David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
So I’m filling out 401(K) paperwork. I don’t like everything I see, but can live with it. I guess it’s what I don’t like that’s important. Or why I don’t like some things I see, that is.
Then again, some people may be wondering why I’m even investing at all.
I spent a few hours last night with an HP Mini 110 1012NR. It’s a model with a 16 GB solid state drive (no spinning mechanical hard drive) and Windows XP.
My biggest beef is the keyboard. It’s undersized, and I can’t touch type on it. Try it out before you buy one.
The rest of the system isn’t bad, but there are some things you’ll want to do with it.The system acted weird until I removed Norton Antivirus 2009. By weird, I’m talking not staying on the network, filesystem errors, chkdsk running on reboot, and enough other goofiness that I was ready to take the thing back as defective. The system stabilized as soon as I removed Norton Antivirus, and stayed stable after I installed ESET NOD32.
The system also ran a lot faster.
Don’t believe the hype about Norton Antivirus 2009. Use ESET NOD32. This is the second HP laptop in a month that’s given me Norton Antivirus-related problems.
McAfee is better, but only sufficiently better to use if your ISP is giving it to you for free. I still think NOD32 is worth the $40 it costs. The Atom CPU in the Mini 110 feels like a Pentium 4 with NOD32 installed. It feels like a Pentium II or 3 with something else installed.
The SSD isn’t a barn burner. I have OCZ Vertex drives in my other PCs, and this one doesn’t measure up the Vertex. Reads are pretty quick, but writes can be a bit slow. Windows boots in about 30 seconds. Firefox loads in about five. Word and Excel 2000 load in about a second.
So it’s not bad. But an OCZ Vertex would be a nice upgrade. Drop it in, use it for the OS and applications, and use the stock 16 GB drive for data.
A memory upgrade would also be worthwhile. With the stock 1 GB, it’s hitting the pagefile to the tune of 400 MB.
Unfortunately, to really make the computer sing, you’re looking at spending $200 in upgrades ($40 for NOD32, $40 for 2 GB of RAM, and $120 for an OCZ Vertex). Spread it out over the life of the machine and it wouldn’t be so bad though. And you’ll be paying $40 a year for antivirus no matter what you use.
The build quality is typical HP. I have lots of aged HP and Compaq equipment that’s still going strong. I don’t get rid of HP stuff because it breaks, I get rid of it because it’s so hopelessly obsolete as to be useless. I hesitate to buy from anyone else, except Asus. And Asus, of course, is HP’s main motherboard supplier.
If you can get used to the keyboard, I think the Mini 110 is a good machine. It weighs 2 pounds and is scarcely larger than a standard hardcover book, so it fits almost anywhere. And having an SSD, there isn’t much that can fail. The battery will eventually fail, and probably the AC adapter will too, but I think other than that, one of these computers could last 20 years, assuming it would still be useful for anything then.
Web browsers take entirely too much room on the screen. I’ve seen tips for putting Firefox on a diet, but nothing that frees up as much space as my bag-o-tricks.
So let’s go.
First, go to View, Toolbars, and Customize. Drag the address bar and search bar up to the top, next to the File/Edit/View/History/Bookmarks menus. Drag the arrows up there too, if you want them. Click OK. Now to back to View, Toolbars, and uncheck the navigation and bookmarks toolbars.
Now do a Google search for "classic compact Firefox theme." Install it.
You’ll have significantly more screen real estate.
I started my professional career doing network administration at the University of Missouri. (I generally don’t count my stint selling low-quality PCs at the last surviving national consumer electronics chain towards my professional experience anymore.)
Today, some 10 years and 11 months since the last time I did it, I left a job on my own terms. I called my boss, asked to see him, and walked to his office with a single-page letter in hand.
It’s not something I’m especially good at, and, being a fixer by nature, it’s not something I’m usually inclined to do. And while there are several things about this job that I won’t miss at all, my main reason for leaving is health care.At first it was an annoyance. I went to the chiropractor. I go once every six weeks or so. I don’t have horrible problems, but a tuneup every few weeks makes everything work better. My old employer sent me a letter of encouragement when I started going.
My new employer and its insurer didn’t do that. They just denied the claims. Then they told the doctor’s office one thing and told me another. Way to keep the story straight. The insurer actually encouraged me to negotiate with the doctor and see if she would just take cash under the table instead of using insurance.
Nice.
Aside from that, I rarely go to the doctor. I don’t get sick very often. My cholesterol was off-the-charts good the last time I checked it, and I eat healthier now than I did then. I go when I have reason to go. It could be next month, but it could just as easily be years.
My wife and son go more often than I do. He goes because he’s a year and a half old. My wife goes due to a medical condition. It’s not her fault and she manages it well, but it’s something she has to deal with, and doing so requires regular medical attention.
So every time they go to the doctor, after paying the $30 copay, we get a bill a few weeks later for stuff the insurance company decided not to cover. Usually the bill was three figures. The most offensive thing they refused to cover was my son’s vaccinations.
My employer wanted my son to get polio?
Well, probably not, but that’s the message they sent. Message received.
Compare that to the actions of my previous employer. The insurance company was hassling us over an anti-nausea drug that my wife needed when she was pregnant. I complained to the employer. They made some phone calls and my wife got her medicine. Then, at the end of the year, they changed to an insurance company they’d used in the past, citing better coverage.
That sent a message too. A message I like better.
So when I heard of a job at the previous employer, I sent in a resume. The main reason I work in this field, as opposed to being self-employed, is to provide for my family. My job involves some fighting, mostly to get unwilling computers to do what they’re supposed to do, but sometimes there are political battles too.
To do my job effectively, I need to save my fight for the computers. Ensuring that my son doesn’t get polio in 2009 ought to be a simple matter of making a deduction from my paycheck, taking him to the doctor and making a copayment. I shouldn’t have to fight the insurance company for basic, routine coverage.
I got the call today with an offer. They wanted me back. On top of good health care coverage, they also offered me a raise. That helped too, since I had several reasons to believe I wouldn’t be getting one of those next year.
So I turned in the resignation letter. My boss asked if it was just about money. I told him the health care was the clincher, and I told him about the large bills I was receiving for routine doctor visits. He seemed to understand. He even seemed a little offended.
It ran up the chain. I got a phone call from a high-ranking executive today. He wanted to know what would make me stay. He didn’t like my health care story either. I told him about what my previous and soon to be future employer had done in a similar situation.
He said I wasn’t the only one who had had issues. Now that I’ve thought about it, I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.
He asked if I thought this problem might cause the company to lose other employees. I said I didn’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The system works fine for people who don’t use it much, and most of my coworkers don’t use it much.
The problem is probably fixable, and he offered some solutions. But let’s face it: It’s a little late now. Had the coverage been adequate–it didn’t have to be good, just adequate–then chances are I wouldn’t have gone looking. But now that I have looked, someone’s dangling good, proven health care coverage and the biggest raise I’ve ever gotten in my life in front of me.
Why wouldn’t I take that offer?
He said he wanted me to stay, and I believe it. The only way to do my job well is to do it poorly for a time until you know the ropes. Then you get good, then something beyond your control changes and you say hello to mediocrity for a while, and eventually, hopefully, you adjust and get good at it again. And during those low periods, the phone rings a lot. It’s a painful process for the person doing the work, and it’s a painful process for everyone else directly or indirectly involved.
When I signed on earlier this year, I wanted to stay until retirement. The company put on a good show during in-processing, and, theoretically at least, offers a lot of opportunities to continue and advance your career. Having worked for a couple of different places where layoffs and cutbacks were a yearly tradition, I was looking forward to working for a company that was winning a lot of new business and seemed to have its best days still ahead of it.
It didn’t work out that way. I leave knowing I’m probably giving up some future opportunities. I leave a familiar situation for something different and new. And from the company’s perspective, they lose an experienced veteran who gained the bulk of his training on another company’s dime, and who will potentially be very expensive, and almost certainly very painful to replace.
But hey, they saved having to pay out a couple thousand bucks or so in health care expenses.
I found a very long and comprehensive guide for using Nlite to reduce the size of a Windows installation.
The guide is geared towards an Asus Eee. But it should work well on pretty much anything that has an Intel CPU in it.A couple of tweaks to his settings will make it suitable for AMD-based systems. Just remove anything Intel-specific, and add back in anything specific to AMD, and there you go.
And if you have a multi-core or hyperthreaded CPU, leave multi-processor support in.
I also recommend slipstreaming SP3 and all the hotfixes you can. Then you don’t have to run Windows Update, them, and you don’t have to clean up after it either. I haven’t investigated all of the whys and wherefores, but I’ve noticed that the more you slipstream ahead of time, the smaller your Windows directory ends up being. I have some systems at work that are constantly bursting at the seams on their system partitions. Other systems, which were built later from a copy of Windows with more stuff slipstreamed in, have a lot more breathing room.
Using the i64x.com instructions, you can pretty much count on getting a Windows XP installation under half a gig in size. That makes life with a small SSD much more bearable, since a typical installation tends to take a couple of gigs these days.
I’ll add some tips of my own. Inside the Windows directory, there are some subdirectories named inf, repair, and servicepackfiles. Compress those. That’ll free up some more space–at least a couple dozen megabytes in most cases.
If you’re really cramped, compress the whole Windows directory. Boot time actually decreased by a couple of seconds when I did this (down to 12 seconds from about 14), but software installations slowed considerably. But for everyday operation, you could almost consider NTFS compression a performance trick. It makes sense; an SSD can sometimes saturate the bus it’s connected to, so data compression lets it shove 20-50% more data through that saturated bus.
The downside is that when you install something that lives in the Windows directory, it has to not only copy the data into place, but also compress it. Installing the .NET Framework on a system with a compressed Windows directory takes a while.
A good compromise is to install pretty much everything you think you’ll need on the system, then start compressing.
It’s difficult to make a case for compressing the entire drive, however. Most modern data file formats are compressed–including all modern media formats and Office 2007 documents–so turning on NTFS compression on directories storing that kind of data gives no benefit, while introducing overhead.
Scratch one investment property.
Running the numbers, it might have still been possible to make it work. But a lot would have to go right, and this particular property didn’t have an especially good track record.We had a plumber come out and look over the biggest problem. He came back with a best case scenario of $5,000. He called this morning with what he thought was a more realistic figure: an eye-popping 15 grand.
Well, there’s a problem. The property easily needs another 15 grand worth of work. And most of it isn’t stuff that a do-it-yourselfer ought to be doing. It was overzealous DIY work that got the house in this mess in the first place.
According to the books we’re reading, we could afford to put $33,000 worth of work into the house, based on what it should rent for. But it’s easy to see how one project going over budget could blow the whole thing out of the water.
And, frankly, doing that much work would cause more debt than I’m comfortable carrying.
We’ll lose some earnest money. But the risks are starting to outweigh the benefits.
We’ve learned some expensive lessons. But at least we’ve learned. We’ve gone and looked at a couple of other houses already. And we noticed things we hadn’t noticed before.
Not only that, in one case we liked what we saw. The question is, how many other people have seen it and liked it too?
Honeymoon’s over. The purchase is getting rocky. I’ll tell you about my troubles so you hopefully don’t repeat them.Mistake: We used the mortgage broker our realtor recommended. She got us preapproved quickly enough for us to get our bid in… barely. The rest of the process to get approval went at a sloth’s pace. And then? She slapped us with a 5.625% interest rate and $2,600 in closing costs. She had a vaguely plausible explanation for both, but the closing costs were highway robbery and the interest rate was half a percent higher than it could have been.<p>
Having been lectured by my accountant once about closing costs, I tried to negotiate. Everything’s negotiable, he said. Nothing’s negotiable, she said.
"So I really should just pay cash for this house?" I asked.
She laughed. "If you can." She thought she had me over a barrel and she was going to take advantage of me.
Hopefully she learned a lesson, but I doubt it. Don’t give a Scotsman reason to reconsider parting with money, because once you do, you’ve lost him.
I was out of fight at that point, but my wife called the bank we use most of the time. She told the agent about our 5.625% interest rate and $2,600 closing costs, and asked if she could beat that, and if she could, how we get out of the bad deal.
She talked to us about our goals and our finances and suggested a Home Equity loan. The rate would be low, the payments would be flexible, we could get approved quickly, and there would be no closing costs.
It’s an unconventional answer to the problem. But for a first property, with uncertain expenses, it gives some flexibility. Let things stabilize for a year or two, then get a conventional mortgage if need be. The conventional mortgage gives long-term flexibility, but a HELOC gives short-term flexibility.
So it pays to call around until you find a loan officer with some creativity.
And true to her word, we had approval on the HELOC in three days. That’s how long it took sloth lady to get us just a preapproval.
The house: Now I know why the house was cheap. Superficially, it looked good. But when we started poking around with an inspector, we found out the house was an Uncle Louie Special. Uncle Louie re-did the wiring, the siding, the plumbing, and almost everything else in sight. Uncle Louie did a reasonably good job of laying tile and painting, but when it came to anything else… Well, the inspector said, "He sure didn’t let not knowing what he was doing get in the way of him finishing a project."
He said a few other things too, but it’s probably best not to repeat them.
Unfortunately, it’s going to take professionals to fix most of Uncle Louie’s work. And it won’t be cheap.
The inspector’s advice: Make the decision with the numbers, not with your heart. Which is good advice. The realtor’s job is to make you fall in love with the property. The inspector’s job is to bring you back to reality.
Sometimes the reality isn’t what it first seems. But sometimes you can still make it work anyway.
That’s what we have to learn next.
I sure wish I’d seen Wintoflash a few weeks ago.
It’s simple. Insert a Windows CD or DVD (anything from XP to Windows 7). Plug in a blank USB flash drive (or one you don’t mind erasing). Answer a couple of questions, and after a few minutes, you have a bootable USB stick that installs Windows. It will be much faster than CD or DVD because flash media has much faster seek times.
So what could be better? Well, slipstreamed and customized Windows of course.First, go get ctupdate and run it to get all the current hotfixes and service packs for whatever version of Windows you use.
Next, use Nlite to easily slipstream in all those service packs and hotfixes. While you’re at it, you can remove whatever non-optional inessentials you want. All the games, Media Player, Movie Maker, Outlook Express, and stuff like that are fair game. If you feel brave, you can even (horrors!) remove Internet Explorer.
Rebuilding a PC used to take most of a weekend to do, but with an up-to-date installation on a USB stick, I think the task could take an afternoon, as long as the target computer is new enough to support booting off USB.
And to a tinkerer, it could be very nice. Speeding up installation and modification would allow a tinkerer to be more aggressive with Nlite in terms of changes. Make a fatal change, and it’s no big deal–just back out of the change and reinstall, and in about 15 minutes you’re up and running with a new configuration.
You’re not going to believe this. This week my wife and I applied for a mortgage.
Not on our primary house. We’re buying an investment property. I’m still struggling with the mortgage bit.The greatest real estate investment books of all time (for mere mortal working class people, at least) were written by a man named William Nickerson, starting in the 1950s. Nickerson took one and only one shortcut in his investing. He saved up 25% for a solid downpayment, and bought property. Usually property with something wrong with it. He liked small apartment buildings and humble single-family houses.
Then he fixed the property up. Depending on the situation, he’d sell it if it made sense, or more likely, he’d rent it out, then sell when the right opportunity arose.
And when he had enough money to buy another property, he’d buy another one. An outright sale usually would yield enough to buy multiple properties. Or if he could make a trade that made sense, he’d trade properties.
His initial $1,000 investment (which would be more like $10,000 in today’s dollars) grew to $1 million in property by the time he wrote his first book, to $3 million by his second edition in the late 1960s, and $5 million by his final edition in the mid 1980s.
Nickerson argued that his method was the safest investment in existence. He had a point. Land is the one thing God isn’t making any more of, but God is still making new people. People who need land to live on.
But how do you find tenants? What if the house sits empty for a long time? After all, my Dad rented out a property for several years and it was a nightmare. It sat empty a lot, and his tenants trashed the place.
A couple of months ago, I saw a house for rent two miles from me. The asking price was $900. Two days later the sign was gone. Now there are cars in the driveway. So someone rented it. I looked up the house on Zillow. You could buy the house for less than that, if it were available at current market value.
I kept watching. Rentals in my zip code don’t stay vacant long. So when a HUD-owned home a couple of miles away came up at a price we could afford (my wife found it), we went and looked at it. We liked it. It needs work, but that’s why it was cheap. We made an offer, and now we’re a few steps away from buying.
We have some luxuries Dad didn’t have. We’re in a hot market, so we don’t have to rent to the first guy who asks. We can get a family with references. We live close, so we can keep an eye on the place. We can use a management company to help keep everything smooth. We’ll pay more for that privilege but it’s probably worth it. And the mortgage payment is low enough that if it sits for a few months here and there, it won’t break us.
Where house flippers–at least the ones you see on TV–seem to get into trouble is dealing in big, expensive homes and being too leveraged. If the market for $200,000-$500,000 houses goes south, they’re stuck.
This house will never be on TV. Well, the Extreme Makeover guys would love to tear it down and build a sprawling, awkward castle on its L-shaped lot. It’s a low-end house, the kind of place a young family would buy or rent, live in for a few years, and then probably vacate once the kids are done with grade school–if not a bit sooner.
People want large houses in outer-ring suburbs, but they don’t need them. But a young couple that’s outgrowing an apartment does need an affordable house for a few years, and when they outgrow that, there’ll always be another family in the same situation, ready to move in.
So why don’t they just buy the house we had our eye on instead of us? I’m sure some do. But not all of them can afford the downpayment and the money it will take to fix it up.
A friend and I discussed the ethics of buying a down-and-out person’s house, back when Robert Kiyosaki was at his peak in popularity. Kiyosaki appears to have no qualms about it. We were less comfortable about that.
As far as I can tell from the records easily available, this house finished up the foreclosure process in May. A bank somewhere in New York had it for a couple of months. Then HUD ended up with it. I don’t completely understand the process yet.
As it stands now, the house is no good to anybody. HUD’s doing the bare minimum to keep it from getting much worse. It’s eating up taxpayer dollars and making the neighborhood look worse.
The best thing for the house and the neighborhood is for someone with money and who knows what he or she is doing to come in, make it inhabitable again, hopefully make it look a little better, and get someone living there just as quickly as possible.
In my wife and me, they got someone with a little money. We’ll have to learn what we’re doing on the fly.
We’re taking advantage of the former owners who got in over their heads, but when I go to work every day, I’m taking advantage of whoever made the decision to replace a working, reliable computer system based on VMS and Unix with a sprawling monstrosity based on Windows. And my wife would argue that they take advantage of me.
By buying a fixer-upper below market value, fixing it, and renting it at market value, we’re taking advantage of the house’s situation and the future tenants. But the future tenants are taking advantage of us, because they get to live in a house they couldn’t otherwise afford.
I’m not crazy about all aspects of the situation but I’m comfortable that I’m doing more good than harm.
Now, back to that mortgage question. I’m still arguing how quickly and how to pay that off. The math suggests I could ultimately pyramid at least seven properties, using rents from the first two to pay the mortgages on all of the others. And a few short years ago, a bank would have been more than happy to lend me the money it would take to do that.
One latter-day follower of Nickerson makes it his goal to pay off one of his properties per year.
I like the idea of fixing a property, holding it for as long as the tax code encourages you to hold it, then selling and using the proceeds to pay cash for more than one property to replace it. The growth is theoretically smaller, but I really don’t like debt.
But that’s really a question for another year.