New Year 2012

Posted on January 2nd, 2012 webmaster No comments          Print

Happy New Year!

I like to start the new year thinking about things I’ve accomplished the previous year and what I want to accomplish in the future.

Looking back, 2011 for me has been very productive. I’ve accomplished quite a bit, some were planned and some were not. These are the ones that stood out:

1.  Exceeded my financial goals.

My very first job while in college was working for a startup company.  I was assembling computers, doing helpdesk, and performing systems/network administration tasks later on.  The main business was re-selling Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle) servers.  We’ll get used parts from vendors and put them together and sell them to customers.

I worked there for about 4 years.  Pretty much since I was a freshman until after graduated from college, when they hired me full time.  I saw the company grew from less than 15 people to over 40.  While the job didn’t pay that well, I learned a lot from working there and enjoyed most of it.  I had a really great boss and met some really great people who I still keep in touch with to this day.  The business, unfortunately, went bankrupt (but re-opened again under a new name pretty much around the same time it filed for bankruptcy, I don’t know the legal details).

Weeks before the big announcement, we pretty much knew something was going on as people were getting laid off.  I was actually one of the few people that were left, but I left the company shortly after it re-opened.  That experience really made me think about job security.  There’s really no such thing anymore.  I was still living at home at the time, so if I lost my job that time it wasn’t a big deal.  But then I thought about my former co-workers, who have families to support and very dependent on that job.  That must’ve been really tough for them.

After that experience, I made the decision to save like crazy.  I wanted to be able to cover at least 1 year of living expenses.  I don’t want to be in a position where I couldn’t sleep at night because I was thinking about how to pay the bills.  I also don’t want to be very dependent on my job.  If I started really hating my job, I want to have the option to be able quit at any time.

I did reach that goal, but I still kept saving.  I also kept looking for ways to cut my spending even when I was making more than twice as much as I did earlier in my career.  I set a goal to have x amount of money at age 30, which I exceeded last year at age 26.  I’ve been very fortunate financially so far.  I managed to save enough to support myself for a few years (note that I don’t have a lot of money, I just don’t have a lot of expenses).

2.  Got more comfortable meeting new people.

I’m not the most outgoing person.  If you talk to my classmates in high school, they’d all tell you I was very shy and quiet.  People voted me in the “most shy” category in the high school yearbook.

I still am usually shy and quiet around people I just met, but not as much as I used to.  I started going to meetups on things I that interest me.  I went to a lot of tech meetups, hiking, and just hanging out with people doing different things.  I’m not comfortable just walking up to strangers and introducing myself, feels like I’m trying to sell them something.  But when you go to meetups, you know everyone is there for the same reason which makes it easier to approach someone and start a conversation as you already have a topic to talk about.

I actually enjoy meeting new people and listening to their stories.  Computer geeks are not anti-social creatures, and most have other interests outside of technology.

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Random Quotes

Posted on September 30th, 2010 webmaster No comments          Print

I’m currently reading Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of Non-Conformity and I really liked the quotes he put throughout the book.  I often paused for a few seconds after reading each one to think about it.

I thought it might be a good idea to have random quotes appear on this blog so I searched the WordPress site for plugins and found this Quotes Collection plugin that can do exactly what I want (and more).  It lets you create a collection of quotes that can then be displayed on a page or on the sidebar.  If you look at the sidebar right now the first thing you’ll see is a random quote.  When you refresh the page or go to another page you’ll notice the sidebar will display a new random quote.

I only have a few quotes entered right now but I’ll make sure to keep this updated whenever I find a new one that I like.

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Twitter

Posted on March 1st, 2009 webmaster No comments          Print

I just created a Twitter account.  I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about it lately so I decided to finally give it a try.  I’m still not sure whether I’m gonna keep using it, but so far I’m liking it a lot.  Very simple and easy to use and it looks like it will be a good complement to my blog.

The first thing that actually came to mind when I signed up for an account was how to integrate it with my blog.  I found a WordPress plugin called “Twitter Tools” and installed it right away.  It seems to work pretty well, you can also use it to post a “tweet” directly from your WordPress blog and you can even set it to notify Twitter every time you write a new post.

You can view my latest tweets on the sidebar on the right.