Category: Uncategorized

The house prices in CA where I live (Orange County) are insane.

The average low-end house is $550,000. Two stories and a small back yard is $700,000. A slightly bigger back yard brings up the price to $800,000.

Suppose you put 20% down on a $550,000 house. You pay the loan off for 15 years.

Monthly payments:

Buy 3 bedroom house: 4000 a month for 15 years, about 800 of which are taxes
Rent 3 bedroom apartment: 2000 a month.

After 15 years: 720000 paid on house
After 15 years: 360000 paid on rent

How long would it take to break even?

Savings of $1,200 a month for 25 years!

So to make financial sense, you have to live in the house for 40 years, at which point you break even.

What’s worse about this is $4,000 a month is quite a lot of money. It’s not all post-tax dollars due to writing off interest, but nonetheless unless you make $100K a year you’re going to be hurting. To be safe you really need a two income household.

A small house just isn’t worth that much damn money. That is why in other parts of the country houses can still be found for $250K.

Unfortunately, the only areas that I know of that have game companies are Silicon Valley and Southern CA, both of which are the highest priced areas in the country.

Funny but true: These prices reflect the recent downturn! A year ago the numbers were 15% higher.

I just got an interesting email from http://www.rentacoder.com noting that they are getting some bad press due to retaliation from buyers or coders that had a bad experience. I want to help them clear the record by saying that while I’ve dealt with some terrible coders, the arbitration process and design of their system is excellent.

Out of my 4 bids so far:

Push C++ function calls on the stack via assembly: Went very well. Coder submitted the work about halfway through the deadline. We worked out the kinks over the next few days. Coder said he enjoyed the project, and I liked working with him because he cared about doing a great job.

Upgrade C++ email client to support GMail: Coder didn’t do anything for two weeks, and lied about it on the status report. It was my fault it took 2 weeks, because I didn’t know at the time that I could have canceled the project due to not filling out a status report, rather than having to ask for one.

PHP directory server of games: Went OK. Coder submitted on the last day, generally working, but with problems caused by a lack of care and attention to detail. I had to spend about a day of my own time fixing stuff, but overall the work got done. Rated the coder a 7 / 10.

Port PostgreSQL to MySQL for autopatcher: Went very bad. Coder submitted on the last day, completely not working. It’s not that I was being picky over quality, it was that the project was utterly not working and only about 25% done. Coder denied the flaws, and at the end blamed the arbitrator for being unfair (on the contrary, the arbitrator was 10X more patient than I would have been). Got my money back a week later.

The system is intelligently designed, with double-blind feedback, ratings based on a factual chart, escrow for both buyer and seller, required status reports, and a chat and message system which is logged. The only problem I see is rating inflation, where most successful projects are rated a 10/10. This is the fault of the users to a large degree for not following the rating chart. It would be better if it asked you specific questions (was the project late, etc), and derived the score based on those facts.

I’m trying to figure out which state is best to register a corporation in for my internet business. I believe I can register in any state as long as I have a registered agent there. It seems like Legal Zoom provides this service for $159 a year.

California, where I live, is very bad because they have a franchise fee.

It looks like South Dakota is very good. No personal income tax and no corporate tax.
Corporate tax table

I’m not sure if CA would require me to pay income tax on distributions though.

It seems like you can also form a company in the Cayman Islands and avoid tax altogether (?)
Website of a company that offers this service

Only the goverment could think it is a good idea to give away money at the same time it is over 9 trillion dollars in debt, with over 400 billion a year deficit. Counting hidden debt, US citizens have a liability of $473,456 per household.

The saving grace is ironically, inflation and the declining dollar. Inflation is bad for people who save money, but good for people who owe money, because the amount they owe lessens each year with no other action. Because of double taxation, for example on Inflation Index Bonds the goverment comes out ahead even further. Theoretically, inflation index bonds just preserve the value of your money. However, you are taxed capital gains tax on the numerical increase of the value of your bond, although the value didn’t actually go up. So even bonds that pay inflation lose money, the difference of which goes to the government. The goverment also understates inflation – actual inflation rates may be between 5% to 10%.

The stimulus check is just insanity. Suppose the goverment takes $473,456 from your household, spends it, takes another $2000, and gives it back to you. Are you now $2000 richer, and benefited in some way? In any case it isn’t enough money to do anything worthwhile. Not enough to start a business, not enough to meaningfully invest.

Just out of spite, I am going to cash mine, keep the cash under my mattress, and not spend it. Or better yet, convert it to Euros. I’ll be good as long as federal agents don’t steal it.

Click image to see full-size version.

Interesting story about a guy trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Security guards took that long to notice him, and then tell him what buttons to press to get the elevator moving again so he could get out. After that he goes on vacation for 8 weeks, wouldn’t return to work because it would jeopardize his 25 million dollar lawsuit, and loses his job. In the end it took 4 years for the lawsuit, he got “barely six figures”, lost his apartment, and is unemployed.

Don’t get me wrong, being trapped in an elevator for 41 hours is a terrible experience, and the security guards were beyond negligent since there was a camera on him the whole time. The guy could have lost his life from dehydration. But in our entitlement society it seems like the first thing anyone thinks of anytime something bad happens is “Who can I sue?”

I can understand going on vacation for 4 weeks. I can understand getting some money to cover lost wages, medical expenses, and a fine against the security guards for stupidity. But to intentionally not to go back to work just because you don’t want to give the appearance that you are mentally fit… now you’re just a greedy bastard looking to win the legal lottery at someone else’s expense. It’s like the case with Max Payne (the computer game) where the developers had to pay millions in legal fees to defend against some wrestler. Well maybe not, but every time I think of a ridiculous case I’m reminded of that.

Back when I was a teenager I used to go to the public library after school. They had those swivel doors that you would pull open and they would slowly close behind you. One time this old lady opens the door, takes one step forward, and just stands there for about 3 seconds until the door hits the back of her heel. She immediately starts shrieking at the librarians demanding they call the police and an ambulance. All the while she was standing there unharmed, and the door’s impact probably wouldn’t have cracked an egg. Call the national guard! I still wonder if she was just an idiot with a bad temper or yet another abuser of the system.

So at the end of that article I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for the guy. But I don’t. He didn’t deserve to get trapped in an elevator. That wasn’t his fault. However, the greedy lawsuit and his corresponding actions were. And in that, he got just what he deserved.

The first time I heard about RentACoder was from David Byttow. He was telling me how he wanted to make a new account and get all 10’s for every project. It’s a service where post a bid with a detailed description of what you want done, and people bid on it. In one week I got about 10 bids on something I posted. It was pretty easy to setup and use. They have a review system so people want to do a good job because if you get a lot of bad reviews nobody wants to hire you anymore.

The only problem I have with it is the same problem an art gallery would have if they posted a bid on a street corner for new paintings. There’s a 100X difference between the best and worst programmers. If I wasn’t a programmer I would only care that the job gets done. Since I am one, I also care that the job gets done at a certain level of quality that goes far beyond the code just working. The code has to be documented, adhere to existing standards, be a good solution architecturally, solve the problem completely, be fast, do not leak memory, and solve the intended problem. A lot of this comes from investment in the code, which is hard to get from a hit and run contractor.

75% of the bids I got are clearly unqualfied. They have an arbitration system if things go bad, but I don’t want to deal with that just over a few hundred dollars, I just want the job to get done right. Also, arbitration does not lend itself to quality, since the things I posted are somewhat objective and require thought. A bad job that satisfies the minimum requirements may pass arbitration, but be totally useless to me.

I was thinking one good way to use this system is for annoying bug fixes. For example:

My email sender class:
Header
Source

Does not work with Gmail POP

The error returned is

220 mx.google.com ESMTP f42sm3090097rvb.13
250 mx.google.com at your service
530 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first f42sm3090097rvb.13

It’s a good thing to post because it either works or not. There isn’t much in the way of objective metrics, and higher level concepts like architecture aren’t really an issue. It’s worth a hundred bucks to me to pass it off, since I hate dealing with RFCs. (Not that I hate standards, just that the RFCs are sometimes ambiguous).

Good service to use if you don’t care about code quality and time is not an issue.

What I’m about to write may sound obvious, but I didn’t do it, so I think it bears stating. When advertising on Google Adwords, be sure your ads are as targeted as possible to avoid wasting money.

Originally I listed every keyword I could think of that was related to RakNet in some way. I came up with like 80 keywords, in fact Google makes it easy to do this.

I set a budget of $20 a day, and almost immediately hit my cap. The campaign optimizer suggested I increase to $100 a day. But as I previously wrote, I had no new sales nor did the forum show increased activity. About the only increased activity I got was Chinese spammers. I wasted about $300.

I went back and targeted all my ads. In the ad for example it clearly states that it’s a C++ programming library. I also disabled ads from non-relevant categories (porn, law enforcement) which are enabled by default. I also disabled ads from domain parking pages, since programmers are smart enough not to go to these pages anyway.

This dropped me down from instantly hitting $20 a day, with a recommended cap of $100, to spending a few dollars a day.

I was looking at some strange Webalizer stats for RakNet.

This IP address 211.153.203.4 has required 10.7 gigabytes worth of data in only 5 visits. That is 10X more than the next highest IP address 91.67.34.76.

The IP address is from China.

91.67.34.76 is in Germany, and has requested 1 gigabyte in a single visit.

I’m not sure, but my guess is all those forum spammers is some gang or bot computers because I can’t see what else would use that much bandwidth.

Edit:

Webhost told me to make a .htaccess file with this list:

Deny from 211.153.203. 91.67.34.76

I tried it with my own IP, and it seems to work.

Edit 2:

After doing this yesterday, today my traffic was down by 80%! So it looks like 4 out of 5 visits were just spam bots from China trying to hack the forum. Good grief!