DarqByte

Sorry, I’ve pulled this post because of concerns over it being too detailed. Please contact me if you’re interested in what it said.

I know I don’t post here on DarqByte anymore, really. I’m resorting to coming here to lodge another complaint to the public at large, much in the same way I did regarding Bar Louie. Hell, that post was actually useful. It got a dialogue going with them and, from what I understand, led to some changes to try to keep that kind of thing from happening again. Didn’t keep them from eventually closing, though. The reason? Poor service. Hah!

Anyway, I’ve decided to take my case against Mint.com to the interwebs. It’s sad, really, because I think when Mint actually works, it’s a phenomenal service. Being able to collect all of your financial accounts into one place and look at your actual total monetary usage across all of them is one of the most useful things I’ve ever really used. Sadly, I can’t really use Mint anymore.

I actually used Quicken Online starting in February of 2008 back before they acquired Mint. I thought QO was pretty good, save for a few things I wanted from the service. When they got ahold of Mint and I saw the feature set that Mint had, I decided to close out my QO account and open a Mint one. After some initial issues where they didn’t actually support connecting to my bank account (or to Laura’s credit card account), we were finally able to get all of our data into Mint. Thus began a happy stretch of actual, usable Mint. It was awesome.

Then came this year. April 7th is the first time I had to email Mint’s support team about issues. This one was a bit minor – my truck loan is with my credit union and the loan was available in Mint, but listed as a checking account. I couldn’t reclassify it as a loan. I got ahold of Mint regarding this issue and it wasn’t resolved until later, due to another entirely unrelated thing. They never really fixed the issue. They said I had to classify it as Other, but it still kept showing up in my account as positive money, not negative. I asked them why this wasn’t possible and never got a real response. In fact, they suggested for me to re-add my credit union account to Mint.

Oh well, I thought. Minor bump in the road, I knew all about my truck loan. Then came April 27th. Well, it was a bit before April 27th, but that’s the email I have with them. My credit union took down their entire online account access section for a couple days. Two days later (likely around the 27th) it came back up again and it was a totally different account management section. Much nicer look, more capabilities, better information. A good change. Mint, sadly, kept listing the account as having a Temporary Issue and it couldn’t collect data anymore.

I told Mint that they totally changed their backend system and I believed this to be the problem. I gave them lots of details too, pertinent details that would be useful to a software engineer. I mean… I am a software engineer, so Mint can’t really get things by me. They got back to me and sounded very confused and said that if I was having problems accessing an account, I had to jump through hoops in their account management interface inside Mint in order for things to get auto-reported to their engineering team. It was a load of bullshit and not even remotely intuitive. I’m a fucking software engineer for Christ’s sake and it wasn’t obvious to me. How about the average person, hmm Mint?

I started getting very irritated in my emails to them. I try very hard not to shoot the messenger when dealing with customer support representatives because they’re not the ones responsible for a problem. God knows the CS reps here at my job get blamed for all sorts of stuff and have to deal with royally pissed off gamers, so I always try to be nice. But it was wearing thin for me, especially since the data access wasn’t restored after over a week.

After two weeks I finally got the formal response that my credit union had changed service providers for their backend. They said I had to close out my existing credit union account and re-attach it in order for things to work properly. I thought this sounded a bit dumb, but I know how software architecture can be and maybe their system couldn’t handle an existing account switching a backend data provider. Thus, I begrudgingly did this. Note now that it’s about mid-May. All of this bullshit happened after I moved here to Los Angeles and Laura and I were operating long-distance on a single bank account. Knowing financials in such a situation is a critical thing!

So I re-added my credit union, and ended up with three problems immediately. On the one hand, I wanted the transactions listed in my now-closed accounts to be attributed to the ones I just re-added. After a few emails to their support team, I got the impression they couldn’t do this, but never got a straight answer. The second problem was that my transactions for the missing period at the end of my “old” account’s closure and the “new” account’s opening were missing, thus giving me an incomplete picture of my financials. These eventually got downloaded and worked out, after I dealt with problem #3. But the biggest problem was indeed #3 – I had duplicate checking, savings and loan accounts listed.

Mint, for some inexplicable reason, kept creating duplicate accounts underneath my credit union’s data. At one point I had four credit union checking accounts listed, each with a small number of transactions attributed to them. I emailed Mint about this, obviously, and they told me that my account was in a batch update mode and that I should avoid touching it for 24 hours. What a solution! Sheesh. It needs to handle customers having no idea what the hell is going on and logging in anyway. I ended up deleting the newly added credit union account and re-added it again. Initially, it held just one copy of checking, savings and loan. But it added a few more again, so I pretty much just washed my hands of Mint at the time and walked away.

About a couple weeks later I returned, hoping to salvage Mint and get things in order. Thankfully, the duplicate accounts had no transactions associated with them and no more had been created. I was able to mark them as closed and move on. In fact, the batch process had downloaded all of the missing transactions that I was looking for. After spending a couple hours classifying transactions and getting the budget numbers in line, our Mint account now finally looked like it should!

Ah, but all was not so happy in Mintland. The next day I saw several transactions with PreAuthorization listed in their description. I emailed Mint about this on June 12th. I’d never seen preauth transactions look like regular transactions in Mint before – my credit card has preauth transactions as well, and those show up in italics in Mint and go away when the real transaction hits. I figured my credit union would operate in the same manner, but apparently not. I told Mint about this happening and their response was to have me mark it as a duplicate manually in Mint. I asked if they could automatically be filtered out and no dice there either. They did tell me that I could delete the transaction as long as I edited some of the details on it. I tried that and never got a delete link like their emails said would appear. All I can do is allow them to show up and then manually mark them all as duplicates. That’s a lot of manual legwork, on top of the fact that the duplicates clog up my view of my transactions, giving me a page of about 1/3 dupes. Thus management of my Mint account had now gotten a lot worse.

So I’d been operating in that fashion for about two months when suddenly Mint was again unable to connect to my credit union to download transactions. Yet again I had to get ahold of Mint customer support. By this point I still had wrap-up emails coming in for prior issues with automated “please take this survey” crap coming in, so I didn’t even know which emails were related to which problems at this point. I explained to the Mint representative that nothing had changed with my credit union website or login information. But just to be save, I changed my credit union password and reflected the change in Mint. It would just sit there interminably trying to login and get transactions. It never got anywhere.

Finally the representative asked for some pretty exhaustive information to send along to the Mint engineering team, so I got happy that they were finally going to get actively involved in my problem. I sent all of that information in about 10 days ago. And guess what? Not a single goddam email back. Nothing. And the problem is still happening, right now.

So right now, I really can’t use Mint, because I can’t access any of my transactions from my credit union. And when things finally do work again, I’m going to have to spend forever and a goddam year categorizing and renaming transactions that represent the gap in access. Of course, that’s assuming that Mint is smart enough to fill that gap. With my luck, it’ll just download the last 5-10 and be done with it, making August an impossible month to step back and financially review.

So I’ve about had it. I want recommendations for a solid Mint competitor that is reliable, usable and actually responds to their customers. This is just ridiculous. All of these problems happened within a half-year window. It’s frightening, really, that my financial information is in the hands of this company. I’ll probably shut down my Mint login here pretty soon, as it’s getting me nothing but heartache and agony in return.

Or maybe I’ll get lucky and some high-ranking person at Mint will actually consider what I’ve gone through to be a travesty and they’ll fucking do something about it.

So yeah… Do you remember that blog post I just wrote? The one where I said I would be working at Guthy Renker? That’s no longer in the cards. I will instead be working for Meteor Games in Beverly Hills. Long story, but they contacted me late in the game and made me an offer that I felt was too compelling to pass up. A chance to start getting into the video game industry in a manner adding to my work for OMGN? Couldn’t pass it up. That is all!

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged here on DarqByte. Really, there hasn’t been a whole lot to talk about until now. It’s been mostly school and work. Laura’s been in law school, so she’s been pretty locked down too. I tend to keep people updated more via Facebook and Twitter.

So anyway, if you’ve read the subject of this blog post, then you know what this is about. I’m moving to Los Angeles.

Basically, the gist is that I was offered a job out in Santa Monica. A pretty kickass job where I can really apply all that I’ve learned as a web developer over the last 7 years and try to do something really great and awesome there. The firm I’ll be working for is Guthy Renker. They’re responsible for those Proactiv ads you see on TV, as well as countless other marketing initiatives and the like. I’ll be working as a backend web developer for them. Somewhat similar to what I’m doing now, except that I’ll be senior-level and within a few months, should I appear to be as good as advertised (and I definitely feel I am!), then I’ll have a shot at heading up a team of developers. A big, big team.

So what does this mean in its entirety? Well, my last day at DataX will be February 25th. I will be officially moving that weekend and my first day at GR will be the 28th. I put in my notice at DataX yesterday, although I spoke earlier in the week with my boss about the offer and that I was considering it. This isn’t an indictment against DataX by any means. It’s just a new challenge and an opportunity to find what I’m looking for in my career.

So Laura? She’ll be remaining here in Las Vegas to finish her law school education. This means we’ll be living apart for the duration of her pursuit of a new career path. Honestly, when it’s all said and done, this may have been the “best” time for me to make a career move that involved living away from Laura. She’s heads-down in law school and I don’t get to see her, talk to her or do a whole lot with her right now anyway. She’s consumed with law school, as is always the case when one is pursuing a law degree.

We’ll be just fine, I can assure you that. Our marriage is very strong, it’s very solid. We’re both very confident we’ll be able to handle this well. Laura was very integral in my decision to take this job. I would not have if she didn’t think it was a good opportunity or didn’t want me to. She understood some of my frustrations at DataX and supported me 100% all the way in this decision. I’ll be driving back on a regular basis to visit Laura and Vegas. How often that is remains to be seen, but I’m anticipating something like every other weekend at the most infrequent. Laura will likely be able to come down to LA and visit occasionally as well, but that will be a rarer treat since she’s always got so much to do for school.

My MBA will be put on hold. I’ve been going after my MBA to further my career, so getting a job that does just that is definitely along the same road. I’ll see about gaining residency status in California for their universities and I’ll go from there as far as resuming my MBA. Perhaps my good GMAT score and UNLV grades will allow me to transfer more credits than is usual and to get a scholarship too! I’m not sure about the latter though, since I don’t think MBA programs typically have scholarships available anyway.

I hope that covers it all. Big changes coming soon!

As I’ve said before, I’m posting video-game related stuff over at my OMGN blog, Gamer of Darqness. And here’s a post I want to share — my account of the building of Beast!

A local church here in Las Vegas, Christ the King, is hosting a Second Chance Prom that pretty much anybody can attend. I was unable to go to prom in high school with Laura because, well, I was dating somebody else at the time. She didn’t have the kind of prom she’d really want to have. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t go with her.

Well, thanks to CTK we get a mulligan! But I haven’t asked her to prom yet. I want to get one million group members on Facebook to show her that she should go with me! So if you’re not already a group member, join the group and help me out. I may end up recording when I ask her and post that on YouTube. We’ll see. The more people join the group, the better chance of that happening!

Well, in the spirit of the KISS song, “They call me Dr. Love!” Actually, I have been called Dr. Love before. And since this post is all about what people call me, I’ll give you that story too.

So over time it’s occurred to me what people call me on a daily basis. The only reason I’ve noticed is because some of my family members notice when I get called Rob and they can’t believe I’d be willing to be called that. Hell, some of them still call me by my kid name that I continually ask them not to use and to call me Robert (or Rob) instead. And a couple still call me by my really kid name, which is pretty much sacrilege these days as far as I’m concerned!

My cousin is on board in calling me Robert, actually. Thank God. And my Dad will occasionally remember to call me Robert. If you’re one of my childhood friends or family and are still calling me by either of my kid names… Robert works just as well. Trust me. I prefer it greatly.

All of this whole “what do I want to be called” stuff has been interesting to ponder. When I drove down to Arizona for Christmas Eve this last year, I learned that my grandma on my Dad’s side had always wanted my sister and me to call her Gran, not Grandma as we always do. I was completely unaware of this, so I’m making a conscious effort to call her Gran now.

See that’s the thing for me. I want to be called Robert (or Rob). Which is why I don’t understand the unwillingness of some people to call me that. I understand that a lot of my family has called me by my kid names for my entire life and that it’s a big change for them and they can only think of me as those names. I get that. But really, my wish is to be called Robert… Really. Haha. I’m trying to change what I call my Gran after 26 years of calling her Grandma, so if I can make the effort, can’t others?

Yeah, you all know who you are.

Anyway, I always introduce myself as Robert. Ever since the beginning of 9th grade I’ve introduced myself as Robert. And I get called Rob about half of the time, and I find that quite interesting. Laura‘s step-dad, Ron, prefers to go by Ronald (and yet I still call him Ron, I need to work on that) and always introduces himself as such. He says in New Orleans, his hometown, nobody ever really calls someone else by a nickname. They call that person by their real name. I think it’s just a part of culture here out in the western US, and maybe elsewhere. It just happens.

So I get called Robert and Rob a lot, but what about other names? Here are some that I get called on a regular-enough basis that I can remember them:

• Ludwick
• The Lud
• The Spartan (that’s another story entirely)
• Sludgewick (creative)
• Spudwick
• Robbo
• Roberto
• RobZone (sweet!)
• Dr. Love

So yeah, the story on Dr. Love… I’ve always liked that song by KISS. I first heard it in the movie Detroit Rock City. I ended up downloading it. Soon it became a part of jokes for me where I would tell people “They call me Dr. Love.” See my last post if you’re unclear as to why I make jokes like this, haha.

So anyway, I once said this to a coworker back when I worked at Swim2000. He said he didn’t believe me, so I said “Nah, everybody does, even Bruno.” Bruno is the owner. So he went and asked Bruno and of course Bruno denied it. Well two days later I was leaving and he and Bruno were still in the office. I said something along the lines of “see ya tomorrow” and Bruno chimes in “Ok, see you tomorrow Dr. Love.”

Thus, I have actually been called Dr. Love.

[Update]

Late addition to the list: Fludwick

Ahh, the Muddy Buddy. Something I thought I was in decent shape for. But was I? Fuck no. Haha.

Prep

I got up at 6am this morning and got myself and my stuff ready to go. Headed out the door at 6:30. I had with me a full change of clothes, a towel, two bottles of water, my bicycle helmet I just bought yesterday and me. Drove off to Andy‘s place because we were driving together. He had the mountain bike, I had the truck. It works. Haha.

From Andy’s we drove down 215 and hopped off at Eastern to get a small breakfast at Denny’s. I had this new “Slamwich” which is basically their Grand Slam ingredients on a sandwich. It was pretty tasty. We hopped across the street to Chevron and Walgreen’s to fill up the bike’s tires with air and grab some AAA batteries for his helmet-mounted video camera. So cool.

In case you’re wondering, we were dressed in Steampunk attire… Just thought I ought to mention that…

Anyway, we arrived at the race and signed our waivers and got all of our numerical decals. Ran back over to the truck and got our outfits finalized and numbered up. We got back to the stage just in time for the final announcements of some details we needed. Once the announcements were over, we met up with Ginger who took my truck key and my wedding ring and Andy and I scurried off to make ourselves “as light as possible” for the journey, if you catch my drift.

The First Three Legs

Here’s where things got interesting. I thought he and I were in Wave 1 because the waves are ordered by gender and the combined age of the partners… However, we weren’t, we were in Wave 2. Sadly, I told Andy right before they were letting Wave 1 bicyclists go that we were in 1, so he took off with Wave 1 and I had to wait until the Wave 2 runners. I thought he would be way, way ahead of me when the first leg of the race ended and we made the bike swap.

I ran for most of the first leg, about 75% of it, and climbed over the climbing wall obstacle that was there. I looked for the bike in the bike drop area and… Not there. I stayed around the area for about 5-10 minutes, looking over the bikes a few times and asking a couple of the attendants what I should do. I actually thought that Andy was disqualified for leaving out a wave too early and I didn’t know about it. Just as I was about to talk to one of the coordinators, Andy showed up.

It turns out that Andy had technical difficulties with the bike and didn’t end up getting it ride-worthy until Wave 3 went out, so I had a head-start on him and didn’t even know it. So anyway…

The second leg was marked by a lot of damn uphill hiking with the bike. And a big, big puddle of water that I wasn’t expecting and couldn’t power through on the bike. The obstacle at the end of it was a balance beam, which was initially difficult for me to overcome because my legs were feeling a bit shot at this point. There was a lot more hiking to the race than I anticipated, so I wasn’t fully prepared. Grr.

In addition, the bike was having chain slippage issues. The chain kept slipping between the chosen gear and one below or above it, and it was making life riding it difficult. I ended up stopping trying to ride it uphill because it was damn-near impossible and required an enormous amount of physical exertion that way.

The third leg was me walking about 75% of the way. I just didn’t have any juice to really get it going until the last quarter of the leg when I jogged in the rest of the way. The obstacle at the end here was a crawl underneath some netting. I wandered off to find the bike, only to see Andy hadn’t leapfrogged me, so I waited and talked to some random guy.

Andy showed up and gave me the bike. Off I went…

The Last Two Legs

The beginning of the fourth leg was already a doozy. There was a big stretch of mud. I don’t mean watery mud here. This stuff was like wet clay. Very, very thick and gooey stuff. The further you got, the deeper and thicker it got. And to top it all off, the second half of this stretch actually did have a big puddle on top of all of the mud, so… Holy crap. About 75% of the way through the non-puddle stretch, I almost lost my balance. In attempting to keep it, my right foot kept sinking deeper and deeper, and once I steadied myself, my left sunk deep as well. I was very worried I was going to lose my shoes and have to ferret them back out. Thankfully, I yanked my right foot and got moving again.

The bike was monstrously difficult to maneuver through all of this. For a little bit of the non-puddle I carried it. Once I got to the puddle, I decided to just plow through the puddle. There was a bank on the right side that looked just like the non-puddle section I got through, but it was tougher to get over there initially and also didn’t seem like it was supposed to be part of the course. I picked up the bike and kept it on my chest and sloshed through the puddle section. It was quite fun, I had a good time making a mess and big splashes. I hadn’t gotten that muddy and dirty in years, it reminded me of when I was a kid. Loved it.

At the end of this stretch was a small hill that was giving people fits because they couldn’t get traction thanks to all of their mud, so I helped a couple people up and was off on my way.

Most of the beginning of the fourth leg was uphill with a few downhill and flat spots, so I actually got to use the bike a bit. I climbed up this massive hill to see a nice, long, downhill slope for about three or four tenths of a mile, so I was looking forward to coasting, using the brakes a bit and just gliding through to the fourth obstacle and the fifth and final leg.

Sadly, this didn’t get to happen. About a fifth of the way down this nice downhill slope, the back tire on the bike popped. Big, loud pop. After I got off and started walking it down the rest of the way, some people expressed dismay that it had happened to me. It happens. It sucked, but it happens. I eventually got to the obstacle, which was a cargo net on the side of an inflatable slide. Said slide was the way back down on the other side.

I started walking off on the fifth leg and figured I’d jog it most of the way, but stopped and headed back to the obstacle area so Andy and I could walk the remainder together. It was a good walk, we got to talk about random shit and see if we were going to be dead last in the race. This leg took awhile simply because we absolutely had to walk it the whole way.

We got to the end and then had to deal with the final mud pit. My God, what an interesting way to end an already muddy day. We had to crawl through a big massive mud pit that had small hills and obstacles that kept us low and in the pit. Once we got out, out entire fronts were just massively covered in this light grey mud. Most of our backs were too, and mud had gotten inside both my shirt and my vest. We looked like we’d slept in the mud.

The Aftermath

Our official race time is unknown because we were supposed to leave in Wave 2 and I didn’t know what value the timer had at that point. And since Andy didn’t leave until Wave 3, who really knows. The race started at 9am and we got in at 10:57am… So we took a few pictures and meandered over to the “shower,” which was really just a massive water pipe and about 30 hoses all spouting out some really damn cold water. And it was only mid-50s and overcast for the race, so it wasn’t entirely pleasant, getting the mud off of us. We collected Andy’s bike and headed back to the truck.

We had Ginger and one of Andy’s friends there with us, and they helped us change, mostly by helping us get our shoes off and holding up towels so we could be modest. The interior of my truck doesn’t have much mud in it at all, but the bed does. It actually looks like it’s been used as a truck, haha!

I dropped Andy off at home and drove home myself. Took a nice, long, long shower, got some pho with Laura and read a chapter for my economics class. And here I am, writing this insanely long post that almost reached 1600 words. Maybe some photos in the future, or perhaps Andy will post some on his blog soon.

It’s been said before that I don’t venture outside my comfort zone much, and that’s probably true. I tend to not initiate hanging out with friends, I often let them do so. I don’t just jump at the chance for new experiences that often…

So here I was, sitting at home poking around Facebook and talking to Laura and she started telling me I should do this Muddy Buddy thing with F. Andrew Taylor. I had actually just seen Andy post something on Facebook, looking for someone to run this thing with him, and Laura started talking to me about it, saying I should volunteer to do it with him because he really wanted to do it.

So I did a quick bit of research on what the Muddy Buddy is. It’s a 6-mile course where you trade off every other mile who is riding a bike and who is hoofing it on foot. Every mile there’s an obstacle that the two members must clear before swapping the bike. And at the end is a big mud pit the two have to slosh through.

I sat for a moment and thought “I dunno, do I really want to? Does it sound like fun? It sounds like… Wait, wait a minute. What the fuck. I never do anything different or out-of-character or interesting. I’m in.” Thus, I informed Andy he had his muddy buddy and that I would join him on this trek.

This spur-of-the-moment decision now has me making damn sure I get to the gym this week. Not that I haven’t been hitting up the gym, but if I’ve got things or errands to do right after work on Mondays or Fridays, I don’t make the gym. And I was marginally sick last week, so I didn’t work out after classes, either. So I’m making sure I get to the gym and do a combination of walking/running machines and the bike machines.

On a side note, I’ve also begun my ab exercises. I need them, badly. My gut sucks.

Anyway, so since then I’ve been also looking into just what I’m going to have to wear for the event, and it seems a lot of people dress up in interesting (to say the least) duds for the race. I’m not sure Andy and I are going that far, but I do want to make sure I don’t ruin any of my good stuff and that I’ll be appropriately dressed for the weather. I don’t want to be mega-freezing or dying of heat exhaustion either.

The race is out at Lake Las Vegas, and Weather.com lists the expected high at 57, so I… have no idea what to wear yet. Probably a short sleeve shirt and pants. Maybe I’ll wrap a longer-sleeve shirt around a bar on the bike or something, who knows. The course is here.

In final prep before the race, I plan on taking my bike at home out for a bit and getting used to riding again, on Saturday. Then the race is early Sunday morning, like 9am. Should be fun.

Some people know that I used to co-own a business. It was called Dambert Lush, it was an electronics e-commerce website. My friend Damian Sheets and I owned it. It never really took off, and a lot of the reason for that was that we had no money to start it. Aside from the fact that electronics e-commerce websites are extremely plentiful, we just didn’t have the advertising money to get the name of DL out there. It was running for over a year but we shut it down because we couldn’t ever get it rolling well. I re-bought the domain recently and have it pointed to DarqFlare Enterprises.

Anyway, I bring this up because my MBA courses relate to starting a business. I mean, one of the reasons I’m getting an MBA is because I eventually want to start a successful business and work for myself. That’s a theme I’m sure you’ve seen pop up here on my blog time and time again. I want to work for myself, that’s my ultimate career goal. Even if it’s working hard, I want to work for myself. As I’ve said before, right now my ideal job is working on OMGN for a living.

In any case, my accounting class’ textbook has actually made me more aware that I want to start a business again. There are examples all over that book of people starting businesses, and they’re obviously always in reference to accounting systems to ensure that money is kept track of appropriately. Some of these businesses have been started with very low funds, albeit more funds than Damian and I had to start DL. But it all just reminds me of where I want to be and where I’m at now.

The start-up funds aspect of businesses is what’s staring me in the face right now. To start many businesses, you need to have seed money. There are many types of businesses, but the two that have been covered so far in more detail in the text are service-based businesses and inventory-bases businesses.

Service-based companies basically accept money to provide a service. There’s no inventory costs really and the start-up cost for a business like this is pretty low. Hell, this is a kind of business I could likely start without any funds, but the problem here is that the income from the business wouldn’t be high enough to cover my family’s expenses. Yet another limitation on me right now.

Inventory-based companies typically have to purchase merchandise then sell it back to other companies or consumers to make a profit. There’s a considerably higher amount of money involved in getting these types of businesses off of the ground since they’ve got to get inventory and a place to put it. This was what Dambert Lush was, but since we were a dropshipper, we didn’t have to hold inventory. Still, our marginal profits were really low and there weren’t enough of them. No advertising, remember?

Anyway, all of this introspection on starting a business and going into the accounting of businesses this semester has really told me that, yeah, starting a business is hard work, is more of a crapshoot than it should be and that you’re very likely to fail many times before getting it right. I’m alright with that and I’d be even more alright with that if I wasn’t married. See, I’d be much more inclined to take risks since it would just be me that I’m impacting. But I’m not. I have Laura to think about and the potential for having a family in the future.

A lot of Web 2.0 companies have started with guys living in their parents’ houses. Many of these people starting these new successful companies were single when they started them. They had relatively low costs of living and a lot of time to burn. I don’t fit the bill at all. Now I’m not blaming Laura or using her as a crutch here, I’m just being realistic. I’d have a much better opportunity and chance of success if I were single, didn’t own a home or any pets and had craploads of expendable time to put towards a big project that won’t make me any money for years.

However, I’m not in that situation. So I have to wait. Wait until Laura and I have more money stowed away for me to start a business with. Wait until we have fewer monetary obligations than we do now (i.e. vehicle payments and student loans). And if we have kids, then that’ll impact the likelihood of my starting a new venture. I’m just trying to figure out if it’s ever going to be a viable thing, me starting a business.

As I’ve said before, really the biggest thing keeping me from working on OMGN full time is the fact that I have to go out and earn a living. If I could pipe all of that time towards the site, I have no doubt it would grow and get bigger and better in stature as time went on. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. All of the responsibilities and obligations I’ve built into my life make it impossible to spend the kind of time and effort required to build OMGN into what I want it to be. Sure, you can say “work on it a little each day and it will grow!” but it won’t ever grow enough. Sites like OMGN require constant updating, which isn’t something I can do and it isn’t something I can expect people to do on my behalf for free or very, very damn cheap either. It’s just not feasible.

So here I am, wondering if I’ll really ever be able to start a business anytime soon. Sure, when I’m in my 40s sometime we’ll probably be in a much better financial position to take a risk like that. But let’s say for example I’m 48 then. I imagine by then we likely won’t have big money-draining kids with us by then, or at least we’ll be charging them enough in rent to make up the difference (haha). I’ll be 48 with about 25 years generated in my 401k and plenty of time in Laura’s IRA. Other financial retirement accounts will likely have money for us then as well. At the end of my 40s, would I rather just bide my time until I can retire, which may be very soon in my 50s, or put a bunch of money towards a business that may jeopardize my family’s financial well-being?

I may need to adjust my priorities. I do like my life as it is now. I love my wife, I’m enjoying my pursuit of higher education and I know I’m fucking good at my job. Sure, I want to move up there as well, that’s another shorter-term goal I have for my career. But maybe this whole starting a business thing just isn’t in the cards. Maybe I should just look at my life, adjust my priorities and be happy. But then again, that’s not my style now, is it? I’m a bit like Laura in this regard. I want bigger and better things for my family, for my career and for me. I want to achieve things and leave my mark on this world. I don’t want to settle, I don’t want to sit stagnant and watch other talented people in the world shape this world. I want to take my place with those people. I just hope I can reconcile my desires for grandeur with reality.