2011 Goal Update (December)

By Jacob Allred | Published: January 1, 2012

This is my twelfth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

  • Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. I know what I want to build. I have the plans. I have the shopping list. But, sadly, I didn’t have/take the time to do this.
  • Launch twelve new websites. I failed. My December website was bigger than I could finish in a month. Okay that isn’t true, I just got lazy. But I did redesign Corban Works from scratch, so that is practically an entirely new site. And I redesigned the Fake Name Generator mobile site. So I kept busy at least.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

  • Start an email newsletter. Didn’t happen.
  • Create a game for mobile phones. Didn’t happen.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

  • Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. I hit this goal in October. December earnings were absurdly high. I hit my 2012 goal, but I don’t think it’ll happen again in January.
  • Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho. I got A’s in both of my classes. Yay!
  • Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  • Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  • Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
  • Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
  • Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
  • Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!
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New Corban Works website

By Jacob Allred | Published: December 8, 2011

I’ve been hard at work on a new project, but got temporarily distracted by the horribleness that was the Corban Works website. I’ve had a rough idea of what I wanted to do with it for quite a while, but couldn’t get myself to devote the time to it.

So I finally buckled down and knocked out the new design in a couple days. It is pretty basic, but I like it a lot. The whole point of the Corban Works site is to showcase all my websites, so I switched from a blog format to a gallery format. It makes the page colorful and fun.

I also added some updated/new icons that show up over certain sites. This is all controlled from a single config file that defines all my sites, when they were created, and when they were last updated. This means I only have to update a single spot and the updated/new icons move themselves.

Anyways, I’m pretty happy with it.

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2011 Goal Update (November)

By Jacob Allred | Published: December 1, 2011

This is my eleventh monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

  • Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing. Probably not going to happen.
  • Launch twelve new websites. Created a quick and easy text conversion tool called ASCII to Hex. It converts to/from ASCII, binary, hexadecimal, base64, decimal, and rot13. I also put a lot of work into the Fake Mail Generator. I revived this site a few months back and have been trying to modernize it a bit. I’ve added a new logo and added MIME parsing, so it can display HTML emails.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

  • Start an email newsletter. I don’t think this is going to happen.
  • Create a game for mobile phones. Probably not going to happen.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

  • Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. I hit this goal in October.
  • Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
  • Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  • Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  • Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
  • Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
  • Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
  • Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!
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Cheap, easy to customize PBX

By Jacob Allred | Published: November 30, 2011

I recently stumbled across an amazingly awesome set of tools: Twilio and OpenVBX. I’ll tackle each one separately.

First, Twilio. This service lets you purchase local telephone numbers from almost anywhere in the country for just $1 per month, 1¢/minute inbound, and  2¢/minute outbound. This may sound like a lot, but it is actually quite cheap. For $10/month you can talk for 15 hours inbound. And you get a $30 credit when you sign up, so really you can have months of service without paying anything.

If you want a toll-free number, it is only $2 per month (standard pricing for most providers), 3¢/minute inbound, and  2¢/minute outbound. Again, this is very very cheap for low-volume usage. I’m currently using Kall8.net and paying 6.9¢/minute inbound.

To make it even cooler, all the local numbers have SMS capability. This means you can configure your local number to accept and reply to SMS messages, or you can configure your system to send SMS reminders to you, or forward inbound SMS to your cell phone, or whatever else you want to do with your SMS capability. SMS is only 1¢ per message (inbound or outbound).

So now you have this local or toll free number, and you want to make it do fancy menu stuff. This is where OpenVBX comes in. This super easy to install software lets you set up all sorts of menus, text-to-speech, voicemail, call forwarding, whatever. So I could have a number that when you call, it checks if it is 8am-5pm, and if not sends it to voicemail. If it goes to voicemail, the system will do voice-to-text and email me the text of the voicemail. Otherwise the call will go to a menu that lets you pick whether you want to talk to me or my wife, and then forwards the call to the correct cell phone.

I’m pretty excited about all this. I’m porting my toll free number over which should save me a few bucks a month, and am working on a whole new website that relies on Twilio. The ability to programmatically make outbound calls (without dealing with the tediousness that is Asterisk) is pretty exciting.

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Half-birthday investment gift

By Jacob Allred | Published: November 25, 2011

My baby girl had her first half-birthday yesterday. It is crazy to think that it has been 6 months already since my first “holy cow I’m a dad” moment.

Anyways, my wife and I have a lot of goals for how to raise our daughter. We want her to have the resources to go to college, start a business, buy a car, go on a mission, or do whatever she wants when she leaves the nest in many many years. We also want her to be excited about investing, to understand how it works, and to see the benefits of it.

So tonight, after a few months of pondering, we settled on a plan: for Anna’s half-birthday each year, we’ll invest $250 into GE for her (keeping it in our name until she is old enough to really understand it).

Why GE? It pays dividends every quarter. She’ll get to see returns from the investment several times a year, even if the stock prices are down. We’ll reinvest the dividends, so she’ll also get to see her number of shares going up each quarter, even when it isn’t her half-birthday yet. GE is also very stable and diversified, so the likelihood of it disappearing is slim. It also tends to be cheap enough per share that we can get a decent number of shares.

There are a few cons to going with GE. Its performance hasn’t been phenomenal over the past decade. There are definitely stocks that have done better (and many that have done worse). It also isn’t a very exciting stock. A kid today would be much more excited about owning some Apple stock than they would about GE.

Why not a mutual fund? Well the goal is to teach Anna about stocks, investing, and to get her excited about it. It is hard to see why a mutual fund’s price has gone up or down. With an individual stock, like GE, we can look at the news or read press releases to find out why the price has changed. We can also talk about how the policies and decisions of our elected leaders can affect the price. I imagine her coming to me and being like “oh my gosh dad the GE earnings report is out!”, and then we’ll sit down together and look over it. (A father can dream…)

We plan on investing $250 each year and, unless she has a dang good reason, we won’t let her take it out until her 18th birthday. This means we’ll invest $4,500 for her over the next 18 years. If my parents had done this for me, then I would have had about $22,000 on my 18th birthday (and that isn’t even counting dividend reinvestments). Of course $250 was worth a lot more back then, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance, but I still think Anna will have a very healthy chunk of cash waiting for her.

Of course, I’m not sure how we’ll afford this once we get up to 8 or 9 kids…

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