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Business is hard. Part 1.

I am behind on my #P52 by a couple weeks so I am going to be catching up over the next few days.

Self help books and thousands of books on the Internet would have you believe that starting and running a business is easy, that it doesn’t take much, and that you will be better off for it. Web based businesses are touted as the ultimate business venture, you can make large sums of money building Web sites and web services for people, because you’ve a book on PHP and MySQL…what else is there to the web?

That is bullshit.

Starting a business is easy, building value is hard, in the State of Utah you simply go to http://business.utah.gov choose your business name, type, and enter the required information. Once you have completed those steps you pay your fees and get your FEIN from a link on their page and you’re set. You have a running business. Now what the hell are you going to do?

Now you, if you believe the hype, start working on your gold mine, Web sites, right…

Chances are you are still working a day job so that you can pay your bills which limits your time working on your own projects so you need to work extra hard if you want your own business to succeed. If you get a couple entry projects chances are you will realize you didn’t know exactly how some integral piece of the project works. If you are extremely unlucky you are also a student, have a family, or both.

Now the problem of time management rears its ugly head: how are you going to spend every moment of your day? There are not enough hours in the day to do what you need to do. Here’s how you might spend a day:

  • 8 – 10 hours at the job that pays the bills
  • 4 hours for school
  • 1 – 2 hours for homework

That is a total of 13 to 16 hours, now add sleep 11 – 8 hours, you haven’t eaten no time has been factored in for commutes or waiting…and you haven’t spent any time with any one other than the people you were in direct contact with at one of the above places. Of course, you will have days off or days without school so there are brief times when you can catch up on things that you are not getting enough of, like sleep or homework time.

How long can you viably sustain this pace? How many days of straight work before you are just too tired to do anything? What about support? If you *have* customers there is going to be a time when they need help or have questions and, if, you get a client from hell you will spend *a lot* of time dealing with his/her issues.

The time table above also doesn’t add any time for your new business or recreation. What do you cut out to make room for everything? What part of your life suffers? Who do you cut-out?

I still don’t know.

“The Book of Eli” – don’t waste your money. *spoilers*

I normally don’t go to the theatre to watch movies (I have a nice size TV and a good surround system) but, occasionally, it is nice to go to the theatre and watch a movie. This was not one of those times.

Watching the trailers for “The Book of Eli” had me believe 3 things:

1. Denzel is a badass

2. He has a magic book

3.  Gary Oldman wants to take it from him

The first half of the movie is spent on establishing my number 1 assumption with Denzel fighting and killing dozens of people with a sword, gun, hands, and what ever else he could use. At the end of everyday he spends time reading assumption number 2. After he reaches the town that Gary Oldman runs the movie starts to go down hill as we learn that this book is “The Bible” not just any old magic book. (queue boredom) Gary Oldman wants to use the words of “The Bible” to make un-educated people follow him, tricking them into believing it, and thus set himself up as king of the world (how early Christian of him).

*More spoilers*

From there the movie gets boring and predictable, the only reason I didn’t leave (I’ve never walked out on a movie before) is that I wanted to find out what was out “west”. Turns out that “west” was Alcatraz where Alex (from “A Clockwork Orange) is a crazed looking old man who prints books to give back to the world. The only real plot twists from the middle to the end of the movie was:

1. The book is in braille

2. Denzel was blind the whole move (but God let him see so that the book could make it “west”, yay God!)

The book doesn’t make it “west” but luckily Denzel memorized the entire book so he could repeat it word for word when he got there (I know, right?).

Summary:

The movie, from the middle on, is shit. The first half is good for action. If you are going to watch it, wait until there is a decent torrent – there is no point wasting your money.