Egnaro TV

It's often said that people hate change and prefer the normalcy of daily routines and following the status quo. I'm pretty sure this has never been me. Daily routines are good for being productive and efficient, helping to ensure things get done and aren't forgotten. But I'm always analyzing those routines looking at how I can tweak them to make things easier or faster.

The larger thought I think I'm working on here – and I am thinking this out in real-time as I type – is that I'm getting hungry for a new work challenge. I'm coming up on 6 years at NOW. It's been mostly great and I've achieved an amazing amount of output here. Every so often when I stop and look at what I've built over this time and how it's helped change and shape the company I end up with a warm fuzzy feeling inside. 

Lately though I'm finding myself bogged down in mundane work and not able to pursue work on larger picture stuff, the problem solving, leading edge type challenges that I thrive on. To top that off I'm constantly getting a taste of other things I love from my work with FITC, teaching at Centennial or most recently curating NXNE Interactive. Along the way I've also discovered between NOW and my various blogs that I love writing – and think I'm not great, but ok at it. 

The question then is what's next? I love everything that I do, but I need either a new challenge, the freedom to explore and develop more complex solutions, time to write, time to teach, something. Or maybe I need a bigger move? I've been trying to figure out how I could make things work as a combination of event work plus freelance work, or something similar for awhile. I'm definitely addicted to the regular pay-cheques and stability that provides. But maybe now that I'm a little more in control of my finances not having this might not be such a problem.

Mostly I'm just rambling out some thoughts right now. NXNE Interactive really left me on a high and wanting more. Guess I'll take the summer to feel all this out and probe some options.

As many blog posts do, this one started as a long-winded comment on a friends post on Facebook. The basic premise of the discussion was to discuss ways to save money and how to make a small amount stretch as far as possible. Since we've been working through similar things for the past few months as we try to achieve a number of financial goals I thought I'd expand on some of the ideas from the FB chatter and also look at some other things Dora and I have done.

Start with the big stuff
Make sure your debt is under control. No investment or savings plan is going to earn you as much money as you are paying in interest on your credit cards. Get them paid off! If you're running a high balance on your cards, go to your bank (or do it online if possible) and apply for a personal line of credit. Transfer all your high interest debt into this and pay it down instead of the credit cards. Some people recommend getting rid of the credit cards. I say leave them at home instead. The cards are an important way of building your credit rating for things like mortgages and credit lines. They are also good for saving money by buying things online. Just don't spend any money on them that doesn't already exist in your bank account. If you don't have this sort of self-control then you may need to resort to cutting up the cards.

Joint finanaces
If you're in a long-term partnership with someone there are numerous ways to deal with joint finances. Dora and I both want to maintain some autonomy over our money. Since we both bring home about the same amount it makes this a bit easier for us to manage. We setup a joint chequing account and a joint Visa card both with TD. I've also recently moved all my accounts to TD and our mortgage is with TD as well. This makes managing money super easy as we can see our personal and joint stuff all on the same web interface with TD. The joint chequing account is basically a holding place for monthly auto-withdrawals such as the mortgage. The joint Visa is for all purchases that we want to share equally between us including household things, meals, gifts for people, etc. We then each pay half of this every month.

This system has worked fairly well for us over the past few years. If our income situation ever changes we'll obviously have to adjust. I'm also sure there are dozens of other ways to manage joint finances. Feel free to share below.

Everything else
Once the big stuff is sorted out move on to the day to day items. Although many of these seem small, they can add up quickly. Read on.

Item 1: Eating at home and bringing lunch to work, including any extra beverages, is definitely a huge one. Spending money eating out can add up quickly. The side bonus here is that making your own food is generally much healthier as well. I would argue that eating out some times is worth while so long as you find some chea p places and don't get the extras, not even drinks. I generally aim to keep my daily food allowance under $5, including coffee consumption! I know, the coffee brewed at your office is not as good as Starbucks or even Tim Hortons, but it doesn't cost you anything whereas a Starbucks in the morning means I don't get to eat anything else that day. 

Item 2: Ride a bike. I can't even begin to fathom the thousands of dollars I've saved by riding my bike ever since I moved to Toronto for the first time 13 years ago. Avoiding the TTC saves big bucks and major headaches. Spend some money to get a good bike for commuting. Take some time to make sure the bike is a good fit for you. Get bags and racks to carry things around with and outfit yourself to stay warm and dry in the winter and cool in the summer. Initially you might spend a lot but this stuff will last you a long time and save you big time in the end. We do own a car but I only drive when required thus still saving thousands in gas, parking and maintenance that I would spend if I drove it all the places I bike.

Item 3: Try doing some detailed tracking of your spending for awhile. I did this for three months using an app on my iPhone calledPennies and it opened my eyes to a few things where I was spending way too much money. I don't do this any more but the three months was enough to get me off some bad habits. In the Facebook comments someone mentioned Wesabe which looks to be an interesting solution for tracking your finances and finding solutions to help you out.

Item 4: Set an allowance for yourself. Every payday I take out a set amount of cash and that is all I allow myself to spend for the next two weeks. If I still have cash in my wallet from the previous payday I don't take another allowance out until my wallet is empty. If the cash runs out I make myself go without until the next payday. 

Item 5: The buzz term of 2009 was the staycation and as much as I think this is a ridiculous word, there are some sound principles here that apply beyond your annual two week holiday. Instead of going out to bars or restaurants to hang with friends, invite them to your place or go to their place. Drinking at a bar is a money sink. Drop by the LCBO and drink at home or at friend's. It's MUCH cheaper. Skip the movie theatre and watch a DVD while eating hot air popcorn. Plan board game nights or potlucks. Not only does this all save you loads of cash you'll find it's a better way to engage with your close friends.

Item 6: Some what related to item 5, drop the cable/satellite service. Few people realize this still but you can get free over the air HD channels for a very small investment in hardware. All you need is a converter box and an antenna. You should be able to get setup for around $100. If you have a newer LCD or plasma TV chances are it has a digital tuner in it already and all you need is the antenna. This will give you a basic set of channels to watch, all in HD quality better than what Rogers sends through it's pipe. Anything you don't get over the air, you can buy on iTunes or wait until the DVDs are released. We haven't actually done this although I'm constantly pushing Dora to consider it. The major problem with this switch is the loss of access to the specialty channels, many of which broadcast shows she works on or wants to work on so it's kind of a work related requirement to keep them around. I would also miss Discovery, Food Network and G4TV. If any one knows of a reliable way to get the content that airs on the specialty networks let me know. The big shows can be downloaded but other stuff, especially Canadian produced, can be hard to find online.

The final word
Probably the most useful thing Dora and I have done is force ourselves to sit down and talk about our finances. I hate doing this, but the end result often leads to useful initiatives and ideas that end up saving us more money or making our finances easier to manage. If you don't have a partner to talk with, then talk to friends and family. Start group discussions like the one on Facebook that led to this post. Just don't be afraid to have these conversations or embarrassed about your situation. Chances our, most people are or have been in a similar place.

I hate talking about money. I hate any discussion that involves figuring out how and what to do with my money. I am slowly learning to get over this though as the benefits are huge. The trick is to figure out how to take control of your situation without requiring too much effort or thought from you. This is why I stay away from continuous detailed tracking of my spending and why I moved as much as I could over to TD. I want to spend as little time as possible actually having to deal with this stuff. 

I look forward to any comments or ideas that people have to share. Good luck getting to your own financial goals!

This is the title of an interview on Salon.com with Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired. First off, it's hard for me to take anything Anderson says too seriously given his magazine was once the tome of the digital generation and is now mostly a pile of ads targeted at upper class business guys and stories trying to sell them on stuff and the latest business trends. To be fair, wired.com is still one of the best sites out there with a load of diverse content. Back to the point of this post…

I'm pretty sure Anderson has no idea what he's talking about after reading this interview. He opens the interview saying "I don't use the word 'media'" and then as @Heather_R points out, uses it 6 times in the interview. When asked if he miss the existance of major newspapers Anderson says no because he doesn't go to them to get his news, he goes to Twitter, preferring to just look at content filtered by those he follows. Where does that content his fellow tweeters post come from though? From major news outlets mostly. And this is the thing that irks me most about people declaring that we don't need major news organizations and trained journalists anymore.

While the average blogger/tweeter/photographer does a great job at getting news tidbits out to the world in near real-time rarely do they do the sort of follow-up investigation into the stories that a journalist would. Nor do they have the experience or historical knowledge of related stories to help put their words into context. When's the last time your neighbour hopped on a flight to Iraq to blog about the war and post some pictures to Flickr – and Joe the Plumber doesn't count? True, some of the best reports are those coming from the citizens in a region, like the recent turmoil in Iran but there is still a place and a need for our reporters to cover these stories too. An Iranian blogger can't help us understand what role the Canadian government could play in a situation.

Once Anderson is done delcaring the irrelevance of current forms of news reporting – while still hinting that he actually reads this stuff but is really just too lazy to source it himself – he moves on to "free", also the title of his new book. There's a tie here to my post yesterday. Anderson is all too keen to tell you about how great it is that he's giving away a digital version of his book for free but then acknowledges that he has to charge for the hardcover and audio cassette versions. What he doesn't acknowledge is that the digital version costs money too. Hosting digital files and transmitting them through the tubes isn't free, therefore his book sales are in some way subsidizing the free version. I'm also sure Anderson doesn't live in an abandoned shack in the woods and has bills to pay. Being the editor at Wired probably affords him some play room to do work and not get paid for it but writing a book is no quick task and I'm sure he, like anyone else, wants to be compensated for his time. 

By the time I was done reading this interview I realized that Chris Anderson really has very little to contribute. His support of 'free' everything is really just a description of the current wild state of the web while he clearly acknowledges we need new business models but offers nothing in the way of suggestions at what those might be. Anderson declares that "free is the force of gravity", a force we can't fight, that once people get some thing free they will always want it free. Yet this is clearly not true. At the start of the decade millions of people were downloading pirated music all around the world and P2P was the way of the future. What we've seen since then is the emergance of iTunes, eMusic, Pandora, Last.fm and a host of other great sources for music online. Filling the demand for music, these services are seeing huge success and shock of all shocks, people are paying for music again! (Read more on this trend over at Mark Evans' blog)

It sure seems easy to declare that "free" is the future and that "media" and "journalism" are dying when you work for one of the largest ad supported magazines and websites in the world. The only thing that Anderson gets right is that the traditional web banner is broken. It doesn't deliver enough value. We need to figure this out so we can start seeing the kind of spending on the web that we use to see in print.

Is it just me or is it completely ironic that BlogTO and Torontoist spend a lot of time going on about the web being the future of news but yet they are both working with printed papers to distribute their content. I'd also guess these are some of the more lucrative arrangements both blogs have made compared to rates paid for web ads. BlogTO announced today they will be providing a page of content to the new T.O.night afternoon paper. Both blogs have good numbers in terms of web traffic and loyal followings, but BlogTO's recent deal plus Torontoist's ongoing relationship with the Globe tell me something isn't quite right here yet.

Web prophets have been singing about the death of newspapers for months now as many prominent print rags have ceased physical production and exist in the virtual only. I call bullshit on all of this. Newspapers aren't going away and most certainly journalism isn't going anywhere. The challenge that news media is facing is one of re-modelling business and advertising structures. No doubt there will be casualties along the way, but they will survive. The problem is really no different than the exploration and discovery period the music industry is in right now. Artists are suddenly finding a new voice, free of the contraints of major labels. I'd hazard a guess that despite the massive decline in CD sales that many more bands are making a living off their music now than ever before.

For too long papers have closed the shutters and hoped the storm would pass, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they actually already have assets of incredible value in their possession – knowledge, networks of relationships, history, brand recognition and more. What needs to be done is a discovery of new ways to make money from these assets. 

Some will be successful with microtransactions, most will not. Advertising will still be the best bet. Others will say the hold-up is in the ad industries unwillingness to budge from their standards. I'd argue that newspapers should be showing them the way. Giving them new ad opportunities, leveraging ad dollars to explore new mediums and helping them create new ways to reach their audience that are both more meaningful and less intrusive to the end user.

Will we still have print editions 10 years from now? I'm guessing no. Between environmental concerns, the cost of printing and new technology I don't think there will be much need for print. Think about the dramatic changes to the way we obtain and enjoy music over the past 10 years. The Amazon Kindle is merely the beginning of e-books. Tech publisher O'Reilly has recently started selling individual books as iPhone applications. Other tech companies are joining in on the e-book market as well. Rumours of an Apple tablet continue to swhirl around the tubes. I think we are going to see the equivalent of an iPod for text over the few years – a fantastically beautiful cross between the iPhone, Kindle and netbooks everyone's been scooping up over the last 12 months. This universally loved and coveted device will comfortably fill the gap between the small screen of a smartphone and large size of work ready laptop. There will be numerous other devices that fall into this market as well and portable digital text reading will finally be ubiquitous.

The point is that newspapers, like music, aren't going away, they are just going to shift from one delivery method to multiple streams, all fed from the web. This is inevitable. The tricky part is bringing the ad dollars along for the ride.

What is it about this time of year that makes me dislike my employment situation so much? (hello to all my co-workers on FB who might read this!)

For a reason I can't quite put my finger on I always feel deeply dissatisfied with my job in December. Nothing I do feels good enough. Nothing feels satisfying. I get frustrated easily, both with my own ability to make things happen and with the larger situation around me.

Is it me? Is it the way the holidays affect others? Maybe I'll pay closer attention to my feelings in the Spring as well. Could be that the only thing that would satisfy when I see piles of fresh powder outside is gliding down a hill on sled or snowboard or zipping through the forest on cross-country skiies. 

Whatever it is the feeling itself is frustrating and only feeds the loop of discontent. I hate feeling this way because I generally love what I do – so long as the term "e-commerce" isn't involved – and I want to come home feeling good about my day and I want to wake up in the morning excited about what I might create.

Or maybe it's just coincidence that this always occurs. I've been spending time working in Premiere and Encore lately and I'm reminded how much I enjoy working with video, something I don't get to do in a professional capacity. Maybe this feeling is somehow related to the discussion taking place on Hugh's blog. I've always been someone who falls between creative and technical work. It's been my biggest strength, but also my biggest challenge. My brain isn't quite logical enough to be a great developer. My brain isn't quite creative enough to do design work (although I think I'm ok at expressing my visions through video and photography). But I can work in both worlds and talk to people on either extreme.

How does this apply to my current situation? I'm spending all my time doing really boring code work right now and even that's ok, except there's such a backlog of things to be done that the things I'm looking forward to are easily a year away from moving to the top of my priority list.

Let's hope this passes and the new year brings a renewed energy to me as it often does.