UltraCrepidate

A call from former co-worker of mine prompted a few senses of annoyance and a research that lasted through the week. If anything, I am more interested in the world of finance than I used to.

It’s not that I feel above the person or arrogance like that, it was the fact that he called me as a representative of Primerica that sells the idea of using RRSP to earn money through income tax returns with an overall gain of 30% a year. 30%!!! I said? Yes 30% they claimed on their company brochure.

The truth is, that is probablly the result of one of their best year. What they failed to mention is that that percentage fluctuates and they actually only want to make you join them. Each person you bring into Primerica brings money to whoever brought you in. The biggest subtext that they failed to mention is that all RRSP withdrawl are subject to a 30% income tax…

Anyway, beside all this shfield, using RRSP to alleviate some tax and earn some money has been a well exploited idea forever. I found an article that explains everything you need to know about RRSP, you can read about it here.

“The smart people adapt to their surroundings.
The powerful people make their surroundings adapt to them.”
~some random quote from someone

The first layer of meaning I get is that powerful people is arrogant enough that people cannot change them and have to adapt to them.
The second layer is that the powerful people are strong enough to make people do what they want them to do

The third layer is that the powerful people realizes that the environment needs to be changed to facilitate the attitude that they want.

We are humen and our surroundings affect us.

My sales guy went on vacation and I haven’t been this scared to go to work for a while. The embrace of 20 email and 5 messages tend to turn a person’s heart to ice in the warm summer heat. Especially when this is 9AM on a Monday morning. I am no exception.
The day is a flurry of talking to people and getting people to talk to people. Desperately trying to get a picture of who’s talking to who and who wants what and why. In the blink of an eye, my day has already gone. I did not produce anything useful. No fun program to run, no cool new understanding about computer revealed. But things moved forward a bit. Do I feel accomplished? No.

Somehow somehow… I am busy again. I can feel the emotional numbness, the stress and and and… the different level of pissedoffness.
The fact that I am not bother to put any effor to my words is a good indication of that too. Or it just doesn’t matter as much compared to all the busy stuff that’s happening.

Work provides free tuition. So I am going back to school part time. Just have no idea what I want to take. I dare say that I miss school, but I miss it. Maybe I don’t know what I am getting myself into.

The final block for pure ambidexterity is writing. I can play computer games at 80% of my right hand’s skill and my single hand typing is actually equal to right hand.

I also might be going crazy because of how fast I am switching scenarios at work:

“Huh waht board prices? Yes that much, specials? Do you have money?

Does it do that resolution? Let me look it up a bit.

Can we do some fucked up technique like that? Maybe.

Code? Oh yeah I finished it. 200 lines nice and short. Don’t try to understand it though cause I only had time to copy and paste from other codes and make it work.

That deadline? What deadline? Sorry buddy it’s your deadline not mine.

Camera? Still stuck at customs, I can’t do jack without it.

What do you mean X-Ray resistant? The board actually get scanned by very strong xrays during operation? Yeah well you are crazy.

Can you please ask all the question at once? No? Why not? Confidential? Great

I can’t borrow this? Ok let me rephrase my question”

I suggest a new Murphy’s law. The more question you can answer, the more you’ll get.

After learning Visual Basic, I decided to have a go at making a program for excel that summarizes my spendings for me. I downloaded the .csv file from royal bank’s webiste and developped something that sort out each category based on user defined keywords and sums up the amount. You can then draw any graph you want based on the 2 columns of data produced. Enjoy:Financial Calculator for Royal Bank

Details of this program below:

Very messy 500 lines of code. I copied and pasted whenever I can from different free codes found on the net. So technically it is one of those use at your own risk and never redistribute for money code. Very little debugging is done since it’s a straight forward process. You paste your .csv file into the page called “Imported Data” and then click on the General form. There’s only 2 buttons, you can’t mess it up.

It only took me 3 days to start kicking ass in Halo while playing with my co-workers. Did I mention that I used my left hand to play? I massacred them with my right hand of course: 25 kills with 4 deaths.
So as a new self imposing rule to my life, I decided to do something differently everyday.

I didn’t expect her to be a workaholic who become obsessed about an unresolved problem… An unresolved “Programming” problem. Even worst is when she fixed a 7 year veteran’s code half hartedly in the short 30 minutes that she spent there.

I remember looking at her, my gaze going through the curves of her body with a tinge of intrigue. “Shit” I am in trouble.
The demographic of ballroom dancers is very simple. There’s the below 20 group where you have the amateur competitors and the above 30 where you get the professional teachers. And in between, you get spots of a few different ages.

I never thought about why this is and just took it in as the way it is. Then it dawned on me today when I looked at my swing teacher who’s about the same age as me. The bastards forbade amateur competitors to teach unless they declare themselves professionals. That about stopped any young adults from teaching dancing and earning money from the hobby that they spent so much time and money on.

I’ve tried to avoid reading the bible as best as I could. The main reason is the fear that there’d be some ultimate truth in there that will convert me to one of the devote christian worshipper. The notion scares me shitless.

I read the bible and along the line, my hope and fear vaporized. I don’t have to fear it anymore and along with that realization is the fact that the small hope of salvation dissappeared with it. It did not contain the answer that I seek, but rather, an answer that I used to sought and have somehow managed to answer through my digging of truth.

Too bad though.