Author Archives: anachostic - Page 14

Random Roads

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

I got to take a ride today.  It had been a little while since I had been out.  Last week I got the bike out and it made it to the driveway for about an hour and had to be put back for bad weather.

So this morning, I got the bike out and started riding before I really had a chance to second-guess myself.  I didn’t really have any destination in mind.  I had a quick thought about a road I always saw cars turning onto and I wondered why everyone wanted to take that road.  Where did it go?

So I went and found out what all the fuss was about.  It turned out to be a parallel road that goes to a neighboring town.  That’s good to know.  It’s good to have options when traffic or whatever happens.

Once in the neighboring town, I thought about what I would eat.  I had another memory that there was a pizza place across the road from the Boston Market that I had always ate at.  Whenever I would eat there, I would stare at this pizza place and wonder what it was like.  So, why not?  The pizza turned out to be pretty good and they had a good salad.  Not awesome, but nothing to stay away from.  While I was there, I could tell it was obviously a “family-run” business.  They had the kids in the back prepping food.  And as only young siblings would do, they were fighting.  Normal employees don’t tell each other to stop doing something and when asked why, state “because you suck at it!”

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On the way back, I came across yet another road that I’d wondered where it went to.  It went parallel on the other side of the main route.  So I went out and back on either side of the main router between the cities.  Interesting.

As is evident in the picture, the clouds were pretty prevalent throughout the whole trip, so I got the bike back home and put it away.  When I was out, i didn’t see many bikes; maybe six.  Later that afternoon on the way to dinner, I saw just as many or more, but they were all battling the downpour we were all in.  And I was in my car.

Still Downsizing

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

Or Resizing, whatever.  Trying to get rid of crap in my life that has no use.  Last week it was clothing.  I did an inventory of the clothes I had, and by others’ evaluation of the numbers, I had an excessive amount of clothes.  I had enough shirts to not wear the same thing twice for two months.

So that was the new project and the plan was to establish a baseline and institute a one-in/one-out policy to prevent that from happening again.  First thing I did to make sure I didn’t start sneaking in extra pieces was to buy new hangers.  Nice, wood shirt hangers and wood pants hangers.  I bought a 24-pack of shirt hangers and two 4-packs of pants hangers.

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This ensured that I had a finite amount of hanging implements.  Now I was limited to 24 shirts and 8 pants, which some would argue is still excessive.

Then I had to get ruthless.  I started pulling out my favorite shirts and putting them on wood hangers.  24 hangers went by pretty quickly.  I then started pulling out the remaining shirts and evaluating them against the selected ones.  Some got swapped out, a lot didn’t.  I kept a few extra shirts intending to take them on “a final ride” before disposal.  I filled out a large garbage bag that will be headed to charity soon and my closet actually has breathing room now.  I followed up with tee shirts and socks, realizing there’s some things I am never going to wear, and some is now obsolete because it doesn’t have a match with my reduced wardrobe.

Two things of note:  I think back (like it was forever ago) about picking my clothes for the day and paging through shirt after shirt until I eventually settle on one I wear all the time.  It’s nice to be free of that useless exercise.  The other is noticing just how long you can hold on to some things.  I had shirts that were years old.  Sometimes many years!  Part of my reassessment process is to start being more fresh.  If I’m wearing the same clothes for years, that probably could be keeping me in a certain pattern in some aspects of my life.

So now today, the bookshelf was the target of resizing.  I’ve collected a bunch of technical books and presentation materials over the years and kept telling myself, “I might need that someday.”  It’s been somewhere between 5 and 10 years and someday hasn’t come.  It’s time for these books to go.  Of course, there is the obsolescence factor as well with technical books, so I’m not missing much.  There’s kind of a psychological resistance to letting things go when you always remember the cost or the value of the object, disregarding the time for depreciation.  You look at it and always think “That seminar was worth $1,700”, even though that company is now out of business and you haven’t used those tools for a decade.  You need to remind yourself “that seminar is currently worth $0.00.”

Looking around my office, I see more and more things that will need re-evaluated.  My collection of wires: audio, video, computer, networking; my computer components (Do I really need a zip drive?  Do I need 3 keyboards and five mice?); even my computer DVDs, they could be ISO’d and stuck on a hard drive.  If I really needed a physical disc, I could burn it to a recordable DVD, then erase it when I’m done.

So much has been done and yet so far to go.

Aggro

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

Tonight, I was playing the keyboard and heading into the final segment of “Sunny Cathedral” when  a funny thought popped into my head that someone watching me play might comment, “why do you hate your keyboard so much?” I’m pretty rough on it.  I’ve broken 5 hammers so far:

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But, I do like the power of playing hard.  When recording, you don’t capture everything, because you can’t hear the keys being smashed.  When playing softly, you don’t get the same tone.  Sure, there’s a time for playing softly, and I do utilize it in some songs.  But sometimes, the section calls for fff and then some.

It’s good to get back the strength and endurance I’d lost over a long period.  It wasn’t many months ago that I was saying I’d be happy if I could play “Interstate” and “Broken Legs” the whole way through on the RD-600 without getting exhausted.  That milestone has come and is far behind me now.

So my next goal, I guess, is some real composition again.  I have some pieces put together and at times, I can get them worked into a decent format.  As usual, I compose just a little beyond my ability so it gives me something to practice and grow into.

Well, well, well.

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

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A big fuck you to Pizza Hut’s web developers.  I’ve watched the PizzaHut website change on what seems like a weekly basis.  I  applaud their efforts, despite those efforts being in PHP and somewhat overbearing on the JQuery effects.

However, I get a little peeved when the Opera browser is intentionally excluded.  I mean, it’s not like you’re doing anything different to code for Opera, you just do it right and it works.  Code to the standards and things just work.

Interrupted

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

Over the last week I ‘d been dealing with seemingly random shutdowns of my computer.  They would happen at odd times: 2:00 AM, 1:00 PM.  Always when I was never there, never when I was working on it.  I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what would cause it.

The computer was recently disjoined from a domain, maybe a scheduled task blue screening the computer?  No, nothing in the event log about a Stop Error.  Nothing in the event log about anything, really.  Some USB device causing trouble (I suspected MagicJack)?  No.  Unplugging the USB devices made no difference.  Overheating? No.  Fans all work.  Bad RAM?  Well, maybe.  I mitigated the problem somewhat by changing the BIOS setting to power the computer back on if it was shut down unexpectedly.

My answer came on Saturday morning when I heard the computer reboot on its own at 4:30 in the morning.  I wasn’t going to jump out of bed and check on it, but it definitely became top priority for the day.  Later that morning, while I was on the computer, the power to the house blinked.  This happens often and the investment in UPS systems for all the computer equipment has paid back many times over.  All the UPS’s in the house raised their alerts, and my computer still shut off.

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And then – because it had been caught in the act – the UPS started blinking its “Replace Battery” light.  Well, thank you…

So a quick trip to a battery shop, which I was expecting would end with “oh, we don’t have that in stock, we can order it, but since it’s Saturday we’ll have it in on Wednesday”, left me pretty impressed.  I went in and asked if they stocked UPS batteries.  They said they did, so I brought in the battery pack from my UPS and a dead, bulging battery from a cold spare UPS (not so much a useful spare, right?).  The salesman recognized the batteries right away, quoted me the price off the top of his head, and had them in stock.  Kudos to Battery USA for knowing their stuff.

Ten minutes and $50 later, I was out the door with brand new batteries and prospects of a smooth-running computer.  Haven’t had a glitch since.  $50 in batteries beats out buying a new $250 UPS by… about $200 or so.

Security Through Absurdity

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

HSBC has always seemed to be the weirdest when it comes to logging in to their banking site.  To log in, you have a username, a password, and a security key – essentially, two passwords.  I’ve had an HSBC account for some time, and their little Java applet where you would enter your security key using the mouse was lame as hell.  If someone is watching over your shoulder, you can type your password pretty quickly and people probably won’t get it.  But if you’re clicking the mouse letter-to-letter, that’s as obvious as hunting and pecking your password with a single finger.

I have to assume it’s to prevent password capture from keyloggers, which is noble in its intent, just lame in its execution.  So HSBC changed up their login to something even more ridiculous. You still have your security key, but now, you enter random characters from it.

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Can this be any more insane?  The first time, I couldn’t even log in.  I was stepping through my key letter by letter, counting the boxes and to be honest, I was using the wrong letters anyway.  I wouldn’t have made that mistake on the old login, because it was a keyboard pattern I was familiar with.

I think I understand the reasoning.  They want to inject some humanized processing of the security word.  What will be their next version of the login?  “Enter your security key… backwards.”  “Enter your security key… replacing all the letter A’s with underscores.” “Enter your security key… using capitals for lowercase and vice versa.”

Welcome To The Jungle

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

I have recently moved my web hosting and email to a new dedicated server on GoDaddy.  I’m rather pleased by this because it will allow me complete freedom to do whatever I want with the server, set up as many websites as I want, install any software, and resell hosting services.

But with great power comes great amounts of bullshit.  With my old hosting account, I had the benefit of some decent anti-spam measures.  So now that my mail is off that server, I ‘m now exposed to more spam.  I’m trying to take it with a good attitude, because some of it is clever and some is just downright retarded.

Case in point, the following email received today:

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Edgardo from the USPS is emailing me from his school email account to tell me, in a poorly-constructed sentence, that they couldn’t deliver a package I sent.  He was nice enough to attach a shipment label in a zip file for me to print and collect at their office, wherever that office is.

Example #2:

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This one is obvious.  You mouse over any link and the address it directs you to is not facebook.com, but some other address where you will get infected.  The best part of the email is that it is a notification for a facebook message posted on December 6, but the email notification was sent 5 hours early, on December 5.  Now that’s advanced technology, like they have in Nigeria, which happens to be in a time zone +6 hours away.  And we just happen to be on Daylight Savings Time here.  Nah, no coincidence.

Choose Wisely,Your Future Depends On It.

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

It’s an awesome time for me.  I finally get to restart my 401k!  It feels like forever when, at my last job, the 401k plan was terminated because of bankruptcy.  The new company offered a 401k, but I figured I was going to a new job very soon, so there was no sense in starting a new account for a few months of saving.  Then, my new employer brought me on as a contractor for six months, then required that I be there a year before starting a 401k.  So I guess it’s not forever, but probably close to two years.

And that’s a shame because those two years have been great for the market comeback.  But no sense in worrying about the past – time to plan for the future.  And this is where I discover some terrible truths.  I’m sure it’s not exclusive to my 401k plan; everyone must have this in some way.  The problem is, you have no idea where your money is going.

Now, I don’t consider myself a savvy investor.  I know enough to get by, but I don’t dig too deep.  My current, simple goals are to be in funds with a low expense ratio and a high yield.  I have decided to exclude any funds that do not build themselves.  In my closed-off 401k funds from previous employers, I watch the values go up and down, but the quantities remain the same.  My only hope is to sell when they are high.  Now, I want to see the quantities climb as well.

So with this goal, I study my options -and boy do I have options.  There are nearly 30 funds to choose from.  So, step one for a new investor is overcoming the sheer volume of choice.  I have dedicated tonight to be my night of research.  I then download the information packets for each fund.  I then discover that the info packet doesn’t have any real information.  It tells me the Morningstar Risk/Return, the past performance, the top holdings, and the breakdown of holdings by sector.  This doesn’t serve my needs.

So I search the internet for the fund name so I can get the ticker symbol and come up with no matches.  This is because the fund I am offered is a “fund of funds”.  This is how it is described:

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The Investment Information section tells you what funds this fund invests in.  And fortunately, it is only one fund, but it may be nested two levels deep, I don’t know for sure.  But searching on the inner fund gets me the ticker symbol and the information I need. So, step two for an investor is to research the funds within the fund being offered.

Again, I don’t consider myself to be savvy, but I can’t conceive an average worker going through these steps and understanding that terrible paragraph describing whatever it was.  To a further degree, I can’t even count on the ticker symbol giving me the info I need, because what I am able to purchase is just a wrapper for that fund.  There’s no guarantee I’m going to get anything out of it.  The inner fund price could have a price of $8/share and give a 3% dividend, while the wrapping fund could have a price of $12/share and not give any dividend.

This is why I’m devoting so much time to research.

Upgrade Your Misery Today!

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

Here’s the banner for an email I recently got:

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Quicken and WillMaker.  Two products that go so well together.  One makes you want to die and the other helps you be prepared for that moment.  It all works together: Customer Service (I want to kill myself), “put your life on hold”, 2012, Quicken.

You couldn’t ask for a more cohesive piece of marketing.

And this is pretty good as well.  The point of the email is “Improved Customer Service is Now FREE2”, with the footnote “Valid for 2012 Quicken customers only and available for a limited time; subject to change without notice.”  So, what I gather from this is: Quicken used to charge for good customer service, but now they are doing what they should always have been doing. They won’t do it forever, though.  They won’t tell you when they’re going to go back to the same old crappy customer service (it’ll just kinda start happening), and you still have to pay for it by buying the 2012 version.  In other words, business has dropped off and no one is calling our support lines because they either have left us or have learned to deal with the existing bugs in Quicken.  That means our support staff can help you better until enough people buy the 2012 version and swamp us with new bug reports.

And they are still pretty much the only game in town.

You Get What You Pay For

Posted by on December 28, 2019 No comments

In posts leading up to this one, I’ve been talking about my garage and new cars.  Well, I finally got the new car and got in it the garage, only barely.

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And I mean barely.  And with that car in the garage, there is no room for the other car.  I’m supposed to have a 2-car garage, and even so, I would classify the MX5 as a half-car, but still, there’s not enough room.  So that’s that.

Now, all about this new car.  As you see, it is a station wagon.  There’s only a handful of wagon models you can buy new in the US right now, and this particular one, a Buick Regal TourX, gets zero marketing and has zero recognition.  I saw this car once on display in a mall back in 2018, and have never seen one since.  So suffice to say, this is a rare vehicle.

The TourX is rare because it’s really low production volume.  There’s aren’t many buyers for wagons, so dealerships don’t order many and so no one ever buys them and the cycle feeds on itself.  When I decided on a car to buy – a wagon – I looked at my available options and this one was the most economical.  Well, it was economical for reasons relating to its unpopularity.  Dealers wanted to sell these things and not so they could order more; they just wanted rid of them.  In my own research, I saw that the 2020 model is coming soon and there are still 2018 models being sold new.

I haven’t purchased a car in nine years.  This time around, I utilized a car buyer service – a person who would search for my car, negotiate a good price, manage all the paperwork with the dealer and basically make the process as easy as possible for me.  When I first got started, I laid out all my criteria and within an hour, he had found me a car.  When he ran the numbers, I was pretty underwhelmed.

The TourX can run up to $40k with all available options, and that is what this particular car had.  So, $40k MSRP and with all discounts and haggling, I could get it for $35k.  After all the taxes and fees were added in, I would pay $38k.  I don’t know… I understand taxes and stuff, but a final price only $2k less than MSRP didn’t do it for me.  And it was about $6k more than I was willing to finance anyway.  So I turned it down.

The buyer went back to work and found another car with fewer options (but all the ones I wanted).  The MSRP was $38k, sale price of $31k, final price of $34k.  That was doable, so I agreed to the offer and we went through the complete sale process, which wasn’t all that bad.  The car was transferred from one dealership to another where I would actually make the purchase.  I gave it a brief test drive and no red flags were raised, mechanically.  The car did have roof racks, which I didn’t want, but I determined I could just uninstall them.  And after two hours at the dealership, I went home with a new car.

It’s been a couple days now, and some of the reality is hitting me.  The first weird thing I experienced was a warning popping up on my dash: washer fluid low.  Ok, whatever,  I can buy a $3 jug of fluid and top it off.  I would have assumed the dealer would have checked all that stuff during the “dealer prep” or whatever that BS service is.

When I popped the hood to fill the washer fluid, I was left aghast.  There were leaves all jammed up under the cowl.  Not just a few leaves, literal handfuls of leaves.  And the plastic shrouds throughout the engine bay were not just dusty, but had a layer of dirt on them.  This hood had not been raised in many, many months.  Yes, the exterior of the car had been washed and the tires glossed up, but there was no detailing of this car in any sense of the word.

As I was pouring the washer fluid in, my astonishment grew.  It just kept taking it.  I poured the entire gallon.  All of the washer fluid in the reservoir had evaporated in the time this car was sitting on the lot.  And the mass of leaves reaffirmed just how long the car was sitting idle and suggested it was not even stored on the primary lot, but in a grass lot back by a tree line.  I found out where the original dealer was located and did some quick math on the mileage for transportation and my test drive. I then determined this car had never been driven once.  It left that original dealer on its way to me with probably about 10 miles on the odometer.

This poor car.  It came to the dealer and was completely neglected for its entire life.  Yeah, yeah, of course cars don’t have feelings, but everything deserves a small level of care.  And a dealer should care for each and every vehicle in their possession.  These are going to be in someone’s family soon (or not soon in cases like this), and they deserve to be treated well until that time comes.

Now, I feel a little conflicted.  I mean, I got a great deal on a car – $7k off sticker price – and I didn’t have to deal with salespeople or haggling.  It was a very low-effort transaction and I can recognize it was probably a low-profit transaction for the dealer.  But at the same time, I still would expect one of the two dealers involved would have opened the hood and at least noticed the mess, or checked the fluid levels.  The bottom line is that I feel like I purchased a car from auction and not from a dealership.  Was I expecting to build a relationship with that dealer?  No way; they are 40 minutes away from my house.  I have dealerships closer to my home and my workplace I would utilize first.  Did I still expect to be wowed by the “new car purchase experience”, where I can show the car off to everyone?  Sure.  I mean, doesn’t everyone pop the hood and show off how clean and new everything is (instead of dirt, leaves, and a post-it note that says “do not turn off”)?  Show off every feature of the car like the power liftgate (which would reveal dusty and dirty rubber seals)?

But, I got a good deal, right?  Now I just need to spend some personal capital on a detailed cleaning of every inch of the vehicle.  Then the TourX will be mine and it won’t need to dwell on its miserable early life alone in a back lot.