Category: Joel

After I graduated from college I got rid of my television.  What is life without television like?

• When I do watch television, I find it to be:
  • Fascinating.  I can see how easily it can suck you in and take hours each day.
  • Frighteningly bad.  So many of the television shows never actually go anywhere or teach anything or even have very good production values.

I had one of my newest employees, Jimmy, do some research into how ObamaCare will affect small businesses for me.  Here is what he found:

• Companies with 50+ employees are required to provide minimum health care package to employees or pay $2,000 per employee per year
• Increased premiums for smaller businesses
• 2.3% surcharge on medical device manufacturers
• Panel of people to determine what is or is not cost-effective
• 2.3% charge on any retired person making more than $80,000
• 16,000 new IRS employees to manage tax bureaucracy
• 10% excise tax on indoor UV tanning
• New health insurance tax on small businesses that is distributed across health insurance providers which will be $8 billion in 2014 and grow to $14.5 billion in 2018
• First decade the health insurance tax will impose new taxes of $87.4 billion
• 1099 reporting requirement requires businesses to issue a tax form for every transaction over $600
• Medicare payroll tax increases from 1.45% to 2.35% for individuals making more than $200k or couples making more than $250k

I don’t ordinarily blog about topics like weight loss or food to eat, but I thought that there is such a huge quantity of misinformation out there by people trying to sell you their crappy supplement or weird meal that I would publish some good information on the healthiest meal you can eat to lose weight fast.… read more “Healthiest Meal To Lose Weight Fast”

Below are all the photos from my rafting trip on July 6th, 2012 with Shawn & Melissa Sturzen and Justin White. It was a lot of fun!

What makes you happy?

This is a simple question that has always been a tough one for mankind to resolve effectively.

I have found that once I met a certain minimum lifestyle for myself, additional income or materials goods don’t make me happier. What makes me happier is spending time with people, accomplishing goals, and personal freedom.… read more “What Makes You Happy?”

If you have been looking for various types of interesting media content, here are some of my recommendations:

• Better off Ted on Netflix
• Chess Tactics for Champions by Susan Polgar
• Battlestar Galactica on Netflix
• Hunger Games book series

Do you have any suggestions?

I just finished reading the Hunger Games book series and I really enjoyed it!  It’s a very fast read – each book takes around 6-8 hours to go through.  It’s pretty dark for a young adults book series!

Workout of the Day:
“Filthy 50s”
For time:
50 Box jump, 24 inch box
50 Jumping pull-ups
50 Kettlebell swings, 1 pood
Walking Lunge, 50 steps
50 Knees to elbows
50 Push press, 45 pounds
50 Back extensions
50 Wall ball shots, 20 pound ball
50 Burpees
50 Double unders

Took me 36 minutes to do.

Repost from Jeremy’s new Tumblr.

Artificial Intelligence

Growing industry and something that you would want to specialize and find a way to grow a company in

Sales Reports using Google spreadsheets and javascript

Joel taught himself Google’s api script, which uses javascript

On Sales Reports – Joel was confident that the increased transparency would add to his bottom line

Jeremy was skeptical of this – not all good ideas work as expected

Good to be crazy and iterate – Newton had crazy ideas some good some bad – Newton believed in gravity and ghosts

He was only right about one

Took 2 days to build a program that pulls information from your sales people’s spreadsheets into one main spreadsheet

More flexible than Salesforce

Joel thinks that this is superior to Salesforce or any off the shelf product, because you basically expand it as needed and there are no limitations

To do lists – Joel’ s list is 100 to-dos, start with ideas break them into tasks

Jeremy’s list is 5 -10 to dos per day of small, small tasks – research shows such as write thank you notes should be broken down into smaller tasks such as, look on Amazon.com… read more “Repost from Jeremy: AI to Structured Play”