Summary: month 1 and 2

http://www.flickr.com/photos/josenicolas/ 

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." —Cyril Northcote Parkinson

These word also known as The Parkinosn's Law is widely known in project management. The first time I have heard it was during studying, on lecture on production management. This law is the theme of  "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferris. It is also used in personal time management. In my opinion, two month long time  boxes to summarize the progress is optimal. Timeboxing is also known in Scrum, where it is called sprint. Recommended length of sprint is 2-4 weeks. My activity is less dynamic than software development. Of course the main rule of Scrum, but not the only one, is to be flexible. It is possible that I will adjust my sprint length in the future. In Scrum there are a few team meetings:

• A planning meeting (at the beginning).
• Short  'stand up' meeting (every day, optional, but recommended). 
• Sprint review, sprint is summarized  (review itself and retrospective which helps to optimize whole process). 

The idea of first and last meeting is brilliant. To take maximum profit from my Scrum experience I decided to reuse the same ideas. Every two months I will publish a brief summary containing my failures, successes (review), analyze them, wrote conclusions (retrospective). After all I will try to share my plans for next two months. I didn't document all my plans two months ago but they could be recycled from the review. Let's start:

Failures:   

• 
  Social aspects of life.
   PhD studies are more and more time consuming. I spend a lot time on gaining new skills, new knowledge about passive sources of income, job via Internet and so on. As a result my social life is neglected. Sometimes I do not have social life.
• Reducing time spent in the office
  My target is to work wiser, more efficient, to earn the same amount of money but also to have time to enjoy life. Now I can see that I am working harder than before starting this blog. What I was able to achieve spending only 8h in the office (lunch included). I also earned 1 free day by sacrificing 3 hours of Sunday (weekend work)
• Regular, physical activity
  I wanted to return to everyday running and trainings. Now after work and 'school' I am too tired to anything. Of course, an important thing is human laziness. I tried to overcome it, after two weeks of intensive trainings I noticed that my organism refused to cooperate (I was permanently sleepy, tired and not able to concentrate) 

Successes

• 
  Natural sleep rhythm
  I am not using alarm clock anymore. Now I feel much more fresh. Humans have natural phases of sleep, ordinary alarm clock wakes you up without checking in which phase you are. As a result you could be tired the whole day. There is a possibility to program yourself to wake up at defined hour. Repeating "I will wake up at hour x" a few times just before falling asleep is enough. At the beginning my accuracy was +/- 2h, now it is +/-1h, not perfect but good enough.  
• Traveling
  Since the beginning of this year I have been able to visit two countries: Germany (one day trip) and Finland (3 day business trip). No I am sure that traveling to different countries, even for a while is the most valuable experience of all. If you have ever been abroad, you probably know what I mean. 
• Remote access to corporate network
  It may look odd to you, but I requested for a token which gave me the possibility to connect to my company network remotely. I am planing to use it wisely to limit the time spent in the office. It is only the first part of my plan.
• 1/8 of PhD studies passed 

More of, less of, continued (classic retrospective)

• 
  More time on PhD studies
  It is a very important activity. There is a big chance that it will be profitable in near future, so I should concentrate on it. What is more, if I lost my job, PhD would be my only source of income.
• Less time on reading about passive income, traveling, independence
  I have Google AdSense on my blog, but my assumption is that my blog is non-profitable. If so, I should concentrate on profitable activities. It does not mean that it is not important, it just should have lower priority.
• Be active
  It was the greatest failure, but should not be abandoned. 
• Constant number posts per month
  3-4 posts per month will be enough for now. 
• Traveling
  I could see how much fun it is, and how valuable it is, this activity should be continued

 Plans

• 
  Swimming pool once a week
• Finnish the most important task for PhD studies
• Sleep 6.5 h plus one 15 min. power nap 
• 3-4 posts a month 
• Looking for some interesting, open project 
• Find informations about psychological mechanisms related to need of long term planing  

Prison is a state of mind

http://wulffmorgenthaler.com/

How often do you dream about a journey around the World? How often do you say: 'If I had one billion dollars I would travel, enjoy my life, spend more time with my family'? Bullshits!
If you are poor child from somewhere in Central Africa this kind of things are dreams, otherwise they could become reality easier than you imagine. Everything that blocks you is inside you. It is not your credit, your salary, your children, your parents, your obligations, your imagination. It is you and your mind, which is somehow limiting you because of: culture, manners, education, old habits. Now I am under a high influence of different kinds of emotions, I have in mind old, Nike add:

 

Isn't it beautiful and true? Be careful when your are making most important decisions in your life, be patient when you are looking forward to seeing results of new actions. Be kind to people you meet, it will pay you back sooner you think. Everything your are doing or planning to do something, do it with passion and enjoy it. Good luck on your way, wherever it leads!

Go for gold

There are many blogs about  investment, gold itself and other metals. I would like to write a few words about why I am interested in  gold and silver.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wikicoins_user_james/

I have been thinking a long time about some investments that would allow me to save money for my retirement, there were a few requirements:

• easily exchangeable all around the world
• 'condensed' (lot of property in small volume)
• time resistant (retirement is a long time perspective)
• resistant to inflation and political turbulences 

This is not a coincidence that gold fits to all this requirements.

Gold's history is also one of the things that speak in favor of its usage as retirement investment. It has been used as the standard for many currencies (known as the gold standard). President Richard Nixon ended the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971. Now the exchange reserves of majority of countries is the U.S. $, in some countries the Euro, but in European countries it is the dollar again. As a result, the economy is based on paper currency which has no intrinsic value, it is called fiat currency . Some analytics suggests end of gold hegemony is only a matter of time, interesting article about it, some thinks that there would be a great return of gold standard (link).

Maybe in th future I will feel competent enough to cover this big topic in more detailed way

There is a few ways to buy gold: using Forex, buying gold certificates, investing in gold mining companies, gold related investment funds, and last, but not the least, buying physical gold. I decided to choose the last option because it is quite safe. I mean that it is real, physical piece of yellow shiny metal. The crash of electronic trading system or very strong sun storm and, as a result global loss of digital data, do not lead to the loss of my property. I can travel with it, sell ti wherever I want, ti always has its value as an metal. If someone planned to buy quite a lot of gold there could be a problem with a storing. In my case it is not, see monthly incomes. :)

First thing that came to my mind was: "How can I check if the piece of metal I bought is really the gold?" Here comes the next advantage of gold. It is unique as an element. Its density is ~19.30 g/cm3. If a debaser wanted to add something it would be wolfram or platinum. In case of platinum it is not profitable (for debaser of course), in case of wolfram it is really hard and the difference could be noticed in case of 1 oz coin or billet. If  the density of pure gold is unique I can just measure it. It was the first approach, but because my choice is a coin and because of its rough surface it was not so simple, but also not needed. My method is simple. Bullion coins have unified size and weight, measuring those values is enough to be 99.9% sure. Before taking any actions I decided to educate a bit. I found a very good site about investment in precious metals but unfortunately in polish (link). There is an article about gold testing. One of also considered methods was the Fisch, but the first approach is cheaper and reliable enough.It is also worth to mention that first coin should be bought in a trusted shop. Of course, it should be also tested to reduce the probability of buying forgery. Next coins could be bought from other, cheaper sources. They should be carefully tested and compared to the pattern (first coin).

As I mentioned before, my choice is a coin, Why? Because it is easier to sell it if needed, it is also harder to falsify.  I decided to buy Vienna Philharmonics bullion coin (same as at the picture). It was the cheapest, available, pure gold coin. No I am happy owner of two 1 oz coins.

   
Now a few words about silver.
Silver is a more common element. There is approximately 17.5 times more Ag than Au  on earth. On 11.02.2011 the price of 1 oz. of gold was worth 1259 $, 1 oz. of silver 30 $, the ratio is 41.9. If we assume that both silver and gold would have their value dependent on their availability silver is undervalued more than two times. Of course such assumption should not be treated 100% serious, there are many more dependencies than this one, but it could be one of  factors which make silver attractive for investment.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bullionbonus/

Silver has longer history than gold because it was easier to obtain. Similar to gold, it was a standard for currency. If we compare prices in last 60 years it could be seen that silver is less stable. A few years ago people started to get interested in silver as an investment, similar as gold. It has a few disadvantages.One of them is oxidation. Contrary to gold silver oxidize in normal conditions. Second is the fact that in case of silver the asset is less condensed. There is also some confusion about silver, for example Marks Keiser's action: "buy one silver coin".

All in all, In my opinion silver could be good alternative to gold. My plan is to have equal amount of money located in silver and gold. This plan is not executed yet, because I had a opportunity to use money in more attractive way. I am going to return to my plan as soon as I will have enough relatively free money. I decided to buy American Silver Eagle, it was a bit more expensive than Vienna Philharmonics, but I would like to be independent from bullion coin producer. The strategy of testing is similar as in the case of gold.