DaveWitwicki.com

Sometime last night, after 2:30am, somebody went on a crime spree down our back lane. They smashed at least three car windows and tossed a fourth car. They rummaged through all the compartments in our car, but, since this isn’t the first time, we keep nothing of any real value in the car. Therefore, nothing was stolen.

However, there is the horror of waking up to that, the mess that needs to be cleaned up, the cost in time and money to get the car fixed, the inconvenience of driving with a broken driver’s side window. It has left us feeling violated. To think that someone damaged our personal property and then went through our stuff is horrible. There is always a human cost to crime, and one that I’m sure most criminals do not consider.

To make matters worse, I was outside at 230am and I purposefully checked the car to ensure it was locked because there was a lot of noise from people milling about after a social at the nearby community centre. I like having a park, community centre and school just out my back door, but I have to wonder now about the side effects. Normally, socials at the community centre are held by local people. It seems that wasn’t the case this time. I can only assume that these crimes occurred because of the secluded nature of our back lane and the fact that because there’s only one row of houses, nobody can see what you’re doing on the other side of the cars. You’d think someone might have heard something, but I know first-hand that all the houses are soundproof enough that you hear nothing.

Honestly, I’m at a loss as to what to do about this. How could I have prevented this? What if I had happened to be outside while this was going on? Maybe that would have made things worse. I’m by no means a small person, but even one reasonably tough thug could likely best me. If there had been more, I’d be in real physical danger. It seems nowadays that criminals are a lot more bold.

At the beginning of summer, I bought a new bike and it was stolen within six days. At that time, I bought the parts to put a motion sensitive security light on the back of the house and the back of the garage. I’ve installed the one on the back of the house, but I need to do some wiring and stuff to get the one on the back of the garage. I guess that will be my project for the day.

This makes me wonder, though, how far do I have to go to protect my property? What’s next, a patrolling security guard for the neighbourhood? I don’t know the answer. I wish I did. What I do know is that I’ll be sleeping a little less soundly for the next while. Looking out the window more often. Keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. And eventually, these feelings of insecurity will fade and things will go back to normal. Until the next time…

- Dave

After stating that I want to be wealthy, I thought it would be a good idea to define what exactly I mean by “wealth”. Well, I’ve been mulling this over in my head for quite some time but I haven’t been able to put it into words in a succinct manner. Lo and behold, Meg over at The World of Wealth has summarized the wealth-building process and has a definition that I really like:

Wealth: the generation of enough income to comfortably exceed your expenses, while simultaneously providing you flexibility, security, independence, and freedom.

She goes on to explain this in more detail and then gives some simple steps for becoming wealthy. Go on over and check it out, it’s good stuff!

- Dave

Here’s a pic of me in the Evil Mastermind shirt from Eric Sink of SourceGear. The deal here is that he sent me a free shirt and in return, I post a pic of me wearing the shirt and allow him to use it. Not only is that a great marketing idea, but its fun looking through all the pics. Alas, I wasn’t brave enough to do the Evil Mastermind pose.

- Dave

Somewhere along the way I decided that I want to be wealthy. I get paid decently by my employer but, in reading various personal finance books, I realized that its going to take me a long time to get wealthy if I rely solely on my employment income. In the books I’ve read, there seems to be three ways to generate wealth outside of regular employment: real estate, investments and business. Some sources separate internet from business, but I feel that this distinction is not necessary since the internet is so pervasive in our lives these days. It would be hard to run a business of any sort without using the internet in some capacity.

Since I work in IT, it seems natural to first consider business and, specifically, some sort of internet-enabled business. I’ve spent a long time trying to think of the “next big thing” and I finally realized that even if I had the perfect idea, I don’t have the necessary skills to make it happen in a timely matter. This realization has caused me to go ahead and just do something to get started and gain the skills. As part of that something, I had to learn about hosting and how it works and I felt this was a good opportunity to start blogging again, so here I am.

In the coming weeks, I will be creating a video tutorial site for non-technical users. There are a few such sites out there, some require subscriptions, some allow donations and some have ads. My plan is to provide the tutorials for free and have ads to generate income. Will this work? I don’t know, my general feeling is that people don’t click on ads but there seems to be evidence to the contrary all over the place. I am targeting non-technical users because I suspect that its only technical users who don’t click ads. I recently came across an article by Des Traynor which came to the same conclusion (and he said it much better than I ever could). Whether it works or not, this will be a good learning experience and the cost to try is low. I’ll attempt to chronicle the more interesting points of this journey here (along with all my other ramblings).

- Dave

Welcome to my place on the web.

- Dave