Mickblog

10 million dollars is enough so that you would likely never have to work again, even if you spent extravagantly (by most standards). You could leave that to sit in a bank account and make six figures on the “abysmal” interest.

So you wouldn’t have to work anymore. You would have to find something else to do with your life.

What would you do?

Mick.

I needed a function to do this to help me do my budget. It was PITA to write so I’m sharing it in case other people find it useful.

Here are versions in perl, python and OpenOffice/MS Office macros. There are also functions to do the reverse, and some extra cruft, but it’s still there.

(I started with the perl version because I didn’t want to be distracted by an unfamiliar language, wrote the office version because I wanted it to work in my spreadsheet, and wrote the python version beause I thought openoffice supported python macros and I wanted to use a real language)

Basically the way it works is do approach the taxed vs untaxed income graph as a series of straight intervals, and finds the one that is intercepted by the taxed-income line in question. The tricky part was figuring out the numbers for each line, given a list of the tax brackets and medicare levy thresholds (well, threshold).

The result is actually ambiguous for a small region around the $50k (taxable) mark, because when your taxable income hits $50k and you get the medicare surcharge, it’s an instant $500 jump in tax. The function returns the lowest taxable income for the taxed income passed in these cases.

The tables in the functions are for the 2006/2007 tax year, and have the medicare brackets set assuming you do have to pay the surcharge (ie don’t have health insurance).

Anyway, hope someone out there finds it useful.

Hell, I’ll take a shot at it.

I’m looking for someone that needs a linux driver for their device. For the right job, I can do the work for payment of a flat amount, agreed upon beforehand and paid upon completion, or at least almost entirely upon completion. I can agree to a timeframe for completion, and support the work for 12 months or so after completion.

If thiis sounds interesting to you, give me a yell. (I can be contacted by phone on 0418 438374). Or feel free to refer me to someone who you think might be interested

I’m taking this approach because I would like to get into this kind of work, and the only way to do it as a job is to work for peanuts. A device driver is a well “contained” project (little room for scope creep etc) and the effort involved can be estimated pretty accurately.

Mick.

You know what sucks about blogs? You can’t just say whatever you want because you’ll get sued or something. So I have to be careful what I say here.

There was a company general meeting today, at which the decision to effectively let this other company buy our shell was voted on. I didn’t atttend, mostly because I thought I would effectively have no voting power - the largest shareholder has (had) about 35%, and nobody else wanted to vote against him.

This is a BIG deal we’re talking about here - the “other company” owns technology which looks like it is going to make it possible to get oil out of oil shale. There is allegedly enough oil in shale deposits to keep the world running on fossil fuels for another few centuries. And this company could get royalties off anyone that they license this technology to.

Turns out the biggest shareholder didn’t vote - he’s apparently too busy with things bigger even than this. If I had attented the meeting I would have had full voting power.

Damn I’m sorry I missed that.

I would likely have abstained anyway. I could have voted to keep the business going with just utbox for a bit longer, but then I would be in the same position I am in now (all the responsibility and none of the power), and I wouldn’t have made many friends. I could have blown the other company’s plans out of the water (the will likely play a big part in accelerating the greenhouse effect), but they would likely have just found another way to achieve their aims.

But at least I could have held that decision in my hands for a while, and maybe given certain interested parties a fright while I callously tossed it about in the air while I decided what to do with it.

So now I have essentially no financial stake in the business I’m working in. The way things seem to be headnig, the future for utbox is not one I am going to want to be a part of, so I’ll be handing the job of running it over to its owners, whoever they may be at the time. Don’t panic if you’re a customer - it’s not going to be wound up, I’m sure of that much. Regardless, I’m back to square one, in a sense. But, I have more interesting plans for my next big adventure. Stay tuned.

As of yesterday I now own two Nintendo DS’s, one standard and one of the new
DS Lites.

It’s been out here for, what, 3 days now? I got it because I will anyway, and also because I have a few multi-player DS games which I’d like to try.

Funnily enough it seems to have been released in Australia before the US or Europe. Weird. Here’s a short review for those that care.

It’s not a huge improvement on the size of the original, but it looks nice. GBA cartridges jut out a bit, compared to the original where they fit entirely into the unit. There was no thumbstrap thingy in the box, but it had the hook for one so you can grab one from an original DS or whatever and use that. The sound from the speakers is a little more tinny. The screens have different ideal viewing angles so they can sometimes look a bit washed out compared to the original, depending on how you use it. On the plus side the screen brightness can be increased from the startup menu to something like 4 times that of the original. The start and select buttons feel a bit mushy and hard to press. The battery is the same, but (once again) the charger has its own special plug specially for the DS Lite (different even from the GB micro).

I sure have enough to complain about don’t I? :) All in all it’s fine, but don’t get one unless (1) size and weight is a big deal to you, (2) looks are a big deal to you, or (3) you are a consumer whore like me, and must have every console Nintendo ever produce.

In other news, My internet connection is shaped, so sorry to those who are finding it unresponsive. I’m working on getting it fixed (by replacing the ISP) but apparently it’s going to be a bit of a ride - I am with iiNet and although I could churn to them ~3 years ago, they have sinced moved me over to their own DSLAM and I can’t churn back out. So I have to apply for a new connection as usual.

Lastly, I am considering making posts that attempt to give quick overviews of what I have learned about various aspects of starting/running/growing a business. To help me decide, if you are interested in reading this sort of thing, or especially uninterested, post a comment. I may, at least, post to my blog but withhold it from planet SLUG.

As a result of past events and my abhorrence to working for the man, it looks like I am turning into a businessman. An Entrepreneur. A mover ‘n’ shaker. A PHB!

That last one is what would likely pop into the heads of most people that are likely to be reading this. That, or something less polite :)

Whether or not I become a successful businessman remains to be seen. This is one of the reasons I’m writing this and future entries on my journey into this world. I want to take the opportunity to treat it like a kind of experiment. My story will act as inspiration, or as a warning, to those who are considering a similar leap.

Also I will get to act as a kind of ambassador, to give all the self-confessed anti-corporate-machine geeks reading this the view of one who has experienced it all from the other side. The same may go for the other way around, in time.

Until relatively recently (2-3 years ago) I used to be all anti-commercial and so on, but a few realisations I have made over the past couple of years have changed that.

First, after running what I consider to be a real business for a couple of years now, I have realised that a business can be a process of creation, rather than one of control or theft or whatever it is most people think of it as. I’ll talk about that more in a later post. For now, the business I run provides a service that enables any business to save a significant amount of money, time and hassle. This is a positive thing I’m doing. I’m not saving the world or anything, but I’m doing something.

Second, I have become confortable with the idea of being, uh, “financially abundant”. Oh fuck it, rich.

There seems to be a pretty strong belief, among the working class at least, that having money is only for nasty evil people. Or they would like to have money but this belief still stirs in the back of their mind and it holds them back. I used to think like this myself, until I made the first realisation I just mentioned, and also because hey, there are an awful lot of people with lots of money out there that are less deserving of it than me. This really hit me when I was one day properly confronted with the concept of having the kind of money that I has previously assumed only came into the hands of the Elite. My first reaction to the idea was essentially one of fear - it’s not me, I’d become the thing I hate, I wouldn’t know what to do with it etc. But I pondered for a while about what I could do with a serious amount of money, and ideas started to come to me like, I could help bring my family closer together (a significant portion of it is in the US at the moment). I could give a friend food and a place to stay for as long as he/she needs. I could make really significant contributions to charities. I could start a charity! or a linux distribution! and so on. All these ideas pretty much blew away any inhibitions I had for letting money come my way.

I have already passed the hurdle of thinking I can’t start a business. I essentially already have - there is little left of the business I’m running now that is not my own work. It’s getting regular income, and growing steadily. A similar realistion to the evil-rich-guy belief came to me too - there are a lot of idiot managers and such out there, that somehow manage to hold $200k jobs. What can they do that I can’t? Being a businessman is not a birthright, not in the free world. There are courses you can take or, hell, you can just borrow books from the local library. Shit, there are a whole bunch of people at the top - I mean the very top - that didn’t even go to uni.

So as I go along I am going to write about my observations and insights into how the business world works, both in principle and in reality.