Constant Random Change

A simple tip to start the first work week.

Forget the “Golden Rule”.

Everyone has different motivations in the workplace. Some are there for the money. Some are there for the titles and recognition. Some are there for the sense of achievement that comes with closing a deal or finishing a project. Some are there for the learning experience to prepare them for their next job.

It is a common mistake when dealing with co-workers to think that what motivates them is the same as what motivates us. You can’t bait fish with cake, nor can you entice people with worms.

So the next time you need to ask something from your subordinates, or the next time you need to convince your boss to do something, put things in that person’s perspective instead of your own. If you can’t, make an effort to find out more about those persons in order to make it putting yourselves in their shoes easier.

It’s a Sunday so we might as well do some cleaning.

Organize your hard drive with the help of a disk space analyzer.

Longtime Windows users should already be familiar with this app. WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) provides a treemap view of your hard drives, making it easier to find out which files or folders are taking too much space.

This is a Windows-only utility, but alternatives are available for other OSs. JDiskReport runs on any computer that runs Java. Mac users can also use Disk Inventory X, while Unix/Linux users should be comfortable with just using du.

This one’s going to be a bit harder than the previous post.

Know your financial situation.

It is common to see people living beyond their means just because they aren’t aware that they’re earning less than they’re spending. You don’t need to read books to know that the obvious solution to this problem is to be aware of one’s financial situation.

However, personal wealth is more than just your paycheck and bills. In order to paint a better picture of your financial situation, you must track down other aspects of your finances and your life.

For this tip, I’ll be asking you to take note of the following for the next month:

Your passive income.

This is the money you’re getting in a month that doesn’t require any work. The simplest example would be collecting rental fees for a house that you leased to other people. Other examples would be interest on bonds, valuation increases in stocks, and profit from businesses you’ve invested in.

If you’re a normal twenty-something professional, this should be zero.

(Spoiler: financially independent people have a passive income higher than their expenses.)

Your wealth.

To simplify things, just ignore your “assets” and just focus on your wallet and your bank accounts at the end of this month.

Your current wealth should be the sum of the money in your wallet and all of your bank accounts (credit limit not included since it’s not real money) minus all of your debts. Credit card balance counts as debt and should be subtracted from the total unless it’s on a 0% monthly installment (then it should be counted as part of “expenses” below). Also, if someone owes you a substantial amount of money, add this to your wealth.

The normal value for a twenty-something professional would be at most at the low 5 digits (Philippine Pesos) to around negative 5 digits.

Your income.

This should be easy. Just get your paycheck and take note of your gross income.

The time you spend for your income.

This is a key point from the book Your Money or Your Life. The obvious example would be to compare a person earning PhP 5,000.00 for 40 hours of work to a person earning PhP 2,000.00 for 10 hours of work. Even if the two are set in the same time span (say, a week), the latter is more appealing because it’s 200 pesos/hr compared to 125.

The not-so-obvious way of thinking stated in the book is to take into account the other hours you spend for the sake of work. There’s commuting. There’s the hours you spend dressing up for work or shopping for work clothes. There’s the work-related meals. There’s the “decompression entertainment” and vacations to keep you sane. There’s the visits to the doctor due to work related stress.

It won’t be surprising to find out that a person who works 40 hours a week spends another 30 hours a week on the average to support his job.

So for this step, track down how many hours you’ve spent this month as a side effect of your job.

Your expenses.

Here’s the hard part:

Track down and itemize every expense you make down to the peso.

I would suggest you go low-tech for this one, using a small notebook or hipster PDA then transferring it to a simple spreadsheet instead of being tempted to find an app for your expense tracking. The problem with the latter is that their classification systems are usually inflexible. You’ll have more freedom classifying your expenses when you do it manually.

Yes, it’s annoying and yes, it’s easy to fall off the habit after a few days. However, knowing your financial situation depends on how accurate you track down your expenses. This is the only way you’ll see if you’re spending too much on certain things like food and clothes.

This process might also cause some feelings of guilt, especially if you notice that you are spending too much on stuff like food and clothes. Don’t feel guilty about your expenses (yet). You’ll just fall into the same trap as binge eaters who feel that they need to compensate for their overeating but just end up in a worse condition in the long run. At this point, just spend as you would spend normally.

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Next month, I’ll write a follow-up post to discuss what to do with those numbers.

While browsing through e-learning items in my Google Reader list, I found this very insightful list from the sidebar of a blog pointed to by a shared link:

What The Blogosphere Wants More Of:

Blog readers want to see more:

• original research,surveys etc.
• original,well-crafted fiction
• great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
• news not found anywhere else
• category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
• clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
• benchmarks,quantitative analysis
• personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
• first-hand accounts
• live reports from events
• insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
• short educational pieces
• relevant “aha” graphics
• great photos
• useful tools and checklists
• précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
• fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:

• constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
• ‘thank you’ comments, and why readers liked their post
• requests for future posts on specific subjects
• foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
• reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
• wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
• comments that engender lively discussion
• guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs

Back when I was still working, I never really cared about paydays. So while everyone else was looking forward to those two days in the month where their accounts would magically be filled with money again, I’d be actually be so oblivious about those dates that I’m often surprised when the ATM receipt says I have more money in my account since I last checked it.

Since I didn’t care about my paycheck, I didn’t realize that it was a very good indication of my financial stability until Lifehacker linked to The Simple Dollar post about living from paycheck-to-paycheck.

Paycheck-to-paycheck living happens when you are regularly waiting for your next paycheck before you make basic financial moves, like paying bills or buying food or doing something fun. It’s incredibly dangerous for a number of reasons:

While it has never been not be applicable to me, I know many of my friends have this mentality. Head over to the post and see if the advice there would help improve your financial stability.

The First Steps Away from Paycheck-to-Paycheck Living [from The Simple Dollar, linked by Lifehacker]

Here are some of the follow-up questions my friend asked me after posting the previous two posts.

Why not go for SLI or Crossfire?

For those unfamiliar with the terms, Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and Crossfire are terms used by nVidia and ATI (now AMD), respectively, to call their method of allowing two or more video cards of the same to work on the same graphics rendering tasks at the same time. This should theoretically allow the computer to produce twice/thrice/etc the frames per second (fps) for games or other graphics-heavy programs.

In practice, however, the performance gains provided by both configurations are unpredictable. The performance might double in some applications, while the performance difference might be negligible on other applications.

Another downside to using SLI/Crossfire is that not all motherboards can support them. For example, none of the motherboards that I chose in the previous two posts support SLI, but all support Crossfire. If you’re planning to build an SLI-ready or a Crossfire-ready PC, you will have to make sure that the motherboard supports it.

The increase in the power requirement of your system from using multiple (energy guzzling) video cards might also require you to upgrade your PSU. You can go to this site to check if your (brand-name) PSU can provide enough power to your planned SLI/Crossfire system.

Speaking of PSUs, manuals usually ask the system builder to connect each video card to a dedicated line from the PSU to avoid overloading the line. You must make sure that the PSU has enough lines for your card as some PSUs only have one line for the 6-pin PCI-Express connectors.

There are cases where SLI and Crossfire make sense, though. One obvious scenario would be getting the absolute highest performance from the cards in the market. No single card would be a match to a system two or more of the most powerful video cards in the market working together in SLI/Crossfire.

Of course that scenario would only be applicable to the most hardcore of system builders. For the average enthusiast builder, SLI and Crossfire provides a way to beat the market sometimes. Recall what I said about the cards I chose being in a sweet spot:

…go any cheaper than the HD 4850 and you’ll get a large decrease in performance, but going for even a slightly more powerful card will give you a large increase in price.

Depending on the state of video card retail prices, there are times where SLI or Crossfire configurations would provide the same (or better) performance compared to their more expensive counterparts. This is currently the case for Radeon HD 4850 / 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 (that is, if you can find stores that sell those cards at those prices).

Another possible practical scenario takes advantage of the fact that prices always go down as new hardware gets introduced in the market. A system builder can therefore settle with just one video card first and just buy the second video card when the price goes down. This would allow him to “upgrade” his computer without having to buy a new (and more expensive) single video card.

Any incompatibilities should I watch out for when choosing parts?

First would probably be the motherboard. Some of the older motherboards do not support newer processors even though the processor sockets are compatible. There’s also the IDE ports: because of SATA, most of the newer motherboards do not carry more than one IDE socket so if you plan to carry over more than two IDE hard drives or IDE DVD-RW drives from your old PC, you’ll have to make sure that the motherboard you choose has two IDE sockets.

Another would be the PSU. As I mentioned above, you’ll have to make sure that the PSU has enough compatible connectors with your planned parts. It should also be able to provide enough power for your entire system.

Finally, there’s also the PC case. I’m sure you won’t make the mistake of buying a “micro-ATX” case when your motherboard is clearly labeled as “ATX“, but even the most well-informed computer user might not realize that some high-end video cards don’t fit in smaller cases.

I’m planning to buy this in December…

Don’t.

By December the lists I provided will already be obsolete. Who knows whether nVidia would release a new chipset that would quickly dominate the sweet-spot in the video card market? Who knows if AMD would release far better processors than Intel’s proposed i5 line? Would SSD (Solid State Drive) prices go down low enough to make the average consumer buy one instead of the traditional magnetic platter based hard disk drives?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions. Because of this, you will have to re-conduct research on parts on December.

Fortunately, most of the rules of thumb I mentioned will still work by then. For example, focusing on the video card will still be applicable by December given that the speed of improvements in graphics card chips is faster than in CPU chips.

For additional information, some sites like Tom’s Hardware provide system builder guides and buying guides giving readers details on how to choose parts based on the current state of the market. You can also go to vendor neutral sites like TipidPC where you can ask members for suggestions on parts.

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And that’s it for this post. I’ll post another one if my friend asks more questions.

A group who codes programs without revision control is stupid. And crazy.

Seriously, what self respecting software developer in 2009 in their right mind would use a “shared network folder” approach in sharing code instead of opting for a VCS?!?!

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Here we come to the second important purpose of revision control, namely, to automate most of the processes involved in sharing work among multiple users. Those processes and the problems involved with them are neatly described in the SVN book. Just click the link and come back here when you’re done reading the chapter (saves me the copy-paste effort ).

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Spent a good part of the day waiting in line for SSS ID processing. Realized later that I could make a short yet informative post about it.

I don’t want to insult my reader’s intelligence (which is what, averaging 140? ) so I’ll minimize repeating stuff found in the official website.

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