The debate whether making a twice-monthly mortgage payment saves money is making the rounds on some popular blogs right now. The idea is paying your mortgage every two weeks rather than every month in order to save money. Whether this trick works depends on several things, but the most important part is that you shouldn’t pay a penny extra for this service. You should also consider twice-monthly mortgage payment alternatives.
Misguided security
I once worked someplace whose management laid an egg when they found out that it was possible to sniff network traffic over hubs. So they replaced all the hubs in their network, at considerable expense, with switches for an extra layer of security.
That’s fine. Except…Except the back door of the building never closed right, so it was pretty easy for anyone to just waltz right into the office. Nobody ever did, that I know of. But still, that’s not good.
But that’s not the end of it. One time I saw one of the other IT guys pick the lock on the server room. With a sheet of typing paper.
Yes. He grabbed a piece of paper out of the closest wastebasket, folded it in half, then in half again, pushed it into the gap in the door, made an upward motion, and freed the catch. Then he just walked in. It was easier than remembering the combination.
They spent tens of thousands of dollars out of paranoia that some employee would bring in a sniffer and plug it into the network, but wouldn’t pay the $200 or $300 it would cost to have a contractor come in for a couple of hours to make sure the doors were secure.
One of my clients had an incident with a door in a secure room yesterday, and that reminded me of this former client’s door problems. This current client fixed the problem in about 30 minutes.
It’s been five years, but I probably could still get into that former client’s server room. The hardest part would be remembering where the doors are.
How to go bankrupt and/or lose your house
I have a Saturday ritual. On Saturday mornings, about 49 times a year, I go to estate sales. On numerous occasions, I’ve been to estate sales of millionaires who, for one reason or another, were downsizing.
And on Saturday afternoons, I’ve been known to go look at foreclosure houses. Or, now that my wife and I have bought one, working on the foreclosure house.
I see a pattern.It’s unusual for the last owner of a foreclosure house to be in the house for very long. And almost invariably, I see a lot of home improvement projects. Often there’s at least one unfinished project still sitting there.
Often the projects are pointless–tearing out plaster walls to put in drywall, only because that’s what the stupid shows on HGTV say you should do.
But it’s always pretty clear from looking at the house and the information available in public records what happened. They bought the house, they made some payments, the house increased in value during the real estate boom, they took out a home equity loan and started changing things, then eventually they got in over their head.
Often the changes weren’t worth it. They’d start out with a $60,000 house in a questionable neighborhood, sink tens of thousands into modernizing the kitchen and bathroom and finishing the basement, and if everything had gone well, they would have a modernized house, still in a questionable neighborhood, and contrary to the promises they saw on TV, the house didn’t increase in value at all. Someone ends up buying what’s left of it for $35,000 or $40,000, fixing whatever is wrong or unfinished, and renting it out to someone for $700 a month. A rather inglorious end to those TV-inspired dreams.
I see another pattern on Saturday mornings at estate sales.
More often than not, the family stayed in the same house for decades. The kitchen appliances are usually dated. Sometimes they’re from the 1990s, sometimes the 1970s, and on rare occasions, you even see a range from the 1940s or 1950s. And generally most everything about the house gives the impression of age. Sometimes you see kitschy trends that have come and gone, like shag carpets and dark wood paneling. Sometimes you see timeless craftsmanship. The latter is particularly common in the homes of the wealthy–when they did buy things, they bought things that wouldn’t go out of style, so they’d only have to buy once in a lifetime.
None of these houses will show up on HGTV or any other TV, and for good reason: Houses like that don’t make you run out to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy their crap.
But at the end of the career or life, there’s something to show for it. A paid-off house with things in it that have to be liquidated, which then goes into the estate. The money from all of it then helps pay for retirement, end-of-life expenses, or goes to the heirs.
The foreclosed houses look a lot more like what you see on TV, even if you have to wipe some grime away to see it. The appliances are certainly newer, the kitchen cabinets are usually newer, and somewhere there’s at least one TV-inspired project, maybe still brewing.
But what’s left to show for it? Years of payments, lost. A wrecked credit score. Possibly some other maladies. Nothing anyone would want.
Clearly it’s much better to just live within one’s means, even if it means sacrificing coolness points in the short term.
In the long term, I’m pretty sure the people who chased the newest trends, overextended themselves and ultimately lost their houses ended up with about the same number of coolness points. Maybe a little less.
Is linoleum out of fashion? It shouldn’t be.
Every so often someone tells me linoleum is out of fashion. I don’t understand it. We have a linoleum kitchen floor and we love it.
A former coworker told me his ex-wife cleans a lot of high-end houses, and the cool kids are all replacing linoleum with stone or tile.
The cool kids are making a mistake. In 2009, I replaced a trendy tile floor with Marmoleum, a brand of linoleum. It’s one of the best things I ever did. If my son takes a tumble on the linoleum, it’s usually not a big deal. It’s not like it’s foam rubber or something, but he has to tumble really hard to hurt himself.
On tile, he was more prone to fall because that junk was slippery. And if he did fall, it hurt. It was like falling on concrete.
But the tile was exceptionally high maintenance. You pretty much had to mop it every other day for it to look decent. It attracted and held onto dirt like a magnet.
The linoleum looks great if you mop it once a week. If my wife gets busy and misses a week, I never notice, although she seems to. What I do know is that she mopped it on Saturday morning, and right now, four days later, it looks like she just mopped.
The other problem with tile was breakage. After about five years, every tile around the refrigerator was broken, due to something falling out of the freezer. Popping tile up and replacing it is possible, but it’s a project. I did it a couple of times and I can’t say I miss it.
Stone theoretically ought to hide dirt better than ceramic tile in the cleaning department, but my wife’s family likes to rent a condo on the Gulf Coast every summer, and invariably the kitchens have stone floors. We’re cleaning them every single day. No thank you.
I do think a lot of people confuse vinyl with linoleum. Given where my boss lives and the age of the houses there, I think vinyl is a lot more likely. He also said after 9 years, his “linoleum” is shot. Given that it’s common to find 100-year-old linoleum in old houses that’s still perfectly serviceable, I think he has vinyl rather than linoleum. I can see vinyl wearing out in 9 years.
Tile, and especially stone, are very trendy right now. But they’re high maintenance, and I suspect they’re just a trend, like wood paneling in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then it was the thing to do, but now when people run into it, they either tear it out or paint over it.
If I were faced with a kitchen in need of a new floor, I’d put linoleum down in a heartbeat. Pick a shade or shades that go with pretty much anything and don’t go out of style, lay it down, and forget about it. You may never have the trendiest floor on the block, but it will be functional, and it will outlive you.
It sure beats having to put down a new floor every decade.
Buy wooden trains cheap
My son likes wooden trains. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since I like the bigger metal (and sometimes plastic) trains that run on O gauge track. The downside to Brio and Learning Curve (Thomas) trains is that sometimes they seem to cost nearly as much as Lionel, even though they’re essentially carved blocks of wood. But I learned how to buy wooden trains cheap.
There are several ways to save money on them, it turns out.
Wouldn’t you agree, more income is the answer?
So a friend of a friend came over the other night, pitching a pyramid scheme. He just told me he’d started a business. I figured (and kind of hoped) he wanted to sell me handyman services. Actually he wanted to get me out of debt.
“But I have no debt,” I said. He told me I needed to keep an open mind.
I remember the last time someone told me that. It was two Mormon missionaries. To be nice, my wife and I let him keep talking.
Best public DNS – finding the best for you
If your Internet connection is slow, it almost always helps if you optimize your DNS. But there’s more to the best public DNS than just speed. I’ll tell you how to find the fastest DNS, but using a DNS that offers improved security gives your computer protection beyond what your antivirus and firewall provide.
Sometimes it’s enough, and it’s definitely cheaper than buying a new router. Even if you do get a new router, using fast DNS helps. Here’s how to find the best public DNS to use, to improve your speed and your security.
Why don’t wins count anymore?
In Kansas City, baseball fans are celebrating. In St. Louis, they’re fuming.
It’s usually the other way around. Right now, Royals fans are celebrating Zack Greinke’s highly deserved Cy Young Award. In St. Louis, fans are complaining that Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright, expected to finish 1-2 in the voting, got "snubbed" and lost to San Francisco’s Tim Lincecum, who won a total of 15 games.
Greinke, for what it’s worth, won 16.The Cy Young Award usually is "the pitcher with the most wins" award. And that makes a little sense–Cy Young won 511 games in his career, the most all-time. And that itself shows the problem with wins.
Cy Young is the winningest pitcher of all time, but he’s not the best. Walter Johnson won 417 games pitching mostly for last-place Washington Senators teams. Put him on the teams Young pitched for, and he would have won more than 511 games. Win 110 games over the course of your career and you’re considered a pretty good pitcher. Johnson pitched 110 shutouts.
I learned playing Micro League Baseball in the mid 1980s that wins are an overrated statistic. Cy Young was an outstanding pitcher, but Walter Johnson and Lefty Grove could beat him most of the time. Advanced baseball statistics barely existed in the mid 1980s and my Commodore 64 sure didn’t know anything about them, but I quickly started paying attention to WHIP–walks plus hits per innings pitched.
In their best seasons, Johnson and Grove permitted fewer than one baserunner per inning. And they permitted fewer baserunners than Young. Fewer baserunners means fewer chances to score, which means a better chance of winning.
Greinke and Lince*censored*won on the strength of their advanced statistics. Carpenter and Wainwright were very good this year. But they gave up more baserunners per inning than Greinke and Lince*censored*did, and other advanced statistics also indicated that Greinke and Lince*censored*were the better pitchers last year.
In the case of Greinke, the Royals lost six games in which he gave up one run or fewer. Yes, you read that right. Six times, Greinke took the ball, pitched seven or eight innings and gave up one run, or zero runs, and the Royals still lost.
So it’s easy to imagine a scenario where Greinke would have won many more games. Had Greinke pitched on a team that could consistently score more than two runs, had the Royals had more than one reliable relief pitcher to back him up, and had he had more than one above-average fielder playing the field behind him, for example.
Greinke realized he only had one guy behind him who knew how to catch the ball, so he would intentionally pitch in such a way as to make them more likely to hit a fly ball to wherever David DeJesus was playing, usually left field.
Lince*censored*suffered from less bad luck than Greinke did, but still won his 15 games while pitching for a weaker team than the Cardinals.
According to Baseball-Reference.com, pitching for a team with average offense, Lince*censored*and Greinke each would have won 18 games. Under the same normalized conditions, Carpenter would have won 15, and Wainwright would have won 17.
Both pitchers had good years, and admittedly they played for a team that had problems. But Tim Lince*censored*pitched for a team with even bigger problems.
I see the words "which pitcher gave their team the best chance to win every fifth day" thrown around by St. Louis fans a lot. The answer, when you normalize the statistics, is Lincecum.
Or, to look at it another way: Carpenter’s and Wainwright’s win totals showcase just how good Albert Pujols is.
The case for Tim Lince*censored*was less clear than the case for Greinke, and that was why the vote ended up being so close.
But it’s obvious to me that the voters got it right in both cases. And that’s good.
Twenty five years ago, it wasn’t as easy to go much deeper than conventional statistics like wins, losses, and ERA. Today it’s simple, so there’s minimal excuse to pay attention to them.
Striking royalty.
It wasn’t what I set out to do, and it definitely wasn’t what I expected to do. But genealogical breakthroughs rarely are either, it seems.
My mother and I have now collected more than 9,000 relatives in our genealogy. Needless to say, you literally need a computer to keep track of all of that. There are three families I feel the greatest affinity for. Two of them are Scottish, and Highlander families at that.Both of those families are pretty much dead ends. I can trace one of them back to Scotland and go back a generation or so. I can find plenty of people with the name, but can’t prove relation, mostly because the church that contained most of the birth and baptism records burned in the 1780s.
The Farquhars are tougher. I have an idea when the patriarch of my family was born. Of course I know he was a member of Clan Farquharson. I know he was born in Aberdeen, possibly as early as 1714 and possibly as late as 1729. I found an Adam Farquhar in Aberdeen–with parents even!–during the right time frame, but the death dates didn’t match up. I don’t believe there were more than a dozen or so Farquhar families in Aberdeen in the early 1700s, based on the books I can find, but, once again, without parents’ names, I can’t prove relation to any of them.
So the holy grail–tracing my roots directly back to Farquhar Shaw, patriarch of Clan Farquharson–remains elusive. For now at least.
My search for clues about Adam Farquhar’s identity led me to his second wife, Elizabeth Andrews. I suddenly realized I’d never researched her at all. I researched Adam’s first wife, because it was an interesting story. His father in law disapproved of the marriage, apparently because Adam wasn’t a Quaker, and disowned her. But besides that, one of the descendants of Adam Farquhar and Hannah Gaskill married Walter Percy Chrysler. So I chased those stories, even though they were outside my main bloodline.
Soon after Hannah Gaskill died, Adam married Elizabeth Andrews, daughter of a Quaker minister and missionary. I found the Andrews family had been in the United States since the first half of the 17th century, and the line lost steam at Edward Andrews, born in Barbados in 1618. Pretty impressive.
But Samuel Andrews, a carpenter and shipwright who settled in New Jersey, married Mary Wright in 1663. Mary Wright’s parents emigrated from England, and the Wright family happens to be very well documented. Normally, when a line gets to be a certain age, you start expecting dead ends. The Wright line itself was, but the mothers’ lines just kept on going, and usually with precise dates. Not "about 1630" like I’m used to seeing. I’m talking "18 October 1476."
And once I got into the 14th and 15th centuries, I started seeing titles and French names. I started to get suspicious. I got especially suspicious when I searched Google for more information on some of these people and found they had Wikipedia entries.
Last night I stopped for the night at John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. Skimming his Wikipedia entry, I saw he fathered a king. Literally. Henry IV, King of England, was John of Gaunt’s son.
I shouldn’t have stopped. I learned today that John of Gaunt’s father was King Edward III of England–one of England’s most successful kings, known for a number of things, among which was war with Scotland.
War with Scotland? ARGH! What was my full-blooded Scot great great great great great grandfather thinking?
I’m sure the bigger question to most people is how a middle-class guy from Missouri who spent five years of his childhood in Farmington–Farmington!–could be related to a king. Directly.
Think about it. The genealogies of commoners burned, so they were lost. I’m sure I have ancestors who lived in the 1300s who were potato farmers with no money, but I have no idea who they were.
The royal genealogies were preserved. And somewhere down the line, the royalty with the least chance of ascending to the throne had to marry someone, and if there wasn’t any royal blood left to marry, they had to marry commoners. Wealthy commoners, hopefully. But commoners nevertheless. But as the generations wore on, the chances of those descendants marrying royalty lessened. Some couldn’t even get land, so they emigrated to the colonies.
Most genealogists believe that every modern European is related to Charlemagne. And if you have English blood that emigrated in the 1600s, I’ll say there’s a very good chance you’re related to William the Conqueror. Both of my parents are.
I haven’t traced Henry III back to William the Conqueror and Charlemagne yet. Yes, the two of them were related. That’s just a matter of time.
I’d frankly be more excited about tracing one of my Scottish families all the way back to the founder of the respective clan, but I’ve just hit the genealogical equivalent of a home run. A World Series-winning home run, perhaps.
I’ll take it, and wait for technology to help me get those holy grails. Perhaps DNA testing will help. The option is on the table.
My standard security lecture
Myth: Nobody wants to get into my computer because I don’t have anything important saved on it.
Fact: I don’t care who you are or what you do with your computer, security is important. Do you want the Russian Mafia using your computer? The North Korean military? Al Qaeda?
If you’re OK with that kind of vermin using your computer, then do whatever you want. I hope you don’t have problems sleeping at night. If you don’t want that kind of vermin using your computer, I suggest you read on.Odds are, the next 9/11 isn’t going to involve airplanes or even bombs. It’s more likely to be a computer attack of some sort.
Modern computer viruses generally join infected computers together into large networks, which then “phone home” for orders. They can sit dormant for a long time, or they can start carrying out orders immediately. Those orders could be sending out spam e-mail messages. Or those orders could be to conduct an attack on some other computer, perhaps a bank, or perhaps a government or military operation.
Imagine Al Qaeda building a network of a few million computers, then using that network to overwhelm an important computer. When Amazon or eBay have a bad day and you can’t get to them, it’s possible they’re being attacked and struggling to cope with it.
The same approach that crashes Amazon.com could theoretically be used to crash the stock market or the Space Shuttle. Fortunately, that kind of trick is nearly impossible. But not completely.
Building the network is the easy part. Locating a target to point it at is the hard part.
The network already exists. There was a virus expected to trigger on April 1 of this year. It didn’t, for whatever reason. But everything isn’t OK. The network still exists, it’s still growing, and nobody’s figured out yet who built it, what they intend to do with it, and how to get in and disable it. Believe me, there are experts around the world trying to figure it out.
Whoever or whatever is behind it, you don’t want your computer unwittingly participating in it.
Here’s to avoid inadvertently aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists with sloppy computer security practices.
1. Use antivirus software and keep it up to date. Many Internet providers will give you antivirus software for free these days. Call your provider and ask. If not, download Microsoft Security Essentials.
2. Configure Automatic Updates. This allows Microsoft to fix security vulnerabilities in your computer as they’re discovered. Macintosh users, don’t get smug. You need to configure Apple update too–Apple releases a dozen or so fixes every month to fix security issues on Macs too.
3. Don’t open unexpected e-mail attachments. It’s been 12 years since this has been safe to do, but people do it anyway. STOP. NOW. I don’t care how funny the joke is, or how cute or hot or whatever the picture is.
4. Don’t open unexpected e-mail, for that matter. Booby-trapping an e-mail message with a virus isn’t especially difficult to do. Frankly, if any e-mail message looks suspicious (a subject line like HOT HORNY SINGLES WANT TO TALK TO YOU NOW! is usually a giveaway), I just delete it.
5. And if you ignore steps 3 and 4, for Pete’s sake, don’t buy anything. Nearly 10% of people actually buy something based on spam e-mail messages. That just encourages all of this other activity.
6. Use web-based e-mail. Most web-based providers use good spam and virus filtering, giving you an extra layer of protection.
7. Use an alternative web browser and e-mail program. Internet Explorer is literally a superhighway for viruses and other malicious software to hook directly into the operating system. Use Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.
Have I scared the living daylights out of you? Good. If your computer is beyond help, get a reputable IT professional to clean it up. Then start doing these things. If your computer is OK right now, start doing these things.
And then stop aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists.