Looping the Hen

Yay!

As everyone knows, I am the epitomy of modesty and self-restraint...however, I must say I just received my 3rd promotion in 3 years and it feels pretty good. I am now Purchasing Manager, and have to admit I greatly enjoy my career, far more than I ever could have envisioned in the 90's. Not too bad for someone who started at my company as an $8.00 an hour temporary in 1999!

Tammy would probably say that as stingy as I am personally, Purchasing is a perfect avocation for me. I guess everyone is happy that our department's budget continues to go down every year instead of up.

Go me!

Creepy...why I hate the MPAA, reason# 57

Very Orwellian.

Cometh the Taxman

Uh-oh.

Laptop experiences, anyone?

My newest goal is raising around $3,200 cash for a new high-end gaming laptop. I've never used anything but desktops, but some changes in my life habits are making me think a laptop is finally right for me.

I'm hoping to get around $1,200 for my other Eve Online character and $1,000 from other random Ebay stuff; the rest will come out of my regular savings. With hope I'll have it in time for Christmas.

Anyone with any advice it would be greatly appreciated! I am looking at this Dell XPS Laptop. Looks nice with a 17" monitor and 512 meg video card; I'd upgrade it to 2gb RAM. I am also considering an Alienware (also now owned by Dell I think) laptop; it has an AMD processor, but I'm not really sure which is better, the AMD or Dual Core Intel chips. It's around the same price tricked out as the Dell is. It also looks like it might have a better wireless card, which will be beaucoup importante.

I think my honey is going to get a laptop too, as she is becoming slowly addicted to the box as a device to help with everyday things instead of something mean and scary. And neither of us are good at sharing.

Anyhoo, anyone with any thoughts to share, please drop me an email as I'm flying blind in the laptop department!

I was planning on buying this game...

I don't let Sony put spyware on my PC; I certainly won't let EA try the same.

A game that costs me $60 is now going to have in-game ads targeted to me and written on my hard drive 'temporarily'? Please.

Bribes for babies...

The part that struck me most about this article is the $960 cash subsidy per month for a third child. That is around what all of my bills run monthly. Assuming they only get half that for child 1 and 2, and you are looking at potentially $2000 monthly, tax free and in cash, on top of all the other child care subsidies and job security for 3 years following a child (potentially nine years job protection after your 3rd child!). Even if you choose to work, you have 36 paid holidays yearly, plus another 4-6 weeks paid vacation. That's all of 194 actual workdays yearly for those keeping score at home. I thought I was doing pretty well with my 3 weeks vacation and 11 paid holidays yearly, for a total of around 235 actual workdays yearly.

To reverse negative population growth, which is a death sentence on a society, many measures are 'appropriate'. Although my Libertarian instincts scream at the mere notion of such a grand cash-for-babies scheme, I understand a nation-state's survival instinct on that scale (I could even think of it as an odd form of national self-defense). However, the amount of resentment your average single, childless person could feel is potentially huge. Which I guess is the point, as they are trying to turn single, childless people into income-redistributing, check-collecting mothers and fathers.

Out of Breath!

My honey entered her first 5k this weekend, I am supremely proud of her! Her and Arnold ended at 46:25, just under a 15:00 mile pace (14:59). You go Supergirl and Wonder Woman (Arnold is WW)!

I was pretty thrilled to see my time also; I haven't run a whole lot this summer, and I've been fighting off a cold/lung thing for a few weeks. I ended at 25:55 (8:22 mile pace). This was the first race I ran last year when I started running again. I think I did it at over 30 last time, so the summer layoff wasn't as bad as I thought!

Go us and a superhealthy lifestyle!

Holy Y Chromosone!

Honey, you need to join the mainstream and play more online games!

Working at Romanian wages...

Okay, so not everything goes as smoothly as I expect. Err...or even close. So much for getting rich on little people. I finally sold some custom figures for Heroscape, and at a decent rate in comparison to what I would have gotten selling them for my game. However, the time expenditure was huge and devalued the project as a whole. I've probably spent 60 hours or so working on this project all told, and the total return so far has been around $40 after auction and Paypal fees. Sounds like $.75/hour. (hey, it was $.33/hour two weeks ago...Tammy asked if that meant she could buy three hours of girlfriend time for a buck!) I could probably do better than that with a metal detector at the beach. And that doesn't count the initial outlay on supplies like photo paper, ink, and the like. So I'm still waaaaaay behind.

Still, it's taught me some good things. The best of which is how to use Gimp,(yes, I think it is a reference to Pulp Fiction) a very powerful photo/image editor, near in functionality to Photoshop. And it’s free, while Photoshop runs around $700. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm steadily getting better at it. The bulk of the 60 hours was spent creating custom artwork. I'll write it off as a training class or something!

The other main positive takeaway is actually completing a project. Sometimes I am more like some folks in my family than I will admit. I think about doing a lot of things, but rarely follow through. From starting this project to first auction was all of 7 days, and I am a little proud of that.

Still, I probably have another 10 hours worth of work before this project gets to go on auto-pilot. When that happens I will probably make more in the $10/hour range. So to make more than minimum wage over the course of the project, I will need to sell something on the order of 150 auctions. I feel compelled to at least make enough to cover my out-of-pocket costs. Once that happens, I will actually be ahead slightly, as I will have the top-end Dremel I bought paid for by little people, as well as a nice Exacto. If things are humming along smoothly when that is done, I might try to sell enough on top of that to pay for the $400 camera I bought partially to be able to take pictures of stuff to put up for auction. (Though not just little people)

Now I can get back to some other projects that were put on hold due to budget time at work and little people! (Sorry G!)