Kjartan Mannes

I still think daylight saving is a stupid idea, and just utterly confusing. Waking up today was interesting as almost every clock around me was using a different time. My PC was reporting 07:30, my alarm clock 06:30, one mobile 08:30 and another mobile 09:00. I'm confused!

I'll have to find out the real time and get it sorted. 6 months or so till the next time, joy.

Paperwork sucks. It just sucked another 3 hours of my life. Amazing how we have managed to create a society that involves so many crappy things. Humans :-)

Steven has way too much time and made this rather cool Line Rider movie.

The new plan is to retire when I am 30. I've decided I am living an accelerated life so by my calculations I should be able to retire when I am 30. At least thats the plan. So far in my 24 years of living I've accomplished more than most people my own age, and started five - mostly sucessful - companies.

The first one was sold off during the early-dot-com era. Since I wasn't a major player I didn't profit that greatly from it, but it was a nice sum of money for a 17 year old.

Then there was an annoying 10 months doing my time in the Norwegian air force. Stupid required military service. 12 rather unproductive months of my life. Except for that small programming contract I got out of it. At the end of the 12 months I was starting to get afraid they would force me to stay on as resident geek. All in all I probably only did 6 months of real military service, but then again they payed me minimum wage for the additional stuff that wasn't service.

The second company was during the crazy days of the dot-com era and I cashed out when the going was good as I realized the company would never make a profit, or a working solution. 5 months later it went bankrupt. It was a decent business idea, but the timing was all wrong. 10 years from now I'll re-consider and start up again as it is a pretty neat thing.

Then for the last 3 years I've been involved in the insurance sector, and to a lesser extent financial sector. I wouldn't call it fun, insurance is a necessary evil. Nobody wants it, but everyone has to have it. So there is plenty of money to be made, and so far its going good. Probably the reason I don't blog that much about work. Most of what I do is rather boring and hard to understand if you don't have a good grasp of Scandinavian insurance sector. Making applications that predict the premium increase for the next 5 years based on past changes and insurance claims is just dull to talk about. In any case I have helped start two companies related to insurance and do contracting jobs for clients that have needs we don't cover in my free time.

Today I signed my share of the paperwork to start a new company that will deal with something entirely different. Might reveal more later, but for now there is a general do not mention details rule. Not much need for my services as a computer geek in this company, but there are a few challenges in their main application that will be interesting to tackle. Also the potential of the company is very good, and if we manage to gather the right group of people we should be making a profit by Q2 2004.

So I wonder how I will manage to top all this before I am 30 and have enough saved up to live doing nothing for the rest of my life. At least I can dream, as working 10-15 hours every day of the week doesn't appeal to me as much as it used to. My general feeling is that if things continue they way they have been its not an unrealistic plan, but at the end of it I will be a programmer turned CEO. I already spend more time handling the business side of things than I actually program.

That said the next plan is to start something new when I am 32 as I could never imagine doing nothing. How dull would that be?

Today is one of those days where I miss having a female in the house. I can't for the life of me find out where i put one of my spare WiFi PCMCIA cards. Considering I have 3 of those cards lying about the house thats amazing. Women have this annoying ability to find things that I can't. I remember ranting and raving about how I couldn't find my watch and my mom sent 10 seconds looking and found it pretty much right under my nose. It wasn't there when I looked for it. Really, it wasn't. No matter how annoying it is it would come in real handy right about now as I want to get one of my laptops without built in WiFi online.