Random Stuff

Can’t talk about it, but had to at least say it. I’m excited.

Working for a start up company is all about Risk vs. Reward. Typically working for a start up means that there is a fair chance you will lose your job when the company folds. Or perhaps the company has too high of a burn rate and has to lay off a people because that last round of funding didn’t come in when it was expected, or perhaps that contract that would have made the company a couple of giant bags of cash was given to someone else.

There is also the chance that a start up company you work for makes it big time. You see the product you work on spread and become the center of the known world, or even a part of it.  You become part of something big. Hopefully all those stock options you got when you signed on were all worth the effort.

It is because of the above points you need to look at how you view your employment. Is it a job or an investment? Anyone can work for a company and do 9 to 5 work. But what is the payoff? Even at big companies, you won’t get far just putting in your time. Those that make the big pay checks are the ones who go the extra mile, take risks, and put in the extra time.

I look at who I am working for as an investment. Because of this, I look at the amount of risk I am taking versus the amount of potential reward. Will the payoff be big enough to justify the sacrafice of time, the stress of knowing I may be sent back home when I show up one day because the company ran out of money? How much sacrafice does my employer expect me to make and how much is he going to reward me?

Payday is one thing.  I can collect a paycheck anywhere. Does my employer expect me to make extra sacrafice for just a pitance and be happy with the knowlege I have a job? If the company sold tomorrow, what would the return be for the founders? Would the return on my investment match the amount of work I put in?

These are all things I have on my mind at the moment. When I started working for my current employer I made it clear that I viewed this job as an investment. Right now that investment is weighed.

I’ve been interested in search engines since I was first able to get results out of the WebCrawler. When looking at just what the web crawler did, I thought “I could probably do that some day!” but lack of time, resources, and most of all knowledge, I never did. I’ve kept an active interest in search engines, but getting real info was hard to come by. WebCrawler no longer does indexing, rather they aggregate information from other search engines now. But it started the search revolution as a project from University of Washington.

It’s at this point I really need to learn more. I need to go back to school. Why? Well, for the most part, I am self taught. The only formal education I’ve had in computer progamming were all in introductory classes about stuff I was already quite skilled at and using on a daily basis. I need hand holding. I do know some SQL (a language used for accessing databases), but anything outside a simple query is right now beyond my reach without more understanding of what lies underneath.

But back to the topic at hand. Off and on over the last few years, I’ve been working on my own crawler to index web pages and follow links. While toying around with this tonight, I stumbled on the original paper written by the founders of Google when they were at Stanford. When I started reading it I was fully expecting to be confused by all of the complex information presented. In actuality, it is clean, simple, and thorough much like the Google search interface itself.

So I sit here looking at the simple genius in that paper and wonder if I can come up with anything like it. I don’t know that I can, but it is still fun to toy around and solve problems for myself as a means of satisfying my curiosity.

What do you wish a web search engine would do?

Something my employer has done is on my mind. I’m irritated. Failure to follow through on a statement that was made. Not a broken promise, but close enough to break trust.

People there are still great to work with but I have lost respect for those in charge.

Comment from Debbie to Jake “You’re going to be just like your father aren’t you?”

Jake replies “I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.”

Today I put down new carpet inside the car, put the back seat back in, put in one of the front seats.

I also bolted the transmission to the bellhousing, spend some time figuring out what clutch fork to use and how it is mounted. Tried to locate some dowel pins for the clutch, but no luck there.

And now that dinner is settling, I’m headed back out to work on it some more.

Part of the reason I’m doing this is gas prices. Running around using up gas is not in the picture. It just costs too much, so much so, that I am going to start riding the bus. So rather than sitting around bored, I decided to start putting the car back together.

I need to buy a clutch equalizer bar pivot and locate those dowel pins before I can go further on the transmission. So now on to the interior while I can’t work on that.

I just got off the phone with the IRS. After several levels of voice menus, and then a hold time of about a half hour, I got to talk to a very pleasant lady. It turns out when they reviewed my tax forms, they missed the little box that says the income and tax from all of my securities sales is already reflected on my w2.

Since the notice also included an overpayment of Social Security tax, I now get a check from them for almost $400. That should make up for the lack of sleep this caused last night.

All others pay cash.

I got a bill yesterday from the IRS saying I misfiled my 2006 taxes and owe them $3800 by July 2nd.  Actually it says I owe them $3000 + $835 in interest (and they say loan sharks are crooks).

I don’t think I misfiled. They are adding my stock awards to my income, which is already stated on my w2 as part of my income and appropriate taxes withheld, effectivly saying I made $15,000 more than I really did. It’s happened before, and I can see where the error is.

Problem is. I am in a position of having to pay someone to straighten to prove I don’t owe them more money. But that won’t happen before the bill is due. So I have to pay up front, then pay some more to get it back. Losing situation all the way around.

It’s a sad state of affairs when you have to pay someone to figure out how to file your taxes correctly, or pay someone later to prove you filed your taxes correctly.

My sources of income aren’t that complicated either.
$$ Salary
$$ Stock Grant Sale (already declared on w2 as income, 33% withheld)
$$ Stock Purchase Sale (on company discount, already declared on w2 as income, 33% withheld)
Deduction for mortgage
Deduction for Kids
Deduction for Car Tabs
Deduction for Medical bills
and in WA, deduction for sales tax.

That’s it.

I just noticed that several letters on my keyboard have worn off so if you didn’t know what letter the key was supposed to be, you’d have a hard time with it. Also, all the keys on my keyboard used to have a matte like texture to them. A good majority of them are now smooth and shiny. You can tell where my fingers land on the keys, like I tend to use my left thumb more than my right when hitting the space bar, so it’s only shiny on one end.

This keyboard is only a year old.

Gas Prices are killing my budget. $75 for 16 gallons this morning. That covers about 4 days. For the first time I’m going to be riding my motorcycle out of necessity instead of pleasure. Time to buy a rain suit.

I wound up leaving a party last night a bit early. It was for a friend who is shipping out to Iraq in a week. Debbie wasn’t with me, but my friend’s parties are usually quite safe. Attractive single women have not been commonplace at any of his parties in the past.

There was an open pit fire going in the back yard where a couple of people were keeping it well stoked, so it was a nice place to hang out while others from the party filtered by and chatted. It was also a good bit quieter than inside the house making it a good place for conversation. I got to meet and talk to lots of different people as the night went on.

Joon and her friends showed up, my friend introduced her to those of us sitting around the fire.

“Kobanwa.” she said with a slight nod to the head.
“Kobanwa.” I responded back in the same manner. Kobanwa is a Japanese way of saying Good Evening.
“Ah! You speak Japanese!” she said in Japanese
“A little, but not very well.” I said back in Japanese. Then I followed up in English that I didn’t know any more than that. Next thing I know, she is sitting on my left and we are talking about Japan and Okinawa.

Soon after Tina showed up. She was a neighbor of my friend from just up the street. A couple others from the party were openly trying to pick her up and failing miserably. It wasn’t long before she had that “Get me out of here” look on her face. I was watching this when she looked my way. I couldn’t help but smile, an acknowledgment that I knew what that look was. But then she smiled back. I actually turned my head and thought “Shit, I shouldn’t have done that.” Next thing I know she is sitting on my right.

The conversation was enjoyable, but they started to get a bit obvious. The hand on my arm when making a comment. The slap on the shoulder when I made a joke. The scooting closer and closer on the bench. I think the most interesting was I now had an entourage of two when I went up to get myself a drink. It was flattering. But as they both became more obvious as well as competitive for my attention, I decided to call my exit.

That’s the first time I’ve actually been uncomfortable with the attention I was getting.Flattering yet, but I was just looking for conversation. Had I been single I most definitely would have stayed and I suspect it would have been quite interesting to say the least. But I am not single.

I called my girlfriend as soon as I was back in my car and on the way home.

It’s a joke with my girlfriend that I can’t help it. Just being me is what “it” is and I can’t turn that off.

My son had mentioned his girlfriend a few times in passing conversation. From what I understand they have been dating for a couple of months, which seems to me an eternity for a 14 year old kid. He hasn’t revealed any information about her except when pressed by me. Questions like “Is she smart? Is she cute? What’s she like?” and so on. The usual curious father type questions.

I met her for the first time today. She was helping my son with his homework when I got home today. She is very smart, very cute, polite, very well spoken. The type of girl any father would be glad to see his son dating.  I took her and my son to give her a ride home. I was saddened by the fact that she was concerned about being seen because of very racist people in her family that wouldn’t understand why she was dating a white guy.

I kept my mouth shut which is contrary to my nature. But any kid who has to put up with that from their own family and has the courage to step above it has my utmost respect. A very bright girl indeed.

Just for fun I updated the engine and some of the website that I have for groveling car pictures off the internet. The engine code is much cleaner, the database is smaller, and searches are faster.  It’s also got a separate component for loading the pictures so the image information is preserved.

Check it out: carpicarchive.com

I had to delete the last post. Not only was it messing with the layout for my entire blog, but it was also crashing FireFox web browsers. I’ll try again later.

I’m getting the feeling that I’ve stretched myself too thin. Too many things going on, too many projects, too much work.

At work I am undertaking a major project that I have to give a presentation about in two days. This is in addition to all of my day to day work. It’s enough to keep me busy 10 to 12 hours a day.

On the personal tech side, I’ve got 5 different web projects. One is close to being implemented, two have foundations in place but need a lot of busy work to complete. One that is an idea from someone else, that I am researching what it is going to take to implement it, that I think is an excellent idea. One that is an idea of another person for which I am providing technical know how.

At home, my car needs new brakes, I had to get new tires today, my son needs some new clothes, my lawn needs to be mowed (but I need a new mower first), my garage needs to be cleaned out, I need to build a shed, I have some stuff to haul to the dump, my hedge needs to be trimmed. I have some old computer equipment to get rid of, walls need to be painted…

too much

I headed out to visit a couple of friends last night and wound up coming home with a pile of parts.

Now add to the parts list of cool things I have:
World Class T5 transmission
Centerforce Dual Friction clutch
350hp 302 Ford Small Block Engine
and a pile of other misc parts that I need.

I now officially have every part I need to actually put my Cougar together. I just need to finish taking it apart.

last month

For income tax and social security I paid $1688.00
I paid about  $60 in gas taxes based on about $.544 per gallon.
I paid about $200 in sales tax
I paid $204 in property taxes
Dividing my car tabs over a year, I paid $16.00
I paid $7.10 in taxes on my cell phone.
My home phone had $2.79 in taxes and fees

So I pay about $2200 in taxes per month. About $26,000 a year. And this is just a rough estimate. I’m sure there are plenty that I am not accounting for. I haven’t looked at my power bill, or my garbage bill, or any of the other utilities I may be paying for.

I’m still angry. Not in the blatently pissed off, want to yell and swear, kind of way like I was yesterday. But a gnawing upset, pit of the stomach kind of angry.

Angry. Plain and simple. Just got off the phone with my ex-wife. Now I am downright pissed off. I’m at work, so there’s nothing I can do about it other than swear under my breath and perhaps blog a bit.

I wonder if she truly understands the legal ramifications of what she is about to try.

Grand Theft Auto IV came out today. This is the end all be all to violence, crime, and sex in a video game. I’ve played earlier versions of it. And I liked it. And yes, I would let my youngest son play it. I also wouldn’t say no to my oldest son, even if he was under 18. I have also taken my kids to “R” rated movies. I have let them see movies on cable that had nudity in them.

I’m sure there are some parents out there who shudder at the thought. The first thing to do would be to conclude I must be an awful parent for exposing my kids to such thing. That my kids must be, or will be, violent boys. My response would be to get to know my kids and me before you make up your mind about that. But I doubt that will happen if you’ve already made up your mind.

The simple fact of the matter is that I trust my children’s judgement when it comes to telling the difference between what is real and what is not. As well as what is acceptable and what is not. I’ve taken the time to teach them that there are consequences for actions. To think before acting. While I do have some of the typical problems associated with raising kids,  I have on a regular basis been made proud by either choices or direct actions made by my kids.

It is easy to blame video games, television shows, the internet, movies, and even music for the way children behave and how they behave when they grow into adulthood. But the simple fact of the matter is that if your children are behaving badly because of any of those influences, then you are the one who are letting your children down.

Talk to your kids. Talk to them. Ask them what they think. Let them know what you think.  Give them the freedom to make choices. Praise them for good, punish them for bad. Be an example.
Step up and be a parent. Don’t let a video game fill in the holes for you.

Today…
Seattlest used one of my Snoqualmie Falls pictures in an article.
Total Performance Racing let me know they want to use my pictures of their 222mph truck on their website.

No money, just fun.
Just how I want it.

I just stumbled on an irritating feature of my camera. I spent today at Pacific Raceway watching drag races. Because I’ve had my camera set on “fine + raw + large” format, I actually ran out of room on my 4 gig flash card for it.

I spent time between races deleting unwanted pictures. (not hard to find when you’ve taken 800+ pictures, gotta love digital cameras). It’s not a big deal, but now that I am downloading the pictures to my computer, I found that rather than continuing on the order numbering, it went back and filled in the holes. So pictures 800 through 900 may have my 924th picture burried in there somewhere.

It’s not a horrible thing, but I’d like the numbers to continue on upward regardless of any holes in the numbering sequence.

I’d say it’s a pretty high compliment when someone you know marks one of your pictures on Flickr as a favorite without knowing it’s you.

I took some time last night and watched the Dalai Lama on TV last night. He was answering questions in front of an audience at the UW.

It was interesting. But nothing he said was new. I’ve heard pretty much everything he’s said before. I’ve read it in philosophy books, and heard it from discussions with other people about religion, peace (or war), or in some cases my own thoughts.

I’m not saying I am great, and I am also not trying to make light of the Dali Lama. Rather, everything he said was, I believe, absolutely correct. It was grounded in common sense, logic, and understanding human nature. I have a great deal of respect for him because of that.

I find it amazing that people ask questions and look at what His Holiness’ answer is like it is a revelation.  Perhaps I shouldn’t.  I know it is some people’s dream to meet a spiritual leader such as him, and that is the entire reason for asking a question in itself. But I would think that would only be self serving. Why not ask a question you really want to know the answer for, or a question that is truly causing conflict in you. Not ask a question you already know the answer and are just looking for validation, or worse, just having a chance to just ask any question.  Or maybe they really don’t know that if you thought about things for a minute.

I was asked by a coworker if I would like to meet him. I would. In a heartbeat. What would I ask him? “Would you be my friend?” Probably followed by asking for his email address so we could chat.

Today was an amazing day. I’m too tired right now to go into too many details, but I’ll give a few now before I hit the sack.

We took Debbie’s Jeep for some light offroading today up at Rieter pit. Top down, it was  a bit chilly this morning, but  things warmed up quite a bit. By around Lunch time we were several hundred feet in elevation driving through about a foot of snow spinning tires and throwing mud all the way up to some of the most spectacular scenery this area has to offer.

Back down, then to the house, then out to Lake union into Ivars for dinner (not the fast food, but the restaurant on the north end). From there we headed out to Alki and watched the sun go down amidst the hundred of cars and motorcycles out cruising around.  Around Alki point and back home again.

We have a few pictures from the mountains, but to be frank, I’m just too tired to upload them right now. Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve been using Flickr more and more. I was reluctant at first to use it because I could just as easily write my own web page to host my own pictures. But as I began to take more photos, it became cumbersome and the utility of Flickr became apparent. It wasn’t until I reach my limit as a free user that I decided to pony up for a pro account. I think this was the first service on the internet that I actually paid for. I’ve come to a point where I really rely on it.

I’ve mentioned before my opinion on Microsoft buying Yahoo. Regardless of my opinion on why or why not that deal should happen, I worry about what will become of Flickr. I like it just the way it is. It is exceptionally clean, easy to use, reliable, and powerful. A rare combination.

Knowing what I do about Microsoft from working there for ten years, is that if they do wind up owning it, they will not be able to leave it alone. I can imagine it being clumped into the mess that is MS-Live. Worse yet, I could imagine it requiring MS-Silverlight (MS answer to flash) making it incompatible with any operating system other than Windows.

Both of these would be a tragedy to a wonderful service.

There is something sobering about reading this living will document I have sitting here in front of me. The questions are simple, but the answers are not. In addition to talking to my family, I think I may need to consult a medical professional as well. I want to know exactly what I am answering yes and no to before doing so.

I do think about my death from time to time, but it is in terms of how it will affect those closest to me. So as such I owe it to them to talk about this.

Snoqualmie Falls 3
Originally uploaded by jesse_hires

Moving water pictures have always fascinated me. I finally took some time this morning while everyone was still asleep to head out to Snoqualmie Falls. This is one of about 50 that I took while trying out different settings on my camera.

It’s wonderful to have a tripod, a camera with a lot of control, and a remote.

I’ll have to head back there when the water is really flowing. During flood season, the entire wall you see in the picture is covered with waterfall.

Not enough coffee? Not enough sleep? Not sure what it is, but I woke up this morning in a somewhat bad mood, and the way the rest of my morning has been going, my mood is not improving.

The default Wordpress template is beginning to get old. Although it is a brilliant design by any standard, I am finding that I am getting more and more limited. Mostly because lately I’ve been posting pictures as well as writing. I need to get one that is a little more suited to this.

I’m open to suggestions if you’ve seen a decent template out there.

Hail in my hand, originally uploaded by jesse_hires.

The hailstorm we had the other day was quite spectacular, as well as very wet. I’ve never seen a hail storm last for 30 minutes. No damage (at least to any of my stuff) but it was coming down hard enough I thought I might need to pull off the road.