log entries of timotheus

It is the end of the month. I realize I haven’t been doing a whole lot since I arrived from Baltimore, not work related anyway. I have done a fair amount of reading though, so that is good. Still, I need to get back on my schedule I was on for most of September, which was a minimum 5 hrs of work stuff a day.

My first thing on the agenda tomorrow morning is to take a little while and map out some milestones I want to accomplish this month. When I have them, I will post them here for all to see. Maybe some accountability is good for me?

Weather Info for Mobile Devices

This morning I worked for several hours to bring an old application I wrote up to speed. It is a page for mobile devices that takes the zipcode from the user, and shows the current weather conditions, as well as a three day forecast. The page with the weather for a specific location can be bookmarked, and whenever it is hit it refreshes with the newest data.

The site pulls the data from the Weather Channel’s RSS feeds. My older version was manually parsing the entire XML file, and generally was a totally backwards way to do it. I now am using the SimpleXML functions to traverse the RSS feed, and pull out the data I wanted.

You might wonder why I made it in WML instead of xHTML, and my reason was so it could be used on even basic cellphones that have WAP access.

Let me know what you think.

There are people who have soul and you can see it in their eyes. When I say soul here, I mean that spark of creativity and original thought. It is what makes one unique; the soul. The issue is, their soul is flaming in their eyes while their mouth stays mute; they have thoughts on life, or a topic of some sort yet they are unable to express themselves. The ideas and thoughts just smolder, never getting farther than their eyes, and in moments those ideas flicker away.

How does one get better at expressing their original or unorthodox thoughts? I used to think it came with age. That as you gained experience in life (years you have lived) you naturally develop the skill to give some voice to your thoughts in an intelligent manner. I don’t believe that to be true any longer.

If you are not careful, you will fall back to the comfortable territory of common sense, and reduce your ideas to washed out cliche and metaphor. That is why most people, as they get older, begin to agree with the notion that, “There is nothing new under the sun”. They take their ideas, those random flutters of creativity, and find the common sense saying or proverb that sort of fits it. They force their ideas into these ill-fitting molds. When they look back they just see rhetoric, and their desire for original thought fades, and the soul in their eyes dies out. They are now just husk bodies for society; that lowest common denominator of intelligence.

So if age and experience don’t bring about the ability to connect the souls ideas into an informative dialogue, then what will? The answer, I think, lies in practice. The beginning attempts to do so will be stuttering and clumsy, but take heart in those brief moments of insight, where for an instant your soul has a direct link with your audience. My thoughts on philosophy and other ideas still come out of my mouth full of uncertainty and confusion. Though I try to explain myself, I don’t always make sense, but I am working on becoming better at it. But those brief glimmers of clarity give me the motivation to keep trying.

Saturday was my sisters wedding. Everything went fine, nobody tripped or anything! Here are some of the pics, more to come soon.

Hope and I before the wedding, I for some reason look like a mob boss.
Doing the Vows
Group Picture

I will try to link to the sites that I received information on. A lot of this info came from my Mom, who is an accountant and who I grilled for thirty minutes last night.

First off, if you earn more than $433 from your self-employment, then you should be paying the Self-Employment Tax and Estimated Taxes. (See the IRS site on Self-Employed Individuals Tax Center page for more info) Failure to pay Estimated Taxes quarterly can result in fees.

Next is something that needs to be explained, but the easiest way to do this is with an example:

Tom designs a website for Underhill Associates. Tom isn’t very good with graphics, so he has his two friends, Bert and Bill help with that part. Tom gets paid $1000 from Underhill. He turns around and gives $250 to both Bert and Bill.

(Queue Sesame Street-ish music) What are the tax implications?

Tom has to declare all $1000 as income. Now the good news is he can say the $500 in labor he paid to Bert and Bill was an expense. (And you pay taxes on your net income; income minus expenses). But lets add to the scenario a bit..

Tom does two more jobs at the same rate, with Bert and Bills help. They each get paid $250 per job, so now they have recieved $750 from Tom this year.

What are the tax implications?

Since Tom is paying over $600 to the subcontractors, Tom will need to give each of them a 1099-MISC form at the end of the year. (See this great article)

Now Tom is thinking, what if I turned to stone or something, and couldn’t carry on the business. All the billing is coming from my account, and in my name. Could I just set up a seperate checking account or something that all the billing is attached to, so if I was stone, Bert and Bill could carry on the work?

Sadly not without forming a corporation. A bank account needs to be tied to an entity. This is either a person, two people (joint account), or a corporate entity like a business.

I hope this has been informative!

I am currently over halfway through my visit to CA. I flew in on the 24th of September, worked a day then traveled to Berkeley to hang out with maiki, Susan, Justin, Kimi and Jason. Colin came up for a day too. It was really great to see everyone, and to work on getting our main site done. I also had some really good design talks with maiki, who gave me some really good inspirational ideas. Specifically, I had a moment of insight on my finance app. It needs to be easy to use, and obviously helpful to people. I was trying to push some of my financial beliefs onto users with the interface I was using. It will be very basic, with an ‘advanced interface’ option later on.

I got back to Sacramento on the 1st. I worked the next day, went to lunch with some co-workers which was nice. The 2nd, I had some errands to do around town, and those were all put on hold when my tire on the Crown Vic decided to leak air? It was covered under the Costco warrenty, but that was 2 hours out of my day. Wasn’t fun.

Saturday I spent some time with Greg. We got lunch, then went over Eric’s house and let Chino and Kade (dogs) play around outside. Jenn, Teresa, Elly and Jeff met up with us later on and we went to Sutter St for some dinner. Afterward, Greg had to go home, but I stayed out for a while, visiting with old friends. Got home late that night.

Since then, I’ve been mostly working, though I think today is my last day. I picked up some books from my old library, and I am going to try to read them all before I leave. I realized my reading has actually declined since I moved, which is a travesty!

All I have coming up is my sisters wedding on saturday, then I fly back on the 14th. I’m looking forward to getting home. I miss my house, my friends and family, and green growing things!

I realize this post isn’t very exciting, but it is more of a log then anything. I want to be able to look back at this trip and know what I did.