Archive for February, 2007For the past 3 weeks, Melissa and I have been on the hunt for a home. We’ve been throwing enough money into our apartment complex, and since they decided to be punks and tell us that we can’t get credited for the “Internet Credit” that they had been letting us do for a year and a half, we’ve decided it’s finally time that we move towards ownership rather than renting. Not to mention, painting and home improvement projects are fun! But, Melissa and I didn’t realize how difficult this home search thing was going to be! We’ve spent countless numbers of hours sifting online at the various different homes that are up for sale, including having our realtor take us by at least 8 or 10 of them - only to find that most of them are not as impressive as we had hoped they would be. We ended up sending an offer to one home. They had started asking $129K for it, then they went down to $124,900. The home is old and in “okay” condition. From what we can tell, though, there are foundation issues with it. The owners seem to think it’s just “settling” - but diagonal cracks from a window tell me otherwise. We went ahead and shot an offer of $120,000 and having them pick up $5,000 in closing costs (because we won’t be able to close on a home if we don’t have the seller pay for the closing costs). They flat out refused the offer and wouldn’t even consider counter offering. So now Melissa and I are considering these new homes that have been built by Main Street homes on the south side of College Station (Wellborn, actually). They do all the financing themselves, so closing costs and “down payments” will be rolled into the cost of the mortgage, so we don’t pay a dime at the time of closing and moving into the home. The home we want is about $125,000, but with $11,000 in closing costs the final mortgage price will come out to being close to $136,000 - making our monthly payments roughly $1,360. This is doable for us if Melissa goes to work full-time, or if I get the job I’m hoping (but not betting on) getting with Customer Applications @ CIS. In any case, it’s about lunch time, but I felt like rambling about how difficult it is to do the home search thing. I’ve finally made some significant improvements to my website, especially when it comes to the Photos page. I’ve finally gotten around to using the photos that are already uploaded and just imported them into the Gallery system, so now (most) of them are all available. Just simply click the Photos link above (or back to your left) and check them out. Register an account and rate some of them! Lately many individuals have been asking me whether I’m depressed or down. I don’t know where they’ve been getting that impression, but from what I can tell, most people think I’m exhibiting these factors. I suppose maybe I am. Lemme explain what’s been going on in my life: 1) My business is failing. Sure, we got another client to “agree” to sign on with us recently, but there’s been no contracts signed as of yet and the workload for this website will be huge. Past that, the business doesn’t have any income, and Tom and I haven’t been able to pay ourselves this month or last month because we have no money in our corporate account. All bills for the company have been going on our credit card. This debt is racking up quick, and it is admittedly depressing me. The sheer amount of time and effort that I’ve put into this business, only to see it not pay off as well as I thought it was going to, has effectively made me feel really down. I guess the big thing that ended up pulling me down this far was the fact that one of the potential half a million (yes $500K) clients has not come through yet - and it’s already 1.5 months after when we were told the deal would have been signed and we’d be working on it. The next meeting for it is on February 28th - a hell of a long time from now. The business world moves too slowly, and it’s really aggravating me. 2) My job @ CIS sucks. My boss doesn’t do any work to help our project progress - she’s been doing other “administrative” things, which will effectively add more for us to do in the future. Job Security: No problem here - there’s more than enough work cut out for us (or should I say me)? The problem that I have with her doing the things she’s been doing is that we’re a two-person team. A reasonable expectation for this would be that she would have her boss handle the administrative tasks (such as dealing with big businesses and the issues with their contracts), dealing with other departments, etc. This would allow both of us to work on the project together. We’d get a hell of a lot more accomplished this way than the manner we are currently taking. Additionally, I’m only an IT Associate - literally the lowest of the low on the chain. I make shit wages, no where near what I should be paid in the field. In fact, all the work I’m doing should be earning me $45-55K a year, but I’m stuck at a measly $32K. The fact that I’m doing nearly 100% of the work to keep us on track (which a timeline really doesn’t exist in our group) really makes me want to tell my boss they should be paying me more. Additionally, I feel my efforts would be more worth my time if I were able to exercise the things I’m fricking trained for. I’ve been to 2 conferences this past year (1 this and 1 last fiscal year) to learn about new and emerging technologies in PHP and the development world. I’ve learned a LOT from there. Here’s a list of things that I want to do (and feel SHOULD be done) because our applications are all left in the dark ages: - AJAX My boss absolutely refuses to allow me to add things such as the above. The reason? There is none. Generally she just tells me that’s a bad idea or “most people don’t like that”. The issue I’m starting to have more of that is the simple fact that most people in the department actually “don’t mind that”. JavaScript is the culprit. I admit that I haven’t interviewed nearly all different departments, but 4 out of the 5 that I have interviewed has said they honestly don’t care about JavaScript. The application we are working on is using coding concepts that are still PHP4, and more than likely will remain that way if I’m not allowed to implement anything cool, new, and what the web is moving towards. My boss just doesn’t seem to understand where web content is moving towards and that many new technologies do exist and are there TO BE USED! More things include using tools to develop and maintain our apps. Things such as trac, subversion, and other tools would be EXTREMELY helpful for us, as we’d be able to trac our code better and finally have documentation for our application. But, anytime I try to recommend these things to Kim, or heaven forbid install them, she tells me we’re not going to consider it now. “We’ve got too many other things to deal with.” This mainly involves moving from one server to two newer servers, which has been going on for 6 months now….I swear this move could have been taken care of in a reasonable amount of time, but the fact that it’s still going on is really depressing. On the upside, a couple of new positions in another department are about to open up, and I’ll be applying for them, because I want to get off this dead end project. In Summary I suppose I have been a little depressed as of late. I’m going to skip out on my TREC (Engineering Competition) later tonight because of this fact. I needed some alone time (and probably need more). But I need alone time that doesn’t involve work or anything else. Just myself. Hopefully Sunday will lift my spirits, as Melissa and I are going to look at a potential first house for us. We’re not telling our parents (so Courtney, don’t even think of mentioning this to mom or dad!) because my parents especially think this will probably be a bad idea. Most online things are telling us that it’s not that bad, and for a few hundred dollars more a month, we’ll be on our way to OWNING, instead of keeping with the renting cycle we’ve been on. Enough. I’m done with this post. Hopefully the final part to this last journal entry… This is a continuation of the previous entry in my Journal because it was so long to read… Well, I am officially on the airplane back to America. This has been an amazing trip, and there are plenty of more things to write about. Today was our first day in Tokyo - being able to do stuff at least. Last night we checked into the hotel & got dinner at Jonathan’s Family Restaraunt - a chain here in Tokyo (at least). Let me continue on with my previous rants before I talk about today’s adventures. |