Beat Lego Batman tonight; thanks Joe!
Joe and I finagled a sweet deal with the facilities group today. There’s going to be some hardcore moving over the next couple of months. I’m going to tackle The Force Unleashed next in my never-ending quest to play through my existing games.
I called my mortgage company today to inquire about some things. In particular I wanted to know if after paying your last payment, how are property taxes handled?
News to me, but they’re handled by me from that point on. This was one of those burning questions in the back of my mind because I know they have to get paid one way or another, but I wasn’t sure how exactly that goes about happening. I hear Ramsey saying “how does it feel to not have any payments” but I still asked myself “well, you still have a monthly property tax payment don’t you?”
The answer is actually no you don’t. You can set up your own escrow things and essentially do that, but you can also just wait till the time of year you get your taxes and just pay them then.
The other thing I wanted to know was where I sit in regard to PMI. I put a chunk of change down on the house but was wondering where I was at since I first bought it. The PMI can be removed when you reach 80%/20% debt to asset ratio based on the closing price of the house. See, first of all, I knew about the 80/20 rule but I thought it was on market value. So I was confused on whether PMI could magically disappear if your house appreciated and, conversely, if it would be automatically re-instated if your home dropped in value.
It’s such a simpler calculation to just base it off the closing price of the house. So PMI on a $200,000 house is eligible for banishment at $160,000. I was informed that I’m currently at 90.3%; yuck. My house didn’t cost 200k though; *whew*
In any event, student loans are at the top of the list for the rest of the year; after that, comes the car. One of these days when the car is paid off, then I’ll begin working to reach PMI banishment (if I haven’t already reached it by then…probably won’t). And if I can accomplish all that, then I start the long…arduous journey to no mortgage.
Anybody care to help the process along by contracting out support for nessquik? 
Sweet. I totally got a Digium TDM410 and set up an Asterisk server. Now the Wells Fargo Cronies are S.O.L. Asterisk is sooo cool. I’m going to hook it up to some things at work because that’s obviously just a cool thing to do right?
I’ve been on vacation since Friday and it’s been not too bad. I finished Devil May Cry 4, which was a really cool game. It was just short enough to enjoy while not being one of those “ok, when is it going to be finished” games.
I’ve also been working through Atlas Shrugged more. I’m about a 3rd of the way through it.
It snowed yesterday…odd…it’s almost April after all. Where’s all the warm weather? Snow doesn’t make me feel like spring. I’m sitting here wondering why I’m watching Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Hulu. He’s not funny and his show is not funny. I think I’m watching it out of pity or something. Or maybe I figure if I keep watching it, that maybe it will get better.
Probably not.
And why The Roots? The lead singer never does anything. The drummer and guitarist do all the work.
So I decided I could probably live with one less master or cloud hanging over my head today; so I canceled another credit card : )
So I’m out $12,300 worth of potential credit. Eh big deal, this card was never used that much anyway. I got it in the first place so that I could mooch 0% from the CC company to buy a bed frame. It’s got no perks that would justify me keeping it, and it’s got some ridiculous interest rate, so it’s more of a liability now than anything.
So my wallet is a couple grams lighter now : )
Hanging on the line here waiting to cancel it brings back memories of Bioshock because they are TOTALLY playing music from that game right now, haha.
Today I learned a funny little fact. The savings rate that you often hear touted in the news is actually a rather bogus number. The formal definition of the savings rate is the amount of money saved by individuals after you factor out fixed and discretionary expenses.
So what’s wrong with that number you ask? Well, it doesn’t take into account retirement savings, like 401k, 403b and traditional IRAs. It doesn’t take into account any IRA savings for that matter; traditional or Roth. It also doesn’t take into account pre-paying your mortgage; or pre-paying anything for that matter (where you would save money from not having to pay the extra interest).
Finally, it doesn’t take into account individuals who are already in retirement. For example, if you’re retired and say you have $3000 of expenses for the month. You would take a withdrawl of $3000 from your retirement accounts to satisfy those expenses. But the miscalculation here is that you’ve essentially saved 0% of your “income”. Well, no duh, you only withdrew as much as you needed. This isn’t factored in to the equation though, so one could argue that retirees save nothing, which is obviously not true.
Anyways, it’s a funny number because you’ve probably heard lately that savings rates among consumers have been dismal in the recent past (negative in some cases). Well, that percentage is misleading. With the savings rate now being something like 6% when I last checked, it’s still misleading, but you can figure that the real rate is something far higher than what is being reported.
I also recently found this super awesome mortgage amortization spreadsheet that lets you enter pre-payments into it. I’ve found several in the past that were just simple calculators. This one however is far better.
Summer’s just around the corner and you can tell from the number of motorcycles on the road; just saw 4 in the last minute. This summer I’ll be riding a paid off bike; cool! It needs an oil change, and I’m getting a windshield for it. I’m looking forward to riding more with my dad this summer and on in to the future. Natalie is also within range of a bike. I think she said her “motorcycle account” is at ~10k; yowza! You can buy a solid bike for even half that much! I’m super proud of her!
So after several couple of days of checking out various esoteric programming languages with Joe, I’ve gotten on a kick of learning some new language. No real reason; just because. So that new language at the moment is Erlang. There’s a whole sad story behind this that involves CouchDB, Lotus Notes, and Joe, but I’ve been reading quite a bit about the lang and boy is it a doosie.
In other news, Ubuntu is just different enough from Redhat based distros to be frustrating. There’s a good tutorial linked below to get one’s self setup with apache and ssl.
Just paid off my motorcycle! Woooooooo! On to the student loans!
Today I toured the students of Indiana Tech (my alma mater) around Fermi. We’ve done this in the past and they really like it because of the gi-normous number of computers we have. Well, I get the impression that they had a good time today too.
Finally, my dad and step-mom had a wine-tasting event at their house tonight. It was really cool. I don’t really drink, but this was pretty cool because we learned a lot about wine, how to taste it, what to look for when tasting it, etc. So it explained a lot of things and made the overall drinking of wine seem more intellectual and fun.
There are times when caching is great and there are other times when it’s a headache. For instance why is my certificate not being used in Firefox? It says it’s in the cert store, and I have Firefox configured to “ask me every time”. Even after a restart of Firefox it’s not asking for the cert.
I check my network settings and I notice I’m configured to run through the proxy. But wait, proxying is excluded for the domain I’m accessing. So I say “no proxy” in firefox and refresh the page. Voila, now I’m asked for my cert. What the hell?
I bought a USB missile launcher from Fry’s the other day. It works in linux using the pyrocket libraries. So since we do a fair bit of python in house, I think it’s critical that we tie the rocket launcher in to a critical process here at work.
That chicken tacos link below sounds delicious as well. Joe sent me a recipe the other day for a corndog-like muffin. It sounds good too. When I left this morning the chicken was already beginning to smell awesome.
Sometimes I can be terribly impatient. Take tonight for instance. I’m waiting and waiting and waiting for my last motorcycle bill to arrive in the snailbox so I can pay it off. Usually it’s here by today, but not this month!
Anyways, so I was itching to pay something off. I had planned on putting the scraps left over from tax season towards the student loans, but was going to wait until the state taxes came back too (plus I have some outstanding travel reimbursement due me) so I was going to lump that all in and throw it at that 800 pound gorilla in the room named Sallie.
Well, because Honda apparently doesn’t want my money or they’re just being lazy, I couldn’t wait any longer so I just started attacking the students loans tonight. I can’t wait to see that number go buh-bye. It’ll be about a year from now until it’s gone forever, but chiping away extra at it every month helps boost the self esteem far more than the piddly $130 + 15 years it would take otherwise.
St Patricks Day is coming up soon I noticed, so I flew off to the grocery store to see if they had corned beef brisket; one of my weaknesses. I love corned beef, and I have a slow cooker, which means that I’ll probably be dead next week due to too much deliciousness.
Finally, I made a case for Bro today by discovering a bot’d machine. That proved the applications usefulness in two weeks and borrowed hardware versus 6 years and who knows how much stuff was bought to support a stalled P.O.C. So, I win. Seth, I’m driving out to Ohio and camping outside your office if you don’t respond to my emails.
This last week I’ve played Mario Galaxy hardcore just about every day. When Mario 64 came out way back when, I loved it; it’s still one of my favorite. Well, Mario Galaxy was just as well executed. I thought it was an awesome game, and thank god it wasn’t terribly difficult or complicated like so many games out today. One can comfortably walk through it from start to end and enjoy it all.
Being a fan of 64, I was totally stoked to hear the same music for the path to Bowser in Galaxy that they also had in 64; I love that song!
I’ve also been churning through books. I’m finishing up Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke. The book is close to 30 years older than I am : ) It’s an awesome book though and smokes modern day SciFi. For example, I recently finished Marooned in Realtime. I was really looking forward to it because the abstract of the book sounded cool. Unfortunately it was a slow read and altogether didn’t hold itself together well. It seemed more for adolescents than the Clarke book did.
My monitor for the computer I use in my office at home to watch Netflix and Hulu also decided to crap out. I brought it in to work and Joe walked past it, making it work again; go figure.
Watched the last episode of Conan. It’s sad to see him go, but I hope he’s just as funny on the Tonight Show.
Bought a really cheap Netgear router at Fry’s (surprise!) a couple days ago. It was a 54g thing for $39.99. When it rang up at the counter though, it rang up as $32.00. Ok guys, I’ll take that! It’s at my mom’s house now to replace the existing wireless from her DSL router. The existing one turns itself off when my Ubuntu laptop connects to it, and one of their Windows laptops refuses to get an IP from it.
Anyways, the new Netgear works like a charm. Plus, it was purchased with a gift card that I’ve been waiting to rid myself of. I really don’t need or want anything from Fry’s, but I’ve had this $100 gift card from a birthday sitting around collecting dust. Well, now it’s slightly more used; still have $68 to rid myself of with it. What do I need?
The VMWare link below resolves a problem for 2.6.18 kernels in virtual machines (in my case VirtualBox) where NTP stops working correctly (it slows down or speeds up or something). Anyways, SLF (even the most recent versions) still uses that hella old kernel, so when I’d use SLF in my virtual machines to VPN back to work, kerberos would always be royally screwed due to NTP being way off. The extra kernel parameters mentioned in the VMWare article make the problem go away thankfully.