So a bunch of things happened: we did NOT get that car in order to avoid the payment and/or depleting our cash reserves, met a bunch of new friends through work, moved up a little in the career, went back to Michigan for a visit, just to name a few. I’ll try to post more regularly since I kind of have more time now.

As you might know, I am from Eastern Europe, which means I was raised in a framework of poor dental hygiene. Don’t get me wrong, my parents made sure that brushing my teeth every night became a habit, but never really knew anything about gum maintenance, hygienic cleaning, or flossing. Couple that with bad dental genes, and you get me, a guy with a good grille, but shitty molars.

A couple of years ago, I came around and developed a dental plan involving fillings, crowns, and implants, but it was kind of too late. A bunch of teeth had to come out courtesy of crazy Ukrainian/Polish/Hungarian dentists who LOVED to root-canal teeth, leave tools in them, fill them with amalgam, and NOT “crown” them. So a few teeth came out, and a few got filled with REALLY deep fillings.

Speaking of those deep fillings … They tend to run a little too close to the pulp and the nerves, which means if you have a deep filling, it’s pretty much like having a ticking time bomb in your mouth. That’s right. A time bomb whose payload is PAIN.

Teeth constantly shift and travel. Apparently, during one of them shifts and travels, something detonated one of my little time bombs, and it EXPLODED. And by “exploded” I don’t mean “o-o-o, my tooth hurts“. I mean, “somebody put me out of my misery” kind of pain you see in the movies. I thought I was Mr. Orange, on the floor, dying; only instead of being shot in the stomach, I thought I head a headwound the diameter of a CD … not to mention the related pain in the shoulders, back, right leg, and right arm.

Four days of that, I shit you not. My dentist said he could not perform a root canal, and that I needed an endodontist due to the tooth’s complex anatomy. The only available endodontist could fit me in five days, regardless of my pleading for an earlier appointment. Extracting the tooth was out of the question — I had too many of my teeth extracted already. I requested some Hydrocodone, got some ice packs, sleeping pills, called into work, marked “Tuesday” with a thick red marker on the calendar, and barricaded myself in the house.

Dostoevsky was on to something. Suffering has its merits. At the very least, it makes you appreciate NOT BEING IN PAIN for 96 hours straight. It takes you on a weird trip, during which you realize with dread that your Mickey Mouse generic substitute for Vicodin wasn’t really designed for the kind of pain you’re experiencing. During the middle of the trip, you’re still trying to be creative and find ways to numb the pain a little — do some pushups, sleep while sitting up, rinse the mouth with salty water. However, towards the end of the trip, you understand that it’s just you and your pain, and no one can possibly help you at that particular time. Very liberating stuff, folks.

So I got everything taken care of — the tooth will be saved, nothing hurts any more. I got a kick out of the endodontist (a good-looking lady) doing a double take: “You did what? Do you know that you basically waited until your nerves … DIED?” Too bad you could not fit me in earlier, you crazy woman.

Of course, then I got the $1,150 bill, of which the insurance will cover a whopping $180. Makes you appreciate Michael Moore’s “Sicko“. Please go see it, I beg of you.

Since the Linkworth checks are still rolling in strong even though I haven’t posted in like a three months, I figured I’ll post … I’m starting to feel bad.

So, what have I been up to? Working non-stop. Exciting new projects requiring lots of learning, tinkering with data, building prototypes and models, and, unfortunately, dealing with people’s shit.

What they don’t tell you when they give you your own team is the fact that managing people is probably the most difficult thing you’ll ever have to do.

Seriously, when you’re a regular team member, you don’t realize that “long hours”, “difficult tasks”, “rigid deadlines” got NOTHING on trying to knock out a moderately-complicated project through other people. You’ll realize very quickly that working as an individual or a member of an established team is really a cakewalk because you don’t have to coordinate anything but your own efforts, your own time, and your own vision of the big picture.

Toss in a few people with their problems, a peer with whom you butt heads, and a couple of end-of-quarter data-mining projects, and you’ll realize that you are working off every penny they pay you in your newfound yuppie lifestyle. That’s right, working it off through long hours, take-home work, being on call, and growing a stress-ball in your stomach – a tight, heavy, restless ball of stress the size of your fist lodged permanently between your belly-button and chest.

Then you come to realize that it’s really supply and demand curves in action, a simple macroeconomics concept. There are lots more individual non-managers than managers, so it would make sense that managers managing individual non-managers would be paid more … enough to keep them in line and motivated.

After that, you discover that past certain point in your career, your technical skills don’t really matter any more, regardless of how good of a programmer/developer you are. Now you got people who are supposed to help you with that, and in return, you’re suppose to organize everything.

So if you’re an individual team member, enjoy it while it lasts because it’s like being a kid with no responsibilities. Eat your veggies (do your reports), go to bed at nine (meet your individual deadlines), and wipe your own ass (clean up your messes) – that’s all asked of you. If you’re thinking career, though, you’ll most certainly be wiping other people’s asses.

For awhile, I was hellbent on generating passive income through online affiliate marketing, websites, ads, online businesses, etc. It seemed easy to create a few satellite websites, apply for a few ad blocks, and voila! I would be building up by passive income stream ten bucks at a time. I mean, based on numerous examples, perseverance does pay off – income-wise, if you stick with it, it WILL replace your day job.

However, I soon realized the hyper-monotonous nature of such an approach. You ponder for days to pick a niche, create a site, add new content weekly … pretty soon you lose interest AND the income. Instead, I focused on picking up new skills and improving old ones: (OLD) php, .NET, T-SQL, and (NEW) AJAX, OLAP.

When I moved across country in August and posted a crappy thrown-together resume on Dice.com with keywords Excel, SQL, and data mining, I did not have high hopes. However, when a big-office recruiter called four hours later with a nice offer, all of a sudden I put things into perspective.

A good DA (data analyst) in this town (Austin, TX) can make $50-70k, depending on the size of the firm, experience, and, most importantly, negotiation skills. If you make $60k, that’s about $48k takehome, which is $4k a month and $1,000 a week. To generate that kind of income by blogging or affiliate marketing, you must be working a lot of blogging / AM hours. The most I could ever swing was $250-300 per month even though I was busting my ass for months.

The bottom line for me – invest in myself. Whether it’s books, classes, or correspondence courses, I noticed that a combination of technical skills and leadership skills can yield amazing results.

So Nev dropped $15k cash on a car. I haven’t discussed it with him yet, but I think it’s straight up crazy. Why?

I drive a 23-year old car worth $1,700 and it STILL gets me from A to B reliably and luxuriously (link).

Fifteen large in cash is too valuable of an asset to be dropped on something as disposable as a set of wheels. Sorry, man.

If you’re a city dweller, how far do you drive? I say you sit in traffic on Mopac for much longer than you’re actually driving.

So I’m thinking of getting a second vehicle for the wife. Of course, if it was up to me, she’d be driving a 300D …

… which she won’t because all girls care about is how comfortable the seats are. They don’t give a shit that a 617 “iron five” diesel engine is arguable the best diesel engine ever created in the history of engines period. They don’t care their husbands can repair practically everything on the car, paying only for parts. They want looks, comfort, and stupid little gimmicks like “chilled gloveboxes” (I’m looking at you, Dodge Caliber).

Long story short, I did my research. We’ll be getting a Pontiac Vibe.

Why?

• It’s a Toyota.
• It’s cheap.
• It’s roomy.

Oh damn. It’s also a car payment.

In the beginning, there was a weekly email to 4-7 people (and one guy in BCC field) with some sales figures – Johnson sold this many of Product X, Williams sold this many of Product Y, and Stefanopulo sold none and perhaps got canned.

Then, somebody decided it would be cool to not copy and paste those lines into an email all the time, so that’s how Monthly Sales.xls was born.

Then – a breakthrough! Each day of sales can be tracked on a separate worksheet!

Wow! We can now fit like an entire month into this file! When a month is over, we’ll just make a new workbook! And to be completely awesome, we’re gonna NOT follow a naming nomenclature and keep random crap in the folder!

This is a sample Sales Tracking System:

On one bright sunny day at the end of a fiscal quarter, management decides they want to know who sold what, for how much, and so some charting. Manual copy-paste hell ensues. People are working till AT LEAST Saturday, conglomerating hundreds of malformed Excel files into one big master Excel file.

The efforts are gargantuan as there are no templates of ay kind, and data in each sheet looks slightly different. There’s Johhny, sipping on his Coke, methodically copying and pasting values from cells in a horizontal row into a vertical column. He will waste his company countless hours of labor because neither his superior nor Johnny are aware that a simple Copy – Paste Special – Tranpose would automatically convert anything horizontal into a vertical range, and vice versa.

There’s Jennifer – while biting her lower lip, she’s trying to set up permissions for the folder so that other people can access the file, but the concepts of a “Network Share” escape her.

When the master file is done, it will look tweaky, but presentable. “Whew“, everyone will say, and nervously laugh.

Some time after this little fire drill, Stefanopulo will decide that he’s more less an expert in “data”, so he will do the unthinkable.

He will design an Access database.

On some slow Thursday morning, he will “create a new database“, and doom his teammates to corporate hell. By designing a crooked, completely unvalidated BLUE form connected to a query created on a table with lookups, he will trick the co-workers into using this abomination for a week or two.

After that, it will be too late.

As the word gets around that the Sales and Quality department has an “app”, more and more people start using it. The *.ldb file is now always next to the *.mdb file, and those two evil creations are silently waiting for their next prey.
The MS Jet Engine 4.0 is creaking, but working. As user number 40 gets into the database, it squeeks, and dies. By that time, there are at least 50 queries on top of queries, 30 tables linked together on MEMO fields, 20 forms and subforms, and 40 reports in blue italic font.

Stefanopulo is now on duty to “compact and repair” every Saturday morning. While he’s waiting for the backend to finish “repairing”, he quickly writes a subroutine and a query to “validate” the dates users enter. The sadistic AUDIT TABLE is born. It corrects all user entries where CLOSE dates are BEFORE the OPEN dates … on the backend.

As users enter more and more invalid dates, the audit system grows more complex, though reports are still shady because Stefanopulo doesn’t know the culprits of a LEFT JOIN.

Finally, the Access app grows so large that users (now completely hooked) start complaining DAILY. A PROGRAMMER is commissioned. He will fix EVERYTHING! He will move everything to a SEQUEL SERVER! O-O-O-O-O-O!

Four months later…

The programmer is still tweaking the Access app. The data structure is now so inefficient and crazy, that he buidls another app just to migrate the data from the old app to the new backend … but he missed a few things, and the tool does not port properly.

Five months later…

A buggy See Sharp app is born. It pukes up the yellow stack every time you click a button.

But it’s fast …. er. That’s all that matters.