Two books have a profound impact on me, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Alchemist.

The central theme of the books is a quest for meaning in the world. They take different journeys to the discovery of meaning, through inimitable prose. I highly recommend both books.

I recently left much that I held dear, in terms of city, employment and many friends in a larger quest to find meaning in my own life.

To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.

The Alchemist

As a child I wanted to be able to do something memorable, that had an impact on the future of humanity. This led me to a range of ideals, from scientist, to teacher, to engineer.

My current believe is that my path to significant meaning is the creation of an organization that in turn creates meaning. Guy Kawasaki put it like this:

If you make meaning, you will probably make money. If you set out to make money, you won’t make meaning and you probably won’t make money.

Guy Kawasaki

I’m not there yet. I have not even figured out what sort of company I should create or what type of meaning it should strive for. The important part is to take the first steps along the path, the rest will become known through action.

For now, I’m largely focused on self improvement and being able to enrich the lives of those around me. Beyond here lies the realm of possibility.

The short version: If you shave using a razor more than once a week, then you can justify buying a $300 electric shaver and reduce your expenditure by more than half over 5 to 10 years.

I’ve been a little bit lazy when it comes to financial things. My main strategies have been misguided intuition, guesswork and ignorance. However, after reading a few useful books on accounting and earning, I have focused on more defensive financial planning.

I made some basic assumptions:

Electric razor

• Purchase cost: $300 (AUD)
• Lifespan: 7 years
• Service rate: once every 750 uses
• Cost per service: $50

Razor blades

• Cost per blade: $2 (AUD)
• Number of shaves per blade: 4
• Cost of shaving foam/gel: $4
• Number of shaves per container: 20

My motivation for doing this is an intent to increase the frequency I shave. At the moment, it would be once or twice a week. I’d like to believe that I can manage 5-6 times per week, so an assumption of shaving three times a week is good start.

I split the cost of the electric razor and the services for it into a yearly cost. As far as my accounting knowledge stretches, this depreciates the cost of the electric razor over its effective live, with no salvage life.

With three shaves a week:

• Electric: $53.29 per year
• Razor: $109.50 per year

That’s about 205% cheaper to use an electric shaver, and a reasonably expensive one at that.

In the interests of saving my brain, this was all calculated using a spreadsheet model, so changing the numbers is easy. This allows for different scenarios to be run rapidly.

Assuming six shaves a week:

• Electric: $63.71 per year
• Razor: $219.00 per year

It costs around 340% more to use a manual razor than an electric!

Playing around with the numbers a bit, I worked out that I can go from shaving on average 1.5 times a week to 4 times a week for the same outgoing expenditure by switching to an electric shaver.

Hopefully the time spent investigating this, and the time spent researching a good shaver is balanced by a time saving by using an electric shaver.

ps. thanks to the wonderful shop assistant at the shaver shop in the city for answering my questions about types of electric shavers and their useful life.

Not so long ago…

• a web server was a large piece of software requiring large expensive hardware to run.

  Now one is deployed with all major operating systems, and can be embedded into applications.

• a database server required a team of people to maintain and a dedicated server.

  Now it is possible to embed one into your application. (Apple does it for you with Core Data).

• a web browser was a hard fought venture.

  Now a browser is a control that is embedded into many different applications.

Things that were once big are now available as small and nimble and “mashable” in normal applications.

Search is slowly permeating the desktop as an assumption rather than a feature. Microsoft has even taken the essence of a big iron EAI toolset and scheduled it for inclusion as a workflow engine suitable for the desktop.

With these kinds of building blocks it’s an exciting time to be an application developer!