rianjs.net

As I mentioned in my last post, there's a lot going on right now, and for the first time in quite a while, everything that's happening is positive. I thought I would share my short term plans with the small number of readers I have more for accountability purposes than to say "Look at me!"

I firmly believe that getting others involved in your success is just as essential a part of the process as anything else. It's an extra measure of external accountability.

Finishing school

My first goal is to finish school. I've been struggling with motivation problems as it pertains to schoolwork, but I've recently been jazzed because I found out a piece of good news that I didn't anticipate: rather than graduating in December of 2009, I can graduate in May instead.

I can't even tell you how exciting this is. As someone who has struggled to finish anything, I can truthfully say that this will be a huge weight off my shoulders. I've never finished anything in my life. I'm just not one of those people that can put there shoulders down, dig in, and finish something. I have to believe in what I'm doing to get anywhere, otherwise I give up.

Things must have their own intrinsic merit. Merit cannot be imposed by an external force, otherwise I will not do it.

Starting my own business

I mentioned in my last post that David and I have something going, and that the business plan is largely written. While I don't think it was technically necessary to write the plan, I think it's been a worthwhile exercise, because it allows you to get a better handle on what you want to do; refine your income sources; learn about your competitors in a structured fashion; and just generally get a better handle on where you stand.

Getting a small amount of funding will be the next big challenge, but frankly I'm not really worried about that. It's a solid idea, the plan stands on its own, and I've done the hard part of asking for money to fund a business idea before. It was uncomfortable, but this time I'm actually looking forward to it because I believe in this from my toes right up to my (thinning) hair roots.

Wrapping up OnThePharm

I've been thinking about how to wrap up OnThePharm for a little while now, and I've hit on a good way to close it out. I won't share it here, but it's a topic close to professional students' hearts of all stripes and colors. I hope to get the two to three posts written in the next month.

Unlike some med bloggers, I won't be deleting the blog or taking it down or selling it. (Though I could probably sell it for $10K or so.) While I don't ever envision myself moving back to the medical field in any front-line capacity, I do still have a love for the field, and I would like to eventually be in a position to use the property to build a nice pharmacy publication. I'd like to hire a couple of pharmacy and/or medical students to write current news articles and opinion pieces for me on a pay-per-post basis. Get a nice theme, get a couple of premium advertisers and go to town. More as a hobby than to actually make a significant profit from it.

That will likely be 2-3 years from now, though.

Keeping my head above water

I haven't had a panic or anxiety attack since February. Before that it had been since ~November. I want to keep that going, and I think I'll be able to. My life hasn't felt this in line with my inner desires since I was back in high school, ready to charge off to university to conquer the world.

I'm able to exercise — I bought a nice road bike! — and I'm loving it. I just wish the roads around my house were less trafficked, and had fewer potholes. As it is, I have to keep my bike at my dad's house, because riding it is too painful (literally) to do so around here.

Over the last month, I've unconsciously begun moving forward again in a personal development sense of the word. I've started several new things, and dropped several others during that time. I've begun studying economics formally, and while I've struggled with motivation at times, I'm moving forward. David and I have something interesting in the early startup stages that will quite likely be incredibly profitable, but more importantly, it's relevant to anyone with a driver's license. While it's not interesting from a low-level, implementation point of view, it is interesting in that it does solve a big, higher-level problem.

So while the business plan for that is ~60% written, I'm juggling some other things as well. One of them being elimination. You see, one of the quickest ways to make progress when you're trying to work on yourself is to simply eliminate that which adds no value to your life. Here are some of the things I've done over the last two years…

Cut down time spent on discussion forums

As of this writing, I have 22,409 posts on the Ars Technica discussion forums. I'm sorry to say that most of that time has been wasted. Yes, I've made several friends, and many acquaintances during the time spent there, but there's been an inordinate amount of time and mental and emotional energy expended there, with little to show for it.

When I backslide and start posting more, I'm quickly reminded that I could better spend my time doing other things when discussions quickly devolve into dog-piling and other similar kind of uselessness.

Pruned my RSS subscriptions

Unlike many who enjoy technology, I don't find that having tons of RSS feeds essential or even particularly interesting. Lately, I've found it counterproductive, as seeing whatever new thing is coming tends to lend itself to a consumption mindset — so I've been religiously pruning subscriptions that don't add value to my life in any meaningful way. Even some of the blogs that I've followed for years. Indeed, this is a natural extension to cutting down on the amount of time spent on discussion forums.

I find that the less time I spend taking in information, the more time I actually spend doing things that are worthwhile. Things like biking, working on our business, and talking and spending time with friends or family.

I'm using RSS for three things now: to keep up with those I care about, to take in blogs that add value to my life — I've been loving Success Soul lately — and to take in a very limited amount of information in two narrow channels: technology and medicine. I have literally three feeds for news, and of the content they push, I read maybe 5% of what's published. I hit that "Mark all as read" button religiously.

Decreased my media consumption

I watch far less television than I did even two months ago. I actively avoid watching sports, because it's such an amazing sinkhole for time. It's currently baseball season, and someone in my family watches every single game. At six games a week at 3.5 hours per game, that's about 21 hours per week spent in front of the tube. Almost a full day.

What a complete and utter waste of time.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy sports. Particularly playoffs. I would even like to own my own professional sports franchise at some point down the road — most likely basketball — but then passive consumption becomes smart business.

Decreased my alcohol consumption

I've never been a big drinker, per se. Maybe once a month I'd have a couple of drinks. Now it's more like once every two or three months. I find that as I spend time doing things that are worthwhile, my desire for alcohol has decreased to levels even lower than they were before.

Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses, and I believe that he was right. But I also believe that alcohol is, too. (And if you want to get technical about it, alcohol uses the same reward pathways that opiates use, which is why opioid antagonists show quite a bit of efficacy in alcohol dependence. )

Along with alcohol, I'll throw in cigars. I haven't smoked a cigar since my birthday, and I haven't really wanted one.

It should be noted that both cigars and alcohol are expensive hobbies relative to the satisfaction one derives from them. Worthwhile activities don't leave you with a foul taste in your mouth or a hangover when you're finished.

Pruned some friends

The greatest change that I have made in terms of lasting impact has been on friends. It's hard to cut loose the dead weight in one's life, because it's uncomfortable. Giving up booze and cigars is easy because they don't talk back. They don't call on the phone.

But it can be done, and I would urge those that are in unhealthy relationships — both romantic and otherwise — to reconsider. Life can be so much more rewarding without dead weight dragging you down.

–

You'll notice that a common theme here has been changing my mindset from that of consumption to that of abundance. I find that the less passive consumption I partake in, the happier and more buoyant as a person I become.

I have a couple of more personal development posts in the works, but not many, and they're less in the way of pontification, and more in the way of explanation. I don't find writing about personal development rewarding so I tend not to do it, and others are far better at it than I. What IS interesting are the results that come about as a result of making constant effort to better yourself.

While going through my RSS reader this morning, I came across one of JD's daily links posts, and one of them was to A History of Debt in America. It's quite a long article, but well worth reading. Unfortunately for people like me, reading large quantities of text on a screen gets to be painful after a few minutes.

I whipped up a quick PDF of all of the pages, and Tom, the author of the article, has graciously allowed me to post it here.

It's 21 pages long, and will take you a little while to read it, but it's worth the time.

PDF link.

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy my post on how paying off debt is like folding laundry — a behavioral, as opposed to mathematical approach to paying off debt.

I've been wanting to learn MySQL and PHP for a little while now, because I think it'll be useful in the coming months, so I decided that I should probably install Linux, rather than installing the two on Windows. (There's something about that that just feels wrong.) I have something I'm itching to build, and it's time to start picking up some new skills again. I've had a spare 500GB drive lying around for a couple of months, so I popped it in on July 4, downloaded Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, and installed the OS almost as a spur-of-the-moment thing.

I was amazed at how quickly and painlessly the OS installed. Back in 2001-2002, the last time I made a serious go of running Linux (Debian), it took almost 18 hours to get the OS installed and configured to the point where I could use X. It took a lot of help from the guys in #linux, too. I never would have been able to do it without their help.

But this time it was as easy as putting the CD in, booting from the optical drive, entering my desired username, password, and localization settings, and that was it. About 45 minutes later, I booted into Gnome, and had working sound and networking, right out of the box. I ran the GUI Update Manager, which found a proprietary display driver for my GeForce 8800 GT — in addition to other normal system updates — and a single restart later, I had graphics acceleration and an up-to-date OS installation.

Total time to working install: ~60 minutes, including software updates. It was faster and easier than installing XP, Vista, or Mac OS X Leopard, and by a significant margin. In terms of ease of installation, I would rank them in this order:

1. Ubuntu 8.04
2. Windows Vista
3. Mac OS X
4. Windows XP

I also installed the Redhat Liberation Fonts following the instructions here, and pretty soon, I had non-crappy looking fonts. (You'll have to change your system fonts in both Firefox and Ubuntu itself to use them before you'll notice a real difference.) While they're still not as nice as Windows or OS X, they're quite a bit better than what you get OOTB with Ubuntu. And I'm not even sure that they're *bad* per se. I think they're just different than what I'm used to.

That ended my adventures in Linux for a few days until tonight. I needed to get a significant amount of schoolwork done which unfortunately requires Internet Explorer. I'm pretty well caught up there, so I've been booted back into Linux for the past two hours or so. In that time, I've gotten my laser printer working using the generic PCL6 drivers with Foomatic/pxlmono. Print quality is great, and I can even configure the printer to print as "draft" quality without messing around. I couldn't even do that with OS X.

My only complaint so far as that when the machine is woken from sleep or hibernate, there is no sound. Apparently this is a common problem with a couple of possible solutions, but I have not felt any inclination to try any of them yet. Maybe in another couple of days or so.

Hopefully I will be booted into Linux for another couple of days before having to go back to Windows for any reason. Alas, I am unable to ditch Windows entirely as I do some pretty intricate page layouts and PDF conversions from within Word, but hopefully I can minimize the amount of time I spend there.

To figure out for the future, should time and attention span allow:

• iTunes replacement that can import old iTunes metadata
• Figure out these page layouts and PDF conversion in OpenOffice, if possible
• Get my Blu-ray player working, which should be possible with mplayer and some other tools

My main focus right now, though, is building my project, which has some very serious monetization possibilities. Now if only I can get someone else to answer his phone.

Today was one of those days where you think to yourself, "Wow, if I had a day like that every day of the week, who knows where I'd be."

Very curious — I often have productive days where you get a bunch of stuff done. Do X, take care of Y. Normal stuff that does nothing for you except keep life running smoothly. Those days are merely mediocre. Average. Not anything special. Today wasn't like that. I actually finished a final exam in a class that I will be very sad to see go. I absolutely loved psychopharmacology, and I really wish there was a Psychopharm II or a Neurobiology I. I also wish there was a computational pharmacology or some other kind of class that I could dive straight into. But I know that even if there were, I'd be lost.

And that's something I want to change.

Days like today make me wonder where I'm going with my life. I'm sort of headed back in the direction of more technical and "science-y" type stuff. Really getting into the nitty gritty details of the brain thanks to school, and on the side, doing quite a lot of IT stuff. Not the rewarding kind of computer stuff — the creative kind — but rather the Do X, take care of Y kind of thing. Nonetheless, it has sparked some old desires of mine.

A very close friend of mine is moving home in the next five weeks, and I can honestly tell you that I've never been so excited for something in my life. It's like Christmas that's been years in coming. Someone close to me made an observation that was completely out of the blue — "I think you two were meant to go into business together and do something great. But I think he needs to work in the private sector for a while and you need to be academic for a while."

Probably so.

For no reason at all today, I decided to try to fix my old gallery software, as I had several hundred photos uploaded, and I wanted to be able to view them again. It's been broken for probably a year or so, and I wanted to back and look at some of the captions I had put on them. (I have all the photos offline, just not without the descriptions.)

Memories fade, but images do not.

Took me about an hour and a half, but I successfully got:

1. Gallery working again,
2. Upgraded to the latest version of Gallery 1 so that I could
3. Run the necessary scripts to import to Gallery 2 and
4. Import my old Gallery 1 galleries into Gallery 2

So my image galleries are now consolidated at the G2 URL, and this includes my trips to Europe and Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

http://rianjs.net/fotos/

Along similar lines, I've been thinking about what to do with this site, because I haven't been writing here very much. I like owning my name, and at some point, I will probably open some type of medical practice, and I'd really like to start doing some professional blogging under my real name instead of doing it anonymously like I have been lately. (That'll take quite a shift as there is some freedom in anonymity which allows me to post stuff I otherwise might not be able to — though perhaps less than one may be inclined to think.)

But at the same time, there's quite a lot of content here, and not all of it would I want potential clients and business partners to see, so I've gone back and pruned out probably 75-100 blog entries that are either nothing but fluff, or so contrary to the person I am today as to be "not me" anymore. Or just so negative I'm embarrassed to have written them.

At some point in the near future, I am probably going to change the look of the site as well.

…even when you're actually not.

With working 6 days a week, I find myself in a position with more money than I need to get by. Theoretically, anyway. Since I just barely started working enough hours, that leaves me with precisely zero financial flexibility in these first couple of weeks. Pretty much every paycheck goes to pay a bill that is due in the next 10 days, and while I'm not behind, it IS kind of annoying. Working all these hours and you look at your account balance, and it's hovering uncomfortably close to "E".

I suspect the week after next will be the time when I finally get a nice buffer in there again. Having made my car payment 4 days before it was due, and then paying rent right after that… well that means I'll have to make another car payment within two weeks. I like to pay my bills as soon as I'm able. Plus it's getting towards the middle of the month, which means that my car insurance will be auto-debited in two weeks. Urgh, annoying.

I'll be out of credit card debt by the end of next month, which is a relief, but it still feels like I have a long way to go before I can breathe easier. I've had to contract my lifestyle in the last six weeks because of not having any leeway, which was a bit of a challenge at first. Working six days a week means I basically just want to sit at home on the seventh, which is good for the wallet.

Tl;DR: Basically I'm cramming two months worth of bills into ~3 weeks, and it's frustrating because you don't get to see the fruits of your increased labor. I'm looking forward to being out of this position. The plus side is that I've been saving regularly throughout this time, which means that my savings account balance is growing rather than shrinking.

Money, debt, savings

I sell most of my old textbooks on Amazon, especially if I think I'm not going to use them again. I listed two organic chemistry books last night. Within 45 minutes of listing the textbook, it was sold.

I think I paid ~$160 for the book, and it was sold for $140 used. Talk about recouping costs on used books!

The secret is to sell it as soon as the class is over lest another edition take its place and undercut its resale value…

The other secret(s) are to 1) not abuse your books and 2) sell it at a reasonable price that's on the lower side, but not the lowest price you see. People automatically shy away from the absolute lowest price because they think they're going to be getting an inferior product. Use that to your advantage. Price it on the low side, but don't make it the lowest price.

And I'm doing math listening to the soundtrack to A Beautiful Mind. How oddly appropriate.

I've got tutoring at 10am…

math, a beautiful mind