Monday, April 16, 2001

‘Twas going to complain about a general lack of updates on Brennen’s diary of late, but then I realized how hypocritical that would be if I didn’t do a diary entry myself. But now I am writing a diary entry, so can I complain now?

I decided I’m not going to.

But I already have.

Went to an explanation of stock options at work today, and I’m starting to grok the bare essentials. I’m going to explain it here, mostly because I want to record it.

Stock options are just a contract between you and your company, allowing you to buy stock from the company. You don’t have to buy it; you’re just agreeing that, yes, you can have this certain number of shares at this certain price.

And that’s the power of stock options; you’re buying stock at a certain, very low price. You pay that low price no matter how much the stock is actually worth. So. How does it work?

There’s one major restriction, namely, the vesting date. The vesting date is just a date which specifies at what point you own the stock. If you try to buy the stock before the vesting date, then the company will hold that stock until it vests, and then give the stock to you. If you buy the stock after the vesting date, the stock is yours, end of story. But there are tax issues with doing that, because of how your income is calculated based on if you buy before or after the vesting date.

Then, it gets really complicated, so I won’t go into that. Suffice to say that those are the basics. Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with my options….

I spent some time during the day cruising for online diaries. Nothing really grabbed my attention, though there are definitely interesting diaries out there. This happened to lead to a discussion with Brennen later on in the day, where we agreed that the strongest online communities these days seem to be between online diary enthusiasts. And how there doesn’t seem to be any Yahoo! equivalent for online diaries, and there really should be. It could be done more as an indexed database, or like a topographical map of connected, related sites.

In the evening, I purposed to follow a schedule: Dinner from 7:00 to 8:00 (after exercising at the gym), devotions/e-mails/sketching from 8:00 to 9:00, and then writing from 9:00 to 10:00. Writing proved to be the hard thing, as I don’t really have any stories burning in my soul at the moment. I did hash out a very nice idea for a story, though, which I can attack later in the week.

I did manage to draw another practice sketch, though, based on my practice fashion magazine. My attempts to copy real human poses is helping me a lot with understanding basic proportions and shadows, as well as the amount of detail that can go into a sketch before it becomes over-burdened. The sketch came out quite well, IMHO, and I uploaded it to my gallery.