Joseph brought up some good points in the comments for the previous entry, and I don't think a short response does them justice. He wants to know what the personal finance experts have to say about the current economic crisis.
Suze Orman actually went on TV a few weeks ago and called it an opportunity of a lifetime. I'll explain.
My wife and I are adopting Dave Ramsey's envelope system.
We did OK budgeting up until now--I'd say paying off a mortgage 5 /12 years after I moved into the house qualifies as OK--but it doesn't work as well when there are multiple things you're saving for.
So I had a chance to try a registry optimizer out on a typical PC. It's a 2.7 GHz Celeron, made by HP, restored with the factory restore discs. So it was as pristine as any consumer HP PC ships from the factory.
My wife came upstairs last night. "The mouse froze," she said. I walked downstairs to the computer. Sure enough: Frozen mouse, no caps lock light, no vital signs to speak of. Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't do anything either. I shut down, powered back up, and got the black screen of death.
A couple of coworkers were talking about taxes, deficits and the national debt this week.
One of them looked my direction and said, "I'll bet Dave can figure out how to pay off the
national debt."
I have no idea why I never found this sooner: papercdcase.com.
Type in an artist and album name (or publisher and software name) and a track list, and this thing generates a PDF that you can print and fold into a paper case/envelope, complete with spine.
I took a phone call tonight from my old college fraternity. I've been trying to be nicer when they call asking for money. The organization and I see eye-to-eye on virtually nothing, but the poor pledges who have to make these phone calls every year have no control over any of that.
We actually ended up having a nice conversation about the transition from college to high school.
I got a few letters behind my name this afternoon. I passed the CompTIA Security+ exam with flying colors. And that means two things: I get to keep my job, and I was qualified to have the job in the first place, but now I have a certificate that says a third party agrees.
Yesterday, during my weekly garage sale adventures, I bought some computer equipment. Among the haul: a Biostar Socket A motherboard with an AMD Sempron 2200+ CPU and 512MB of RAM. It's not state of the art, but can hold its own against some of the stuff still on the market, and it's a big upgrade over the 450 MHz Pentium II that's been powering this web site since July 2002.
