I made the mistake of starting to reread Jacob Fisker’s “Early Retirement Extreme”, and it has me fired up on a few things. One of the best points made in the book, in my opinion, is that specialization can be represented as a narrow but tall curve on a grid where the x axis represents […]
Author: risky
In Defense of Paying Off Your Mortgage Early
A number of people even in the FIRE community will often sing the praises of not paying off your mortgage. The idea is that if you can lock in a low interest rate, you can pay the minimum on it while investing the rest in something like the stock market, which will likely have higher […]
Voices of Discouragement
I had a coworker at my first software job who, despite being a friend, was also insensitive and demeaning on more than a few occasions, not just toward me but also toward others. He was very technically capable, and for that reason it was hard to dismiss his technical criticism. However, one day I was […]
Reflections on Cloud Computing and Monthly Expenditures
A large portion of the software and IT industries have refocused in recent years on “cloud computing”, a term that refers to running things over the internet instead of on premises. I believe this buzzword originated from the practice of representing the internet as a cloud on old network diagrams. I’m not a huge fan. […]
The System is Always Right!!!
These are brief, scattered, cynical thoughts, but I wanted to write them out. I’ve noticed that people who did really well in school are very quick to defend the educational system, and it’s like, “Yeah, of course you enjoyed it – it worked for you”, whereas many other people had very different experiences and consequently […]
Brief Thoughts on Spreading Yourself Too Thin
I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve accomplished this past year, and while I read several books that were great, I also feel that I didn’t focus enough on the books I had, as several remain unfinished. Most interesting of these books were a few I had on the Tibetan language. After my first trip to […]
Digital Clutter
My inbox recently reached 1,000 emails. This is unprecedented, as I’ve always cleaned my inbox around the 500-700 email mark. But I let it get out of hand this time. Cleaning this stuff is no joke. Behind every email, behind every file, is the latent fear that losing access to this one piece of information […]
Thoughts on Shifting Careers
I feel like half the battle of life is just turning up, and the other half is finding the way forward. This isn’t a very philosophical understanding, but it feels pretty real to me. After 9 or 10 month of voluntary unemployment, I’ve finally made the decision to shift careers. Despite being a software developer, […]
Reflections After One Week of Using Linux
I’ve been using Linux Mint on my new (used) laptop for the past week, and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with it. Desktop tooling and options have expanded dramatically over the past five to seven years, or maybe Mint was always this customizable and I didn’t know because I was using Ubuntu in […]
Supporting Businesses vs. Wasting Your Money
One of the arguments against the FIRE community and seemingly radical savings is that if everyone stopped spending money, the economy would collapse. It’s an interesting argument, but it’s not showing the whole picture, and while it’s not wrong for this reason alone, it’s an argument often presented by people who are terrible with money […]