Time to go do some work!

JOE MA-AS :p

I love this local coffee shop. Better drinks than Starbucks and 10 times better atmosphere! Free (shitty) internet though! Leeching from Panera Bread :p

So big!

Restaurant on 48th floor - times square

Museum of Natural History

A week and a half ago, I finally reached a major milestone in my life, I graduated from college. Last four years flew by and I enjoyed every single year. From studying, to partying, to playing sports and being competitive, I will miss it all (that's clearly an overstatement). I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree with concentration in Finance. The whole world is open now with enormous opportunities, which I look forward to take on.

Life after college is not without stress though. I've taken two months off before starting full-time at Yahoo! during which there's so much to do before I embark on the next chapter of my life. Still during this short time frame, I've got a few freelance projects to take care of on top of about three planned 1-week-long trips before Mandy and I move for good to San Francisco.

Upcoming trips

Next week, I need to get to New York to get a Visa so that I can travel to Spain in late-June. If I end up flying to NYC, that's one roundtrip flight, or two individual flights, or 2 total so far. Throw Spain in that count and we're up to 4 already.

Next friday, Mandy, her parents and I are going to Orlando for a week. I'm looking forward to Florida, but it's 80 degrees every day here in Pittsburgh (crazy surprise if you know Pittsburgh weather), so I don't even want to think about the heat in Florida. The count is up to 6 now.

Before we move for good, Mandy and I would like to fly to San Francisco and start looking for apartments (a lengthy process from what I understand). If by any luck we find a nice place within that one week, that would be ideal. Mandy also wants to start interviewing at veterinary hospitals while we're there. Currently, we're trying to work this trip out with the relocation folks. The count is up to 8 if we end up going.

July 2nd is when we're planning to move for good. This one-way flight will officially kick off this next chapter of my life I mentioned earlier. I'm not scared at all as I'll have Mandy next to me the whole time through this experience (plus a lot of helpful people on the other side of U.S.) The tally is up to 9.

Stressful? Very, but it's all manageable as long we stay healthy, which I'm not right now, so I'll stop right here.

Looks like it will be priced very nicely at $14.95, but for now you can try it out while it's in beta for free! So get on it and let me know what you think and what MP3 blogs you frequent. Don't listen to any yet? Hop on the bandwagon, check out this blog directory and pick something out.

Now let's backtrack a little bit. Reinvigorate used to be a very useful website tracking tool. Most importantly, it was free. At this point I'm gonna start making things up. Blatantly. Then it went down and many wept for there wasn't a great tool to see live statistics anymore! I really don't know what happened, but I think the demand grew, fast, and they couldn't keep up (?), so it went down hard.

But rejoice! It is back! And apparently it's better than ever! Ok, enough with the exclamation points! (whoops.) The new tool has a plethora of useful statistics and has very easy implementation. Just pop some JavaScript in your website and you're ready to go. The ease of tracking multiple sites is great and there's no limit on the number of sites you want to monitor.

This couldn't have been released at a better time too. I've switched hosts recently to (mt) and it doesn't have Awstats implemented, a tool I used to use at my old host. In fact, all (mt) offers is Urchin stats, which is so confusing! If you've ever used Google Analytics then you know what I'm talking about. I briefly considered Mint, but I couldn't justify spending money (even at a that nice price point of $30) on reading some stats. Sorry Mr. Inman, maybe in the future.

This beautiful tool that is Reinvigorate is currently in beta testing, so I guess I kind of.. lied above when I said it's out. Still, I signed up not even a week ago for a beta invite and have already got it, so give it a try. Good luck!

This decision was a tough one. San Francisco is over 2,200 miles away from home and the distance will be hard to overcome for a while, but I spent whole summer in California, so it's doable. Having Mandy's support and presence will make it so much easier. I decided to document our moving process both to get tips and to also help anyone else who may be in the same situation in the future.

Step 1: Get a job!

Don't move in the blind. Job security certainly helps to forecast the future, to create a workable budget, to see if we can actually afford to move, etc. I was able to come out with a full-time offer after my internship with Yahoo! last summer, so I've taken the plunge and accepted my first full-time job offer. Whoa, I'm an adult? Time flies.

While everything seems to be peachy for me, Mandy has taken steps to become an officially certified veterinary technician. She took the boards exam few weeks ago, so cross your fingers! The certificate will definitely help her get a job in San Francisco and she has been researching vet hospitals in the area, updating her resume and will soon start forwarding it to those places.

Step 2: Find a good location

This hasn't been an easy step since Yahoo! is located 40 miles south from San Francisco. So why did we chose to live so far away? Having spent the summer in the South Bay, I wasn't too impressed with the social life. I'm from a suburb of Pittsburgh and to me, that's exactly what South Bay looks like: a big suburb with 1,500 tech firms and lots of neighborhoods and apartment complexes. Every little town (Sunnyvale, Mountain View, etc.) has a small 1-2 street downtown with a few pubs, restaurants and basically no night life. We're not big partiers (sp?), but we're also fairly young and at 21 years old, I just want more excitement in my life!

Every time we've visited San Francisco we loved it. The city is great and beautiful with all its hills and neighborhoods. From Castro to Noe Valley to SoMa, there's SO much to see. I'm looking forward to it! As we're quickly realising, with that comes a big price: San Francisco living isn't cheap. In fact, it's second more expensive city in the United States (right after NYC). Yuck! This brings me to my next point, budgeting.

I'll cover that and more in the upcoming parts.

• Part 1
  Get a job!, Find a good location
• Part 2
  Budget yourself, Apartment hunt

Step 3: Budget yourself

This step was probably most fun for me. Call me crazy, but anything finance related is fun for me. It' s my major after all! What started as a couple of simple numbers and calculations in Excel quickly grew into an extensive spreadsheet covering almost every part of our lives.

Since my father has humongous Excel spreadsheets for his own finances, he helped me out a lot. Unfortunately, I live at school right now and we barely have enough time to talk about it on weekends. This is where Google Spreadsheets came in. I've never used it before, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out about its collaboration features. Mandy and my dad both got invites to edit the document and right away I started notice changes and corrections.

How to build an effective forecasted budget:

• Start with your projected income.
  This was easy for me, a bit harder for Mandy as we had to do some research on average salaries in the area for her profession.
• Make sure you don't forget to take out taxes from the projected income!
  This takes out a big chunk of course (~30%), so it's important.
• Jot down every possible expense you may encounter.
  Note: Parents know this stuff! So ask them.
• Add, subtract, multiply and pray.

Here's all the things we've noted as monthly expenses:

• Rent and utilities
  Some apartment complexes include utilities in the rent, others don't.
• Health and dental insurance
  Yahoo! has great benefits.
• Automotive
  Loan payments on car, insurance, parking (a lot in San Francisco) and gas.
• Food
  This includes going out to eat too.
• Entertainment
  Travel, bars, clubs, movies, etc.
• Clothing
  Some things here and there... Yeah right!
• Home care
  Self explanatory
• Other medical expenses
  Tylenol, ...
• School loans
  Can't wait for this!

Are we missing anything? Loan payment calculations are fairly easy in Excel (not to mention all dealers have special calculators online). I personally use the PMT function in Excel. It's easy, just write down your principal (car amount minus down-payment), loan rate (the lower the better obviously), loan term (usually 5 years) and you're all set! Make sure you convert the rate and term to months (divide the rate by 12 and multiply term by 12). Write =pmt in Excel and it will guide you through the rest.

Step 4: Apartment hunt

San Francisco apartment search is interesting. In my searches, I stumbled onto this site and it summarizes everything fairly well:

Apartment hunting in San Francisco is unique. Unlike New York, we don't have brokers who control the listings and charge renters a massive fee to lease. And unlike the South Bay (and the rest of America), we only have a few large apartment communities run by billion dollar public companies. Many, if not the majority of rental units in San Francisco are privately owned and barely advertised. Because the market is tight, most landlords can find a tenant within a few days simply by putting a sign in front of their building. For apartment hunters, it's a maddening situation- it can feel like the only way to find a place is to quit your job and stalk every neighborhood looking for "for rent" signs. This is not a life.

Great! I've got my work cut out for me. Fortunately, I've found some good sites. Since Craigslist is the main point of search, HousingMaps.com comes in very handy. This is a basic mashup site connecting Craigslist listings with Google Maps. We've pinpointed which areas we want to live in, so this helps a lot in terms of filtering. Saves lots of time!

I've also kept my eye out for apartment complexes. Although there are not many as mentioned above, some are still attractive. This is where ApartmentRatings.com comes in. This site aggregates a number of ratings for the apartments based on real user input. Every time I find something of interest, I always search for it on this site to get a feel of the management, noise levels, etc. Yelp.com is also useful. Although more broad, it does have some apartment reviews.

Staying within the budget is important. San Francisco is beautiful and it has a lot of good and tempting apartment offerings. Unfortunately, at this stage of our lives, we can't afford to live lavishly, so every time I look for apartments, I try to stay within the budget. Getting a more expensive apartment means cutting some other expenses, which may in turn only worsen our quality of life.

Whew, that's it for now! The rest will probably come in the coming months as we get closer to the date.

• Part 1
  Get a job!, Find a good location
• Part 2
  Budget yourself, Apartment hunt

Break-down the wall of fear that "Someone is going to steal my idea if I talk about it!" -- IT'S JUST AN IDEA. Go get people's PRICELESS feedback on your idea, evolve it, and execute. If someone stole your idea during that process, you're 49 people ahead of them in finding out how to truly evolve it into something that will work. Execution is the key. Don't execute until you know from 50 people's perspectives that you'll be executing properly.

I definitely agree that getting major feedback your next big money maker idea is a very good thing and can potentially save you lots of money along the way. At the same time, I think the target listener should be kept in mind. After all, sharing a web startup idea with hundreds of other web entrepreneurs is risky, especially if you're just starting out with no experience under your belt.

Your target focus group should be those same people who would use your service or product. Now, if it so happens that you're building a service for entrepreneurs, then so be it. Get feedback from potential users! Remember, you're solving one of their problems, so asking your geeky programmer friends about your big idea for next generation running shoes will get you nowhere (unless they run of course!)

I found it frustrating reading some of my blog posts. The text was too small, colors were right (especially for you PC users) and so it was time for a fix. As you can see, this is a really drastic change, but I hope it's for the better. I kept it fairly simple by taking out categories and other random stuff that frankly no one cares about (other than search bots) and not complicating the colors or the layout. Content is the focus, everything else is really secondary.

It was a fun experience considering I only started this theme yesterday morning. Keeping that in mind, if you find any bugs, please let me know!

the largest software release in Adobe's 25-year history

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