Dialectical Reasoning

It is pretty crazy to think that last year at this time I was playing poker one or two nights a week and not really accepting the reality of becoming a father.

The first couple months were are real adjustment for me. It could be because of the colic or just the fact that I have been selfish my entire life. For the past 25 years I have surfed when I wanted to, mountain biked when I wanted to, snowboarded when I wanted to and that was that. I want to surf at 6:30am guess what..I get up early and surf.

Anywho, all that is changed now. Like I said, tough for the first few months but it then becomes the best thing in the world. Becoming a father is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

I am currently waiting for Sydney to wake up. I am in the kitchen drinking coffee and shopping online for a new way to strap our daughter to us so we don’t have to put her in the stroller everywhere we go. Check this thing out:

KELTY K.I.D.S FC 3.0 FRAME CHILD CARRIER

Kelty Backpack Child Carrier

Being a dad gets better and better every day. This thing looks perfect for a Yosemite trip in September.

I had a horrible experience with Spirit Airlines about 18 months ago. I booked a flight from Aguadilla Puerto Rico to Atlantic City New Jersey so Summer and I could go visit my family in Ocean City. After booking my flight online everything seemed fine. However, a month later I received an automated email telling me my flight numbers had changed. The problem with the new flight numbers? We would end up in Detroit, not Atlantic City.

After weeks of back and forth and a long drawn out customer service nightmare I still could not get a refund on my ticket. They eventually gave me a credit that would not expire for my $600 and hours on the phone and I hung up. No more Spirit Airlines for me once this credit is used up.

It has been 18 months since I was issued my credit and I was finally going to fly Spirit Airlines last again. I wasn’t looking forward to it, super small seats, pay for your snacks, pay for your sodas, pay for your water, pay for your bags and don’t forget a pocket full of change for the pay toilets. I called up reservations and tried booking my flight into Florida using my credit and guess what…my credit is expired. Yep, that’s right. No longer valid.

I tried explaining my situation to the operator (that barely spoke English) and I was eventually escalated up and up the chain of command before I finally spoke with an operator that just plain said;

“We are not going to honer this credit and there is nothing you can do about it over the phone. You may go to the corporate office in Florida and take it up with them.”

Are you serious? If I have a ticket disput with a company I have to go to the corporate office to settle? This company is bullshit. They let you book your tickets and spend money online without even talking to an operator, but if they screw up it’s the consumer that pays the price.

It is official. Regardless of the fact that Spirit Airlines flies into Atlantic City which is only 15 minutes from my moms house, I will never fly Spirit Airlines again. I will always fly Jet Blue and Continental into Newark or JFK from here on out.

Fuck You Spirit Airlines.

Yeah, this is going to be a hate post. I am so fucking annoyed with quote PROFESSIONALS end quote that charge thousands of dollars for their services (filing paperwork required by the federal and state governement) yet still leave all the responsibility on the business owner. Seriously people, what the hell is going on here!

I have such a long laundry list of assholes that don’t do what I pay them to do I don’t even know where to start. Sure, this has been going on for years, but as a business owner you just let it slide because you are, novel concept here, trying to run your business!

That is why I hired the professional in the first place. Ok, I don’t want to jump through the hoops of government paperwork, filings, taxes, employee benefits, workers compensation, balance sheets, income reports so I am willing to pay thousands of dollars for someone to do them for me. Thousands of dollars paid to an ‘accountant’ to do my ‘accounting’ should leave me sitting pretty and free to run my business right?

Nope, the only difference is that now the the new accountants bills start coming and I have another person asking me for clarification and more fucking reports. But now, I have to work harder for my business to make more money because I am paying someone new.

The bottom line is that no accountant or lawyer I have ever worked with can make it easy on you despite the money you pay them. Regardless of what I have spent on expensive assholes in fancy suits I have always needed to learn how taxes work, how business filings work, how workers comp works, how payroll taxes work, how balance sheets work etc to even figure out what to send back to the accountants. So wait, what the fuck am I paying you for again?

Right now, I am being scrutinized by an accountant that can’t explain exactly what information they need from me in order to build a balance sheet for my business. After 4 emails and two associates at their firm, they still can’t send me the spreadsheet I originally requested with a list of items they need from me along with associated costs. Basically, I want to be able to fill in all the blanks and let my accountant connect the dots and create a beautiful report that I can give to my expensive, over charging lawyer. Nope, four fucking emails over 10 days (of course they don’t respond same day) and I still haven’t left the starting line. I get infuriated every time I get an email back not answering my questions with more questions from them that aren’t even full questions.

For example, they write: “In order to put together a balance sheet, we are going to need a list of your assets and liabilities etc”.

Really? What the fuck is etc?

So, finally, while my beautiful daughter Sydney is taking a nap I decide to do a Google search for the search term: Open Office Balance Sheet Template and low and behold, there is a professional balance template for Open Office! Whoa, WTF! It has to be harder than that, right? I’ll do a little more research. Google search #2:what goes in a balance sheet?

You have to be kidding me, really? There is a detailed list of everything that needs to go into a balance sheet AND there is a list of all the terms and their associated definition.

I was going to pay an accountant hundreds of dollars to put one of these things together for me so I can keep doing my job for my clients, and here it is right here? By the time my accountant asks the right questions I will be done this fucking thing and Uncle Sam or Tio Sam down here in Puerto Rico is one step closer to sinking another successful business because of all of the paperwork they require. This brings us to another gripe of mine, the government red tape required to run a business which is why I have to deal with all these fuck sticks in the first place.

It is almost not worth running a legitimate business in this country (Puerto Rico and the USA) becuse of all the paper work and taxes required. I don’t need to work for anyone else, I have been working for myself for 10 years now yet, despite my entrepreneurial mind constantly paying my bills, the governments bullshit paperwork and tax schemes are constantly dragging me down. It’s no wonder the economy in the US sucks right now. Businesses like mine pay the rich to get richer by filing my bullshit paperwork for us and lawyers to represent our interests because the system is just too time intensive to jump into on our own. Really, the bottom line for all this is that I am smart enough to do my own accounting, smart enough to navigate the federal governments labyrinth of quarterly filings, annual filings and the states required monthly filings, but that would be a full time job for me and I am not a paper work filer. I am an entrepreneur! Right now, I would like to move my business offshore and never deal with this bullshit again. I hate you (but not you).

My daughter was born last night at 11:10pm. Her name is Sydney James Rest. You can see her picture here for now, but I will be uploading pictures for the next 20 years. I like it.

These email web scams never get old. I haven’t seen too many of them come through because Gmail is so good at filtering out spam, but this one made it. Wow, we are talking about a lot of money. I am going to call them right away.

Greetings,

I am Sir Tom Mckillop,Group Finance Director (R.B.O.S) I understand that through Internet is not the best way to link up with you because of the confidentiality which the transaction demands. However, I have already sent you this same letter one month ago but I am not sure if it did get to you since I have not heard from you, hence my resending it again.

I discovered a dormant account in my office, as the Group director with Royal Bank of Scotland North West Branch. It will be in my interest to transfer this fund worth £15,000,000 million pounds in an account offshore. If you can be a collaborator to this please indicate interest immediately for us to proceed.

Your contact phone numbers and name will be necessary for this effect.

Call me on +447024026524 or email me back at: tmckillop1@hotmail.com

Best Regards,

Sir Tom Mckillop
email: tmckillop1@hotmail.com
phone: +447024026524

This is some good stuff. Enjoy.

I think Wolfram Alpha is doing a great job marketing itself. I have definitely seen it around on blogs and news sites. Today I saw it on Cnet. There was a sneak preview of Wolfram Alpha on a video where the host does a bunch of searches and discusses its functionality. I definitely think it is an awesome way to display information. The host mentioned that 75% of his searches did not return good results or they returned nothing at all, but it is a great start on a really cool project. Check out the Cnet video:

I found a great AdWords mess-up this morning while doing some research for one of my projects. This is a classic case of someone not proof reading their Google Adwords. This ad stating the you can Grow Back Hair Fast is obviously targeting the right market (my search was for Hair Loss Surgery) but isn’t quite hitting the mark. Who wants to grow back hair? Certainly not me. I recommend having someone proof read your ad’s before they go live. At worst, walk away from your computer for a couple of hours and go back and have another look at them. Sometimes the break away from the monotonous environment of your computer workstation will do you a world of good and you’ll find mistakes like this one before they go live and you spend your money on them.

I think it is awesome, Google that is. They have opened up a new economy to the entire world. If you are willing to put in the time to learn about the web, you can turn your back (hair) to day jobs that involve putting on business clothes, commuting to work, dealing with some old asshole’s attitude just because he has been in the business world long enough to know everybody. No more cubicle and no more standard bi-weekly paychecks. On a more negative note, no more wasting time at the water cooler with the hot chick, now that you work for yourself, time is a precious money making commodity.

The best and worst part about this is that all the high dollar big wigs and all these large corporations don’t even know we exist. They don’t even have the slightest understanding of the true potential behind the super economy highway. The Internet, yeah, it’s pretty awesome.

A friend of mine turned a very horrible situation into a lifetime learning experience. A time that will change him forever. He sent me a letter from prison. With nothing but time on his hands, he drew on the envelopes he was sending out to friends and family. My envelope came with a pile of skulls on it. Check it out:

I guess now would be a good a time as any to go on a rant about how broken and fucked up our civil justice system is. Both sides of it. The court systems are run by District Attorneys with unlimited power, use of all government authoritative positions as witnesses and over zealous Assistant DA’s willing to convict anyone once the state is committed to prosecuting regardless of the accused guilt. If it weren’t for all of the advancements in science to disprove the one track minded charismatic District Attorneys thousands of people would still be in prison and on death row. A three letter word that is more valuable than S-E-X to someone wrongly convicted. That word is D-N-A.

The other side of the US justice system that is all screwed up is the ‘rehabilitation’ part of it. Come on, do you really think long term prison sentences are going to help first time offenders? Prisons themselves are a whole new society to first time offenders with a learning curve that doesn’t allow mistakes. Race segregation, new rules on who is charge, new ways instill prison justice on inmates and guards and wardens that know exactly what is going on, but choose to turn their backs to it rather than fight to correct prison life. To most, prisoners deserve whatever punishment they receive in prison because they are there, but if someone is wrongly convicted, everyday is a new hell. It’s not just about being physically or sexually abused, it’s also about being the one that needs to assault other prisoners because your new boss told you to. And I’m not referring to a guard or warden, I am referring to the leaders of each race in each cell block. Races need to keep their race in check. If an inmate is told by his cell blcok leader to assault someone, he/she needs to do it for fear of starting a race riot if the Wood doesn’t take care of the other Wood that is not following the prisoner rules. Kill or be killed. Put him in check, or we’ll put you in check.

This country needs quality affordable criminal defense for the accused. This country needs to hold state prosecutors personally accountable for people they wrongly convict. If DNA exonerates someone, the DA that prosecuted that person should go on trial to prove their innocence in wrongly convicting that person. We need accountability in our government, not a boys club of judges and district attorneys rubbing elbows to better their careers at the expense of innocent people.

It is the nature of my job. I speak to people about the work I do for them and then I sit in front of my computer and do the work…not necessarily in that order. If you read the About Stefan Rest page, then you know I cozy up to my desk, surround sound stereo and get work done.

I have always been an electronics guy and like to have nice stuff, even when it’s nicer than what I need. Having rad electronics helps me stay motivated and makes work seem easier. Yeah, I could probably save money every year by getting by with an older computer, smaller screen or shitty speakers…but I work a lot…and that’s just no fun.

Today, I finally upgraded my home office phone system. I have been looking at expensive VOIP phone systems all over the web and also looking at plantronics headsets because I do a lot of work in front of my computer while on the phone. As far as sales guys go, I don’t really recommend a headset because you will remain less animated and that will be projected in your voice inflection. If you are the sort of sales person that paces around and talks with his hands, you can get away with a headset. For the rest of you phone jockeys, speak into the microphone on your handset and be who you want to be.

I decided to buy the Plantronics Calisto Pro Series home office phone system because it is the entire package all in one. It is a phone and a headset which means there are no worries on whether or not it will be compatible with your current phone system. It doesn’t have any type of answering system, but my VOIP service with Vonage provides voice mail for me and eventually, when Google Voice is open to the public, I will centralize all of my numbers and voice mails to one location.

Check out the features of the Calisto Pro Series hands-free home office phone:

Stay connected, wherever you work, with the Calisto Pro Series hands-free home office phone system. Its integrated multi-function Bluetooth headset offers professional sound for your home office as you remotely answer landline, VoIP and even mobile calls. Combined with a compact cordless/VoIP phone offering a built-in speakerphone, interference-free DECT 6.0 technology, and ability to download Outlook contact numbers, you’ve got powerful communication options like never before.

I had to spend an extra $30 in shipping to have it sent down to the office in Puerto Rico, but considering the access we have to quality supplies and equipment down here, that is a small price to pay. I’ll do a customer review on the Calisto Pro as soon as I receive it and plug it in.