Now Playing:
High Impact Velocity Spatter
And because Jacob is a Big fan of 8-bit music:
Enjoy
Word came in last Monday. The code that I've been trying to humanize, so the group I'm working with can use it in the future, has now been put up for a legacy freeze. All my tinkering, all my attempts at graphing out more clever pathways and reorganizing the whole thing is now superfluous. The code is to be put back in its legacy state, I am to add headers to every subroutine (there were none, zero, no documentation before) and I will compress the whole thing in a .zip file that I believe no one in their lifetime will unpack in an attempt to analyze any of our old data.
I have to unroll the entire code base to its old weird format, add documentation to it and wrap it in a bow and kiss the last 9 months of work goodbye...
That meeting just pulled the plug out of my mental tub and all the hot water where my ideas used to float just drained away with a thick gurgle. My motivation is slowly shriveling as it clings sickly to the sides of a quickly drying vessel. I can feel the dried up, curly ends of what used to drive me to work with intent and focus, shrivel away and drop off to join the crummy gunk left on the bottom of the tub as all mental buoyancy was lost.
My work ethic, in pictures, is best described as trying to balance a soccer ball on top of a broomstick handle.
14 years ago I worked outdoors in a two-month long snow storm. My hourly wage as an apprentice was 6.0$ per hour and all I did for two months was to drill holes in cladding for an endless row of sheds.
That was much preferable to how I'm feeling about work right now...
Now Playing:
The Murderer's Pact
No 8-bit this time. Get over it.
Current long-term plan is: survive the next month, wrap software up, start a blog with the statistics I do for my PhD and any statistics I do in my spare time. Hopefully that could prove useful for a future job interview. Beeline for the bio industry and it's never-ending pit of logistic regression and survival analysis. Dabble in time series analysis and see what comes out. Search with intent for all knowledge that will enable me to work freelance unless I can strike an amazing work-from-home kind of deal. But if I don't like working with statistics either, doing it freelance is not going to solve any of my problems. I might just be retarded.
There is a very small probability that I will become FI in the same way others here are. My tolerance for mindless suffering in non-existent. I can't do much else than power through the PhD and try to make myself as employable as humanly possible; then unjob to the best om my ability. I'm too
puttylike and too unimaginative to fit into a standard profession and to see what alternatives are available to me.
When at work there is nothing I want to do other than fuck, cook and bake, listen to music, and play with my daughter. Placed in my office chair I'm groveling at the base of the Maslow pyramid; I want to be warm, safe, sound asleep -and most importantly- somewhere else. Luckily I'm VERY good at shutting work out when I'm home so I'm not taking all the pissiness home with me. One of the great benefits of being parsimonious with your stuff and your obligations is that when you come home from work, there is nothing to do other than enjoy time with the family. Nothing to repair, keep, clean, pick up, browse for, or otherwise be bothered by.
Come home routine:
1) Kick off shoes
2) Drop the backpack
3) Go crazy while blasting
this and dancing in approximately the same manner.
It has finally become obvious to me how much my need to tinker with new things is impacting the quality of my life, but if I don't, I feel even worse. The Peter Principle has placed a hard mental ceiling above me and I'm constantly bumping my head up against it and my stupid brain keeps dragging me to new places where I've yet to crack the plaster.
I feel like a marionette, the paint on top of my head all chipped off, and a cruel puppetteer insists on trying to drag me through Peter's ceiling by force, my little arms and legs flailing helplessly under the control of something that is stronger than I am wise.
The recent discussion on the continued viability of the 4% rule makes me all shriveled up inside as well. Knowing myself, I honestly don't think that I could make money as 'real' bona fide active investor, as opposed to a lazy indexer. I'm not sure paper trading my ideas would do it, since virtual cash can't replicate the psychology of losing real money, so in order to find out, I'd have to put actual money on the line.
And speaking of, I really can't figure out how much money to hold in cash while I'm saving for FI. Given that it's either 100% stocks with their volatility (and current high valuations) or very high taxation on something less volatile, I'm sort of stuck in a weird limbo. I have a couple of years expenses invested in stock indices, but I'm not really certain whether I should keep piling money into my current funds or keep the money in cash. I'm potentially missing out on dividends and appreciation and I'm surely losing money to inflation, but the variance on inflation is theoretically a lot lower than the variance on stock indices so I'm more certain of the actual realizable value of my portfolio a few years down the road. In case something tanks, corrects or otherwise goes to shit for a while it would be very nice to buy some indices while they're on sale.
Given that the investment horizon on stocks is something like 5 years before you should even consider investing in stocks, and that I'm looking at an 8 year journey towards FI I should then put most of my money in stocks in the beginning and taper off my contributions as I approach my allotted stock allocation and 'earmark' a certain amount of money as stocks in my savings account. But that seems like such a cooky idea that it's probably wrong in a million ways. On the other hand, the interest and dividends earned over a shortish accumulation phase is minuscule compared to the risk of the markets themselves isn't it?
Now Playing:
Indulge In Perversity
I started reading the 4 Hour Work Week but had to stop. Ferriss was not doing anything except making me feel inadequate and miserable about my life. It's remarkably tough to be a squirrel brain with not have an original thought in ones head while reading about a squirrel brain with plenty of out-of-the-box-thinking. I can see a lot of similarities between Ferriss and myself, except Ferriss gets those few things right that I just motherfucking can't grok... He's probably also a really nice guy too, so fuck you Tim Ferriss!
Now Playing:
We Drink to Your Demise.
Too Long Didn't Read: Work sucks, teenage angst, plenty of fun at home, fuck off Tim Ferriss, the soundtrack to this journal seems to hold the answers to most of my bitching.
PS: I bought a banneton. Bread baking is now awesome!