How I Spent My Stimulus

Interesting idea for a site. Especially interesting to see what some people chose to spend their money on (plane ticket to leave the country, land in Second Life, guns, tats, etc.).

Debtinator - The Best $15 Investment I've Ever Made. Seriously.

Debtinator is simultaneously the best $15 I've ever spent and the best thing I've ever purchased but been hesitant to tell anyone about...but screw my silly pride, there are too many people that this app can help besides myself, and the developer has been very responsive to support and feature requests as well, which never hurts!

Debtinator in a nutshell: You enter all of your specifics (debt balances, recurring bills like utilities, interest rates, income, etc.) into Debtinator and it will present you with a spreadsheet, chart and iCal file detailing the quickest way to get out of debt. There are numerous strategies you can try out, though "highest interest first" is all but guaranteed to be your best bet. You choose which strategy you want to use and it gives you the plan.

Helpful Tip: Whatever the actual due date is for each item, enter the due date in Debtinator as 7-10 days before the actual due date. This way, you can go down the spreadsheet and see the date you need to mail the check rather than seeing the due date and having to do the conversion in your head.

Back story: Back in 2004, I decided it was time for a change of scenery, left my previous job, and tried some non-traditional things that didn't work out. Credit cards that had been paid off in full before leaving my previous job were dusted off and used again in a bad way until I finally agreed with my wife that I should "get a real job" again. During that time, I also accepted a sizable loan from a good friend that nearly cost me our friendship. He's paid back in full now and we've been slowly chipping away at the balances that built up during what we'll call my one-year learning experience. I'll go into more detail one of these days, but with all the expensive lessons I learned that year, I could write a book and this little bit is meant only to serve as an explanation of why I took a look at Debtinator in the first place.

I purchased Debtinator last fall and have been using it since. My wife has been a little resistant to it, but once I printed out the chart so she could see what would happen if she stuck to the plan, it really clicked and she seems to be on board finally...which was what I was waiting for before recommending Debtinator to others.

Funny What You Find When You Google Yourself

When I was day trading full-time, I used Trade-Ideas stock screening software and I don't recall whether I sent them a nice e-mail or if they are quoting an old forum post discussing Trade-Ideas, but either way, I was surprised to see myself quoted on a site like this.

To my knowledge, this is a first for me.

...and I still think highly of Trade-Ideas software for anyone who may be looking at it.

NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac Now Available...Too Bad it Requires MS Silverlight

The New York Times has released a beta of their Times Reader app for OS X, but they shot themselves in the foot with one poor decision: They chose to develop it using Microsoft's barely out of the gate Silverlight (MS' answer to Adobe's Flash).

It's really too bad to see big firms make poor decisions like this, though I guess it shouldn't surprise me.

Here's hoping someone at The Times sees the light and re-builds the Times Reader for Mac in Flash instead. I'm betting MS paid them a chunk of change to use Silverlight to try and get Mac users to have a "need" for installing Silverlight...and if they didn't get any payment from Microsoft for doing this, then it's an even poorer decision.

Time Machine Recovery to New Disk Results

Having seen the option to restore from a Time Machine back-up using the Migration Assistant, I decided to do a fresh install of 10.5.1, then give the Migration Assistant route a go since I knew the restore from Time Machine backup option in the install utilities menu has already been proven to work well.

Once I formatted my replacement drive (a 320GB Seagate "7200.10", exactly like the drive it was replacing) and taken care of the fresh install, the usual welcome screen launched and my registration info was pre-populated with the data I had entered the first time I registered. Once past the registration screen, the Migration Assistant appeared. I selected the
"from a Time Machine backup" option, then clicked "Continue". I was then prompted to select which items I would like to transfer (choices were "Users", with the option to select only certain users, "Network and other settings", "Application folder", and "Files and folders on 'Mac OS'"). I selected all options and clicked "Transfer". All in all, I had 73.2 GB worth of data to transfer, which took around an hour.

So far, the only oddity I've run across was the "Tranfser Warnings and Errors.rtf" file that appeared on my desktop after the restore alerting me that I may need to re-install "Norton Utilities". What's odd about that is that I had never previously installed it or anything from Norton or Symantec in the first place.

Everything I was concerned about losing is still here (including some prefs and even browser cookies for the eleventy billion sites for which I was dreading having to re-enter login info). iTunes still knew who I was, iPhoto libraries were intact, and Adobe apps were still activated.

Two nice benefits I see so far to using the Migration Assistant restore option instead of the whole shootin' match route from the aforementioned system install utilities menu:

1. You get a chance to do a fresh install (which means you also get a chance to apply the latest version of the available updates - a good thing since Apple has pulled and reissued updated updaters a time or two in recent history).
2. Restore time doesn't seem as dreadfully long since the restore step is only restoring your data, settings and applications and not the entire OS, log files, caches, etc.

One tip when you're done restoring (and happy with the results) is to make sure you remember to re-enable Time Machine, as mine was disabled after the restore. Also, if possible, buy a back-up drive for Time Machine use only that has at least double the capacity of the drive(s) you wish to back up. Once you've turned Time Machine back on, be sure to visit the options panel to be certain you're backing up all the drives you want to back up. I have two external drives that were on the exclusion list by default, so my entire music collection wasn't getting backed up.

Kudos to the folks at Apple responsible for Time Machine! You just saved my hide.

Boot Camp Surprise After OS X Drive Failure

So...last Friday morning, I walked into my home office, sat down at my desk, shook the mouse to wake the screens on my shiny new Mac Pro, and was greeted by a pinwheel of death which refused to go away. I turned the machine off, let it sit for a few and powered her back up, only to be greeted by what sounded like a noisy front case fan and a gray screen. No apple logo, no spinning wheel. Just a gray screen. I was in a bit of a hurry to get to the office and didn't feel like messing with it, so I just powered it back down and picked back up where I left off once I got home that evening.

No love. Drive was toast. Couldn't boot into single user mode. Couldn't see it in Disk Utility after booting from the System Disk. Couldn't choose the drive from the System Installer. Couldn't select it to restore to. You get the picture. Toast.

I packed up the drive in a paper wine bag (since I didn't have any static bags handy...and because I found it humorous at the time) and headed to the closest Apple Store to see if they could swap it out for me. They confirmed it was truly dead, but they didn't have any replacements in stock, so they ordered one and informed me I'd have to go without my Mac Pro for the weekend.

Rewind to the week after I bought the machine back in March. Fortunately, the first upgrade I ordered was a 750GB drive to serve exclusively as my Time Machine back-up drive...just to be safe. Thank God. I had also purchased a copy of Vista Business...just to live dangerously, but had installed it on its own dedicated disk...just to be safe. After returning diskless from the Apple Store, I fired up my Mac Pro again, this time holding down the Option key, to see if Boot Camp would work in the absence of OS X. Well, what do ya know! It worked. Looks like Boot Camp lives on the hardware and is completely independent of OS X, so Vista booted up without a hitch and I was able to use my machine over the weekend after all...though not with OS X, which is where I prefer to work.

So far, Apple replaced the drive without any hassles and Boot Camp surprised me by working independent of OS X. Next up - Time Machine's system restore functionality put to the test.

Tips for the Latest Instant Millionaire (Things to do (and not do) If You Win the Lottery)

Despite my advice to the contrary, my wife donates to the Texas State Education Fund on a weekly basis in the form of Texas Lottery ticket purchases. She's convinced we're going to win one of these days. There's some good advice here to help keep new found riches from screwing up your life.

Why Bush Will Be A Winner

You won't often see me blog about political matters, but this article by William Kristol at The Washington Post has some excellent analysis of W's performance. My super liberal Bush-hating co-workers will no doubt stop after reading the introductory paragraph, but I personally believe that Mr. Kristol's assesment is spot on.

Enough With All the 'Fat is Beautiful' Crap

All this "it's OK to be fat" stuff has gone too far.

While I agree it's what's on the inside that counts, I think it's outright irresponsible to continue encouraging women that it's OK to be overweight.

Again, I have nothing against large women. I do have a problem with the media encouraging overweight women not to do anything about something that will cause serious health problems in their later years. All these attempts at glamorizing overweight women are, in my opinion, no better than advertising tobacco to children. I have no doubt that there are women out there who will see this stuff and use it as justification to not worry about their health only to be pay a big price down the road.

Well...I WAS Going to Buy an iPhone