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Welcome to another weekend carnival! How is the weather where you live? This one is dedicated to the ongoing winter storms after a mild spell, and the birth of my new business.
Recent posts
- The Importance of Buffering Your Life
- How Did These Unconventional Investments Moves Do In 2011?
- Sudden Bankruptcy Syndrome – When You Blow All Your Money Fast
- How I Quit My Job, and What I Plan to Do Next
- Valentine’s Is Tomorrow: What Are Your Plans?
New Apps
Check out Easy Voice Recorder for Android. This is my first app launch, and I am happy to present it to you all. Here are some of the features:
- Supports several formats, ranging from small & space-efficient to uncompromised raw PCM quality.
- Record in the background. Continue to record while you do other things.
- Files are saved to “EasyVoiceRecorder” on your external storage and remain accessible even after uninstalling the app.
- Uses the audio player(s) on your device for playback; can choose between native and audio mime types.
- Play back, share, and delete your recordings.
- Supports a widget that can be added to your home screen. The widget works in conjunction with the main app so that there are no conflicts.
- Widget available in 2×1, 3×1, and 4×1 sizes.
- No full-screen ads.
- No scary permissions.
- No time limits on recordings!
Business pros and cons
Pluses
- Already released one app, working on the second. I have had good feedback on Easy Voice Recorder so far! Please try it out, and if you like it, please consider rating it in the marketplace and sharing with your friends.
- Brought IIW and FG to one month post buffer, and working on this for Learn OpenGL ES.
- Had a couple of leads for contract work. Did not follow one since it would be full-time in an office environment, and since I just got out of an office I am not looking for something like that at the moment. The others are tentative. There seems to be a lot of demand out there, as I expected!
- A good month for advertising! This has been pretty much my only source of income this month, but the gross is near what I was netting at my day job, and since I am likely to pay less tax this year based on a bit of research, I expect that I will get to keep most of that.
- I have been waking up earlier and getting better with sleep. Lately I have been sleeping only around six to seven hours naturally, and I seem fine most days. A couple days I crash and go for the full eight hours, but this last week has been the best so far. Waking up early and without an alarm clock is great! Maybe what Sam said is right: If you really want it, it will happen.
- Getting involved in two book projects, one a group project involving fellow personal finance writers, and a second a solo project, details to come once I’m under way and I have a reasonable expectation of being able to publish. Both projects will be physical books, with possible e-book options. They will not be the ubiquitous free ebook trying to promote affiliate links, seen so often. I am really looking forward to these projects, since although the payoff is highly speculative, there are a great many soft benefits and doors that open up down the road.
Minuses
- Trying to find a name for my business has totally kicked my ass. This has also delayed opening the business bank account and getting the necessary insurance, as well as opening the official website, so I have been delaying myself over something that is entirely my fault and that I have complete control over.
- A little sloppy with time control. It’s too easy to have a bunch of windows open with emails and stuff, and lose time flitting back and forth. I find I am at my most productive if I close all of the windows and just focus on work, but sometimes that urge to check up on things is hard to ignore.
- There are pros and cons to everything. I do miss working and interacting with coworkers, but I do love my independence much more. Ask me again in a few months depending on how income does.
WordPress commenting and Livefyre
Some of you have noticed that I have switched back to WordPress comments from LiveFyre. The reason I did this is because I had an issue with duplicate comments in older posts (might have been my fault since I accidentally went back to the import when the browser auto-completed to that URL), and some commentators were also never able to get in, probably due to browser or software incompatibilities. I don’t know what the reasons were, but I firmly believe in including all non-spammers into the discussion, and I hate the idea that some of my biggest supporters can’t comment at all.
Unfortunately, some of the comments have been lost along the way. Apparently there was a significant bug with LiveFyre, where comments left by guest posters would never get posted back to the WordPress database. The support team has let me know that the bug has been fixed, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to resync these comments successfully. Nothing against LiveFyre’s team — their customer support has been *excellent* and they have really gone above and beyond. I would be happy to switch back if the outstanding issues can be resolved.
In the meantime, I am very sorry if your comment has been lost! It is still there on the LiveFyre side, and hopefully I can find a way to bring it back into WordPress.
On to the weekend reading:
Weekend Reading
Special features
- A passion for oil and gas stocks - This is a great feature at The Globe and Mail by Larry MacDonald on my good friend Mich from Beating The Index.
- Go It Alone - an eloquently written post on leaving the corporate rat race, by Joe from Retire by 40.
Blogging
Book Reviews
Giveaways
Government
- How the Federal Minimum Wage Crushed the Economy of American Samoa
- The Government is Stealing Your Savings. Seriously. (Read This to See How!)
- Why are Manufacturing Jobs Leaving the US?
Investing
- 3 Tips For The RRSP Procrastinator
- Canadian Natural Resources and the Ecology of Business
- Closing your DRIPs and SPPs, transferring your shares to your brokerage
- Monitoring your Investment Portfolio
- Natural Gas Stocks: Beware of Declining Natural Gas Prices
- What is Equity?
Miscellaneous
- Coffee Talk: Your Tax Return Diary
- I Graduated from College or University… Now What?
- Productivity, Success, and Happiness: What The Hell?
- The Beauty in Saving Your Skin and the Water Supply
- Time Management: Stop Working
- You don’t quit because you are a quitter
Personal Finance
- A Frugal Manifesto
- Creating a Simple Budget the Beating Broke Way
- Financial Literacy: What to Teach Younger Children
- How Important is Motivation if You`re Sorting Your Finances
- When Joint Finances and Emotions Collide
- Your Small Business Doesn’t Need A Loan
Retirement
- How To Retire Early And Never Have To Work Again
- Making The Transition Into Retirement Spending
- RRSP Deadline is fast approaching
- Will Your Retirement Dreams Be Delayed?
Technology
Carnivals
- Carnival of Financial Planning – Edition #224 – February 17, 2012
- First Yakezie Milestone Carnival
- The Carnival of Financial Camaraderie- Rain Man Edition
- Totally Money Blog Carnival # 54 – Valentine’s Day Edition
- Totally Money Carnival: Scared Straight Edition
- Yakezie Carnival Mardi Gras Edition
Hope you all have a great weekend.
Thanks so much for including our article! An older article by Mrs. SPF that I wanted to highlight as we had virtually no readers back when she wrote it. Hope your weekend is going well.
Np SPF, and hope yours went well, too.
All still good without the day job? Good… and good work on building the queues up!
Thanks for the include! For the record, as of right now it’s 60 degrees and it’ll be ~ 70 later. Not bad…
Decent weather! Yep, all is still good but the grass isn’t always greener. I’d be lying if I didn’t say there were things that I missed. I still don’t regret my choice one bit.
I was wondering what happened to my comments. I thought you decided to delete them. Thanks for explaining.
Yep, sorry about that! I just compiled an archive of the lost comments, and will be publishing that shortly.
Thanks for including me!
You include me quite often, so it’s only fair
Thanks for including my link
Np
Thanks very much for the mention!
Congrats on the app!!! I still have a BB, haven’t switched to an Android phone but I think it’s just a matter of time for me. Your app sounds neat.
Any candidates for your business name? I’m sure it’s not easy to determine one and even if you have some leads, probably aren’t ready to share them. That’s OK. I wouldn’t know where to start and probably pick something very goofy.
Wow Kevin, it sounds like you have a ton of cool things on the go. Very impressive.
Hopefully you’ll make time to take a deep breath, and enjoy your weekend
Cheers,
Mark
I’ll send you an email
You are into a lot of things, all the best. And do let us know if your apps are ready..
Will keep you posted!
Glad the old commenting system is back
Thanks for the mention Kevin and keep that business rolling, focus on the pros!
Yep, gotta focus on the pros. Thx Mich!
Thanks for the link to my success post, it got a lot of good feedback.
Any suggestions on an iPhone app for recording phone calls/interviews? Did you do any research on that end when you were writing your Android app?
Cool stuff, and best of luck.
I don’t even have an iPhone, so haven’t done any research into that, yet. iPhone is still the biggest app market, so I may very well go in at one point, but it all comes down to time and opportunity. Android is growing very rapidly, too.
Very interesting update Kevin. This actually makes me consider some new possibilities. Let me know how the process goes with writing these two books. I am interested to see how the effort vs payoff is. Congratulation on your new found enthusiasm for life!
I will definitely keep you posted!
Thanks for the mention Kevin, and wishing you great success on your app developments. You are an innovative and busy guy!
Thanks, Joe!
Hey Kevin – thanks for the mention – didn’t care much for LiveFyre, so glad for the switch.
One thing I miss about LiveFyre is the ability to easily respond to comments quickly and sequentially. My site is dying with all the DB queries right now!
Thanks for the mention!
I wasn’t a fan of LiveFyre either, so am glad you’re back
Hopefully there will be less issues going forward.
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