Just another day in the life: Day 55

It is a beautiful day today. Perfect weather. The girls are playing together nicely in the living room, Missus is upstairs at work. I have half an hour before my scrum call, so I’m going to try to write quickly today.

I finished The Future Is Faster Than You Think. It took me a long time to read because of everything else going on, plus I wanted to let the ideas percolate in my head. A full review is upcoming as there are a lot of takeaways. They have CEO training — I wonder what they charge for that! — plus a venture fund that might lead to some possible opportunities. They have a digital version of their Abundance360 program that might be within my reach.

I downloaded GPT-2 here on this laptop, via their Dockerfile. It needed almost ten gigabyte of downloads for the model, and I still have no idea how to run it. That will need to wait for another day. I’m not quite sure what I want to do with it, but getting it up and running will be an interesting test. I’d like to see what it can do. I imagine prompting it with a subject and have it generate papers and blog posts. I’m sure there’s a business model in there some how. I know AI is used by a lot of financial news sites to generate articles based on firm reporting results, so the question is, how far can it be used.

Using Docker for development is going to be my new baseline, though. I really want to be come proficient with it. Ideally I’d like to have a setup where docker is running on my downstairs Linux server, and I can just connect to it using whichever machine I happen to be on. I currently have three workstations, though, one for “work”, my upstairs rig, and this laptop. It seems a bit much and like something I’ll need to pare down if we want to minimize or downsize. I should probably just get rid of the downstairs one completely, since I don’t really need a headless Linux server right now.

Today is the first day of the week, and I have a couple goals:

  • Provide at least two hours of value this week to my two clients, plus the pilot test I’m doing through Zombie, Inc. (six hours)
  • Sign a third client, at a higher rate than the other two. (two hours)
  • Register my LLC. I need liability protections to operate. (two hours)
  • Finish updating my resume and add it to the website.

Half the day is over, and most of the morning has been taken up with a trouble call and managing the kids and the kitchen.

Yesterday I spent several hours going through old mortgage statements and updating acccounts in GNUCash. I investigating refinancing and changing insurance companies, but both seemed a dead end. Even if we shaved an interest point off our mortgage, by the time you factored in three thousand dollars in fees, we’d save just over four hundred a year. It might make sense if we were going to take twenty five years to finish paying it off, but we don’t. If we roll rental income from Missus starter home into our mortgage, we could have our house paid off in ten years. Anyways, we’re at the point where we can drop our mortgage insurance. Applying that money to our principal will shave another two years off the maturity date.

The homeowners insurance quote I got from Lemonade wasn’t very good. The payments were higher than our current coverage from Nationwide, plus it didn’t seem that the coverage was better either. It was worth the fifteen minutes it took though.

I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do with our accounting, which will wait till next week. I’ve got nine months of utility bills to plug into GNUCash. Anyways, it’s one o’clock, and the girls are fighting.