breddy.net

Last week I had what might be the strangest air travel experience I’ve ever had. I was flying from Raleigh to Ft. Lauderdale via Atlanta. Before the gate agent in Raleigh opened boarding for the flight, she found out that our plane was called in for maintenance. It wasn’t fifteen minutes before she changed our gate to the next one over and told us we’d be on a different plane. No problem, we thought.
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I finally sucked it up and bought a Mac. I knew about how smooth the system was, but in all my years have never had one as my primary machine. I ordered a refurbished Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 with 512MB and a Combo drive. Certainly not a powerhouse but I decided that if I wind up loving it, I’ll order a more substantial box and relegate this one to media center duty.

Within the first hour of use (not including all the OS upgrades), I was using all up and running with a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and Mighty Mouse. I also had my Nokia 6682’s contacts synchronized with Address Book via Bluetooth. iTunes was playing my music library, Front Row was playing DVD’s (from across the room with the Apple Remote) and I was surfing the web with Firefox.

The out-of-the-box experience is first rate. Nothing else out there compares. Windows has a lot of good hardware support but as of Windows XP MCE 2005, it still didn’t play DVD’s without a third-party coded installed. And Bluetooth? Good luck!

There are things I haven’t adjusted to yet. Avidly using, supporting and administering every version of Windows from 3.0 forms some pretty strong habits.

• The mouse acceleration curves are just wrong and you can’t adjust them. Things like MouseFix are out there, but leaving this parameter off of the Mouse control panel widget is just inexcusable.
• The side buttons on the Mighty Mouse are so hard to press, they might as well not exist. Other than that, the thing is fantastic.
• Checkboxes and buttons don’t get focus. For a keyboad-centric user like myself, this is a big deal. The typical username/login/remember combination of just about every website now requires me to go touch the mouse. Suck. This isn’t in every browser, though. Safari and Firefox behave this way, but Camino (which uses what looks like the native checkbox widget) allows focus. Go figure.
• The keyboard is nice, but dammit, can’t they make an ergonomic one?

If anyone has advice for these gripes, I’m all ears.

I was listening to the radio the other day and it occurred to me that there may be some problems with the American health care system. Just about every politician is talking about it and about as much as we can grok from all the rhetoric is whose plan isn’t going to work. But it seems to me that we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
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I came across something disturbing recently and I want to get my two cents on the table because this isn’t the first time it’s come up. Several components in the project I’m assigned to store various configuration attributes in text files. Whether they’re name-value (properties) files or XML data, this is a good choice because it allows the customization of application behavior without code changes or redeployment … if you do it properly.
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I’m typing this post from the Gnome blog post client installed on my laptop which is now running Ubuntu Linux. I took the plunge a few days ago after getting the itch to try an alternative OS. I knew that if I did a dual-boot, I’d bail out and revert to Windows in a few days. So, I blew away the entire disk and let Ubuntu 6.10 have its way.

So far I’m pretty pleased. The out-of-the box suite of applications is more than adequite for the average user, and it’s Linux, so the power user will never be left wanting. The only stumbling I’ve done is on multimedia codecs. So far I have yet to get anything resembling Internet-type audio/video to play, but I’m not sure I’ve done everything right. Flash 9 beta is installed so all my favorite rich-clienty sites work well (Google Finance, YouTube, etc). No MP3 or AVI joy yet though.

I’ll wrap this up and hope it posts, with the thought that I’ll do a more in-depth review soon.

Marissa decided the house was way too quiet without our furry friend around. Even the cats were looking at each other, waiting for someone to challenge their reign of the house! That’s when we found our new friend in the online classifieds. A family in Port Charlotte, FL (about 2.5 hours drive) had been surprised with a litter of nine purebred rottie puppies! They had only one left — the one they’d considered keeping as their own.

We drove that day to look at the little guy and fell in love. He’s just over eight weeks old and his name is Guinness.

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Last week our 9-year-old rottweiler Bodi was diagnosed with cancer. He had two large tumors and we were forced to make the choice that no pet owner ever wants to make. Bodi did not come home with us.

Bodi was at Marissa’s side almost every waking moment from the day he came home with her in college. He protected the house, his owners and his dog pals. He always knew what was going on and would not tolerate violence. He’d step in to break up a fight regardless of whether it was human or canine.

We will miss him dearly.

Paul B. Farrel, in a recent article published on MarketWatch.com, posits that everything you need to know about personal finance is contained in nine simple steps. In a Dilbert book. He goes so far as to praise the ideas as worthy of a Nobel Prize in economics.

Paul, you may be onto something. I won’t get into too much blabber, but I certainly agree that these simple bullet points are essential and bear repeating. For the lazy readers (and because I think this is so important), I’ll quote them here:

1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

There you go. That’s it. Do these things and you will retire worry-free. Furthermore, you’ll live the rest of your life not having to worry about losing your job or being able to pay the bills.

I realize these things aren’t easy, but work towards them. Most of the people reading this post can go 9 for 9 if only they prioritize a little. If you’re not making much money, you can always save a small percentage somewhere you can’t touch it so easily. Do you smoke? Quit — and put away the $4 a pack. You’ll kill 2 birds with one stone that way (and maybe even save yourself).