Agave Mountain

Posted by Joe Turner at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments

"denial is not just a river in Egypt."

I just got back from a weekend in Atlanta.  As you may notice, my weekend ended today (Tuesday) thanks to what happened last night -- we got "The Bump."

We arrived at the airport in plenty of time, and sauntered to the gate just in time to be denied.  Northwest had overloaded the plane with mail, and started pulling people off the plane.

Although I have volunteered on many occasions to get bumped, this was the first time I have gotten bumped, when I didn't want to.

Our bag ended up making the flight but we didn't.  We were stranded in Atlanta without a clothes or toiletries.  By the time we walked back to the baggage office, they had handed out all of the stranded passenger toiletry kits.  Thankfully, the hotel gave us a toothbrush and shaver.  Still, we ended up spending $65 at the airport gift shop so we would have clean underwear and T-shirts to wear in the morning.

We had to wake up at 4:30 am, to catch the shuttle to the airport to make the 6:15 am flight.  My wife barely made it to work on time; I was late by several hours. 

I have sworn to never fly Northwest ever again, if I can avoid it.

Getting Less and Paying More

Last year well over  64,000 passengers were involuntarily "bumped," on top of 4.4 million pieces of mishandled luggage, and a 73.4% on-time performance.

Additionally, fares have risen.  Business class fares have jumped 12.4 % during the first half of February, while rental cars rates have jumped 20% each week this month (when compared to a year ago).  Hotel rooms rates jumped 5.9% in 2007 (source: msnbc).

It seems that the airlines are on a race to the bottom.  Just check out these "enhancements" which have taken place within the scope of the last 12 months:

• Last year, American and United announced that they are expunging accounts that hadn't had activity during the previous 18 months. 
• Beginning May 5, customers who fly United will be faced with a $25 fee for checking a second bag, to provide "...choice, flexibility and low fares."
• US Airways will no longer offer a 500 mile minimum on short trips.
• US Airways has announced it will charge $25 for a second bag, following United.

It makes me wonder what is in store for the future.

Labels: business travel

Posted by Joe Turner at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments

Last week I started looking for someone to give me a newer, better corporate logo. 

I considered posting a job on rentacoder.com, elance, or guru, but didn't really want to get burned with a crappy logo I wasn't satisfied with. 

Enter Logoworks.  Logoworks is a design shop that targets small business.  Packages range from $299 to $1,499.  They also offer custom designed stationary, glossy business cards, brochures, and even web site templates.

Dutifully, I started searching the Internet for complaints.  The only complaints I found were from graphic artists complaining about their low prices, and their business practice of farming out logo design to freelancers. 

Also, Logoworks was recently purchased by Hewlett-Packard which added some legitimacy in my mind, so I pulled the trigger.

They will take a $99 deposit and turn around and deliver a few design "concepts" for you to review.  You can walk away at that point, and just loose the $99, or continue to revise and commit the rest of the fixed price ($299+).

To be honest, I didn't like most of the design concepts (and my wife agreed).  Given the wide variety between the concepts, I think I would have been frustrated working with an overseas graphics designer.

Introducing Our New Logo

So I am proud to announce our new corporate logo:

It is much cleaner than my embarrassing attempt at a logo.  Here is the old logo that I designed myself is below:

Posted by Joe Turner at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

As seen on the Joel on Software forum (click HERE for the original post):

I am getting paid $75k (on a W2) for 20 hours a week.
W2 means they are spending $6k for FICA.  (And same w/ me)
I have opted out of HMO coverage. (getting it elsewhere)

They have agreed to convert me to consultant.
Any downside for me?
They are spending $75k + $6k FICA for a total of $81k

What should the annual consulting pay be?
Leave it at $75k? 

Will the extra deductions offset the extra FICA?
Note:  I will not W2 myself (from the S-corp) the entire $75k income.  (Note:  I need to pay both sides of FICA, so I would W2 maybe $20k)

First of all, let me say that $75k for 20 hours a week is a great job.  Good thing you posted as anonymous, otherwise your employer would be receiving lots of resumes (including mine *cough*).

I originally wrote a post (Calculating Equivalent Corp-2-Corp Rate) on this very question.  Convert your rate to hourly rate, and then crunch the numbers.  This should give you a MINIMUM rate.  If you are offered at or below this rate, you should insist on W2. 

As I said in the blog post, your costs will definitely be more.

Keep in mind that you will have additional expenses:

• incorporation filing fee
• yearly franchise or state corporate tax
• worker's compensation
• general business liability insurance

If you outsource your tax preparation to an accountant, you will also have to pay out approximately $500 for the 1120S and Schedule K each year. 

Good luck with your negotiations.

Posted by Joe Turner at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Even though I haven't had an active resume on the job boards for well over a year, I still receive a fair number of job solicitations and calls from recruiters.  This week, I counted five emails and several phone calls.  Three were for the same exact job down in Georgia. 

So I decided to change up and revise the standard "I'm on a contract" email to be a mini-marketing pitch for my new consultancy. 

Here is my new email template responding to unsolicited job solicitations:   

Thank you for contacting me about the position.  Unfortunately, I am not currently looking for any direct W2 employment right now; I am only considering corp-to-corp arrangements.

Last year, I founded Agave Mountain (http://www.agavemountain.com/), a consultancy / microISV created to provide customized software development, provide hourly software development services, and to showcase my primary focused skill areas:  C/C++, STL, Boost, Linux, Windows, embedded driver and applications development. 

I am more than happy to discuss what I can do for your client.  

My corporation incorporated in Delaware, registered to do business in Minnesota, and fully insured.

Thanks.

So far, it is working well.  I send the canned reply, label the email and archive it.  It is out of my email with little or no effort, yet I remain with a clean email inbox.

Simple, quick, and professional.

So why even respond to the flesh peddlers? 

I remember a tip given to me from a salesman, who did very well for himself (and founded several successful companies).  One of the things I noticed is that he would sometimes shift the conversation back to him or his product.  He always took the opportunity to market himself and his product.  

I thought I would start doing the same.

Posted by Joe Turner at 6:20 PM | Permalink | Comments

It has been a few weeks since I purchased my Mac Pro, and here is an update.

To recap, I looked to upgrade my development PC and start heavily using virtual machines for development and testing; I wanted a workstation class machine that would replace several existing computers. 

As a result, I purchased a Mac Pro with the following specs: Two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, 2GB memory (800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC), ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics with 256 memory, and a 320 GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive.  I also purchased a copy of VMWare Fusion.

My rationale was that this would be the last PC I would purchase for a very, very long time, and I would be able to run multiple VMs simultaneously, for development and testing.  Additionally, I would be able to multi-boot to Gentoo Linux or Windows if OS X turned out to be intolerable.   

My initial impressions:

• Compared to Dell and HP, the base configuration of the Mac Pro 8-core system is much cheaper  (with better specs) than the competition.  While this may change in the future, right now the Mac Pro (for an 8-core system) is simply the best deal around. Yes, it surprised me too.
• General impressions: The workstation is whisper quiet and extremely heavy. The mouse is terrible.  The paint on the top scratches easily (placing USB drives on top isn't recommended unless they have rubber feet). Also, the Mac Pro now comes with a Bluetooth transceiver built in (which wasn't obvious or advertised).

Ultimate  Developer's Rig?

So how does it rate for mission I chose it for?  Here are my opinions:

• I can rip a DVD to mp4, play an iTunes movie, download a bit torrent, while simultaneously compiling the kernel, gcc tool chain, and the system is still responsive -- and hovering around 80% CPU usage. 
• VMWare Fusion rocks. Pros: It has a mode (called "unity") which will break out Windows XP application windows and turns them into native OS X windows (scroll down to the youtube video for a demo).  You can cut and paste between applications on different operating systems.  Cons: doesn't support multiple monitors (i.e.., you can turn on unity and drag Internet Explorer from one monitor to another).
• 2GB of memory is simply not enough.  It works well for ripping DVDs and compiling, but when I activated Virtual Machines, the memory would get used up and the memory would be continuously paged out to disk.  Performance slowed.  Safari would just disappear.  Just running a few application natively, I was up to ~1.5 GB used.  I'm budgeting 2GB for the system plus 1 GB per VM.  I'm now trying to find a source for some inexpensive memory, because...
• The memory for the Mac Pro are PC6400 800MHz ECC FB-DIMMs and they are expensive. They require a heat sink because of thermal issues, and they also have to be installed in matched pairs. 
• I added two 500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration (they were on sale at for $99 at Circuit City) and moved my home directories to the RAID-1 set. 

Still, I have to say the system totally rocks. I have now installed and running:

• Subversion
• Cruise Control
• Windows XP VM (for Quickbooks, Microsoft LiveWriter, Visual Studio 2008, Office 2007)
• Gentoo VM for development and testing
• Vista VM for testing
• Fedora 8 VM for development and testing

Conclusions

I love the machine and am keeping it (after all, it was just too much work to convince my wife to go along with the purchase in the first place). However, would I recommend getting a Mac Pro for Mac/Linux/Windows development?

It depends.  To be honest, an 8-core system is really overkill for most developers unless you do hardcore computational, video  work, or need to virtualize in a big way. 

I chose not to add to my collection of decrepit PC pseudo build cluster and go down the path of virtual machines. The PCs I have are now exclusively for device driver development. 

For developers, the bottleneck is generally disk I/O.  Given my experience my advice would be:

• First spend your cash on multiple monitors.  Most likely this will give you the biggest productivity boost for the least amount of money. 
• Secondly, I have to say that it makes more sense to spend the cash on some good, fast disk drives, and a relatively fast CPU.

More Info

Here is a good demo of VMWare Fusion's Unity Feature:

And this should give you an idea of what the system can do:

Posted by Joe Turner at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments

This week, I discovered TripIt.  TripIt is a dead simple travel itinerary web service.  In a nutshell-- you forward email confirmations from a variety of rail, airline, hotel, and car rental sites to plans@tripit.com and a travel itinerary will be created automatically.  

But it is more than that -- you can invite friends or coworkers to view and collaborate on the itinerary.  You can also publish an ical calendar (think Google calendar) feed so friends, family, and coworkers know where you are.

I tried it with an upcoming trip and the service worked flawlessly, merging an airline confirmation with a rental car confirmation, to produce a unified itinerary. 

I have decided that I will be using it for all of my business related travel in the near future. 

A few random thoughts:

• For business travelers, I can see the value of this.  I can hand an employee their marching orders and tell them to add me to their business trip.  With no effort from me, I know have their flight number, schedule, and rental car reservation information.  Likewise, they can have access to mine.
• When my wife and I visit family, I always forward the flight information to my father who meets us at the airport.  Now I can just add him as a collaborator and he gets the details and changes automatically.
• Although I haven't tried it yet, it crossed my mind that a TripIt generated itinerary would be perfect to submit with a foreign business visa application -- just forward the emails to TripIt and print.   

The site is as simplistic as the idea.

The site's investors hope to make money on advertising and data mining, so someday there will be cluttered ads all over your itinerary, and they will probably mercilessly sell your private information.   However, for now, it is free and it does exactly what it promises to do.

Labels: business travel

Posted by Joe Turner at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Very often I can read here the opinion about assigning boring/low-level tasks to contractors (most recent example here: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.592674.8 ). To me - in Germany - the opposite is true in all the years I'm doing this kind of job. I'm most of the time hired for my particular/general experience. Up to the point, that Employees are a bit envious at times. Seems to be reasonable too, considering the amount of money put into me / the consulting companies. And a waste of money otherwise.

So, is this a general characteristic of US contracting?

It depends, and varies from company to company, contract to contract. Most contracts tend to be of the staff augmentation type -- temporary help to get a product out the door, unless you have a specialized skill set.

Personally, I really don't care-- It's a job.

When one manager asked me what I wanted to do, I simply told her that I would do anything she wanted so long as she signed my time sheets and paid me. Of course, I had to add, "...except anything that is illegal or Java... but I'm flexible on the illegal part provided we renegotiate my rates."

To me, a contract is just a temporary job, and I'm basically a technical prostitute. I'll do whatever you want with a smile; there will be plenty of time later to cry myself to sleep, and repress those memories (I can't believe I fixed that JSP code, I feel so dirty...).

Whenever I run into a difficult personality or situation, I just try to think about what I could be doing in a few months-- sitting on a beach. After all, it is just a temporary job. Get back to work, and finish one more document, debug the horrible XML code, because tomorrow will be a better day.

And it will. One thing I have learned is that managers, no matter how preferential they want to be to their own employees will ultimately start doling out the hardest work to the developers who are the most productive, and they will generally fight to keep them.

My original six month contract has been extended again, and the client wants to keep me until the end of the year, that will be a total sum of two years... as I look at the snow falling outside in arctic Minnesota winter... I think about someplace tropical.

Labels: Consulting

Posted by Joe Turner at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments

• If you have a Starbucks card, you get 2 free wi-fi hours.
• AT&T lowered the price to $4 a day for two hours of access, compared with T-Mobiles $6-10 per hour charge.
• T-Mobile will be a roaming partner onto the AT&T network through a side deal; hotspot subscribers will still be able to access the hotspots.

Labels: Business, business travel

Posted by Joe Turner at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments

Someone sent me a link to officesnapshots -- a web site that collects photographs of offices in  Silicon Valley. 

As I scanned through the offices I was appalled.  The prevailing theme in Silicon Valley start-ups is to cram developers into shared open environments where privacy, space, and quiet are nonexistent. 

It has been well documented for a long time that proximity kills productivity, at least when it comes to deep thinking professions.  I learned early on in my career that I was most productive (in the "zone") when everyone had already gone home. 

Quest for Solitude

I know first hand how noise, phone calls, interruptions, and intrusions by coworkers can damage productivity. 

A few of the things I have tried:

• Foam ear plugs don't work.  They are great for muffling explosions and gunshots, but let through the higher frequencies and they are uncomfortable.
• Sony MDR-NC10.  These noise canceling in-ear earphones worked well.  I purchased a pair in an airport shop during a business trip.  However, I found them uncomfortable for long periods of time.  My ears would hurt after a few hours.
• Koss headphones.  I've tried a few "over the ear" types.  All had horrible passive noise cancellation.
• Shure E2c Sound Isolating Earphones.The Shure E2C earphones were highly recommended.  I plunked down over $100 on these (now they are selling around $60).  After reading the marketing materials, I thought these would block out most of the sounds around me.  They didn't.  I tried each of the sleeves (soft, ultra-soft, and foam) to no avail.

Last week I purchased a set of Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones at the Bose Store in the Mall of America.  I was simply fed up with a never ending stream of yammering, sneezing, giggling coworkers that intruded on my attempted productivity.

So far they are the best headphones that I have every owned.  I am now wearing them several hours at a time during the day. 

The only downside are the consumables.  The headphones are powered by a single AAA battery.  After the battery runs out, the headphones simply do not work anymore.  A battery lasts about 20 hours.  In my unscientific usage, a rechargeable AAA battery seem to last me about two days of heavy usage. 

Having the ability to tune out the rest of the world and focus on my tasks is priceless.  This might be the cheapest productivity boosting gadget that I have ever purchased.

Posted by Joe Turner at 9:13 PM | Permalink | Comments