This post doesn’t have anything to do with development, but I’ve just been pretty excited about it and felt pretty inspired to write something about it. This is my experiment with attempting to get my life back to “scratch.” I’m making a valid effort to cut out any service that I don’t feel adds to my daily “happiness” factor in an attempt to reduce my monthly cost of living.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “What in the world is a happiness factor?” Well, in my opinion it’s different for everyone. For me, being a developer, obviously I can’t cut off my internet. I use it daily and it’s just not something that I’m willing to part with. On the other hand, my television was costing me ~$80 a month; which I probably only utilized maybe 10% of the time in a month. The cost just wasn’t there. So I cut it out.

Over the past month I’ve managed to cut down my monthly cost by approximately $235 dollars. And to be honest I’ve been able to cut out services I really don’t find myself missing all that much. What are the things I’ve managed to cut out? Here’s a list:

• DirecTV ($80) – This was a pretty simple thing to cut out for me as I’m still able to watch most of my television programs online or downloaded via torrent watched at a friends house.
• Lawn Services ($50) – I was paying $25 every two weeks, because I was too lazy to get my ass up and go mow my own lawn. No more.
• Gaming Services ($30) – I hadn’t played this game in probably 6 months yet I was still paying $30 a month for it to sit there.
• Netflix ($25) – I love my Netflix account so I couldn’t cut it out completely, but I did drop my movies from 5 at a time to 2 at a time; which was a nice little savings.
• Slicehost ($20) – I had a personal VM that was nice to have around and got some use, but it was just a nicety that I could live without.
• Haircuts ($30) – I’m a guy and I have short hair. I don’t think it’s rocket surgery to cut it. I was paying ~$15 every two weeks for someone run some clippers over my head and have an awkward conversation with. I went out and purchased a $30 pair of clippers and just taught my wife how to do it … fairly simple, but I will probably end up going to get it done every now.

All that adds up to about $235 a month. Which is a total of $2,820 a year! I never really took the time to really think about how all that adds up, but it adds up to a vacation every year! Or an extra payment on a mortgage or car.

When I started to think about why I never cut these services out earlier I had a couple thoughts. One, I just couldn’t get over this weird feeling that I’m required to be paying for these things. I have this feeling like I need to be loyal to my services.

For instance, I love DirecTV. After hurricane Katrina came through the mailed me a card saying (paraphrased), “For the families in the area of hurricane Katrina we’re offering you three free months of premium channels (hbo, showtime, cinemax).” For that, I had this strong feeling that even if I wasn’t using their service … I wanted to give them money.

And two, I also had this nagging feeling of, “Well, what if I need it sometime?” “What if I have people come over and we want to watch TV?” “What if I want to go back go and play my online game one weekend?” “What if I wanted to watch a TV series over the weekend (5 disc netflix)?” And to be honest, I hardly ever did any of these things. And I certainly didn’t do them enough to justify not saving $235 a month!

Anyhow, I still have some more things that I would like to do in order to reduce my monthly costs even more. Get a better rate on an electric plan, contemplate disabling my XM radio in the car, seeing if my wife would be willing to cancel her tanning, shopping around for insurance rates, selling my motorcycle

Well, I made it through my first presentation and I have to admit it was a lot easier than I had imagined it. My nerves were probably on edge, because the last time I presented in front of an audience was back in college when I was trying to slink my way through a presentation about social reform during the great depression … yeah, it was brutal. But I’ve learned that presenting is actually pretty easy when you’re actually knowledgeable and passionate about what you’re speaking on. Perhaps if I have kids some day I’ll relay that little tidbit on to them!

I went through my slides a little faster than I wanted to, but I had about 10 minutes remaining and the audience had plenty of questions to ask; which filled up the rest of the time nicely. I also got some nice direction from Yehuda as well … which was very cool.

I’d like give a big thanks to everyone who came up and said hello before or after the conference as well. And for the support and feedback that I received after MerbDay. It was really comforting to hear that people were interested in the talk — even if you were just being nice; it gave me warm fuzzies. It was also really cool meeting some new people and getting to see some of the Merb developers face to face.

I think I’ll definitely be sending in some more proposals for talks in the future. Now that I got my first one out of the way I think I could get comfortable speaking in front of an audience and hopefully get in to some other topics that I’ve always been interested in. Agile Conference 2009 in Chicago might be my next target … I’ll keep you informed!

Anyhow … you can find my presentation on The Merb Router In Depth at SlideShare as well as the small sample application I put together with a few obvious routes in the MerbDay Atlanta Github repository.

Again, it was awesome seeing and meeting everyone and I can’t wait ’til the next Merb get together.

I’m sitting here in Atlanta for MerbDay. We’re currently in the first half of the conference; which is a live coding tutorial session. It’s been pretty smooth so far for me, but a couple of my co-workers have had some issues with dependencies. Some strange params errors that are being spit out by ParseTree.

Anyways, this will be my first time presenting so I’m actually a bit nervous. I’ve got this bad preconceived notion that I’m just going to speed through the entire thing in less than 10 minutes. Although, I’ve been working on my presentation for some time now and I think I’ve got plenty of good examples and enough to fill up the 30 minutes that I’ve been allocated.

I’ll try to make a post later with all the code and notes that I collect and a few links to anything of interest.

So I’m typically not an outspoken person when it comes to politics. I don’t particularly care for the drama of it all. Nor do I like how fired up people get over the whole thing. But there are times when people just say things that irritate the crap out of me.

To preface this, I am a Republican. But to be honest, I despise the stigma that comes along with either of the political parties. It seems like people in this country are starting to dislike people just because they’re Democrat or Republican. Conservative or Liberal. Left or Right. Which is why I always stand in awe when I hear people brag about how “I hit them with the full Democratic ticket” or "I just voted for everything with an “R” next to it." Seriously? As if either party could possibly speak for you on every single issue on every single vote? That’s very naive. Perhaps this has always been the case and I’m just now realizing it, but … it feels wrong to me.

It is not the Republican or Democratic party that makes this country great. It is having both parties to balance each other out. I agree with McCain on a some of the issues and I agree with Obama on some of the issues. The only person who is going to agree with me 100% of the time on all the issues … is me.

It shouldn’t be hard to understand that one party goes off to do it’s thing for 4 to 8 years and people get tired of it and they elect another party to go back the other way. It’s a balancing act. Each party plays its role in this country and that is what empowers the people, not the government, to make this country the best country in the world.

One of the things I keep hearing from the Republicans now is, “I don’t want to give my money away to people who don’t deserve it.” and then immediately a Democrat will retort with “That is the most selfish thing I have ever heard. I would gladly give money to anyone less fortunate than me!” To which I reply … what a load of horse shit. And if it isn’t … please feel free to deposit $100 in to my PayPal account (bryansray [at] gmail [dot] com), because I have credit cards that I need to get paid off.

So the next person I hear say, “I can’t believe you wouldn’t want to give your money to those who are less fortunate than yourself.” I’m going to stab you in the jaw. I will meet you somewhere and stab you in the jaw. There won’t be too many of us out there. Just look for the guy stabbing jaws. Come up, say hello, and I will stab you in the jaw.

The thing I keep hearing from Republicans is that “Obama is the Anti-Christ! He’s going to totally destroy this country.” Come on now. Get off it. I might not agree with a lot of Obama’s policies. I might not think that Obama is the best person for the job. But the Anti-Christ? Hardly. Contrary to what rumors say … He’s not going to drive this country in to the ground. He’s not going to hand it over to terrorist on a silver platter. He’s not going to start placing 666 on people and sacrificing chickens on an alter.

How do I know this? Because, regardless of who is in office, Republican or Democrat … the American people are resilient. We’re not as dumb as the media would have us believe. If we get attacked by some other country. You better believe that something in some foreign country is going to get blown up. That’s what we do. That’s what we’re good at.

So … to end this. I’m just going to say congratulations, Barack. Lets see what you can do!

Welcome to the all new BryanRay.net. It’s actually got some pretty interesting technology behind it … static files! It’s all being powered by static HTML files which are dynamically generated by Webby and then pushed up to the server. I have to admit it’s a nice change of pace to be able to only worry about content and not have to worry about my administrative interface for entering in my blog text.

If you haven’t looked in to Webby … I would highly recommend it. Even if it’s just to have a tool under your belt if you ever need to create a nice static site for a product, a friend, or if you really focus on creating web content (blogs in my case). It’s got a lot of really good functionality baked right in to it and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I’ll admit that it took me a while to get out of the ‘database’ mindset and in switching over to treat static files as your database, but once the little lightbulb clicks … it will all flow together.

I’ve still got a couple thing I’ve got to do to the site that I’m hoping to have done this weekend. I need to migrate over some of my previous articles, setup my RSS feed, and I’m going to take a look at using Disqus to implement comments back on the site so that I can actually have some feedback on some of the articles that I’ll be typing up in the next week or so. I’ve had a ton of stuff that I wanted to say, but it’s just been such a burden to get them posted that I haven’t even bothered. Enter Webby …

Update: So far so good. It took me all of 30 minutes to integrate Disqus in to the site … we’ll see how well it works. So far things are looking good.