The problem in the mirror

We started our kids in home school yesterday.  We’ve been called crazy by a lot of people, but I’m okay with that.  Generally, those people that call us crazy are also the same ones that keep asking for money because they don’t have any food.  They don’t have any food because they wrongly prioritized their income and paid the cable and internet bill instead of buying food.

It’s been 2 ½ years of hard budgeting since the last time I had trouble paying rent or buying food.  Maybe more.  I guess I learned the right way to do things, and now I do those things constantly.  These are the same people who try to show off their brilliance by doing intelligence tests on Facebook.  It takes 5^th grade level math to run a budget.  Maybe even less than that.  But 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.  Where’s the intelligence? 

I think we’ve become caught up in a race to learn useless knowledge.  I think there is a belief that states “if the answer is simple, the answer is wrong”.  And people just keep trekking after supremely complex answers to simple problems.  It takes knowledge learned in 5^th grade to balance a budget.  Yet 70% can’t.   

So it leads me to believe that there is considerably more to the economic failures of individuals than is originally assumed.  I guess you could say I try to look at root causes to solve problems.  And one of the ideas I’ve thought about is the root cause of financial failure in most people is victim thinking. 

In victim thinking the problem is always someone else.  It is never the individual.  Because the person believes the problem is never their fault, they never work to fix whatever the problem is.  It’s easy to blame a manager for not getting promoted.  It’s hard to say “I’m a lazy bum”.  But frequently that’s the case.  It’s obvious from people on the outside, but not so obvious from people on the inside. 

I think it narrows down to a basic fact: you can either admit the problem is you and start succeeding, or you can blame other people and give up.  It’s a simple choice.   But a hard one. 

As Dave Ramsey has said though, if you admit that you are the problem, then you can also know exactly what to fix to get rid of the problem: you.  You are the only thing you can change in your life.  You can’t change your past.  You can’t change your race.  You can’t change your ethnicity.  But you can change your blaming, complaining mindset and turn the world inside out.

As for book recommendations today, I’d say QBQ! The Question Behind the Question by John Miller.  It’s a short book, but a good one.

Return to Quicken

I’ve been contemplating buying Quicken 2014 Deluxe.  My last version was Quicken 2011 Deluxe.  Intuit decided they needed a new paycheck to do the exact same thing they did previously, so I can no longer download my bank information and have it automatically entered.  All manual entry if I want to do that type of thing.  I really don’t.  I manage my account well, so I know how much I have and I review it several times a week.  Note the “managed” part of the account. 

So I guess I wonder if I should repurchase it.  I’ve been out of service with Quicken since the end of April, though I slowly quit using it prior to that because the darn thing wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do.  It didn’t seem to understand the term “monthly budget”.   Telling me I’m over budget because I’ve got rent scheduled for the next year and I don’t have the money to pay Decembers rent in February is kind of stupid to me.  But that is what Quicken does.  Maybe it thinks I’m trying to prepare for apocalypse. 

So stupid.  Have they fixed any of this?  I doubt it.  But some part of me thinks I should go get it just to see if it anything is better.  I do wonder if Quicken is the best because everything else sets the bar so low.  But I digress.  Could be I’m just complaining because I feel like it.  Seems like a good thing to do.

I think the other, and real, problem is a mental problem.  When my gas account gets up high, I think of things to go off and blow it on that don’t have anything to do with vehicle maintenance.  I need to go replace my front tires and all my shocks.  But that wouldn’t be “fun” or exciting.  Buying tires is kind of like having a root canal.  I haven’t had a root canal, but I have bought tires.  It was somewhere in the “supremely boring” category.  And did I mention expensive?  Yeah, that too. 

Going back to the budget I wonder if there is really anything useful for me in Quicken that I don’t already do.  Other than categorizing things and figuring out where money goes, I don’t know.  I do yearly budgets with an Excel spreadsheet and that works fine.  Seems to work a lot better than the over complexity of Quicken.  See, Quicken operates for casual budgeters.  I’m an “every dollar on paper on purpose” budgeter.  There is no “left over” money at the end of the month.  Because I spent every single bit of it before I ever got it.

Now, sometimes that money is spent in the “blow” category.  Sometimes it’s spent on rent.  But it’s all got a name and a purpose.  I know when the bills come due and I know the generally amounts.  I know electricity and gas swap being horrible based on the season.  I know when I’m going to put money into savings and when I’m going to be short.  I always know.  Because my life is balanced off a budget of me not working a single minute of overtime.  And I always work overtime.  There is always a degree of flexibility there that allow me to do whatever I need to do.   And if I truly am short, then I’ve got $1,000 in an emergency fund to make the problem go away.  Simple.

I guess the end of this is I don’t want Quicken.  I just thought I did.  There is nothing it can provide me that I don’t already do or have.  And that $55 (or $65 or $48, depending on where you look) can easily be spent paying off debit or buying tires.  

Weeks between

This is the first thing I’ve written on Office 2013 other than email.  Something about the movement of the cursor looks weird to me.  It doesn’t have the mechanical snap that I’d expect out of a computer.  Kind of creepy, but I guess I’ll have to deal with it.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about time management.  Really, it’s a wonder of whether the time being spent is worthwhile time.  I was listening to the Andy Andrews podcast (In the Loop #135, to be specific) and he started talking about “as a man thinketh, so is he”.  Thinking leads to choices which leads to action which changes families which changes societies. 

The other point he brought up is that when people don’t know what to do, they do nothing.  That is a simple, but highly profound observation.   If you do nothing, you get nothing.   If you get nothing, you go nowhere.  So you end up stuck where you are because you don’t spend any time doing anything that will get you out of the rut. 

Which based on all of this, it seems intelligent to pick a direction to go, and go there.  It may be the wrong direction, but it is a direction nonetheless. 

I don’t remember where I was going with this, but it seemed important, so I’ll keep it. 

Moving on to the current day…  I’ve been reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  I’d recommend anyone and everyone read this book.  More than anything else, I think his ideas on habit creation and formation are the necessary things to transform lives.  Habits are what take us through life without thinking.  If those habits that lead you are going in the right direction, then you will continue on in the right direction.  If they take you in the wrong direction, then the habits need to change. 

Either way, building habits to get you where you want to go seems to be a good way to go.  I’m going to have to experiment with that…

I should get back in the habit of blogging more often.  We shall see.  We shall see.

App Development

AI guess Marc Cuban was right.  Ideas are easy.  Execution is hard.  Though I’ve had a really good idea for an Android app, I realize I don’t have the Java skills to write Android applications.  So now I’m having to go back and learn the necessary skills in order to execute on the idea that I had.  I think the idea is worth the effort.  I still think it’s just different enough to be completely unique. 

Could what I write make it to the top of the charts?  I think so.  I downloaded several games last night, and they were crap.  And yet they were at the top of the iPhone free games chart.  On one of them the controls didn’t work.  The other was a basic shooter on rails, except it was the same level over and over and over again.  It’s like they spent all their time on the game engine and didn’t have any time or money left to create content. 

I guess this all makes me realize that although the application markets for Android and iPhone are relatively mature, the content itself isn’t.  Everything is still very much in its infancy.  Many of the games are roughly the same game, except with different graphics and sounds.  A large number of the games fit into the on-rails category where the character moves forward and the player does something to keep that player moving forward.  It’s really just Temple Run with some slight variation. 

And that’s really the issue.  Most things are just slightly varied in comparison with the rest of the markets.  You get Angry Birds, then you get ten thousand variants of Angry Birds.  Then you get Temple Run, followed by three or four thousand variants.  The situation is a result of many people playing a game, deciding they can make the game “better than the original” and then producing it. 

But then, that’s the games side of things.  On other sides, you get the Wal-Mart app.  And it’s really just a link to their mobile website.  And in lots of businesses, that’s what constitutes having a mobile presence.

I guess I’m being too harsh, but there isn’t much originality when it comes to the mobile markets.  The second obvious question to all this is: do you need originality?  Phones are designed for rapid, simple interaction.  A twitch reaction, if you will.  Twitch, look at phone.  Twitch, look somewhere else.  Twitch, and back to phone.  It’s very different from the console experiences where companies want you to invest three or four hours at a time.  In the mobile world, most are looking for a 15 to 20 seconds of interaction at a time.   It’s hard to develop buy-in when you only get 20 seconds. 

The other part is my idea is only slightly original.  It’s an extension of an existing idea, and therein lies its uniqueness.  But it’s not the “killer app”, nor is it the next best thing since sliced bread.  It’s just a slight variation in a theme.

IDE Failures

I’ve been trying to work on my idea for an Android app, but so far most of what I have been doing is fighting Eclipse.  There are several contributing factors.  The version of Java I need for work is different than what Eclipse runs.   Unfortunately, I’m using my work laptop for development.  My ability to sit down and work at a physical desktop is limited.  I run about 900 miles an hour, and when I am home I get distracted every three to five seconds.   It’s not intentional.  I have a wife and three kids, and one of them needs something from me constantly. 

I’d try to upgrade Java and leave it upgraded for a bit if it just required an install to get it working.  But it doesn’t.  There are a few settings in Java that I’ve never documented that are required to get things to work.  And it’s some of those critical things that would keep me at the site during an install longer.  So Java 6 has got to stay.

The second part of this is the emulator.  I know I’ve messed with the Eclipse Android emulator before, but I’ve screwed the thing up somehow so all it does is crash on me.  Joy.  It didn’t have any virtual device created, and the instructions I’ve seen for creating virtual devices are different than those on screen.  So I tried to fake it and that broke. 

So I’ve found myself fighting with everything except code, and it’s driving me up the wall.  I haven’t had a single chance to even try to look at code because I’m busy trying to set up the environment.  I’ve messed with Netbeans before, and as an IDE I think I like it better than Eclipse.  It also runs fine off Java 6, so I don’t have to install/reinstall every day.  Really, it would be every day.  I’m working on site upgrades for the next three weeks, and every single one of those requires me to get in something that only works on Java 6. 

So I spent some time this morning tracking down the location of the source file, and until further notice, it looks like my editor of choice is going to be Notepad++.  So much for the wonders of IDE.

Simplification

Running late this morning.  Not even sure what to say.  Yesterday, some knucklehead decided to do a denial of service attack against one of our sights.  I was setting the site up for failover network capability.  The failover worked, so the entire denial of service attack was a big joke.  It was one of those perfect storms where an attack occurred, but the attack was completely mitigated without any harm to the site. 

 I’d like to say it was intentional that it happened this way, but it’s not.  It was just pure luck.  But I will take pure luck. 

Despite all this, I keep returning to a realization I had over the weekend.  In the Bible, Solomon is considered the second most intelligent person.  The first most intelligent being Jesus.  But back to Solomon.  For all his brilliance, after his reign the country of Israel goes down the tubes.  Solomon had hundreds of wives, and he allowed them to openly worship idols, leading the country towards idolatry.  I guess the main point here is all can screw up, even the most brilliant around us. 

The more I think about it, the more I believe excessive intelligence becomes a hindrance and not a help.  Excessive intelligence leads to more thought and less action.  Action is the catalyst of change in the world, not thought.  And really, most lives don’t need more thought.  They need more action. 

I was asked yesterday if I had been told I was smart.  I told the person I don’t think I believe them anymore.  For all the “intelligence” I supposedly have, simplistic truths have always confounded me.  And in the end, it’s always the simplification that yields the best and most accurate results.  Back when there was a geocentric model of the universe, a man created a map of the movement of the planets.  It was incredibly complex, but still did not explain everything.  Sometime later, the heliocentric model of the universe was developed.  Suddenly, the things that it took a mathematician to understand could be taught to children. 

It really makes me think… if the concept can’t be taught to a child, the concept needs revised. 

a cascade of random

While looking to set up links for yesterdays’ post, I found the Amazon post for Seven Days.  I have to admit, it doesn’t look as bad as I’d thought.  I’m not going to say it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, but it definitely worked for what it is.  I guess the only question is whether it works to show off the story or to sell more.   We’ll see.

 Been a crazy last part of the week.  Worked all night Wednesday night, got three hours of sleep, and went back to work Thursday. 

Now it’s Saturday, and I’m eating lunch and listening to the Dave Ramsey channel.  Listening to some of the people, it makes me realize why raising the minimum wage will not do anything.   Why?  Because you get people on the show making $130,000 a year who are flat broke and people making $40,000 a year who are debt free and have their retirement care of.  The point is simple: if you are broke and in debt at $8 an hour, you will be broke and in debt at $800 dollars an hour.  It has absolutely nothing to do with income.  It has everything to do with behavior. 

There’s a false premise that people assume that comes with a change in income.  They assume that when the income changes, behavior will change.  This is false.  Adding more money to the equation just makes the behaviors larger and stupider.  Instead of a credit card, they get a bass boat or a vacation home.  Increasing income does not automatically change behavior.

While I’m  thinking about it, I’ve gone back to Java development for the purpose of making Android apps.  I’ve always said that one shouldn’t start until you have something to execute on.  Just trying to learn with no end result in mind is very difficult.  It’s different if you have a goal and a purpose.  Now, I have a goal and a purpose in mind.  I have an app that I want to make, and I think it’s just different enough to create a market.  It’s really simple and the idea is either stupid or brilliant.  Like I said, it’s just different enough to be unique, but not so unique as to be hard to sell.