When I was younger and earned less money, I was encouraged to save. Put a little away each month into savings! That is a wonderful sentiment, but after meeting expenses, what is ever left over?
Some years back after hard times I took a new job, set up new bank accounts, and had my paychecks direct-deposited into Savings. Using the online banking interface I set up a monthly recurring transfer from savings to checking. I began saving money without effort.
It is hard, though, to start from nothing. A windfall helps. If you are me you don’t want to squander good fortune, which is what one naturally does without some sort of system. It is harder, though, to start from nothing.
When you have some savings, you see interest accumulating on the monthly statement. You’re getting money for free! Neat! Sure, it isn’t much but dang it is nice to get ahead of the curve. Times have been good these past years, my savings account has enough money in it to maintain my normal monthly allowance for 3-6 months. (And somewhat more than that if I am layed off and collect Unemployment Insurance.)
Once I have about six months worth of expenses saved up, I usually purchase a CD, which means the bank holds on to my money for a certain period of time, with a certain guaranteed return. Anything beyond six months of income I invest in stock market index funds (ETFs) because I have read that over a long enough time horizon, the stock market provides a better average rate of return than banks do. I can afford that risk, but it is nice to have that one pool of money in a CD coming back to me with a certain return at a certain date, in case things have gotten squirrelly.
While we are in the middle of a nasty recession, my own job is fairly secure. Last time I had savings enough to roll over, I decided to forego the currently-low interest rates and instead buy straight into an ETF. This was in March, when the market had pretty well bottomed out, so although my other stocks and 401(k)s and the like have lost value, that lot of stock purchase has grown in value by 40% and I can smile and claim to be a financial mastermind.
Oh yeah, those 401(k)s . . . and my employer’s stock-purchase program. Times are good: my salary is considerably more than my expenses, so lots of money is drained away from my paychecks into retirement savings, and another pool of capital, before it hits the reservoir of my savings account, which I then tap into my checking to meet expenses. A wiser person than me would manage investments such that one pool is for retirement, another for a house, or a college fund, or whatever . . . I’m not that clever, which is why contributing to 401(k)s is nice: that money is set aside by government mandate! My main financial ambition these days is to buy a house, probably after I get married. (That is a different topic.)
Another financial ambition I have been putting off is college money. For the one part, I don’t have kids of my own yet, and there’s no guarantee I ever will. But I am also an Uncle and a God-father: there are children I know whom I want to succeed . . . on the other hand my own experience is that after I was discharged from the Army, I was a non-dependent and eligible for a lot of financial aid, and I attended an inexpensive state school. It is nice if you can rely on your parents’ generation to help you through school, but I also know that “God bless the child that’s got his own.” That’s not to say I don’t want to help, only that I know that even if I can not help, a way can be found.
All the same, it is a challenge and a strain sometimes to live on a “fixed” income, when there is plenty of money that could be spent so easily. To be sure, I kind of enjoying saying “no” to fancy stuff, and driving around in my old car, making do with less, as generations before have done. But I also like to eat out for lunch, take my girl out, fly home for holidays, buy nice clothes, and support my hobbies. I’ll squeeze a little extra out of the piggy bank for the holidays, maybe a vacation, and other one-time expenses like maybe a new computer, and the occasional needs of broke relatives, but I am mostly tight-fisted. The past few months I have had a growing credit-card balance. I raised my “allowance” for the first time in years to pay it off quicker, but I’d rather endure the sting of interest rates that encourage me to say “no” more often than to raid the piggy bank . . . even when times are good, money is a hassle.
If things continue to go well, I like to think there will be a day in the future where I stand proudly in the newly-purchased house that is the fruit of my labors and discipline. Then I’ll have decades of mortgage payments to look forward to. I’ll feel even more nostalgia for the earlier lean times, when life was full of possibilities. But I will also have the thrill of knowing that my settled, successful, middle-class life offers possibilities of its own.
I’m flying to New York. Fortunately, I needn’t lose a work day because for $15, Virgin America has got me on the Internet!
It is zippy enough, and the latency is perfectly fine, so I am guessing it is a terrestrial network. VPN works fine, too.
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Last Result:
Download Speed: 964 kbps (120.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 337 kbps (42.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
It is a bit cramped, for sure. Fortunately, my Dell Mini 10 arrived yesterday, with Ubuntu pre-installed. (Vendor Linux!) I hope to write more about that later, but this is a zippy little thing that is probably about as usable as you’re ever going to get in a coach class airplane seat. Yay!
Virgin claim to have power plugs at each seat. I haven’t seen mine, but given the battery life this thing claims, I shouldn’t need to plug in for the duration of this continental crossing.
That looks like . . . Nevada. No . . . we’re above US Route 6 in Utah. 2112 miles to go. That’s another thing I dig about Virgin America: an interactive map at the seat terminal, and an adjustable headrest, which Southwest lacks . . .
Well, this is a work day, better get back to working.
Virgin America has wireless access on its flights. For $13 you get enough bandwidth to video conference. It was fun.
I tried not to talk too much or too loudly from my seat. To be sure, everyone on Virgin America is pretty much immersed in their personal entertainment anyway so its not so much of a thing.
I rode an older Talgo in Spain, which was delayed due to a fire on the tracks ahead of us. They passed out soft drinks as we sat, and the Spaniards began playing music.
This past Saturday one Muni train rear-ended another at the West Portal station, half a mile from my house. I decided to stay away from the scene, so as not to crowd an accident scene where authorities were attending to around fifty injuries.
I have ridden these trains a great deal. They run under computer control through the subway and then convert to manually-operated streetcar service at West Portal station. Apparently, after switching to manual control at West Portal station, the driver blacked out, so his train rolled down the track at 20-23 MPH, colliding with the train in front of it.
The Chronicle points out that there is a consideration of the practice that Muni has been allowing trains to switch out of automatic mode in the tunnel before entering West Portal station: by overriding the computer control, a second train can get in to the station platform, allowing passengers a chance to change trains. Had this train remained on automatic, it would not have been allowed into the station, and the accident would not have happened.
But, to me, the thought of switching to manual control early doesn’t sound like the problem. The problem appears to be that the driver blacked out while operating a train, possibly due to a diabetic condition. In this case it may have been a blessing that he blacked out at West Portal, where his train was stopped by the train before it. Had he blacked out outbound of west Portal, his L train could well have been rolling downhill on Taraval across 19th Avenue, with little more substantial than automobiles and pedestrians to slow its descent.
I spent a little time researching whether the Breda vehicles are equipped with a dead-man’s switch or not, but couldn’t find anything conclusive. I found some reference to dead-man’s switches being required on all vehicles after 2000, while the Bredas were introduced from 1995 to 2003. My hunch is that there is a dead-man’s switch or other vigilance device, but it may not kick in automatically: had the train been rolling down Taraval maybe the brakes would have kicked, but a few seconds pulling up to the platform at West Portal was enough time for an accident between vehicles operating with minimal distance.
I don’t know . . . NTSB gets to figure it all out. I’m just glad nobody got killed.
This time I am in a moving truck toting possessions of me and my lady to our new place in New York city, where we intend to live for one year for her work. She’s already out there, so it is just me, a 16′ Budget truck rental, and some $3 wifi access at a Motel 6. Hot diggity!
I have made this trek before, with and without my worldly possessions. This time through I own a crazy smart phone which is recording the trip via GPS, and I can upload progress to Google Maps, for all my friends and evil stalkers to see. I can send you a link: just shoot me an e-mail.
I am very happy with the Budget truck. It is a no-frills affair: the radio is just a radio. It has two power ports. I could gripe that it doesn’t have cruise control, but that might actually be a “feature” to keep the fool at the wheel alert. Best of all, it is a Ford, so I already know the dashboard!
This Motel 6 isn’t shabby either. I inquired at a casino just down the road, figuring room rates would be subsidized by gambling, but no. The Motel 6 is less than half the price and has all I need: a decent bed, toilet, shower, air conditioning, a desk and Internet access! (Oh and a TV.) They claim the lowest rates of any national chain, so I’ll have to research what they have down the road.
Ah yes, and as for work: I have received permission to work remote for my San Jose-based employer. As for my old apartment, which I love, a friend fell in love with the place and signed a lease. I left some furniture behind and some e-waste which I have to sweet-talk her into toting downstairs on a weekday, where San Francisco will collect it for free. Another blessing was the help of a trio of college friends who helped load the truck. I treated them to pizza and beers afterwards and we reveled in the pending home ownership of two of our friends. While this recession is hurting many folks, others who have been priced out of the housing market are finding their prudent patience rewarded.
Time to settle in for the evening so I can get on the road good and early tomorrow. The Motel 6 charges $3 for the wifi access, which is just the perfect price for a guy who’d like to kill an hour before bed!
Week one in New York City has been good. We’re still unpacking . . . or at least, I am still unpacking. M had some coworkers help unload the truck. She stayed in the truck to help shift things around and guard against passing kleptomaniacs. I was good and exhausted as she excitedly tore open boxes and began stuffing things in closets. On Monday I went up to the Manhattan office — it is a half hour by subway. I like the place but as the week flowed along I found it preferable to work from home, emptying a couple boxes most evenings, making frustratingly-slow-to-M but measurable progress.
New Yorkers jaywalk habitually. Eastern Parkway has five lanes of high-speed traffic so they posted a sign advising pedestrians to actually obey the walk signal.
One big challenge is that I’m moving from a beautifully large kitchen chock full of cabinets and counter space into something well under half that size, and M has plenty of kitchen stuff as well. I take it as an interesting challenge to jigsaw everything into place in a logical, useful fashion, with every day items reachable by a woman whose height is emphatically to one side of the bell curve. As with any merger, there are redundancies to be reconciled by downsizing. Fortunately, those items left on the curb will readily find new employment in the brisk sidewalk economy of Brooklyn.
Near the end of the week I could tell I was feeling under-socialized. To be sure, I don’t require much social interaction, but even a computer geek in a new town needs some face time. Fortunately, my cousin the Actor / Tour Guide was by for lunch on Friday, and today I had lunch with a college friend, who although he grew up a nice Midwestern boy, has lived in New York long enough to have fully embraced at least the ambitious gusto of the city. “You can’t go about it by trying to save money here: you just keep striving and make more money,” he explains. Alas, he is a recruiter coming in on Saturdays to fix the office IT, and he has taken two pay cuts. But he’s excited that his novel is nearly ready.
Compared to the San Francisco Bay Area, where even a drywall contractor will show you his iPhone and talk about his cousin who works at eBay, New York City is not so tech savvy. When I went to sign the lease, the stereotypically Very Nice Older Brooklyn Jewish Lady seemed astonished at the idea that one could use the Internet to direct one’s bank to pay bills on their behalf. When she asked “what outfit are you with?” I answered and she was excited that I worked for the butchers! I’m pretty sure she had “the other Cisco” in mind but it was a refreshing surprise.
Another frustration is that our newly-renovated apartment has been renovated on the cheap, so various bits need to be fixed, while the “super” is busy managing the renovation of all the other units. (We are the fourth apartment occupied, out of about sixteen.) I won’t get in to too much griping detail, except to say that at one point the cable installers were here and frustrated at the truly horrible and mysterious site-wiring. (No, really, it is truly horrible. They had some nice wiring running to the units which they had cut off and replaced with cheaper coax that has apparently been terminated using a hammer and a pipe-wrench, and of course none of it is labeled.) The cable installer had his manager come in and I called the management company and at one point I had the grouchy guy at the management company and the field technician shouting at each other over the phone. Anyway, no cable until the site wiring is resolved: I’m going to sweet-talk the management company to get their inept contractor out here to label and signal test their drop-downs.
New York does not, to my knowledge, have a NextBus service, like San Francisco. From what I have seen, there’s not much need for it, since everything here operates reliably at all hours with fairly frequent service. It would be nice, for the power user, to know the status of complementary incoming trains on different platforms, but really I have had no problems getting where I am going. All the same, I’m glad Google Maps got transit directions into the Android application before I moved here. There’s also a little application that just shows you the subway map, and lets you zoom and pan around. Instead of looking like a tourist you’re just another douchebag playing with a trendy, overpriced toy.
Download Speed: 12988 kbps (1623.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 2039 kbps (254.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Twelve megabits?! That is a lot of bandwidth. So much so that my old 802.11b local wireless network will actually have less bandwidth than my uplink. Gadzooks!
And the cable comes with some HD channels to watch on our CRT, and a crude DVR which can record shows on multiple channels simultaneously. Not bad, I suppose, for a tad over $100/mo. Yeah, and free long distance, so I gotta start calling up relatives again.
It feels like it has been longer, but at just over a month our apartment building has installed the window screens. Boy is it nice to have window screens! Of course, it would have been nicer if we had had the window screens during the really hot days of August, but I try not to gripe too much.
Of course, when the guy came by to install the window screens, he had to explain that management had instructed that screens not be installed on windows opening on to fire escapes. Since this is an idiotic request, and since I had explicitly requested window screens on those very same windows, he installed screens anyway, explaining that if the management company later insisted, he would have to remove them. I was happy to take the chance.
Later I mentioned the issue to our superintendent, who agreed that window screens do not belong next to fire escapes, and that is just one of the tragic outcomes of a city with so many complex rules governing it. I found that a bit unsettling.
Sometimes I find it hard to sleep at night, and my mind will churn with the great questions of our day, like “is there really a restriction against installing window screens on windows that open on to fire escapes in New York City?” Well, the wisdom of the Internet led me to the Rules of the City of New York, which explains in Chapter 15-10(k)(2):
Wire screens and storm windows. Wire screens are permitted on a door or window giving access to a fire-escape. Such screens may be of the rolling type, casement or of a type that slides vertically or horizontally in sections, providing that there shall be a clear unobstructed space two feet (2′) in width and two feet six inches (2′-6″) in height when the screens are opened and further provided that no such screen shall be subdivided with muntins or other dividing or separating bars into spaces less than two feet (2′) in width by two feet six inches (2′-6″) in height.
So yeah, window screens are completely legitimate. I don’t know if this contrary idea is actually with the management or some fanciful notion that has somehow been implanted into our superintendent, but should the issue need revisiting I can leverage my powers as Internet Man to defend the placement of these window screens for which I have long waited.
This is more for my own reference, because there are some broken rc scripts that don’t detach the PTY correctly, which can be really aggravating if you’re starting or stopping multiple daemons on multiple servers.
XVidCap is a very nice screen-capture program for Linux. I have been dabbling in it to capture video of my desktop.
Unfortunately, the binary offered by Ubuntu’s software distribution has audio disabled. I found a bug about that somewhere and added my two cents, then went and installed it manually. Then I had to reinstall it manually because the Ubuntu version had been bumped and the “newer” version replaced my audio-supporting version.
Ubuntu will be quietly bide its time until it can “upgrade” xvidcap to a version that doesn’t support Audio. Fortunately, you can tell it not to do that!
Open: System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
Search for “xvidcap”
Select the package, go to the Package menu and select “Lock Version”
(From what I can tell, sudo aptitude hold won’t actually prevent xvidcap from being “upgraded.”)
A comment I made on an e-mail thread that was well-received:
Intelligence is the product of basic brainpower, passion, and education. The brain is like a car engine: whether you have a little two-stroke or a V-12 you still aren’t going to get anywhere without some passion fuel, and the going will be really tough without some nice, smooth educational asphalt to help guide you to where you want to go.
Also, to those endlessly debating nature-versus-nurture, the answer is usually “both” . . . you start with a certain genetic baseline, then a childhood you don’t have much control over, and you make of your life what you will. Some folks receive a terrible start in life and are going to have it hard whatever they do, but most people have something they can work with, and with the right sort of ambition, positive attitude, and tenacity, can achieve some sort of success in life.
Barack Obama stumps for his mayoral candidacy near Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn.
Here in New York City, there is a Democrat running a seemingly futile campaign against Mike Bloomberg. As far as I can tell the campaign platform is that Bloomberg is ambitious and power-hungry, with delusions of grandeur. Which, from what I can tell, must surely be a ringing indictment of character for the Mayor of Lake Woebegone, MN.
Anyway, His Holiness recently passed through town, bestowing upon Bloomberg’s Democrat opponent the ringing laurel of endorsement that his colleague was “in the house” . . . somewhere . . . they didn’t have time to meet . . . and then President Obama was off to New Jersey to stump hard for the governor there.
This morning the lamp posts in my black neighborhood are adorned with photographs of Barack Obama, who would surely be an awesome mayor . . . of Chicago.
