Life update & job news

I’ve been remiss on posting, but for a good reason: things are going a little better, my luck may have improved a tiny bit. There are two things I’m working on. One is a new job and in that vein, I had a promising interview today where I scored a near perfect mark on the skills test and nailed the back and forth It’s still customer service, but it’s for a large S & P 500 Internet company with a huge facility here in town and I would literally be getting in on the ground floor — which is still under constructions. The pay is a little better than what I’m getting where I’m at, enough that it would materially improve my life practically from the first paycheck received. The thing I liked best about it is the actual work environment. Going from where I am to this place would be like walking from a 1960s office complex into the year 2035. It’s beautiful and spacious, full gym on premises, room to grow, plenty of room to advance, and it’s a publicly traded with a great discounted employee stock plan and other, topnotch superb benefits.

The other project I’m working on is for Kickstarter. I can’t talk about this much, but I may have some work for anyone who is deft with creating YouTube videos. Leave a comment below with a good email and I’ll contact you. Note: this is not an intern job, it is not a learn as go deal, this is a one time lowish to moderately OK flat fee for a few hours work for a creative producer who can hit the ground running with editing, placing text and other advanced effects on the YouTube platform. Outside of that, more soon.

 

Wendy Davis serious about run for Texas Governor

Wendy Davis standing against the American Taliban during her marathon filibuster to shut down Senate Bill 5 on the floor of the Texas capital in Texas last August. Click image for more on her homepage

 

The lady who rose to national prominence holding the line for sanity against the usual teaparty-backed lunatics in early summer appears to be leaning more and more toward a run for Texas CEO. The Texas Tribune now reports Wendy Davis, a lady who knows the pressure of being a single mom first hand and went on to work her way through college and law school, has further narrowed her options making a gubernatorial run more likely: [Read more…]

A dellion here, a dellion there, & pretty soon we’re talking about real money

microsoft-1978

Microsoft 1978: Would you have invested?

Here in lovely Austin, a growing bloom of progressive blue America encroaching steadily in to the red blight that has infested the Lone Star State for a generation, it’s not unknown to meet a real, full-blown dellionaire. That term may not be familiar to everyone so here’s a little background: back in the day, IBM had a big plant here. My whole family worked there at one time or another. But a few influential employees got together in the 80s and decided to found a new company focusing on IBM compatible computers, as Big Blue had recently standardized a diverse, chaotic PC market around the Intel 8086 architecture running a neolithic disc operating system from a small start up company called Microsoft. The founders of MSFT are shown above; would you have invested a big chunk of your life savings with those kids? Well, that’s another story.

This merry band of former IBM engineers and proven PC pioneers called their new company CompuAdd. It had every advantage. The best and the brightest designers, veteran quality assurance pros, sales execs with a big swinging book of business shipping the growing reseller channel, the latest in manufacturing methods, all sitting atop a cheap, youthful manufacturing and PC literate clerical workforce like a cherry on a money sunday. But they weren’t the only ones to see the writing on the wall, not by a long shot. There were several others in Austin alone. One IBM PC clone was even started up around the same time by a college kid who dropped out of UT and made a few PCs a week, essentially handcrafted and built to custom order. Which one of those box makers would you have invested in?

Well, if you chose CompuAdd, you lost every dime a long, long time ago. In fact it would have been hard for a retail investor to invest at all, CompuAdd never even made it to the NASDAQ. But if you bought Dell common stock on the secondary market after the IPO in 1988, at about $10-15 a share, and held on to it through the dot-com boom in the late 90s, with splits and appreciation, you bagged something like a 100 to one return. Which made the college drop out, Michael Dell, the first of many dellionaires.

Today Mr Dell has another idea, sort of a repeat, but this one isn’t drawing anywhere near the applause of that past miracle. In fact it’s causing a lot of neurosis and fear, from here in Central Texas to the elite boardrooms of Wall Street and beyond. What is it? Follow me below. [Read more…]

August

Texas, August. There are many cruel days in the southwest, but these are the worst. It’s going to be hot, then hotter, followed by blazing hot. AC’s will fail, automobile radiators will blow out, power grids will brown out, some people will end up in the ER or the morgue because of it.

One thing we don’t need here in Texas is more heat and more drought. If you happen to live on or near the east or Gulf Coast, you might want to bookmark this page: National Weather Service Tropical Cyclone page.