Tims Blog

I mistakenly thought that leaving a loaf of french bread in the bag that it came in in the fridge would keep the bread fresh. Well, it kept it from going moldy, but it made it go super dry; like you can drive a nail with it : )

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So I get to babysit my dad’s animals this weekend.

I have six financial goals for 2008. I don’t think they’re overly ambitious, but with, let’s just say 7, months left in the year , I am confident I can meet them.

First I want to pay off my credit cards. I’ve wanted to do this for a while because the interest will eventually eat into my bottom line. I paid off my last interest charging one last month I think. The last CC I have currently has 0% interest. I’m looking to say “I have no CC debt, yay!” though, so I think I’ll either pay it off next month, or over the next 2 months.

Second, I want to pay my last rent payment to my mom. Now, I’m pretty sour about the whole mom charging rent thing, but since I do owe one last payment, she’ll get it and then that’s it. Getting this monkey off my back will help boost the moral too.

Third I want to open a Roth IRA at Vanguard. I have several funds already with them and I really like them. I want to mix a Roth in because, while I already contribute to my employer 403b, I understand the financial benefits of the Roth in the long run. I don’t think I’m ready to fully fund the Roth this year though. I’ll start small; maybe half.

Fourth I want to fully fund my 403b. Currently I’m at about half of full fund-age. Fully funding it isn’t going to be as “omg” as I initially thought. I wish there was a way to better way to dollar cost average the 403b though. I get paid monthly, so I can only put in pre-tax monies once a month. I’d prefer if I could do weekly pre-tax contributions. Oh well. Along the same lines of the max 403b, I’m going to be on the employer sponsored retirement package that is offered after 2 years of employment like white on rice.

Fifth, I want to cash out my Van Kampen funds and move the money to my Vanguard funds. I’ve been real unhappy with Van Kampen. My uncle set me up with this account a long time ago, but everything Van Kampen does just sucks IMHO. Their website is lame, they used your SSN for a long time as your login name (this has only changed recently). They have terrible Quicken support (from my experience) and I, in general, have no idea how well the fund is performing. It’s time to sell and merge. The only thing I’m not quite clear on is the tax repercussions of this move. Or for that matter, any financial repercussions. It’s something I have to look into.

Finally, and I don’t intend this goal to be a “Tim tooting his own horn” goal, but, well, I want my net worth to break the $100,000 mark. Technically it’s feasible, but it’s going to take a great deal of frugality to accomplish. I’m within reach though, so it is possible. This is without a doubt the most difficult of the sixth to meet though. Time to play the saving game again. What is this, something like round 5000 or something? : )

I bought a box of generic Cinnamon Toast Crunch to see if I could tell the difference. I usually snack on it at work so it’s one of those mission critical parts of the day. Well, bad news. There’s just no comparison. Brand name Crunch is leagues better than this generic stuff. I think I’ll stick with the brand name.

Check out the desktop TD game below. It’s a great time waster.

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At work we have a pet venus flytrap named Herman. We had a slight problem initially though in that we had nothing to feed him. Granted, we have a whole window sill of dead flies, but Herman doesn’t like the dead ones. Well, the gods be praised, there have been numerous ladybugs that have popped up this last week. Herman has all 6 of his mouths full of them. Yay!

It was a beautiful day today for riding if you don’t take into account the insufferable wind. Man, it was like tornado speed winds from the south and west. I guess it doesn’t help that I live in an area that’s still developing…so we only have baby trees. Anyways.

Speaking of riding, last year I started attending a riding event for the Children’s Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation. I found this article from my Honda riders magazine. Check it out.

How about Illinois there eh? Yeah, totally kicked the ass of EVERY other state by AT LEAST 2. I’ll be there again this year. It’s a really cool event.

Hehe, so I have a small problem where some scripts get wedged after they are forked. They’re not taking up any CPU time, they’re just zombie’ing along…but they’re not listed as zombies.

Normally I kill scripts that have wedged themselves CPU wise, but this new type of wedge-ness was a bit difficult to diagnose.

The scripts should finish within at least an hour. Luckily, the scripts have the time that they were created written into their file name. Something like this

172.16.1.5-2008-04-16.024001-1208331905.out

With a bit of crazy python, i extracted out the date and time to get a number. I can then compare that number to the current time, and if that number is less than an hour ago, splat, the script is killed. It will re-run it’s self though when it is killed and should finish correctly the next time.

filename = os.path.basename('/root/172.16.1.5-2008-04-16.024001-1208331905.out')
pieces = filename.split('.')
filedate = ''.join(pieces[3].split('-')[1:])+pieces[4].split('-')[0]

haha, man that’s about as obscure as perl now isn’t it? It will print out this

20080416024001

I’m an avid reader of a bunch of personal finance blogs. I like their frugal mindset because they make it sound like a game and, well, I kinda-sorta approach money and saving like a game too.

For a long time I’ve eaten out at Subway nearly every day for lunch. It’s been one of my weaknesses, or to put it more appropriately, it’s the one thing I splurge money on; eating out.

Recently though, I’ve been in a food rut. I would wait for lunch to come around but I didn’t know what I wanted. When I would think about Subway, or any of a myriad of other restaurants, nothing sounded appealing. So I figured this month I’d change my lunch around.

Normally I buy food only when I absolutely need it. Ok, I do that with a lot of things, but I’m really conservative with my money. I was at my parents house the other day and went out to the store with my mom and a shopping list with roughly 10 items on it; all food. An hour or so later I was walking out of the store with a basket full of groceries and a receipt with $157.66 sitting at the bottom; yikes!

Now, single male, eats standard 3 meals a day, maybe some snacking in between. I don’t usually spend that much cash to feed myself. Well…actually I did, now that I’ve figured things a bit.

Subway would run me ~$5.50 a day. That included a 6″ sandwich and bag of Doritos. I love Doritos. If I was stranded on a desert island with only one thing to eat, it would be them. Add to that the cost of gas in driving the 10-15 minutes each way to Subway. Just for lunch, I’m running (conservative estimate) $180 bucks a month. On top of that I need to buy breakfast and dinner food-stuff.

And, that $5.50 only nets me this puny little bag of Doritos! Heresy!

Now, I sat down and pen’d my way through my grocery receipt marking the items that I soley intended to be lunch food. The final verdict? $57.28, a savings of $123+. woot.

It gets better though. I put the Doritos in standard plastic sandwich bags. I’ve calculated this, and one normal sized bag of Doritos can last me one week…filling the sandwich bag. Better yet, almost every week Jewel, or Dominicks or Walmart or whoever is having a 2 for 1 sale on Doritos; get two bags for $3.50. Bam!

So hell this is fantastic. I’ve cut lunch spending by more than a third, and haven’t really lost out on anything. Plus, in that original $150 that includes breakfast and dinner foods. Yay for shopping!

Since I’ve finished Hyperion, I moved on to another book on my shelf called Feed. Well, I started it maybe two or so days ago and I finished it last night.

My first impression when reading it was “You’ve gotta be kidding me, this book sounds like it was written by a 15 year old”. The writing is maddeningly annoying. The author uses the word “like” in just about every sentence. He also uses a really really poor slang that is supposed to make it appear as if the story is being told by a teenager, or group of teenagers.

Well, mission accomplished. I was so aggravated just by the wording alone that I finished the book as quickly as possible to limit my suffering. There were, in my opinion, only two decent parts of the book. One chapter which involved a conversation between the main character and a sub character named Violet, where they argue over the political design of the US. I thought for a moment that the author might be about to resurrect the otherwise terrible intelligence of (just about every) character in the book. I was wrong.

The second good point of the book came around the last 40 pages when the author focused heavily on the reader’s emotions. It was a really depressing ending. If it had been a movie, I may have walked out of the theater saying “Yes! Finally another movie that doesn’t have the stereotypical happy ending”. Being a book though, I didn’t have the same reaction. It was more of an “Oh man, this is heart breaking.”

I guess I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into when I bought the book from Amazon. Their recommendation system said I would like it. The book is about a future US society where 70% of the US population has a device implanted in their brain called a Feed.

It streams content to them and allows them to talk to other feed users in a fashion that is reminiscent of chatrooms and the Internet in general.

The author focuses on what the media could become in the future. By providing constant streams of Ads and commercials to people via this Feed, people become money spending machines that, in the end, create the often feared “Big Business” side of the coin. Think of it as capitalism gone horribly wrong.

Would I recommend the book? Well, can you stomach 200+ pages of bastardized teenage dialog? If not, then don’t pick it up. If you think you can handle a short read with little character development, shallow plot, alarmist prophecies about the future, and absolutely abhorrent dialog, well…then by all means, pick up a copy.

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I think AT&T just went four paws up. I guess the site was down at some point today because my DSL went out. I found out when I went to commit my daily subversion changes back in. Should be all good now though.