Back!

Not that anyone noticed, but I had been gone a few days to good old Las Vegas. I have returned now, so you may all relaxed. Time to continue the endless rush to get work done.

I've read that if you announce a goal to a friend or family member and keep them updated regularly as to your progress, you are more likely to achieve your goal. Only a few of you are friends or family, but I will announce that I am going to somehow find the time to exercise regularly. The most difficult part of this ordeal? Sleeping early! 3am is no longer an acceptable bedtime (alert the presses).

That's all.... ok stop reading.

 

I'm serious there isn't anything else.

 

GO!

Happy Birthday Araks!!!

My beautiful, wonderful, understanding lady, Araks Khachatryan has turned 21!!! Happy Birthday honey! I love you SOOOOOOO much!!!

When I Was Your Age...

Even at the unripe age of 21, it is amazing to look back and see how things have changed. Our generation is definitely the only one who can truly attest to the changes that have happened so quickly. For example, when we were younger (keep in mind this is less than a decade ago!) :

1. We didn't have cell phones. That's right, there was such a time. Beepers were the hot item. You knew who wanted to talk to you, now you just had to find a phone! Good times! Now anyone over the age of 7 caught without a cell phone is publicly humiliated.
   
   
2. We sometimes wrote essays, BY HAND! No spell check, no font change, no double spacing!
   
   
3. In order to do a report, we had to go to a library. Then we had to go and make love to the dewey decimal system.  It's a stupid system damnit and it doesn't even deserve to be capitalized here! There was no Wikipeda or Google with their tantalizingly easy search.
   
   
4. There was no Google! Holy shit, there WAS a time when people didn't use Google. You just... browsed the Internet. Oh and Yahoo! was indexed by real life humans.
   
   
5. No spam! No daily struggling with enlarging your penis, refinancing your home, losing weight, or Nigerian government honchos offering you money to help them transfer funds. It was a virgin Internet. That didn't last very long (slut!)
   
   
6. Full music videos on MTV. Araks reminded me of this one: We used to be privileged to seeing the entire music video during the stupid countdown shows. Now they just mention it. Use your imagination!
   
   
7. No text messaging. Oh yeah, you heard me! You wanted to tell someone something? You had to deal with the entire "Hey, how are you?" bullshit phone conversation.
   
   
8. No Paris Hilton in the media. Oh what a beautiful world it was. But that also meant no pink Sidekick, and who doesn't love that?
   
   
9. Our TVs were more thick than they were wide. A large TV meant half your living room was the TV tube.
   
   
10. No AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN. Think about all the people you chat with online every day. None of that was around. You had to call your friends one by one, ON A LAND LINE!
    
    
11. No MySpace. Unlike now where it is literally impossible not to be on MySpace or know someone who is on MySpace, there was a time when reading comments and being subjected to horrifically designed pages was of no concern.
    
    
12. Laptops. Simple concept, yet there was a time when we weren't able to carry around our digital life under our arms. You were lucky if you had a typewriter.
    
    
13. Here is something we DID have: Oregon Trail. Oh the amazing high-end graphics game that emerged you into a 2D Wild West adventure. Your heart starts beating out of your chest as the words "Your friend Bob just got bitten by a snake" scroll across the screen. Will Bob make it? You already know the answer to that...
    
    
14. DVDs. Flat round discs that can store gigs of data? Who needed that when we had rectangular plastic casings holding tape. Sure the video quality was shit and you would sometimes get tangled in the tape, but you didn't have to sit there and endure the guilt-inducing FBI warning.
    
    
15. TiVo. Back in the good old days, if you weren't there when the show was on, tough luck! Ask a friend (but you have to make sure he is home to pick up the gigantic land line phone)
    
    
16. Napster, BitTorrents, Aries, etc etc etc. We couldn't just watch any movie, listen to any song, and download any program at our discretion. First of all, we didn't even have the computers. And even after we had them, we had 56Kb. It would take hours to download a single song.
    
    
17. Starbucks. I can't believe we were able to live for so long in the dark ages. Thankfully, Starbucks arrived just in the nick of time to provide overpriced espresso for the whole world to enjoy... every single block... in every single city.
    
    
18. Credit cards. Sure they were around, but it's not like you could walk into any store and use it. Cash was king, and checks were there for the larger purchases. Now everyone, their mother, and their neighbor's dog has a Platinum Visa.
    
    
19. Video games. With Tetris being the apex of video game technology, playing football outside with your friends wasn't such a bad idea.
    
    
20. Blogs! In the heyday, you read the newspaper, watched the news on TV, and complained to the person sitting nearest to you. Now you can complaint to the whole world! Want to talk about your lunch? Write a blog entry! Want to talk about your opinion on the Middle East crisis? Just press "Publish." Want to write about how great things used to be and make a list of 20 top things that come to your mind at 2:30am? Well.. we saw how easy THAT was!

Screw Faxing!

Today I decided to cancel my fax line, so I called up AT&T and had them cancel the line. Funny side note: When the call went through, he stated "Thank you for calling AT&T, my name is Mike and I'd like to tell you about our high speed DSL service." Then it got quiet. I said "ok" and still nothing. After a few more awkward seconds of silence, he said "uhm, can I help you?" I was too confused to ask why I wasn't being told about their DSL.

Anyways, fax is stupid. First of all, some stupid phone technician had changed the wiring of my fax line and connected my line to another phone number. So as I was paying the $40 a month for the (818) 240-4014 number, I wasn't even able to receive any faxes. Not that there were any. In the 7 months or so of having a fax line, I have used it exactly 2 times, both of which involved sending.

Now I'm just going to connect the fax machine to my phone line and fax out whenever I want. If, for some insanely odd reason, someone does need to fax me, I'll just wait for it and accept the ring.

Stay tuned for my next adventure: hiring a designer / programmer!

Hang In There!

That phrase sure does make sense now. The reason I have been AWOL for so long is because I had a sudden burst of projects. For a couple of months, things were looking pretty dim. All of a sudden, project after project just fell on my lap. Now I'm sitting here, 9pm on a Saturday night, overwhelmed by how much there is to do.

This is a good thing, obviously. I prefer worrying about how to get all the work done than worrying about how to make ends meet. However, I think I am at my limit. I definitely need help with all these projects. Finding a good programmer at a decent rate whom I can work with is NOT going to be easy.

I did learn a lot from my previous mistake of hiring some random guy:

1. Do NOT give them the broad concept and tell them to make their own decision about the minor details. What they do might work, but more than likely it isn't going to be what you want. Instead, take the time to thoroughly plan what they need to do, with multiple checkpoints throughout the day to see if things are going as planned. It is much easier to make minor adjustments to steer a ship in the right direction than it is to have to stop and make a complete 180.
   
   
2. You get what you pay for. If you aren't willing to pay higher per hour, you are going to get a lower caliber employee. On paper this might be ok, but someone getting paid $30 / hour can probably do in one hour what a person getting paid $10 / hour can do in 5 hours. Doesn't seem like such a good deal anymore, does it?
   
   
3. Test them. You can't just believe everything they say. We all exaggerate, and nothing requires more exaggerating than a job interview. Give them a small project to do (paid, of course) and see how they are with estimating times, working habits, and quality.
   
   
4. If they make a mistake, first look at your management actions to see if there was anything you could have done differently (such as being more specific with what you expected). It's up to you to bring out the best in them. While some people are just not cut out for the job, there are plenty of people out there who are capable of a lot more than they are doing. Management gets too arrogant, which is a very slippery slope.
   

I'm sure there is a lot more, but right now my brain is overheating. Know any good PHP/C# programmers? :-)