Back After Some Maintenance

Sorry for the VERY long break.  Part of it was me being busy but a lot of it was the fact that my hosting company decided to stop supporting my blog and I had to scramble to figure out what I was going to do.  I didn't really want to update the blog while the situation was not settled so I avoided making any posts or responding to any comments.  I moved over the comments that got lost in the migration to the best of my ability.  This site still has some issues after the move but I will try to address this over the next few weeks.

Karma is a Bitch

When I was at Microsoft, I worked on the billing system for my product.  This was mostly an integration effort with another Microsoft team that specialized in payments.   One of things that I worked on was trying to resolve a lot of the problems that our customers had with giving us money.  For a myriad of reasons, we did not make it very easy for people to hand money to us.  Many of these problems were not ours but that of our partners.  You would think that something as simple as handing someone money would be easy but it is not and our customers would constantly get tripped up just trying to do this one simple thing.

Well, this just bit me in the ass.  I have another website that I use for personal reasons.  Microsoft was handing free domain names and free hosting when I was looking to get it so I signed up with them.  My needs were relatively modest so I was perfectly happy to let them handle it.  Well it is time for renewal and the free offer is up so they want me to start paying for the service.  I have no real issue with this so I tried to log in to figure out how much it would cost me to renew.

Well, I spent at least 15 minutes clicking every possible link but absolutely nowhere can I find information on how much it is going to cost me to renew this domain.  How stupid is that?  All I want is the price.  This is the most basic thing in any sales transaction.  Tell me the friggin' price. But this piece of information is NOWHERE to be found.  For all I know, they could charge me a million dollars to do this renewal.

The saddest part of this is that this is what almost all of Microsoft's online applications use to get paid.  Anyone have any thoughts on why Microsoft can't put a successful online strategy together?  If you can't get billing right, what the hell?

Thank God For Google Cache?

I did a stupid thing and deleted my last post.  But thanks to Google cache, I was able to recover that post in its entirety.  While I'm really glad I have the ability to recover from my own stupidity, makes me realize just how permanent the internet is.

Careful What You Delete

Some of you may notice that my site looks a little off.  That is because I made the classic mistake of trying to clean up some stuff and deleting the folder that contained all my Wordpress theme info.   At first, I did not know what to do since I did not think I had the theme backed up anywhere.  Lucky for me, I am bad about cleaning up my desktop and found the original unaltered theme lying around.  Over the years, I have made several modifications to the theme to get it where I wanted it.  I have spent the last several minutes getting it close, but now am too tired to try and completely fix it.

But rather than try and fix up the theme, I am going to use this as an opportunity to pick another theme anyway and revamp the way this site looks.  When life gives you lemons ...

Coming to A Blog Near You: Structure!

I've spent the last year blogging about whatever happens to come across my mind that day.  I admit, it hasn't been the most ordered way to go about things and I think I could use a nice kick in the pants when it comes to blogging.  To that end, I'm really going to try and focus this blog in the coming year and make sure I blog about the things that interest me (and my readers) on a more regular schedule.  To that end this is what I will attempt blog about:

Mondays: Mondays mean it is back to work, so expect me to talk about career advice and other things

Tuesdays: Probably one of my favorite topics, our government and the effect on our lives.

Wednesdays:  Economics.  It pervades so much of our lives, so I'll discuss some sort of economic concept and how it effects us day to day.

Thursdays: What's going on in the stock market and what I plan on doing about it

Fridays: Won't write every Friday, but when I do, it will be about something completely random that has little if anything to do with any of the other topics

Saturdays: Taking a day off

Sunday: Something personal.

I will not strictly stick to the schedule, I may change my mind if something else catches my attention that day, but I will   Let me know what you think

2008, a Look Back

I've had this blog a little bit over a year.  In that year, I will admit I haven't done a heck of a lot to try and grow this site.  I would like to make the excuse that my new job has been much more demanding then I would have realized.  I could argue that I have done really well in my financial goals by putting my focus there rather than to focus on this site.  But in the end, it would just be excuses.  It would all be true and valid but I for one do not like it when people make excuses, so I will not be making them here today.

However, despite this lack of focus in building this site, I am somewhat impressed I have blogged as much as I have.  I have a little over 200 post for the year.  That's no small feat and means I'm averaging about a post every week day.  I hope to do even better next year.  More on that to come.  I decided I would look back at what I wanted to accomplish with this website and see how far off I veered.

1. Double my $20,000 - I gave up on this one just a few month into the year.  I just didn't have the time to do it and in reality, I'm sure I would have failed at it given how poorly the market performed.  I would have done better then the market, I probably would have even made money in the money I was trading, but I would not have gotten anywhere close to doubling the money, that is for sure.


2. Develop another source of Income - I did not get to this one either.  Sad really.  It was something I really really wanted to do.  I make a nominal amount through this site, but just barely enough to cover my yearly cost so nothing much to speak of here.


3. Watch my basket more carefully - This one I have actually done thanks in no small part to this website and the discipline it has made me have.  Still, I lost track of a stock or two and held on to a few I probably should not have.  But everyone had losers this year and I'm chalking this one up to the bad market.


4. Spend more money - This one was the crazy one.  Easy for some, hard for me.  I did loosen up the purse strings ever so slightly.  I bought myself a 50" Plasma TV , a new Digital SLR camera, and a host of things for the apartment (including upgrading the apartment itself).  I even bought an engagement ring.    Admittedly the last one should not count as I would have done it regardless of my decision to spend more money or not but the first few are definitely a departure from me and my frugal ways.  All said, it was a lot of money for me.  Does it prevent my fiance from calling me frugal?  Nope.  She is probably right.  I still skimp and save probably more than I should given our income level.  But in the end, it always comes down to the fact that I rather save now and retire early later.  Then again, with the way our economy is going and the reaction of our government, they may make that impossible.

So all in all, not a very successful year from the blog perspective. It was a very successful year for so many other reasons.  I got the job under control now, where before I was miserable at times.  I got back to California and could not be happier with that move.  And of course, I got engaged!  I honestly could not ask for much more of a successful year.  Well, that is until we turn the calendar to 2009 ...

A Refocusing

I've done some deep thinking this weekend about a lot of different things.  One of the things I thought a lot about was this site.

I started this site out with the stated goal that I wanted to take my money and find some way to double it within a year.  As any regular reader has realized, this journey has been sidetracked for any number of reasons, most notable of which is that my situation in life has changed considerably in the five months since I started this journey.  Back then, I had all the time in the world as I was voluntarily unemployed and was rather enjoying it.  But being the workaholic that I am, I admit I was itching to get a new job and start on the next challenge.

That challenge came much sooner than I could have expected, and it flipped my world upside down causing me to move back to LA.  So here I am now, three months later, and barely made a dent in my Double Journey.  So what now?  Do I pretend that I can find some way to do this in the few months that I have left?  Do I just abandon the whole idea and move on?

Well, I can't just quit.  And to be honest, I really do like blogging and  running this site.  I've learned a few things, even learned a few things that have helped me at work, and I plan to continue this site.  However, I probably need to refocus the site.  I need to come to grips with the fact that short of taking the money and betting on black, I'm not going to find a way to do this in the time frame I originally laid out.

So I will keep doing what I've been doing.  I'm going to continue to blog and I'm going to continue to find ways to try and make money.  I'm just not going to put on an artificial time line of a year to go do it.   Is it going to take me two years, five years, ten years?  I'm not sure.  For those who have come along with me so far, please continue to do so.  I will find some way to make this happen, and I could still use all the help and encouragement I could get.  I'm just not going to make it my main focus.  I've actually done well in terms of making money by not trying to make money.

All my life I've focused on working hard and doing a great job with the belief that money would take care of itself.  So far, it has.

Losing the Battle

Seems like adding reCaptcha didn't really do much for me in regards to fighting comment spam.  Seems that most of the comment spam I get comes in the form of Trackbacks which reCaptcha can do nothing about.  Even after I put up reCaptcha I was still averaging over 100 spam comments a day.  Couple that with the fact that kirah complained that her comment got eaten and she didn't even notice it, and my original fear proved correct.  I burdened my legitimate users without adding any real protection.

I will have to go another way to fight the spam.  I suppose I can just let Askimet do its job.  It catches most if not all of the trackback spam.  Just annoying that I have to sometimes sit through it and look to see if any legitimate comments got through.

War Against Comment Spam

In my last post, I openly wondered why I get so much comment spam.  It was amazing to me that a small site like mine could be the target of so much spam.  Thankfully, pyrochild left a comment and directed me to a wordpress plugin called reCaptcha.  I'm going to test drive it out for a few days and see how it is.  Hopefully my spam will go way down without annoying anyone who wants to leave a comment.  So please, by all means, tell me what you think.  If you have any issues with it, leave a comment.  Well, hopefully it doesn't block you from leaving a comment :)

At first I was a little annoyed that the program ask you to solve two different words.  But then, after reading the site, I discover that one word is known, and is used to verify that you are indeed human.  The other one is used to help with digitizing old books.  So not only are you leaving a comment on my blog, but you are helping the world become more literate.  All the more reason to leave lots of comments.

New Look

No, you aren't going crazy. Despite being only about four weeks in, I decided to go with a different look to the blog. I prefer the two side column look over the one column look I had before. Hopefully, this should be it when it comes to changing the look of the site overall. It actually took me all day to get it to look just the way I wanted even though changing a Word Press theme should be as simple as a mouse click. Maybe that doesn't say very much about my intelligence ...

Budgeting time

One of the thing I find myself struggling with is how to appropriately budget time for this project. With a goal as nebulous as "make money by any and all means necessary" you can sink a lot of time into trying to make something work and at the same time feeling like you didn't accomplish all that much. Despite the fact that I'm not working, and already have my next job lined up, I find that I feel very busy all the time because I'm thinking about this site. How can I get traffic up? Does my design look right? What should I write about next? Etc.

Lucky for me I am a program manager. We are used to dealing with ambiguity and hectic project schedules. But still I find, when you are doing something for yourself, people like myself will tend to overextend themselves. I am not going to try and budget my time better over the next few weeks. This is going to become absolutely critical as I start my new job and I don't have all the time in the world to devote to this journey. So starting today, I'm only going to devote one or two hours during the week to this, two or three hours on the weekend. It will be focused work rather than the kind of helter-skelter approach I have taken so far. My primary focuses will be:

1. Drive traffic up - This includes features added to the website to do this as well as visiting other people's blogs


2. Pick stocks -Since I won't be trading as frequently, I don't need to spend as much time poring over my stocks. Also, I have gotten most of what I need to learn to analyze charts down, just need to apply it now.


3. Writing - I'm going to concentrate most of my writing on the weekends, and then space out my post during the week.


4. Coming up with other money making ideas - Last but certainly not least. Will set aside at least one of my sessions per week to try and come up with something I haven't tried yet.


5. Working on my website - It is for the most part set up now and the way I want it to be. Will work no more than once a week making improvements or tweaking the site from here on.

That's my project plan, hopefully I can stick with it now. Do you have any ideas on how I should budget my time or things I should be focused on? How about you, have you found you are spending too much time on your website?

Going From Good To Great

Jenny gave me a book a few years ago called Good to Great by Jim Collins.  When she gave it to me she said, "I saw this on the shelf, and I just thought of you."  It was one of the nicest compliments I ever got.

While the book is mainly how good companies become great companies, it has made me think about how I can personally make the jump from good to great.   I recognize, and am thankful, that I have a good life.  I've gotten to the point where I am in a great relationship, have awesome friends, a new job that excites me, lots of savings, and no debt.  It's hard not to be happy in this situation, and I am.  :)

However, even though I'm happy, I'm rarely if ever content.   I have started reading a lot of similar blogs about personal finance and jobs.  While I really enjoy them as I think I can add a lot to them because of  my own personal experience, they are all focused on getting to where I am today.  How do I make it to the next step?  How do I go from good to great?  Where is the information on how to do this?

When Tyler talked about finding your niche on the blogosphere, it got me thinking where would I find my niche.  Certainly not in the "make money online" space or the personal finance space.  Those are pretty crowded areas.  What isn't crowded is the space I'm looking for,  people who have found success but want to take the next step.  I know I'm not alone in this.  Rick is trying to get there with me (and while I have a good head start, I think he will beat me to the finish line) as are most of my friends.  Hopefully, as we go on this journey together, we can figure out just what it takes to go from good to great.

Adsense Videos

As I was looking around my Adsense site, I noticed that there was now an option for a video option courtesy of YouTube. I have thus far only done a small adsense section in the lower right corner of my blog, but was curious to see what the Adsense/YouTube add would actually look like. So I'm putting the code here to see what it looks like. I'll post it up for a while, and share my thoughts on it after I see how it really works.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

Update:

Finally got this to work, but had to do a few things to make sure Javascript works in a Wordpress Post. It was surprisingly hard to figure out how to do this. So if anyone else wants to figure out how to make an adsense Video script work in wordpress you just have to do the following

1. Read this about Javascript and Wordpress. Specifically the section about Javascript in Post.


2. Download and install the text control plugin.


3. Set it so that the post is not formatted


4. Plugin the Script that YouTube gives you. Use the "code" section of the post.


5. Do not re-save the work as soon as you paste the code. Wordpress formats this for some reason, breaking the post.

Not a huge fan of this. Not sure how one would use it to integrate it into your site. Am I supposed to have a big section to the side to host this video? I also can't control the content on it at all so how do I know my readers would be interested in it? It's kind of big and obtrusive, unlike traditional adsense ads and the adsense area is kind of small in comparison to the video so not sure how well it will be as an advertising section. I don't see how I would use it on my site, but I'll search around and see if I can find anyone who actually does something creative or useful with this new ad format.

Slight Change in Direction

After doing some serious thinking (didn't I say I always think a lot after talking to my friend) I've decided to make a slight course adjustment. Like any journey, you find things on the way, and new obstacles are presented to you which will make you rethink your strategy. A little more than two weeks in, I've had both happen to me.

The first, and probably most significant thing, is that I've decided to take a new job in Los Angeles. While I'm very excited about the opportunity, it greatly affects my ability to execute on my strategy for multiple reasons. I had actually planned on taking some more time off from the working world. Partially to just take a break, partially to get this project up and running. I had been interviewing with a couple of companies without any real intention to take the job. I was doing it to keep my interviewing skills sharp. Ideally, I wouldn't have even considered jobs until after the first of the year. But when the right job comes along, you have to take it, and it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Of course, that means I have a lot less time to come up with my strategy and to execute it. Active trading is out the window as there is no way I'll be able to monitor stocks closely enough to get in and out of positions when I should while simultaneously starting a new job. That doesn't mean I'm not going to put my money to work in the market, I just can't take the same approach I would have.

There is more data to suggest this is the right course of action. Despite the appearance of inactivity with the money, I've actually been monitoring the market and testing a few of my strategies without putting my capital at risk. Most of my strategy would have been positive (which would be good considering how down the market has been in the last month) but it would not get me close to what I need to do. It was a short time frame, so that doesn't mean too much, but at the same time I know I can't do this with a full-time job on top of it.

Despite this, THE DOUBLE JOURNEY IS STILL ON. I'm not one to put out a goal and then stop before I accomplish it. I will still attempt to end up with $40,000 on Dec. 18th 2008. I'm just going to have to find a different way to do it. I'll get it partially through the market, but it is going to be a much smaller focus than it would have been otherwise. This site will have a slight change in tone. I still want to keep it up, and I still plan on blogging regularly about my progress, but in between my ideas I will focus on some other topics that hopefully you will all find more interesting. I love finance, I love talking stocks, but in the end, it can be a dry read.

The secret to a great blog, and great writing in general, is to write about what you know. If you write about something you are passionate about, and you write it well, people will come read. I'm passionate about a few things. My relationships, money, technology, basketball, and of course my job. I think I'll leave my girlfriends and friends out of it, since I'm not so sure I could tell people how I've been able to get so lucky in this department. Technology has been done in a lot of different places and I don't think I could do better than Engadget or Gizmodo. We have already been over the money idea. Tyler already has a basketball blog and will tell you it's hard to keep up. Besides, I might throw something at my screen if the Lakers keep losing and I'm writing about it. Since I just bought this computer, and I love the huge monitor I got with it, I want to avoid that situation.

That leaves me blogging about my job and my career. I actually end up talking to a lot of my friends about their job and I love to provide job advice. I've been relatively successful in this part of my life and feel I have a lot to offer in this area. Since I'm recently unemployed, and felt I had a pretty successful job search, I will start off with that and see where it goes. I think its a subject with a lot of interesting areas to explore from finding the right job, getting the offer, and dealing with headaches once you arrive. Since I and so many of my friends struggle with these issues on a daily basis, I think it would be at the very least, entertaining and informative.

About Me

Most of the people reading this blog right now know who I am. But over time, that will probably change. So to those who don't know me let me tell you a little something about myself.

I'm a twenty-nine year old, Asian-American, male. I live in Seattle but was born and raised in sunny Southern California. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Valencia, home of the orange and of course Magic Mountain. I ended up going to an Ivy League school, where I spent four years studying about supply-and-demand and how to traverse a binary tree. I ended up in NYC after college, working for a consulting firm, but decided it wasn't for me (the city and the job) . So I packed it up and went back to Southern California.

I took a job as a programmer for a small little outfit. It was some of the best times of my life and I met lots of friends who I still have today (and are probably reading this blog). Unfortunately, that little project failed, and they laid off most of the company. I however remained behind, and even got a significant promotion to boot. I stayed on for several more years, and even though I was one of the last people hired on that original project, I was the very last person to leave (the second to last person beat me out by a couple of days).

One of the people I met at that company convinced me it was a good idea to go work at another small software company. I had some good experiences there and learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that I didn't want to work there, and so I quit. I am now unemployed and working on this blog. I went from a six-figure salary, to this. Earning exactly ZERO. I have no real expertise to do what I'm trying to do here. I am nothing more than an amateur stock picker and a tech geek, so this is as new to me as it is to you.

That's me in a nutshell. But if you want some more random information here it is:

• I have one brother and one sister, I'm the youngest.


• I am in a relationship of over two years with a girl I met on E-harmony (it works!)


• I love eating Sushi, even though I hated the thought of it until I was 24 years old.


• I have a cat which I found on my porch one night. I am very allergic to him.


• I love playing basketball, and am I devout Laker fan.


• I'm right handed, but can only palm a basketball with my left hand.

How I Got This Idea

Feeling kind of nauseous all day yesterday and today. Not sure why, perhaps a stomach flu, perhaps the thought of losing $20,000 is getting to me. So this post isn't going to be too long.

Really quick, wanted to touch on what gave me this crazy idea. I have a friend, his name is Rick, and we worked together when I was employed by the Evil Empire. He produces a Free Photoshop alternative called Paint.NET. If you know Rick, you know he talks about it all the time. And one of the things he loves to talk about is how he can actually make money off a program he gives away for free or how he can actually increase the amount of money he can make by doing X, Y, or Z. Thanks to people like Google and Ad Sense, this has become a real viable alternative. And then there are people like John Chow, and a host of other people who make money off of just blogging. It's crazy but it's true.

So Rick likes to bug me to go start up my own website. I had been reluctant to go do it because I honestly did not have a lot of free time to work on it. But all that changed about a month ago when I decided to quit my job. Now I have too much free time so needed some sort of creative outlet. So about two weeks ago, I said what the hell. I didn't want to just start some random blog, I wanted it to have a purpose and something that people might actually want to read about. So I came up with DoubleJourney. A nice simple idea that is easy to understand and hopefully interesting to follow.

Got to go rest right now. I've been trying to start some books I have on trading stocks, but haven't felt up to actually reading any of them yet. Hopefully, with a little more rest, I can make some progress.

The Goal

So what is this crazy thing I'm going to do? Like I have said, I'm going to take $20,000 and try and make it $40,000. I'm going to do this all in the span of one year. For the sake of total accuracy, I plan on doing this over 400 days. Why 400 days and not exactly one year? I'm doing this for two reasons. First, I need about a month to set some stuff up anyway and collect my thoughts. Also 400 days means I have to average a nice round $50 a day to meet my goal.

That gives me a deadline of December 18, 2008.

At this point, I'm not sure how I'm going to go about this. That is part of the fun of writing this blog. My initial idea is to venture into something I know about, and that's the stock market. Getting a double in the market in only one year is hard, very hard. It means I'm probably going to have to take some risk that I normally wouldn't. Then again, I haven't been doing so great in the market lately so maybe having a completely different strategy will do me some good. Hopefully, if this blog ever becomes popular enough, I'll be able to monetize it somehow. So if you want to help me, make sure you come back and read often.

Now to lay down some ground rules.

1. Everything I do must be legal - kind of a no-brainer, but worth calling out explicitly


2. If it's legal and ethical, it's fair game - No matter how crazy or stupid something might sound, if it will get me closer to my goal, I'll look into it


3. To count toward the goal, it must be the money doing the work, not me directly - That is, I can't count anything I do at my day job toward my goal. It wouldn't be any fun if I went out and "earned" the money.


4. I have to count any and all expenses I incur along the way against my goal - For example, I had to pay for my domain name and web space for this site. That means I'm already almost $100 in the hole.


5. My living expenses don't count - If I had to count paying my rent against my goal, I'm not sure I would ever make it out of the hole. So for this experiment, living expenses are not deducted.

If anyone has a brilliant idea, I'm all ears.  At this point, I'm prepared to lose the entire $20,000, so if you have any idea, no matter how crazy, feel free to suggest it.

The Beginning

The answer is $20,000.

It is the question that is more interesting.

One of the things I constantly found myself talking about with my friends is “that idea”. You know what I’m talking about. It's the idea that is going to make it big for you. It's that idea that is going to eventually free you from your 9-5 job. But the problem for me was that most of it was always just talking. Even the talking wasn't all that useful, because in the end, my friends and I would come to conclusion that we had no ideas. So rather than sit and just talk about it, I decided to do something about it. This site is dedicated to that journey.

Over the course of the next year, I’m going to take $20,000 and try to make it into $40,000. At this point, you and I are in the exact same boat.  I have no idea how I'm going to do it.  So why blog about it?  For one thing, I need to start somewhere and this is it.  I hope that by sharing my journey, we can all learn a little something and have some fun along the way.  By making this a very public activity, I hope it brings some accountability to it and to myself.  I encourage everyone to participate, whether it be giving me ideas, commenting how crazy I am, or just silently coming along for the ride.

So if you have ever felt like you should be doing something else other than what you are doing now, or are just curious how I do, I invite you along for the ride as I try to answer the question, "Just how did Terrence get started?"