Don’t fall for get-rich-quick schemes: Check out the claims before you sign

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

The pitch sounded too good to be true. While most bank accounts in the United States are paying a piddly 4% interest, and rates are more likely to go down than up, there’s another country whose economy is booming, is one of the safest places in the world for your money, and routinely pays 9, 10, or even 14 percent interest on three-month CDs.

I clicked the banner ad. I read what the guy had to say. But I didn’t sign on the dotted line. Here’s why.First, there’s no shame in checking out what the guy has to say. Maybe he does know something nobody else knows. That’s fine. What’s wrong is signing up without checking out the claims in more detail.

In this case, the sales pitch was for 3-month CDs in Iceland. Icelandic banks offer tantalizing interest rates, but there’s a catch.

The salesman said the reason is because Iceland’s economy is booming. Do some more research, however, and you’ll find the real reason for the outlandish interest rates is because the Icelandic Krona isn’t a very stable currency. They offer these tremendous interest rates in hopes that foreign investors will pump their currency into the Icelandic economy.

I did some more digging, and the value of the Krona versus the dollar varies wildly. In the same year, it can be as high as 80 Kronas to the dollar, and as low as 50. Doing a little math, if your timing is perfect and you buy low and sell high, your $10,000 investment could be worth more than $17,000. You make about $900 off your interest, and $6,000 off market timing. But if you time it badly, your $10,000 investment could drop to $6,800 in value, in spite of the high interest rate.

This is what my dad used to call a "Las Vegas investment." If it wasn’t inherently risky, they wouldn’t be paying these kinds of interest rates. And it’s pretty clear to me why everyone isn’t doing it.

But here’s another problem: The U.S. banks that sell Icelandic CDs charge you a 1% fee on the front and back ends. So they charge to convert your dollars into Kronas, and then when you pull your money, they charge you again to convert back to US dollars. In effect, that 9% CD immediately becomes a 7 percent CD.

The other problem is there’s a $10,000 minimum. You should never tie up more money than you’re willing to lose in a risky short-term investment, and for the average person, 10 grand is a lot of money.

If you’re looking for a safe place to store money for a short period of time and get a good interest rate, a lot of banks and credit unions have started offering so-called "extreme checking" accounts to attract new customers. These accounts often pay in the neighborhood of 5.5 to 6 percent, have a small minimum and a $25,000 maximum, and usually have a few other requirements you have to meet, such as making a certain number of transactions per month with your debit card. But otherwise it just acts like a plain old checking account that lets you add and withdraw funds at will. The rate isn’t that much lower than what you can get in Iceland once you pay the conversion fees, and you have easy access to the money in case of emergencies, and best of all, there won’t be any unpleasant surprises in three months if the exchange rate isn’t favorable.

Unless you can afford to tie up $10,000 until some random, future date when the dollar happens to be low against the Krona and your CD is eligible to be cashed in, I can think of a lot of better ways to invest. If you’re looking for a long-term investment, this is a good time to buy stock index funds because stock prices are in the toilet right now. The long-term returns will be good, and you don’t have to be nearly as precise about your timing. For a short-term investment, a high-interest checking account looks better to me. You don’t need as much money and there’s much less commitment.

Make something! Fix something!

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Clive Thompson: I’m sitting on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by electronic parts… It’ll look awesome when it’s done. If it ever gets done — I keep botching the soldering. A well-soldered joint is supposed to look like a small, shiny volcano. My attempts look like mashed insects, and they crack when I try to assemble the device.

Why am I so inept? I used to do projects like this all the time when I was a kid. But in high school, I was carefully diverted from shop class when the administration decided I was college-bound. I stopped working with my hands and have barely touched a tool since.

I can relate a little too well.I think part of the reason I was misunderstood for so much of my career was because I used to do stuff like this. I still remember the day when a new OS arrived for my Amiga 2000. It came on a ROM chip (remember those?) and some floppies to install. I had the Amiga completely disassembled, sitting on Dad’s orange OMT table in the basement. Dad came downstairs, his eyes got big and his jaw dropped, he pointed, and then looked at me. “You going to be able to get that back together?”

I barely looked up. “Yep,” I said, continuing whatever I was doing.

Granted, the Amiga’s design made it look like an onerous task–you had to remove the power supply, the assembly that held all the disk drives, and at least one plug-in card to get at the ROM chip I needed to replace. But at this point, I’d disassembled at least a couple of PC/XTs even further than that. It wasn’t long before I’d replaced all those parts that were strewn about Dad’s table and fitted them back into the case, just as they all belonged. I powered it up, and immediately knew I was successful–all those royal blue screens of Amiga DOS 1.3 were replaced with the gray screens of 2.1.

Dad watched me put it back together, and although he didn’t say much, I think he was impressed.

That wasn’t the only modification I did to that computer. Amigas operated a bit differently in Europe and in North America because of the differing video standards. Software designed for European Amigas didn’t always run right. There was a soldered jumper on the motherboard to switch between PAL and NTSC operation. I bought a small slide switch from Radio Shack, soldered a couple of wires to the motherboard, and ran them to the switch, which I hung out an opening next to the mouse port. Elegant? Not at all. Functional? Totally.

There were tons of homebrew projects for Amigas in the early 1990s. Some worked better than others. But you learned a lot from them. And I think that’s part of the reason I look at things differently than people who grew up with Macintoshes (a closed black box if there ever was one) and PCs. Sure, people have been assembling their own PCs from components for 20 years now (ever since PC Magazine declared on a cover that you could build your own PC/AT clone for $1,000). But there’s a subtle difference between assembling components and modifying them. No two 286 motherboards were the same, while the design of Amiga motherboards tended to change very little, giving lots of time for people to study and learn to tweak them.

So while the PC owners were swapping their motherboards, we Amigans were tweaking ours to give ourselves new capabilities on the cheap. And in the process I think we were learning more.

So I agree with Clive Thompson that I’m a lot less likely to take a salesperson’s claims at face value. And I think that gave me a lot less patience with people who are. With only one exception I can think of, I always worked well with (and for) people who’d taken a soldering gun directly to a motherboard or programmed in assembly language. Thanks to these rites of passage, we had a much better idea of how things worked. And it gave a certain sense of skepticism. Commodore’s own engineers didn’t know the full capability of the machines they built. So if the engineers who design a system can’t know everything about it, then what on earth can a mere sales drone know?

And that’s why I’m reluctant to buy anything that’s just a black box if I can avoid it. What if it breaks and needs to be fixed? What if I need to change something about how it looks or works? And besides that, if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, I don’t want to just throw it out and buy a new one–I paid good money for it!

But I have my limits. A few years ago I checked out some books on repairing Lionel trains from the library. The books suggested using mineral spirits to clean out the old grease and oil from a motor and bring it back to life. That would be good advice, except for one thing: I had no idea what mineral spirits were (a kind of paint thinner), or where to buy them (a paint store or the paint aisle of a hardware or discount store). And have you ever tried to punch it into Google? Trust me, in 2003, there weren’t many answers. The Wikipedia article didn’t exist until 2005.

I’m sure there are lots of people who are laughing at me because I didn’t know what mineral spirits are. But I’ll bet you that if you were to go find my 120 or so high school classmates and separate out the males who lived in the suburbs whose fathers were white-collar workers, the overwhelming majority of them would have no idea what mineral spirits are either. Why not?

Because when we were growing up, we were college-bound. People like us didn’t need to know what mineral spirits are. We needed to know things like the fact that there’s no such thing as the square root of a negative number. (Yes, I know that’s not a correct statement–but those were the exact words of my Algebra II teacher, and those words cost me a lot a couple of years later.)

I even remember one time, a group of us were talking about something, and one classmate’s name came up. “He’s going to end up being a plumber,” someone snickered.

Never mind that the last time I had to call a plumber, my plumber most certainly made more money than I made that year, and he probably got a head start on me because he didn’t have to go to college for four years either.

One of the reasons plumbers make a good living is because so many people don’t even know how to shut off the water valve when their toilet leaks, let alone how to go about fixing that leaky toilet. For the record, I can shut off the water valve, but I don’t know how to fix the toilet. I’m hoping they’ll show me on This Old House sometime.

My gripe with DIY books today is that the authors don’t necessarily realize that there are one or possibly even two or three generations of readers who may very well not know the difference between a wood screw and a machine screw. They don’t learn it in school, and Dad might or might not know, but in an age when fewer couples marry and divorce rates are sky high, is Dad even around to tell them any of this stuff?

Today, I couldn’t care less about imaginary numbers. But I’m reading old DIY books, desperately trying to learn the lost arts of making and fixing things. Thanks to Disney and other useless companies, I can’t use a computer to locate digital copies of anything newer than 1922. That’s a shame, because it condemns all of the DIY books of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to obscurity. They won’t be reprinted because there isn’t enough market for them, they aren’t worth the expense of hiring a lawyer to find out if they somehow slipped into the public domain before the laws started really changing in the 1970s, and they’re scarce enough that you won’t always find them where old books lurk, making them a bit more difficult to borrow or purchase.

That all but eliminates a golden age, limiting me to 1922 and earlier. But admittedly it’s very interesting to read how people made and fixed things in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the previous century. So many books today start out with a list of exotic and expensive tools before they tell you how to do anything. One hundred years ago, people didn’t have as much money to spend on tools, and since things like electricity weren’t necessarily always available, there weren’t nearly as many exotic and expensive tools to buy either.

I found an incredible quote in an 1894 book by Charles Godfrey Leland, a teacher and author from Philadelphia. “It is much better not to have too many implements at first, and to learn to thoroughly master what one has, and to know how to make the utmost of them. This leads to ingenuity and inventiveness, and to developing something which is even better than artistic skill.”

That’s not just good advice for metalworking, which was the subject of this particular book. That’s an excellent philosophy of life.

Unfortunately right now I have more time to read than I have to tinker. But I think once I have a little time to tinker again, I’ll be able to make some nice stuff. And maybe someday when someone says they don’t make ’em like they used to, I’ll be able to smile and say that I do.

The sad story of Scott Spiezio

Dave Farquhar Baseball ,

Scott Spiezio was a mediocre baseball player who could really rise to the occasion. A good defensive first baseman with a so-so bat, he was nevertheless a key part of the Anaheim Angels’ 2002 World Series team. During the regular season he hit .285 with 12 home runs, and when injuries called for it, he slid across the diamond, filling in capably at third base. During the postseason, he went ona tear and hit .327 with three home runs.

In 2004 he signed a lucrative contract to play third base for the Seattle Mariners. His career quickly imploded, with only a .215 batting average in 2004. The next season, he sported a microscopic .064 batting average in 29 games and the Mariners released him in August.

In 2006, the St. Louis Cardinals gave him a chance as a bench player. He filled in at five positions: first base, third base, second base, and left and right field. He also hit well, and his clutch hitting in the postseason when other players faltered made him a fan favorite.

Unfortunately in 2007, the honeymoon ended. The 2007 Cardinals had a lot of off-field problems. First, manager Tony LaRussa was involved in an embarrassing DWI incident. Then pitcher Josh Hancock plowed into a tow truck at high speed on an interstate while driving drunk, killing himself. Then Spiezio abruptly left the team, checking himself into rehab for unspecified substance abuse problems.

Spiezio returned with a lot of fanfare. St. Louis fans are quick to remember past heroics and eager to forgive when someone makes an effort to right wrongs. In late January 2008, he spoke to St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Derrick Goold of ways to avoid making what he called “bad decisions,” and taking responsibility as an example-setter.

What Spiezio didn’t mention in that interview was that about a month earlier, in late December, he’d made at least one of those bad decisions. According to a California police report, he got behind the wheel of his BMW after drinking vodka, wrecked the car after driving erratically, and fled the scene. A neighbor then tried to help him, and that ended in a fight, with Spiezio throwing punches at the neighbor and slamming him into a wall.

On February 27, the story hit. Spiezio was wanted in California, facing six charges. The Cardinals promptly released him.

Unless there was an unusual provision in his contract, the Cardinals will pay Spiezio about $2.5 million to not play baseball this year. Over the course of his 10-year career, he’s already made nearly $17 million. He should be more than set for life. Even if that money is gone, this year’s salary should provide for him and his children for the rest of his life.

The question is whether he’s lost enough.

I don’t know what will happen next to Scott Spiezio. He had a good job with the Cardinals, a good organization where he fit in well and the fans loved him. Right now is a bad offseason to be unemployed. A lot of talented players are still trying to find work. Some of them have more baggage than Spiezio, but some don’t. Spiezio does have several things going for him: He’s young enough to still have two or three or more productive seasons left, plays five positions competently, he switch-hits and has some power. He probably can’t be an everyday player anymore, but there aren’t very many players who have his mix of skills and he could be a useful player coming off the bench for almost any team–if he can keep it all together.

I can see Spiezio landing on his feet and perhaps even ending up on a contending team. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see him playing in the World Series again this year.

Staying clean and sober is the harder challenge. I know from watching my dad and others struggle with alcohol that the only way you overcome it is when you hit bottom and realize that unless you overcome the addiction, you will most likely lose absolutely everything that matters to you (if you haven’t already). And even then, it’s possible to relapse, however briefly. As far as anyone knew, former Cardinals catcher Darrell Porter had been clean and sober for the better part of 21 years when he died from side effects of recreational cocaine use in 2002.

I believe the Cardinals did the right thing by releasing Spiezio. It sends a much-needed message to him, the organization, and the fans that no matter how versatile and important you are, staying free of substance abuse is more important than playing baseball.

For Spiezio’s sake, I hope that whatever happened in California is an isolated incident and he is able to do whatever he has to do to keep it that way. History is littered with the names of good baseball players whose lives turned tragic in spite of what they accomplished on the field. There’s no need for him to become another one of them.

2016 update: A couple of months after I wrote this, Scott Spiezio signed with the Atlanta Braves as a free agent. They released him a week later. Spiezio never played baseball in the major leagues again. From time to time he makes promotional appearances in St. Louis, where fans still fondly remember his role in the 2006 postseason.

What net neutrality means and why it\’s a good thing

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , , ,

This week, John C. Dvorak makes a good argument in favor of net neutrality.

I’m going to take it from a different angle. I am a conservative. While I rarely vote a straight Republican ticket, I am registered as a Republican. Republicans generally are against net neutrality.

They are wrong. I will assume it’s from a lack of understanding rather than bad intentions, but in this case, wrong is wrong. I’ll explain why. Read more

Getting domesticated (or at least more handy)

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

I go back to work tomorrow. I wish I could take at least another day or two off, but something came up and they need me Monday.

I spent some time tackling little projects around the house. Watching This Old House for the last six months or so is paying off.The day we brought my son home, I had a project waiting for me. A wind storm had ripped one of the gutters almost completely off the house. It was hanging by a thread on one end, and the other end had twisted itself around a vent over the kitchen. Nice. The vent probably kept the gutter from completely coming off.

I asked a friend from church to help me with it, because there wasn’t really any way one person could do it all at once–especially when that person is me. While I’m perfectly comfortable straightening metal, drilling pilot holes, and screwing it into place, I’d rather fill out tax forms than climb on the roof. Fortunately, with help we got it done in about 30 minutes.

When the weather finally gets nicer, I’ll drive some screws into the other gutters. For now they’re hanging on OK, but I doubt they’ll last another year without some intervention.

I also fixed a leak in the bathroom sink. I fixed it a few months ago with a bunch of PVC pipe repair kits, but the local Sears Hardware didn’t carry exactly the combination of parts I needed to reach from one end to the other. I ended up needing to mate two threaded pipes in the middle. My temporary fix was to put a smaller piece of pipe inside the two. Most of the time it worked, but sometimes it leaked.

I managed to find a threaded connector at Home Depot that fit, but it was galvanized steel and weighed way too much. There was no way these PVC pipes would support that weight. I settled for a female adapter. It screws into the threaded pipe on the bottom, and I rely on a press fit to for the top. I could secure it with some PVC glue, but first I’ll see if friction and gravity do their jobs. PVC glue isn’t something I want around the house with a little one roaming around.

Finally, I have some loose kitchen tiles. I found the original adhesive in the garage this morning. When I pulled one of the tiles, I could see why the adhesive failed: It’s the wrong kind of adhesive for the subfloor I have. So I picked up a combination adhesive/grout and we’ll see how it does. I’m not sure if one substance can do two jobs well, but theoretically I only need a little, and I’d rather buy a little of one thing than a little of two things. And I don’t see how it could be any worse than the original stuff.

I ended up paying about $10 for a quart of the adhesive/grout, $3 for a trowel, and another $3 for the tool for applying the grout. That’s not too bad. I should need a chisel, but with the original grout crumbling, I think I can get by without it. Good thing, because I couldn’t find one at Home Depot.

I’ve never laid tile before, but I’ve seen it done several times now on This Old House, so at least I know what the proper technique looks like. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but neither did whoever put this stuff down.

Once I get this project out of the way, the house will be a little bit nicer and a little bit safer. And I’ll have a little more experience.

Misplaced faith

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I know a man in his late 30s. He’s not all that unusual. He was raised Christian, then sometime during his teenage years, whether it was in high school or college, he pretty much stopped going to church. He got married young, had a couple of kids, didn’t live as comfortably as they would have liked at first, and he and his wife put their focus on improving their careers and trying to raise two children.

Something happened within the last couple of years, and now he’s extremely interested in going to church. He reads his Bible, listens to Christian radio, and talks about it. None of this is terribly unusual. But he’s been having some health problems, and those are a bit unusual.A few months ago he and I talked about it. We were sitting in a restaurant, waiting for our wives to finish shopping. He told me the things that were going on with him. I hate to say it, but he was precisely the kind of patient Dad used to come home and complain about: No end to his problems, yet medically, there was nothing wrong with him. And he admitted as much.

"People keep telling me it’s all in my head," he said, sadly. "I guess I just don’t have enough faith."

I really think he has two problems. I think the first problem is that he eats too much unhealthy food. I don’t know how he eats all the time, but when I’m around, he eats too much fried food, too much meat, and not enough fresh fruits and vegetables. From my personal experience, one of the fastest ways to put myself into a funk is to eat fast food every day for a week.

But now let’s talk about that lack of faith.

It’s a common problem, and when I hung out with a lot of evangelical-minded people, I saw it a lot. I had it too. People have a tendency to keep score a lot, which is a real problem. Read the Gospels, and you see Jesus pointed out people who had lots of faith, or way too little of it. The problem is, He was able to see it. He could see things that the rest of us can’t.

We do not have the perspective to judge our faith in relation to that of other people, so we just shouldn’t do it. We can see signs, but signs can be deceiving. We can’t see what’s really going on in the other person’s head, nor can we see what the other person is like when we aren’t around.

I see my pastor about an hour and a half a week. I don’t know what he’s like the other 166.5 hours. He says if I did, I wouldn’t trust him during that hour and a half. Yet, by all outward appearances, my pastor is a spiritual superstar. He came to a small, struggling church on the outskirts of the St. Louis metro area, and inside of a decade, turned it into one of the largest Lutheran churches in the St. Louis area. For that matter, it’s one of the fastest-growing Lutheran churches, period.

So if this superstar who lives and works about four miles down the road from me struggles sometimes, the rest of us shouldn’t be surprised if we struggle sometimes. It doesn’t make it right, but it makes us human.

Jesus had something to say about lack of faith. He said if you have faith the size of a mustard seed–at the time, the smallest seed known to his audience–you can move mountains.

When people have problems that their faith can’t overcome, often they come to the conclusion that their faith is smaller than a mustard seed. Unfortunately, many Christian circles perpetuate this. The contemporary Christian hit "Faith Enough," released by Carmen a few years ago, is a good example of this. The song’s lyrics talk about all the things you can do if you have enough faith.

Yet very few Christians are doing the things Carmen says are easy. Why?

The mindset doesn’t work.

The mindset puts the focus on faith, when the focus needs to be on God. Let’s look at what he said again: People keep telling me it’s all in my head. I must not have enough faith.

What are the nouns and pronouns in those two sentences? People. Me. My. Head. I. Faith.

Where’s God?

The amount of faith doesn’t matter. When your faith is in your ability to believe, the focus comes back to you, not to God. In that regard, our faith almost becomes an idol.

It’s easy to say how to get enough of the right kind of faith, but it’s much harder to do. Look back on your life and the lives of others. Read the stories of the Biblical heroes. Look at everything that went wrong with them, and look at what God was doing with those circumstances. Did God ever let any of these people down? Ever? What kinds of things did God carry you through? What kinds of bad situations did God make good things come out of?

And when the situation doesn’t let up, it could be that we aren’t ready, or something else isn’t ready, and God isn’t finished with us yet. Remember that God works for good in all situations and circumstances, and look back at your own past for the proof.

And by all means don’t compare yourself with others. A decade ago, another Christian got very frustrated with me because I wasn’t in the same place in my faith as she was in hers. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, because nobody else is either. Not then, and not now. We all develop a little bit differently. My cousin learned to walk and ride a bicycle at a younger age than I did, but I learned to read and write at a younger age than he did. Why is faith any different?

As long as that faith is in God, and the focus is on God and not on ourselves and our own abilities, God will take care of the rest. It’s exactly like when my son cries out to me. He’s not old enough to understand much of anything except hunger and maybe sleep. He knows that when he cries and I pick him up, he’ll get milk. Depending on where Mom is, sometimes it takes longer than others, but he believes in me.

Sometimes our understanding of things is almost as limited as my son’s. But God can still work with it.

This changes everything

Dave Farquhar Personal

I won’t post specifics in order to protect him, but I became a father this week. This is my first, a son.

Don’t expect any coherence in any of this. These are just some thoughts in the order they come to me.I’d never changed a diaper before in my life. The day he was born, I think I changed four. By the time I did the last one, I was even able to change one without him screaming bloody murder.

As I changed those diapers, it was so clear how vulnerable he is. He’s pretty much defenseless in every single way. Maybe that’s the idea, so parents will protect and nurture them.

They had to monitor his blood sugar really closely at first, and he screamed bloody murder whenever they took those samples. I tried to figure out how I could convince them to let me take the sample. Of course any sample I took would be from me, not from him.

Balancing your son’s long-term safety against comfort for the moment is a bit difficult. In the long term, all of those shots and other things will make him healthier. But there’s no way to explain any of that to him. All he knows is that strange people are hurting him and he can’t hear mom’s and dad’s voices anymore.

So far it looks like he has my ears, my eyes, my hair, and my wife’s nose and bone structure. The combination quickly made him popular with the female nurses. I hope his vision ends up being comparable to mine and my dad’s, but I sure hope he doesn’t end up being as prone to ear infections as I was. It also might be nice if he doesn’t get his first gray hair in the sixth grade like I did.

I’ve always been afraid to hold other people’s babies because I was afraid I might drop them. I haven’t had any trouble with him. It’s easier for some reason when it’s your own.

Trying to bribe a newborn with promises of a puppy, trains, and Tonka trucks doesn’t work. I didn’t think it would, but I thought it was worth a shot.

It’s also impossible to explain to the dog where my wife is and that she’s bringing a baby home. My dog loves kids, and any time kids come to visit, she’ll walk around the house looking for them even a couple of hours after they’ve left. I don’t know how she’ll react to a newborn, but once he’s big enough to crawl, she’ll have a playmate for the rest of her life.

I used to joke, derisively, that some people want to baptize their babies before, or right after, the umbilical cord is cut. I actually understand that attitude now. I still don’t agree with it (except in case of dire emergency of course), but now I see the perspective. I wasn’t there in the room holding a glass of water. But did the thought cross my mind? Yes.

The argument for paying your mortgage off early

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I’ve had a number of people tell me I’m making a mistake paying my mortgage off early. If all goes well, my wife and I will be rid of that debt sometime this year.

I can understand the logic behind keeping that "good debt." But that’s idealistic. I have lots of reasons for getting rid of that as soon as possible.First, there’s my personal experience. Right out of college, I invested everything I could, and for a time I looked like a genius because the market was doing gangbusters in 1998 and 1999. Then the double whammy of the dotcom bust and 9/11 happened, and I literally lost half of it. Now that those investments have mostly recovered, the market is in the toilet again. How much will I lose this time?

Of course, when the losses are piling up it’s a great time to buy at low prices and hold. If that were the only factor, I might do it.

But in the meantime, I know exactly what the return will be if I pay off the mortgage early. And it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the economy does.

The second factor is job security. Let’s look at my recent history. In 2005 I lost my job. About six weeks later I found another one. It wasn’t ideal, because the company was having financial problems and I knew going in that it might not last. I took it because I was on the hook for pair of $400 car payments and an $1,100 mortgage. By my math, the money I had in the bank would last about four more months. I took the job because I didn’t like my odds of finding anything better.

The job lasted four months.

When that ended, I interviewed with another company for a temporary job. It was anything but ideal: About an hour away, and it was only for two months. But it was late October, not a good time for job-hunting, and this would get me through the holidays. The interview was a home run.

I didn’t get the job though. Later that very day, the company did a round of massive layoffs, and the job I interviewed for ceased to exist. I lost the job before I even had it.

For two months I looked and didn’t find anything. I couldn’t even find a desktop support job.

Finally at the end of December I got another job. It wasn’t ideal either. The biggest problem was that it was 45 minutes from home. For seven years I’d worked 10-20 minutes from home. Did I want the job? No. Did I have a choice? Given my recent history, not really. My car was paid off but my wife’s wasn’t yet, so we were still on the hook for $1,500 every month. This job was secure for at least a couple of years, which was a lot better than the last two opportunities. So I took it.

I’ve looked for something closer since then. The problem is that there are so many other people who want any job that comes up. I’ve had a few phone calls, but never an interview.

My job is reasonably secure until September or October. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. If the house is paid off before then, it doesn’t matter nearly as much.

In decades past, if you got a job with a good company, there was a reasonable expectation on both sides that you would work for that company until you retired. That world doesn’t really exist anymore. A lot of companies want turnover, because it keeps wages down. It almost seems like some companies try to make sure you won’t be around more than five years so they don’t have to give you a third week of vacation.

Other companies run themselves into the ground before you can stick around five years.

In that kind of environment, being on the hook for $2,000 a month for 30 years just doesn’t look very appealing. There will be periods of time in your career that you won’t have that money coming in. The only question is when it will be, and for how long.

Changing careers becomes much easier without a mountain of debt. A lot of us end up in jobs that don’t really suit us, for whatever reason. We go to college and study four or five years, hoping to figure out what we want to do with our lives. It’s really not enough time, and most of us don’t actually find ourselves until we’re somewhere north of age 30. By then it may be too late. We’ve built up our debts and our lifestyles to the point that we can’t afford to change careers and start over at the bottom of the pay scale again. And if you have to go back to school on top of that? Ouch.

What if you want to chase the American Dream the classic way and go into business for yourself? The problem with that is that most businesses can’t make enough to support the owner until they’re two or three years old. This is why most businesses don’t survive more than 18-24 months.

If you’re not on the hook for $2,000 a month, you can much better afford to weather a few lean months or even a couple of years until you can either climb the pay scale in a new career, or your business matures to the point where it can support you. Getting rid of debt puts you back in control of your own destiny.

Finally, I’ve seen what it’s like to not have debt. Some friends of my mother in law and father in law convinced them that it would be a good idea to pay off all of their debt, and they gave them a plan to do it in seven years. They did it. And even though the two of them had modest salaries–she was a schoolteacher and he was a disabled veteran with no college education, which limited him to jobs that didn’t pay a lot–without that debt, they were able to live very comfortably and retire while they were in their 50s.

Imagine what it would be like to have the freedom to change to a career that suits you, reach the point where you’re able to retire in your 50s, but not really want to retire yet because you enjoy what you’re doing.

Not having an anchor of debt hanging around your neck opens a lot of possibilities, doesn’t it? I think it’s worth sacrificing a couple of years of investing to get to that point.

Identifying what processes are talking on your Windows box

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

If you’re curious whether a particular piece of software might be spyware, or you have some other reason to believe your computer might have been compromised and might be talking to something it shouldn’t be, there’s a quick and easy way to find out besides using the standard netstat -an command.

Windows XP and 2003 (and, presumably, Vista) have the netstat -o command, which tells you what IP addresses your computer is talking to and on what ports, plus it adds the process IDs that have those ports open. There’s a hotfix to add that functionality to Windows 2000, but it appears you have to demonstrate a need for it in order for Microsoft to provide it.

Regardless, I like the Sysinternals tool TCPview better. The most important thing it does is give you the names of the application, instead of the process ID, using each port. That saves you from having to run task manager and figure it out yourself. It puts everything in a GUI window, making it a little bit easier to scroll around, and it also tries to resolve the IP addresses, which can be nice. So if all you have open is a web browser pointing at Google and you see processes talking to web addresses you’ve never heard of, you have reason to be suspicious.

The next time someone complains to me that a computer is running slow, once I think I’ve cleaned off the spyware I think I’ll run this utility just to see if there might be anything left.

What’s wrong with Kirkwood?

Dave Farquhar St. Louis ,

Tonight at 7 PM, a Kirkwood area contractor named Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton walked in to a city council meeting. On his way in he shot two police officers, then opened fire and shot five others, including the mayor, his intended target. He fired on the city attorney and missed; the attorney fought back by throwing chairs at Thornton until more police officers ran in and shot Thornton dead.

Five of Thornton’s victims are dead.Kirkwood is the place where Kevin Johnson hunted down, shot and killed police officer William McEntee after the Kirkwood Police were unable to save his half brother in 2005.

A little over a year ago, kidnapping victims Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby were found in a Kirkwood apartment.

Thornton and Johnson lived about three blocks apart, in Kirkwood’s Meacham Park neighborhood.

What’s wrong with Kirkwood?

Well, mostly Meacham Park, which is what was wrong with Kirkwood 20 years ago.

Kirkwood is largely an upper middle-class suburb today, although there are working-class pockets. At one time it was a railroad town, and it shows in some of the neighborhoods. But by and large, it’s the kind of place a doctor, lawyer, or executive wouldn’t be ashamed to call home, and a potential client wouldn’t think any less of a professional who hailed from there.

I know the area well and like it. In high school, I worked in a restaurant in Kirkwood. I worked in Kirkwood off and on from 1998 to 2005. I don’t live there mostly because I can’t afford to.

When I was a teenager, Meacham Park was mostly a nuisance. People from Meacham Park would come into the restaurant and cause trouble, making a mess or stealing things, whether it would be food off the salad bar or stupid stuff like napkins or straws. When a shift supervisor disappeared mysteriously one night and left the safe empty except for a single $5 bill and some singles, he hid out in Meacham Park. Another coworker who lived in Meacham Park found him–alive.

When parts of Meacham Park were leveled to make way for an enormous strip mall, I didn’t shed any tears for it.

How you fix the Meacham Park problem is pretty clear–provide opportunities. Thornton, by the accounts I’m hearing, did some things right. He had a bachelor’s degree and ran a small business. Unfortunately he racked up more than $18,500 worth of fines, which has been cited as a motive in the shootings. Thornton used to show up at city council meetings and cause trouble. I guess he couldn’t come up with a more constructive way to protest the fines.

It would have been better if he just would have gotten the permits he was supposed to get in order to conduct his business legally.

Thornton claimed discrimination, and others have said he would get ticketed for minor violations. I knew plenty of Kirkwood police officers from my time working in the restaurant. This goes back several years of course, but the Kirkwood police weren’t prejudiced against people because of the color of their skin. They were prejudiced against people who caused problems.

Many of my coworkers were African-American, and the only one who had problems with the Kirkwood police was involved in criminal activity, so it was justifiable.

So I believe they may have targeted Thornton, but I believe the motivation was the past violations.

I don’t know many details of what’s happening, but if you’re a praying person, please pray for the city of Kirkwood and the families of the six deceased and two wounded.