works of wanderlust

Tag: laptop computer

  • weekend wrap, twenty

    I guess this was the final weekend in October, huh? I started this month with a personal art challenge, drawing every day, and so far I’ve kept up my end of the deal. But somehow whenever I immerse myself it the act of doing something daily over the span of a month it seems to speed up time and I blink and… well, it was the final weekend of October.

    Friday evening was a tiny little self-contained adventure.

    I had to go pick up my race package from the store up near Whyte Avenue. The wife had a little AGM meeting to attend with a big purpose right near there. Her meeting was for a board she sits on and it was the meeting when they were electing a new president to replace her—happily so—since the kid is no longer doing that particular extra curricular thing and she doesn’t need to run the organization and fundraise for other kids, huh? 

    I dropped her off and drove up to the Running Room and grabbed my race shirt and bib. Ran into Kim, because she was working, and PS, because he was also picking up his package at the exact same time.

    I got it into my mind to go back to the store where I bought my little sketchbook, the one I’ve been doing all my drawing in for the challenge this month. It turns out that they are only sold at like three places in the city, and one of those places was on Whyte Avenue. But Whyte Avenue, the city’s gentrified Uni-adjacent trendy shopping strip is a terrible place to try and go casually on a Friday evening. I could not find parking—at least not some free parking (and I was feeling a bit too cheap to pay) so I ended up driving laps around the neighbourhoods for a while until I got frustrated and just decided to try to drive back to the studio to pick up the wife… which is when I got trapped in a construction zone hell and it took me twenty minutes and a few middle fingers to navigate.

    I picked her up and we decided since it was almost 8pm to finally grab a dinner. There is a little sushi and rice bowl place on the way home so we swung in there and ordered, and as she hands us our food in to-go bowls (confusingly) she told us that they were closing at 8 and we could only stay if we ate fast. Ugh. So we ate our sad little bowls at home twenty minutes later and settled in to watch some television.

    I got paid for a couple of my contracts last week, so on Saturday morning I made my way to the store to (finally!) replace my laptop. I’ve been working on a mix of (a) the shared family computer, (b) a ten year old gaming desktop in my cold, cold basement, (c) a fourteen year old recycled MacBook Pro hacked to run Linux and (d) a six year old iPad that is starting to show its age. Since setting up the corporation I’ve always known that the best tax approach is to use the money and invest back into the company rather than pull it out as salary and pay a bunch of taxes on it. So, new laptop for the business was bought… and then most of the afternoon setting it up and getting all the softwares installed on it.

    We had a lite dinner and settled in for some more television on Saturday evening.

    Sunday I woke up to rain. Rain is not inherently bad, but Sunday morning was also race morning and I looked out the back door as even the dog refused to step out and tried not to think that I needed to be at a start line in a couple hours to run sixteen klicks.

    I met the gang for a carpool over to the race and we were plenty early to spend time wandering around and overthinking the weather. Of course, soon enough the race was run and it being the first real race I’ve done in over a year (Park Runs apparently don’t count, but they’re also only 5k) I was spent. 

    We piled in and went for a late lunch at some enormous asian buffet place on the north side that I’d never even heard of, and I stuffed myself to borderline feeling ill.  

    I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening recovering from the race (and lunch) and went to bed at a far too reasonable time for a guy with nothing much to do on Monday morning except write.

  • i, capitalist, part one

    I have all these little things floating around in my life that are probably worthy of entire articles. Heck, if I wrote some of this stuff down and started a blog about each of them I would probably get wicked traffic… you know, because the whole money, investing, business and buying shit is the type of stuff that ninety-nine percent of other guys besides me salivate over day after day. 

    It’s not that I don’t do any of it, it’s just that I’m not intellectually interested in it… the same way that I don’t really care about professional sports. The teams are companies. The games are repetitive. And unless you’re gambling on it or cheering for the playoffs it’s all one big circle… of whatever.

    That said, I do a lot of capitalism things and this is site is kinda like my journal and half the point of it is to drain the thinks out of my brain onto the page, so… yet another new series: i, capitalist, wherein I yammer about my business and my investing and my other stuff.

    Like, I’ve been getting all consumer capitalist drooling over a new computer. I’m writing this on a six year old iPad. It works. But kinda just barely. I’ve been working on a contract for my business and the business is definitely going to be investing in a new computer so that I can do business work on something besides my gaming desktop computer in the dark basement or an aging iPad. And crazily enough Apple is apparently announcing the next version of their MacBook Pro series. I’ve been doing a lot of coding and sound design and a bit of video work, not to mention writing millions of words (on a freaking iPad) and while it all kind of works with the equipment I have, those new M5 terabyte multicore drool-inducing laptops are haunting my dreams. I don’t yearn for much, but a slick new laptop is hard to resist… especially if it’s a business expense, huh?

    And speaking of business I’ve been trying to figure out what it all means to be the sole director of an incorporated business. About six months ago while I was job hunting I had a few opportunities to apply for some sweet government work. Long story short, I didn’t get it because they closed all the competitions because of a labour dispute or something, but in order to apply I had to do so as a corporation. It’s not exactly an epic origin story for the side of a beer can to write “8r4d Consulting Ltd was built on the owner’s dream of meeting the minimum requirements to apply for a part time government system analyst contract …and the rest is history!” But here I am. And I need to responsibly track all the money and the bits so that I can file taxes and be a good corporate owner guy. It’s a time. 

    And speaking of money and bits, I got suckered by an advert, I admit it, and I downloaded one of those day trading apps to my phone and plunked a bit of mad money into the stock market. As of this morning I’m up… but only by about eight cents at the moment. It was as high as 35 cents when I started writing this, but such is the rollercoaster of the financial markets. (It’s particularly fitting that as I was writing this at a Starbucks, my actual investment guy who works at the bank across the parking lot strolled by with his coffee. We’ve got cash in a managed fund portfolio through him that all kinda makes my little trading app look like I’m playing a video game. But heck, I’m almost fifty and I know virtually nothing about the stock market. I figured I should learn a little bit.) My thought was not to try and partake in some get rich quick fantasy, but rather to spend a little bit of cash to see how the system works. It’s unlikely I’ll lose my shirt gambling a few hundred bucks on some tech and energy shares, but I’m playing with the assumption of a sunk position anyhow… and the rule of not chasing bad investments with more. I am more of a gamer than a money guy, after all.