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September 28, 2006

business, beer, jetblue

The Dow-Jones Industrial Average has briefly gone above its record-high close, set back in early 2000. I liked how they pointed out that the NASDAQ isn't expected to get back above its record-high close anytime soon (the NAS is at about 2260-ish, and its peak was almost 5050, which also happened to be on my 22nd birthday).

House stuff continues! It's a constant thrill.

I met up with Scuba Steve last night and we had beers at Sunset Grille. Now I go to Sunset Cantina with Kara all the time, and the two places have the same menu, but the Grille has far more beers on tap. I tried a number of good beers. I will say this: Saranac Pumpkin Ale tastes like movie theater butter. I mean it. Seriously seriously buttery. You could pour it on popcorn and it would probably be fine. There was another beer I tried that tasted like pumpkin pie.

So here's the thing: Sunset Grille has a Yuengling neon sign hanging in the window, so of course I asked the hostess if they had Yuengling on tap in there. She said she didn't think so, but she is from Scranton and so we chatted briefly about the Yueng and how all PA expatriates love it and worship it. So I asked our waiter, also the bartender, if they had it.

They don't, and here's the reason: Yuengling doesn't currently ship to Massachusetts. So that's the secret behind why I can't find Yueng up here. I'm going to go email the brewery in a few minutes here.

But as it turns out, the waiter used to live in Mount Pleasant in DC, and actually lived probably a street over from me at one point, on Lamont...I lived on Irving. Small world, huh? We talked about how Yueng suddenly showed up in DC a few years ago, and how it's now absolutely everywhere.

So that mystery is solved.

I am almost done with my first grad school paper. The hardest part was trimming it down to only 3 pages. It's probably not the best paper I've ever written, but it's not too shabby.

It's an analysis of Jetblue Airlines, which is kinda funny seeing as how I just worked for a travel company. Also amusing because we are going to end up taking Jetblue out to Vegas for Jody and Brock's wedding in November. That's gonna be a fun trip; I love Vegas. Robin is staying with us and she's never been. I'm gonna win a solid gold helicopter on the penny slots!

Posted by Mark at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

house!

I believe the term for what we are right now is "under agreement."

Our new home is up the street in Brighton, pending inspection, review of condo docs, and us getting a mortgage. If all goes well--and, being an optimist but also a realist, I have no reason to believe that we will hit any further snags--we will get the keys on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, thus leaving us to move boxes with one hand whilst eating turkey legs with the other.

Funny thing is, turns out that one of the women we are buying the place from is a Syracuse grad...and Newhouse class of '99 as well! How's that for a small world? Kara noticed the 'cuse sweatshirt hanging up when we went to look at the unit, and I checked the Syracuse alumni page to see if our suspicions were true. So when we went back to the open house, we had something to talk about. Did it help? Who knows. If past experience is any indicator, it probably did.

Kara and I were in Ikea when we got the phone call. She had never been to an Ikea before, so she was both thrilled and overwhelmed. That was certainly compounded by the fact that we ended up closing the deal over about a five-hour span on Sunday afternoon.

I'm very pleased with how things turned out. I was re-reading my old "mark.txt" file from last year, where I was keeping little tidbits of information and which I am now using again to keep track of what furniture we need and stuff like that, and I found a list of "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves" from our initial house search. We got all the must-haves--not basement, washer/dryer, dishwasher, 2 bedroom--and a lot of the nice-to-haves, including a small deck, hardwood floors, and a location near the T.

There were a number of other negotiations that have fallen through in the last few weeks to months. In one recent case, the guy bought at the absolute peak of the housing bubble, and, to boot, didn't take spectacular care of the place (two-prong plugs, questionable painting skill, no AC and windows that wouldn't accept standard window AC units). The fair-market value of the place was sadly about 10-15K less than what they guy paid for it.

In the case I alluded to in an earlier entry...well, let's put it this way: when you list your house, you never list it at what you want to get for it, certainly not in a buyer's market. If you figure your place is worth 100K, you list it at, say, 110K, the buyer offers 90K, you ideally end up somewhere around 100K. The other thing is, you have to look at the comps, which is what similar properties in your area have gone for...and this is important, you have to look at recent comps. What a unit next door in similar condition went for in 2004 is not a recent comp.

Oh, and another thing: you, as the seller, don't set the price. The market sets the price. Hopefully the market sets the price above what you paid for it. If not, you either take the loss or you wait until the market improves. Yes, you may have put years of TLC into the house and it may even have sentimental value, but the market doesn't so much care about that. What you can get for your place is what you can get for your place.

So anyway, this reticent seller wanted X and listed her property at X, so when we offered X - Y%, as is the normal opening gambit in real estate negotiations, she was not only offended, she dragged the negotiations on for about a week while we went back and forth. And it was on the day that she made her final offer that we saw the place we are now buying. The moral of the story: if you are trying to sell in a buyer's market, know the true value of your place, and negotiate quickly, lest a better place come along. Also, dropping your price by a whole thousand dollars on the first round of negotations does not send the buyers the message that you are a "tough bargainer with a fair idea of the value of your unit," it sends the message that you are "a real jerk and an idiot who is still going to be sitting on this place come next fall."

Unfortunately for those folks, but, things worked out pretty well for us, I think...again, pending that everything works out with inspection, etc. I'm very excited about having a 2-bed place with some real space in it. It has much better resale value, and it gives us room to grow should we decide to start a family while we're still in the city. Of course Kara is thrilled about the washer/dryer in unit, as am I, and I'm thrilled about the deck, as is Kara. The kitchen needs to be redone, but I think the appliances will last for a few more years until we have the time/money to do a big renovation. All-in-all, it has worked out quite well.

Posted by Mark at 08:51 AM | Comments (1)

September 19, 2006

accounting, real estate, unconsciousness

I never thought I'd say this, but accounting is fun.

I think it's the process of learning something so completely new, so alien, that appeals to me. After years of studying computer stuff, it is fascinating to work on something completely new. Yeah, there are differences in programming languages and design architectures and that sort of thing, but seriously, it's all the same stuff. If you've seen one n-tier database-enabled transactional web application, you've seen 'em all. Some languages are better for doing this or that, but they're all fundamentally just instruction sets.

I guess what's neat about accounting is that it, too, is a language, and an instruction set, but it operates with a totally different set of rules. Now that I think about it, perhaps it isn't that different from a programming language after all...just as a webapp has a database and a controller and a presentation system, so accounting has different types of spreadsheets and documents for different things.

Maybe another aspect of it that I enjoy is that accounting has been around since the 1400s, whereas programming is a discipline less than a century old, depending on what you consider "programming." Furthermore, the refinements that have come about to make up what could be called "modern" computing are only about as old as the web, so 15-ish years. It is refreshing to work with something that has such a history, where the important questions have been answered.

And yet, changes still happen to accounting...like programming, it is a living entity. It's just neat. It's like D&D or something. So many numbers, so many calculations, and they all make a sort of sense. It reminds me of when I made up my first role-playing game with my brothers; it was a system for throwing objects at each other, wherein we would assign "damage" numbers to the objects we threw. Some were missiles, some were bullets, and they had differing effects on our "hit points." I think it was just called "Combat." I have it in a closet somewhere.

Rambling is fun.

Ok, other stuff. We are in the middle of hard-fought negotiations over real estate. I'm not sure if I'll ever tell the whole story over the blog because it is quite financial, and while I personally don't care too much about talking numbers, Kara is obviously involved too, and I respect her desire for privacy. So I'll probably keep my mouth shut. The other thing is, negotiations are still going on, and I'm not saying anything about anything until I have a housekey in my hand.

This morning I had a doctor's appointment, and, as usual, I passed out during the process of drawing blood. The one nurse tried to get blood from my hand, for some reason. It didn't work, and shortly afterwards, I blacked out. This has happened enough times that I don't get freaked out when I come to, and I was very British about the whole thing afterwards. Lots of "Oh, terribly sorry, yes, I know where I am, the doctor's office, and it is Tuesday, September 19th, and my name is Mark, and yes, I do tend to pass out when you stick me with a hollow metal tube, was I twitching much?" The nurse who actually did take my blood did a great job of it, and I was just fine afterwards. Didn't feel much of a thing.

The blacking out bit is really weird. It's like having some sort of a crazy dream. I guess that what I see and hear as part of my "dream" is what is actually happening in the room, and so, when I come to, it's quite disorienting. Suppose you had a dream involving some sort of flying cat, and when you woke up, there was a cat hovering beside your bed. Same sort of thing.

It's not a gradual waking up, but fairly sudden, too. In the first seconds, I generally have no idea what is going on. In fact, it's very much a feeling of "where am I and what's going on?" After a few seconds, my memory comes back, and I can piece together what happened. I'm remarkably calm and generally quite apologetic about the whole thing.

In other news, tomorrow the company is taking us to a Red Sox game. The Sox are sucking right now, so tickets are cheap. Hey, I'm all up for hanging out at Fenway. I can park at the school of management, too.

Posted by Mark at 10:08 PM | Comments (1)

September 15, 2006

life is good

I'm feeling pretty good today. Class continues to go well, and after class last night, we had a little social gathering at Cornwall's, which is a pub apparently frequented by BU students. It's really a great bunch of people. There's another guy, also named Mark, who is in both my accounting and management classes, and we were talking about how nice it is that everybody seems smart and ready to work hard. It feels like freshman year again, but with less culture shock.

Tonight we're going to go look at a condo again that we might put an offer in on. I'm pretty excited about the prospect of becoming a homeowner again. All indications are that the Fed is trying to avoid a recession and is concerned about inflation, so I actually don't think that interest rates are likely to go up again anytime soon. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they went down a bit.

Do I think that we're going to see continued double-digit growth in the housing market? No chance. Do I think that things will probably slow down and maybe even move a bit backwards before they stabilize? Probably. Do I think that we are on the cusp of some dramatic housing bubble meltdown? Nah. Call me crazy, but people need places to live near where they work, and Boston has plenty of jobs and plenty of people. And if the housing market does completely tank and we need to relocate, guess what? We become landlords. I wonder if we could find somebody to rent out our condo right near a major college and within T distance of several others...hmm.

So, while there are risks, I feel comfortable and confident entering into this transaction. We're looking for a place to live that doubles as a long-term investment, not a quick flip to make a profit.

What else. Greg Tucker from back in the day is in town for a conference, so I'm hoping to meet up with him either later tonight or tomorrow. We're going to a Red Sox game with work next Wednesday night. MLK weekend in January the 'cuse crew is heading up for some basketball and cheap beers in CNY. I have quite a few little projects that I'm juggling in work, and I feel like I have a really good understanding of operations here and the ability to actually make some meaningful contributions. Life is pleasantly busy, and I feel absolutely great.

Posted by Mark at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2006

a general update

I have a number of things to discuss today.

Caffeine

This is a wonderful drug that I had really forgotten about until yesterday. I had been dragging a bit at work when I decided to have a cup of delicious coffee. I immediately perked up and have been flying high ever since (with a small break for sleep).

Coffee is great! It is the lifeblood of commerce! Drink a cup of caffeinated beverage today and watch your productivity soar!

Grad School

Grad school is great! I think that this is what I envisioned undergrad to be like. There do not, as of yet, seem to be any dummies or slackers present, although I am sure that will probably become more evident as time progresses. However, I think that the general ratio of people who want to be here versus people who do not want to be here is likely to be very high, given that:

I am sure that differences in experience and ability will likely be observed as time goes on. But I get the feeling that the baseline is a lot higher than in an undergrad program.

Also, I am learning a ton of stuff. I never thought accounting would be so entertaining. I now understand that Kara calling me a "liability" was in the fiscal sense, not the legal or political. A - L = E. They aren't training us to be accountants, only to be able to look at a 10-K or a balance sheet and know what's what, and that's useful in itself. Our professor is a career guy who is teaching as a side thing, has a day job and all, and seems like a generally energetic and entertaining individual with a real grasp of how to present accounting in an entertaining manner.

We had the first session of our Organizational Behavior class yesterday. I think the first case study we saw was a real Kobayashi Maru scenario; that was a little disheartening. I hope that we get some useful tools for surviving no-win situations at some point. Perhaps the illustration was that sometimes, things get so far gone that there's just no way to fix them. And sometimes you get placed into a situation where, no matter what you do, personalities and disagreements about what is right and wrong are going to sink you before you even get out of port. Obviously, I'm no stranger to that.

But, I can't imagine trying to negotiate the business world without some of the stuff that I'm just starting to learn. What a useful program.

Foxmarks

This is a great bookmark synchronizer for Firefox. If you use Firefox (obligatory nerdy "you should use this it is good Microsoft sux IE will kill your computer" commentary), it's a great way to keep all your bookmarks in synch across multiple computers. I tried using web-based bookmark solutions like del.ico.us and just didn't like them; I like using the bookmark menu to keep track of my links, not a web page someplace. Also, I like to organize my links in simple categories. I know that gaming site Kotaku could technically be listed in "Blogs" or "Games" or "Tech" or "Links" or "Words" as far as folders go, but I just pick one and get used to where it is. I don't need some kind of uber-complex relational ranking system to illustrate the n-tier relationships between arbitrary meta characteristics. I just wanna keep my links organized and know that if I add a "to-read" on one computer it gets updated on the other one(s) too.

Nerd Annoyance

I used to think that because I was a "developer" and part of the "information revolution" and a "techie" that I should get some sort of special privileges (I admit that I still need to spellcheck that word every time I type it). Why can't businesses be meritocracies where technologically-superior solutions win out over politics and moneymaking? Technology should drive the business. Stupid other "overhead" departments like marketing and HR and sales and editorial and customer service and manufacturing and production and business development and whatever else should bow down to all-powerful technology, which is the Holy Grail of the New World Order of geekdom.

Wow, what a jerk I was.

Technology does form a vital part of the modern enterprise. It is certainly not, in most companies, "overhead." Without computers, much of what any modern business does would be impossible, and of course many businesses are now utilizing computer-based technologies to service new markets and develop new products. Hey, most of the companies I've worked for use websites or other web-based technologies as a key part of their business plan.

But that doesn't mean that other parts of the company can be ignored. Yes, some are more overhead than others, which is why certain departments are, unfortunately, first against the wall when a recession hits. But all fulfill a role within the organization, and acting like they are beneath you just makes you look arrogant.

Without salespeople to sell the technology, there would be no money for those shiny servers. Without marketing people to get out word, nobody would know about the product and the techies couldn't pay their rent. Without editors or production or whoever actually adds content to the product, all those great frameworks that tech built would be empty frameworks, like a mile-high office building with no tenants. Without HR, you might not get paid on time, might not get your insurance card, might have to fill out tons of paperwork for your newly-hired sysadmin yourself. Without customer service, you'd have to field all those phone calls from irate non-technical people asking about the "cupholder" in their computer. And without management holding it all together, there would be no vision, no way to take your hard work, coordinate it with the efforts of others, and succeed in making money, which is the goal of business.

In short, a business is an organism, and while some parts of an organism are more important than others, without all of them working in synch, the organism is not operating at the greatest level of effectiveness. And because businesses compete, an organism not operating in top form is in greater risk of being killed by others.

Yes, if you are in a position to make your technical staff happier by providing to them certain perks that are more likely to result in them being happier, you should do so. Some technical people prefer some types of benefits, such as flexible work hours, programming books, etc. over other benefits, such as titles or money. But this is not universally the case, and I think the crux of the issue is this: you should know your employees and what motivates them.

And from the worker's perspective, you have to be realistic. Business has been around a lot longer than this newfangled "IT culture" that insists on a jeans and T-shirt dress code and lots of telecommutting. If you want to be successful in the business environment, you are probably going to have to play the game. That may mean dressing up. It may mean playing politics. It may mean going to meetings and understanding that sometimes, the technically-superior solution may not be what is best for the business for all kinds of reasons. It may mean accepting that business is all about the almighty dollar, and you have to couch your arguments and recommendations in terms of what helps the business make money, as opposed to what may be "cool." You can't sit in your cube and complain all day that "management doesn't understand me." If they don't, you need to figure out why, and you need to meet them halfway and understand them.

I'm still working on a lot of this. I like to think I've taken the first step but at least acknowledging that there are other needs in the business besides my preferences as a techie. Yeah, I like wearing jeans too, and I like having flexible hours, and I would prefer that we could always do what is technically best. But I understand that there are competing interests, and that I need to be here most of the time, and that sometimes wearing a nice shirt makes you look more professional and therefore more respectable.

Technology is a very important part of business in a way that it never has been before, but that doesn't give technical people the right to arrogantly call for extra-special treatment. If management wants to do that, great, but that's management's prerogative. If you want to be a successful member of a team, it may mean learning about business culture and existing within that framework.

What brought this little essay on is constantly reading articles out there on the interwub about how techies should be treated like rock stars, given preferential benefits, how business should adapt its culture to assimilate this new subculture. I'm not sure this is the best approach. Techies are valuable, but no more so than many other members of a team. If you prove that you are a superstar, you should be treated like a superstar, but a) not all techies are automatically superstars, and b) nothing gives you the excuse to act like a jerk. I think techies may need to accept that they, like everybody else, needs to learn to play the game if they want to get ahead.

Again, I'm still working on this. I can be a bit of a jerk and a primadonna sometimes. I have kind of a strong personality. But at least I'm looking at myself and admitting that that's not always a good thing.

General Stuff

Life is pretty good. I'm learning a lot. The job is going well. Kara is good, and we're going house shopping tomorrow morning. I am generally quite happy with life and the way things are going.

Posted by Mark at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)