It's funny the things that come up when somebody asks you to describe your life in forty five minutes. If you're particularly lucky, it might take three or four forty five minute sessions to describe just what has happened to you since you instilled your mother with post partum depression.
Again, if you're lucky, you probably don't dredge up some deep seated hatred that's been influencing your life for thirty years. Well, okay, twenty. It's frankly rather charming that drugs can both mask that hatred, and prevent the further seeds from growing. Or so it seems, while the drugs last. Well, that and nobody asks you about said hatred or what makes you do 120 (thats mph, you euros) with the traction control off around turns in morning traffic.
The world is peachy.
The STI, while delayed, should be arriving this month. The wife, happily, has abandoned her Shures for my last pair of Etymotics. I've since moved on. The happy result of this is that she has to bite back vitriole and ridicule when a customer comes to her and tells her that the Shures or the Ety's "aren't bassy enough." Well, mister, fuck your bass. What headphones, and indeed speakers, are about, is accurate reproduction of what the musician cut onto the wax. And if your interpretation of their music is more bass, well, go and be a fucking musician yourself. Get a pair of Ety's and you know what sound is really supposed to sound like. If you want bass, Bran Van 3000 has some tracks that will utterly tax your cans -- or car stereo, etc.
Obligatory biographical technological open sourcical related stuffness...
So picture a trajectory:
Helpdesk (or junior sysad)
Sysad
Senior Sysad
Sysad that moves to the business side, directing sysad operations
Business sysad moves to corporate side, helping corporate understand how business interacts with sysad side.
Sysad then moves to CTO/CDO/CIO (CDO is a Yahooism, Chief Data Officer) type position.
By the by, the above could probably s/sysad/programmer/ if need be. So life places me at the 4-5 junction right now. Meaning I still write code, and I am continually surprised at just how facile a process it is. I need a build process for a piece of software (okay, so throw that "don't be a djb" stone at me now, I don't mind), and I write one. But you know, I'm tired of scraping my knuckles putting machines in racks. And I find that sysads are generally pretty boring (if nominally competent) people.
To get more out of your career, you gotta ascend that ladder. There are people who are happy with 2-3, but for sanity's sake, can you do that for a career? What if you live to be 100? What if you live to be 170? And you plan to retire at 65, after having earned $90,000 for twenty years (okay, this is a little US centric). Maybe you made it to step 4, and it's a little closer to $100-110k.
Write a perl script with me. Take a number. Let's say you save $12,000 a year. That's a lot of money, really, a thousand dollars a month. More than most people set aside. How long before that becomes a million? Let's look at this:
my $i = 12000;
my $p = 0;
my $y = 1;
my $ir = 1.055; # interest rate
while ($p <= 1000000) {
$p += $i;
$p *= $ir;
$p += $i;
$y++;
}
print "You saved $y years to make a million bucks. $/"
In 23 years, of saving a thousand dollars a month, assuming a steady 5.5% (i.e., no "tits up" markets between now and then, etc), you'd have a million bucks. How long would that last you? Fidelity told me recently that it would cost $640,000 in health care costs for me and my wife if we retire at 62 and plan to die (how morbid!) at 100. That leaves us about a thousand a year. Hmmmm. Scientific American and various other journals keep harping (even USN&WR a couple weeks ago as near as said we'd cured cancer starting with HPV) and that "this generation" (you and me, folks) would be living longer. A lot longer.) The Extropians think we'll live forever, if we plan things just right between now and "then". The Methuselah Project seems to also hint at a vastly longer lifespan.
And so we change $i from something like 12,000 to 40,000, and we take the steps from our above list, because otherwise, our craft kills us.
Sell out or die (or live forever) poor.
