I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and talked to some American friends about this, so I decided to share with you some insights into the personal finances in Europe (actually it might be only Spain, or just me).
The original idea for the title was “What’s wrong with American personal finance”, but I guess a positive thinking could help more than just criticism. I usually read some productivity and lifehacks blogs like LifeHacker or zenhabits and once in a time, a money article pops up. The two most common pieces of advice in this field are:
Avoid late fees by using Quicken/MS Money to pay your bills
Get rid of your debt
Those two common issues amongst American people were really bizarre for me the first time, and still today I can’t fully understand were the problem comes from.
Avoiding late fees
Simply put, I’ve never paid a single late fee in my life (maybe renting videos long time ago). The most common payment method in Spain for recurrent bills like Internet, rent, phone,… is called domicilación bancaria. I’ve been told there’s something like that in the US, and I’ve found similar concepts on the Wikipedia: Direct debit and standing order.
That is, if I get a new DSL contract I give my bank account number to the service provider and they charge me every month directly in my account. The only chance to get a late fee there is if there are no funds in that account.
So, my piece of advice here is: ask your bank about this possibility and get your bills paid with direct debit
Get rid of your debt
This in fact hit me long time ago, in an episode of The fresh prince of Bel-Air, when Will gets his first credit card and starts spending way more than he can pay. I thought that was a silly joke, but as I discovered later, it seems like the sad beginning for a lot of people.
I have one credit card and I only use it to buy online and when I travel outside Spain. My other cards are debit cards: some Visa Electron and some Maestro. In fact, most of the time my credit card stays at home.
I don’t even know if there are debit cards in the US, but if they exist, you should get one.
I found this cool parody some time ago about getting out of debt:
Conclusion
My final basic trick is that my expenses are much lower than my income, so I can pay them every month.
I think the above video is my conclusion to this: don’t buy stuff you can’t afford and I should add find the financial tools you need to stay away from credits.
Business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions. Too many so-called “successful” men are making business an end and aim in itself. They regard the multiplying of their millions and the extension of their works as the be-all and end-all of life. Such men are sometimes happy in a feverish, hustling sort of way, much as a fly placed in a tube of oxygen is furiously happy until its life burns out. But they have no time for the tranquil, finer, deeper joys of living. They are so obsessed with the material that they cannot enjoy the immaterial, the intangible, the ideal, the spiritual&emdash;quiet thought, self-communion, reflection, poise, inward happiness, domestic felicity. What profiteth it a man to gain uncounted riches if he thereby sacrifices his better self, his nobler qualities of manhood? Mere getting is not living.
Forbes Magazine, September 15, 1917
This was the first Forbes editorial, the first US business magazine.
My decision about 1 year ago to start doing training was a strange move for me. It was totally new and scary field for me, but like I said at the moment, according to my experience all change has been for good. I think I can trust my intuition.
Like Seth Godin said (more than) once: Safe is risky
I found a short article about How we learn which summarizes my point of view after 5 courses.
10% of what we READ
20% of what we HEAR
30% of what we SEE
50% of what we SEE and HEAR
70% of what is DISCUSSED with OTHERS
80% of what is EXPERIENCED PERSONALLY
95% of what we TEACH TO SOMEONE ELSE
William Glasser
You can never imagine the kind of questions you are going to get from so many different mindsets, so you have to find a lot of answers that you’d never find otherwise.
Much has been said about music prices nowadays, I remember reading somewhere that usually the 10 most sold albums in Amazon every week were below $10. That’s not a bad price, but let’s call it sensible pricing.
Sensible pricing is sometimes not enough. Some albums are so good you’d feel confortable paying $20 for them, and some of those $9.99 albums have only one half-good song. I found this 37signals’ article today: Jane Siberry’s “you decide what feels right” pricing detailing how some small record labels are letting consumers (I don’t think that word applies anymore, but still) decide which is the fair price for a CD. At this time, 14% paid above suggested. See it on Sheeba Catalogue
The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a clever system: she has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes
This is not new, magnatune has been doing that for about 4 years. They let you listen the full disc, then download it paying what you consider a fair price
And to help this cool ideas, if you like piano music, let me recommend you Rob Costlow (blog). It’s a great album to stop and relax enjoying the beautiful sound of a piano. And he could be called a piano hacker according to his biography:
By the time he was twelve Rob Costlow was annoying his piano instructor by adding unwritten endings to songs during rehearsals and recitals.
I just found this video on Youtube by chance. It wasn’t being too funny but, after a while, when trying to explain why you shouldn’t talk in a public restroom, it starts with an example:
They strike up a conversation about Linux. […] So there they are, discussing the advantages of open source development…
That really got me. They story gets really complicated and in the end… well you best watch it yourself. And remember: never ever say a single word within a men’s room
I’ve been looking for an open source project to collaborate for some time now, and given the time I’m spending with MySQL lately and the expertise I’m gaining thanks to MySQL training, it looked like an obvious choice.
During the last advanced bootcamp, Tobias found bug #27894, which apparently was a simple fix. Dates in binlog were formatted as 736 instead of 070306 (for 2007-03-06). During the bootcamp I used my lonely nights at the hotel and came up with a patch, and some days later my first contribution was going into the main MySQL code.
The problem
Now I had to find something bigger. One of the things that most annoys me of MySQL is the lack of some way to abort a procedure or trigger: there is no raise method. To generate a custom error you have to do hacks like:
SELECT `
Error: Invalid firmware series for this model
` INTO dummy FROM model;
The solution
There is a SIGNAL command in the SQL:2003 standard which does the job, but it’s not implemented (yet) in MySQL. The syntax, according to the manual is as follows:
In this first part I’ll cover the basics: just the SIGNAL command with a fixed generic error, enough to get rid of the dirty hacks.
The implementation
Getting used to foreign code always takes some level of difficulty, but when you have to deal with grammars and parsers it’s all crazy fun. First, we have to add a symbol for our new command
sql/lex.h
In this file, we have a symbols[] array where we have to add SIGNAL. Since it seems to be sorted in alphabetic order, we’ll put our line between SHUTDOWN and SIGNED:
Before we get our hands dirty with the parser file, let’s get our custom error prepared. I took a look at the SQLSTATE error messages and I found the 38503 (Exception generated from user-defined function/procedure) enough related to this.
In this file we have a series of error constants with their corresponding error messages in various languages. Since our new error will be related to stored procedures, I decided to put with the rest of SP-related errors:
ER_SP_CASE_NOT_FOUND 20000
eng "Case not found for CASE statement"
ger "Fall für CASE-Anweisung nicht gefunden"
ER_SP_SIGNAL 38503
eng “Exception generated from user-defined function/procedure”
ER_FPARSER_TOO_BIG_FILE
eng “Configuration file ‘%-.64s’ is too big”
ger “Konfigurationsdatei ‘%-.64s’ ist zu groß”
sql/sql_yacc.yy
And finally to the point. Here we have to declare that we’ll be using the SIGNAL_SYM which we defined at sql/lex.h as a token.
Then, in the sp_proc_stmt label (look for sp_proc_stmt: at the beginning of a line), we add sp_proc_stmt_signal as another possibility (we’ll define this in a minute):
This basically tells the parser to expect the SIGNAL_SYM token (SIGNAL) with no arguments, and generate an error with our new error code (ER_SP_SIGNAL). As you might see there’s some extra code which I copied directly from similar definitions, which I’ll refer to as parser magic (anyone willing to explain what sphead and lex variables are will be very welcome)
Conclusion
This one wasn’t so extremely difficult if you had some previous experience with Bison, but the next part can be more interesting, since I guess we’ll have to add some more functions than sp_instr_error to be able to show custom error messages. Also, we’ll have to prepare some test cases to verify our newly created behaviour.
I hope this helps someone trying to contribute to MySQL. If you want to try this at home you can follow the article or apply the patch
Reading Linux failing to boot screen on the plane I remembered I saw something similar in my flight to the MySQL Users Conference. It wasn’t so critical, but my entertainment screen got an unexpected reboot and I could see the tux logo and the console for like 2 secons while booting. This was with Northwest Airlines.
