough of a living to supplement readily with, say, side computer work or Deb taking a job, I’d probably be all over it. By extension, I could undoubtedly do the dime a dozen job of helping company(s) establish, maintain, position, or cope with blogs. The blog thing is almost a natural extension of doing written support on the web for Visual Basic, which I did full time, the first person there to do so.
I guess that’s not that wide a range. Then again, taking my skills and background and all, there are any number of positions by names I couldn’t even tell you that would be appropriate, and perhaps more ideal than anything I’ve mentioned. A former colleague became a training coordinator, for instance, and I could do that as well as she can. I’d just never want, nor would I expect to be able, to do sales.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Jay: Crazy Dream
I had the strangest dream the other night. In it, the trailer park for the elderly that now overlays the woods where I grew up substituted for a more traditional workplace, as if each unit might have been an office or cubicle. It’s not common, but I have had that before, and I suppose it makes sense, given that one of my first ventures was clearing snow and mowing lawns and such for people living in them. back in my day, not only was it a forty mile walk uphill both ways to go to and from school, but there was virtually no such thing as jobs for teenagers. Not compared to now, when it’s easy to get one, if you want to and aren’t fussy, or perhaps even if you are fussy.
The dream also seemed to have restaurant elements, shades of having watched too much Kitchen Nightmares.
I was headquartered on Maplewood, just past the route 106 end of Rosewood, at a trailer on the outer edge. For the family who would have known the area when it was as it should be, it’s the spot where the wild asparagus were found, where there was a bit of a clearing an also as I recall at least one feral fruit tree. Not only does that spot tend to show up in my dreams for some reason, I also have an entire alternate woods and landscape that seems to relate heavily to it, replacing and extending what actually existed. But that’s when I’m dreaming the woods, rather than a warped version of what the woods became. At least, that’s like the utopian dream of the woods. There’s yet another version that’s dystopian, in which there’s a massive non-swampy valley beyond Ferndale and the hill where Sycamore ends, being razed, graded, networked with roads, and developed with houses by the hundreds, if not more.
So back to the job, which was basically to hang out and wait for something to need attention; kind of crisis management. It was sort of akin to what I did at Stream as TDL, when people would come to me with questions for which I’d spring into action to help them with a case, but otherwise might or might not have anything else to work on that could bear to be subjected to such activity. Also akin to what I generally did for the former big client, being tied up on-call, ready to respond in some form if needed, otherwise not very free to do much else. In the dream, I was pacing, feeling bad about the nature of the job and not having anything to do, replaced by excitement when an emergency arose.
A customer had not gotten their cookies! What happened to their cookies? And was that burning we smelled…
As that arose and I went to respond, my former TDL counterpart, Paul Bowe, showed up out of nowhere.
He stole my thunder by joining me in going to check it out, while giving me a hard time about having been doing nothing important up until then. This was funny, since he hadn’t even been at the job until then, and might have missed the need for intervention entirely.
We went up the road slightly, to another trailer where they were baking the cookies and had messed them up but not adequately informed the rest of the staff or immediately redone them or whatever. This was where it seemed like Gordon Ramsay territory. I think it was my surprise that it had to do with cookie production that made me aware it was a dream and the whole thing was absurd, even as I remained dreaming a bit longer.
It struck me as a ridiculous thing for me to have to deal with, worse, for two of us to deal with, and especially for someone to be hired to wait around with nothing to do while waiting in case such an incident arose.
Probably it’s a dream that takes job stress and combines it with environmental factors, types of work I’ve done, and the paranoia about how people perceive what and how I’ve done, which is never helped by those jobs where there is no right way but thank you for playing.
I grabbed the environs from Google Earth, with the red circle indicated the headquarters and the blue circle indicating where the crisis in baking was (click for slightly larger)…
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Jay: Submit the word you see below
Hey comment spammers, fuck off.
The rest of you, disregard this post. I am attempting to mess with the results the manual comment spammers from Ukraine, Russia, or wherever they may lurk, get by searching Google the title of this post in quotes for this domain only. That is why I am marking this post as being in every available category, because then every category should come up as a link in Google that is not a distinct individual post page with comment entry available.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Jay: Poor Valerie
Valerie and Sadie each have little money pouches we collect their gift money into. Or, for instance, what they get in the Easter egg hunt.
Sadie is now up to $28.55 in hers. Henry doesn’t have a pouch or whatever yet, but he has started with a $10 bang.
Valerie has a mere $7.25, and part of that came from me so she wouldn’t be as absurdly low. I’m wondering if maybe she did receive more and it got lost in the shuffle, or if sheer coincidence she hasn’t received as much, in which case she’s likely to make up for it when she turns two. In the meantime, poor Valerie.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Jay: Ouch!
Last month’s electric bill was $171! That’s unprecedented, by about $40.
On a second look, besides any rate increase or extra electricity purchases (outside of what the town utility generates), the bill actually closed September 11, so it covered a lot of time when we ran the air conditioner.
I had paid enough ahead to cover a full month and a little, anticipating impending poverty, and ended up owing $28. $41 if not paid today to get the early payment discount, which apparently you lose all of by not paying 100%, rather than it being prorated. I’m dropping $50 in the payment chute, which should put me where I thought I would already be; a wee bit ahead for next month’s bill.
I’d been meaning to post, once October hit, that now comes the race to not turn on the heat. Ideally we can get by on ambient temperature and sunlight warming the place until after the first of November. Last year we didn’t quite make it, but I believe we did the first year here. As annoying as it’s been to have 80-something degree days into October, on the other hand I consider them little treasures of thrift. They cost something to run fans because they’re too hot, but they keep the gas bill at bay. The way the critters are acting, this winter’s gas bill will need all the help and delay ramping up it can get. The hornets are building nests in a different, much more sheltered place than normal, and the cellar is crawling with unprecedented bugs that having come inside in anticipation of the cold.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Jay: Kelo, Tattered Constitution, and Oregon Enlightened
Part of the way through this article, Kelo was mentioned. For some reason it tripped me over from merely thinking the court was moronic for Kelo, to a feeling that if the court cannot be trusted to rule correctly in a case that any idiot off the street can grasp is unconstitutional, then the country is seriously broken.
The other thing about the article in question is I can remember in the eighties reading about Oregon’s onerous land regulations. To this day, it makes me reticent about ever living in Oregon. I have a mental image of them being one of the worst anti-property states. There must have been a backlash or sea change somewhere along the line, as they now correctly are required to compensate for regulatory impact on property value, not just outright takings.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Jay: Me Want
Yet another item for my Christmas list.
In the early to mid-eighties, when I moved in overtly libertarian circles, I was on the right mailing lists to receive a promotional mailing from Greenspan, regarding whatever it was he was doing at the time. I was astonished later when he was appointed Fed chairman. A libertarian Fed chairman; how could that happen? We were relative outcasts, even in Reaganland.
Obviously a good choice. Though going back in time, Volcker is one of the handful of things that Carter did right, keeping him from being a complete loser.
At any rate, it sounds utterly fascinating, and I’d love to read the whole thing. I know, my inner economics geek is showing. Not to mention my unquenchable libertarian tendencies. How many other people analyze the nature of property, how and why we treat it, and what it would mean to have truly unfettered property rights, while vacuuming the kid’s room? Surely we are few, far between, and that fact is a relief to many.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Deb: Blogging for Dollars
Speaking of multiple income streams, I’ve noticed that this wacky paid posting thing has gone on longer than I thought it would really be viable. I’m expecting the infinite number of monkeys who write Google’s algorithm to find a way to thwart it any time now, but in the meantime I’m having a really serious and protracted fight with myself over it.
You see, we need the money. Very badly, if not quite desperately. But--and I know this is new information, because I figure ‘your blog, your business’ and I haven’t commented on it where invited because of this--I find it deeply obnoxious. Some of y’all are very good at it, yes, but I still don’t like it, because I’m lazy and I hate having to put out the effort to avoid the posts I don’t want to read. Because no matter how talented you are (and do I have to say again that y’all are talented?) my time is pretty limited right now and I don’t have any interest at all in most of the things you’re paid to write about.
Which makes this way of making money a really bad fit, right? Except that I don’t really have to be interested, I suppose, just competent? Ad copy doesn’t require passion, does it? I know I can write competently about things that don’t stir my blood the way that say, a good political infight or some new dumbshit health news does.
And yet...it just feels wrong. Because I don’t like reading it. And I don’t know where I got the idea that I need to like what I’m writing, but it’s pretty damned ingrained.
*sigh*
Thoughts? Besides that you think I’m a poop for having/holding/never mentioning that I’m not a fan. That I’ll just assume. Anything else, though?
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