Category - Software & Technology

I was in Greenville SC yesterday to visit our office up there and found out that a small group of the guys there read my blog and Mark Turansky’s blog over lunch on some days. One of the guys, Brian Corbin, has his own blog that is both entertaining and useful. Brian is one of the more creative individuals I have met in my life and consistently delivers more than expected. So I decided to feature his site today.

Rock the Fat Knot, Brian’s Site, was originally a showcase of Brian’s tie collection but has since evolved to contain a number of things. While fat knots are still paramount, there are a number of other posts about Brian’s life and his extremely heavy involvement and interest in software, programming, and technology. Take a minute to click over to Brian’s site – you are sure to be informed, entertained, or both.

No matter what, applications should not automatically assume that they should take the center stage and pop to the forefront. This does two things – it takes the cursor focus away from where the user was typing and it creates the need to shift focus back to the place it used to be. This is bad behavior. If you write GUI applications please, please, please don’t allow your application to do this.

The most common form of figuring inflation uses the consumer price index (CPI) to monitor the changes over time. These numbers are tracked and compiled, by region, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are different indices but the most revealing of all is the CPI for all items. This includes energy, food, service, and other costs. The only notable thing it excludes is healthcare costs. These numbers give us an idea of what consumer spending is for many different items and categories over a period of time, which gives a fairly accurate depiction of inflation itself.

To figure inflation the first thing we will need is a data set for the regions you are interested in. I chose national and southeast. Keep in mind that it takes a while to compile all the data, so there is always a lag in what is available. Here are the numbers since 12/2006:

	National CPI	Southeast CPI
12/2006	201.800	194.800
01/2007	202.416	195.021
02/2007	203.499	195.950
03/2007	205.352	197.904
04/2007	206.686	199.618
05/2007	207.949	200.804
06/2007	208.352	201.675
07/2007	208.299	201.571
08/2007	207.917	201.041
09/2007	208.490	201.697
10/2007	208.936	202.155
11/2007	210.177	203.437
12/2007	210.036	203.457
01/2008	211.080	204.510
02/2008	211.693	205.060
03/2008	213.528	206.676
04/2008	214.823	208.085

 We can then use this formula to calculate the change over time as a percentage, which is inflation:

 % inflation for period = [ (cpi² – cpi¹) / cpi¹ ] * 100

To calculate the total inflation throughout 2007 we take the index from December 2006, to account for the change in January 2007, and the index from December 2007 and plug them into our formula:

[ ( 210.036 – 201.800 ) / 201.800 ] * 100 = 4.08%

Likewise, we can calculate the inflation for 2008 using the same methods, which show us to be off to a rocky start:

[ ( 214.823 – 210.036 ) / 210.036 ] * 100 = 2.28%

These calculations are important to keep in mind when it comes to negotiating salary, regardless of whether it is for a job offer, a raise, or anything else. If the inflation rate you calculate is less than when the compensation increase is, you are losing real income, if the inflation rate is the same then you are breaking even, and if the inflation rate is lower then you are increasing your compensation.