The road to financial independence

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , ,

Early in The Millionaire Next Door, Danko and Stanley single out the Scottish. When my wife, Emily, read it, she said, “That explains everything about you!”

When I read it, I thought it explained everything about my two grandfathers–one was rich, one was poor, both were Scottish, and both spent their money pretty much the same way.

I’ve been reading a lot of these kinds of books because I’m not going to let what happened to us back in May ever happen again.But I blame Emily. She’s the one who started bringing me these kinds of books.

So what am I doing? I can’t list everything, but I can definitely give enough examples to highlight this Scot’s mindset.

Pick up that quarter. You know that adage that if a lawyer drops a quarter, it costs him more money to bend down and pick it up than to leave it be? Forget that. A lawyer standing in a parking lot isn’t billing time. I always pick up that quarter. I’m not a vulture–if I see someone drop a coin or three, I pick them up and hand them to the person. But if it’s on the ground and there’s no sign of the rightful owner, it goes in my pocket, whether it’s 75 cents or a penny.

Be scrappy. When I was out of work, I walked around picking up aluminum cans. At 45 cents a pound with a 10-pound minimum (a pound is roughly 35 cans), it was a slow way to make money. But if you’re out walking for exercise anyway, pick ’em up. I pick up cans when I spot them in parking lots, and I save the cans the local hoodlums throw in my yard. The last time we took cans in, we got more than $8. That pays for dinner for a night or two, if you cook. I only gather cans when someone’s not paying me to do something else, but during those times, why not?

Pay down your debt. Once Em and I got on our feet financially and it was clear we wouldn’t have to live off our savings anymore, we paid off our cars. We’d been making extra payments anyway. By paying off her 5-year loan in 3 years and mine in 2, we probably saved $3,000 in interest charges. That 3 grand is going to come in handy.

And that’s Biblical: Romans 13:8 says, “Owe no man anything, except love.” Does that mean my home mortgage and my car loans are sin? Yep. At least we’ve got two sins out of our lives.

If you can’t pay it all off, make extra payments. Even tiny extra payments help. Do a Google search for a financial calculator. Plug in your home mortgage. Many will figure the effects of extra payments for you. On my mortgage, just $10 a month pays off my house a full month sooner. A lousy ten bucks a month eliminates a single $1,000 mortgage payment. I can come up with 10 bucks. About 18 months ago I quit buying a doughnut and coffee at work, taking a thermos and a couple of packets of oatmeal every morning so I’d quit spending $1 a day on those things. The total savings per month was almost 20 bucks. Packing my lunch saved another couple of bucks a day. You get the idea.

Initially I was doing it for hobby money, until I realized how much more I would save by eliminating debt first. Once that $1,000 mortgage payment and $300 car payment are no longer over my head, I can buy a lot more $10 train cars. Even if the price doubles by then, which it probably won’t.

Keep an eye out for business opportunities. My brother in law has the right idea. He and his wife bought the laundromat in the town they live in. They have to fix something once a week, but compared to their regular jobs, it’s easy money. Within a few years it will have paid for itself and the money will just be there.

He’s looking to start another business too. Ethanol costs about $1.84 a gallon and the price is steady. That’s 70 cents less than a gallon of gasoline sells for in their town. So a lot of farmers use ethanol. Many would anyway, because they’d rather support corn farmers than middle eastern oil tycoons. So he’s looking to buy an ethanol station.

Emily and I moonlight selling stuff online. She loves shopping at thrift stores and yard sales. I spotted a copy of How to Make a Fortune With Other People’s Junk and bought it (with a coupon, of course). We’re not following it exactly, but it put us on the right track. We’re small time but we’re profitable, and now she’s getting paid to do one of her favorite things.

The goal isn’t the high life. This might be the most important thing. The reason most wealthy people stay wealthy is because their goal isn’t a swanky $500,000 home in a ritzy suburb with two new foreign luxury cars in the driveway all the time.

Don’t get me wrong: I may not drive a Honda Civic all my life. But I could see myself driving a Toyota Camry or a Honda Accord whether my net worth was $160,000 or $16 million. A BMW or Mercedes (or a Lincoln or Cadillac, for that matter) does nothing to improve quality of life.

The goal is something completely different: not to be anyone’s slave.

A year ago, whenever my phone rang after hours, I had to answer it. If I failed to answer the phone more than maybe once a year, I was afraid I’d be fired. So I picked up the phone and did whatever the person on the other end asked, whether it was reasonable or not, whether it made sense or not. Sometimes that meant I had to cancel plans. But it meant extra money, and I thought it proved how indispensible I was.

And it was all over one Thursday afternoon. There were cutbacks at work, and my position was eliminated. So I got in a car that belonged to Honda and drove to a house owned by the bank, where I sat down (at least the couch was owned by me) to figure out how much money was in the bank and how many months that money would last while I looked for another job.

Freedom is being able to say yes when the phone rings because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s what you have to do in order to support your lifestyle. Freedom is when it doesn’t matter if your job evaporates because you boss’ boss’ boss screwed up and lost a horrific amount of money because the main reason you’re working for him is because it’s more interesting than sitting around at home watching daytime TV.

Most people don’t have a job. Their job has them. And the main reason is because their lifestyle has them.

In a way I’m glad I learned this at age 30. I’m also very glad that Emily understands it, and that when I can’t explain something peculiar about the way I spend or (more often) don’t spend, she trusts me. This doesn’t work very well when only one person is on board.

And as long as both of us can hold down a job for about five years–a reasonable expectation, since both of us have done it before–we’ll get there.

I just got back from vacation on the Gulf Coast

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

Nine days away from pagers, e-mail, Internet, and even, to a large degree, telephones. It was nice, let me tell you.

Actually Emily and I tried to bring Internet access along, but my closest Southwestern Bell dialup number was long distance.It wasn’t exactly a honeymoon, as it was designed as a family vacation. Yes, I just went on vacation with all of my in-laws and enjoyed it. I knew Emily was something special when I met all of her family for the first time and liked them.

So, here’s a rundown of what I learned about the Alabama Gulf Coast (which pretty much looks like the Florida Gulf Coast, but is less expensive and a bit shorter drive for us).

Lulu’s has to be the most overrated restaurant in the whole state, if not the entire Southeast. I’ll be blunt: If it weren’t owned by Jimmy Buffet’s sister, it would be out of business. Five items on the menu: a couple of burgers (of course) and a few seafood dishes, the quality of which is comparable to Red Lobster. The live music was two dirty old men being crude in front of children. And the staff was incredibly rude.

You can get hamburgers and Red Lobster-quality seafood anywhere. There’s no point in wasting your time with that place.

The next night, Em and I went to Original Oyster House, which was every bit as good as last year. Their stuffed shrimp is amazing. Well, everything there is amazing, but the stuffed shrimp is another level of amazing. One hint: If you need to add salt to anything, use the sea salt in the special container on the table, rather than the plain old table salt in the traditional shaker. It’s healthier and tastes better.

Another hint: Get there early. We got there at a little after 4:30. There were four parking spots left. They seated us pretty quickly, and we were eating by 5. By about 5:15 you can’t get a seat without a long wait at that place. It’s worth the wait–last year we waited two hours for a seat and we weren’t disappointed–but it’s nicer to avoid it.

There are two grocery store chains down there: Bruno’s and Winn-Dixie. Bruno’s is the less expensive of the two.

I bought a big bag of Clementines for 99 cents. Clementines are a sort of mini orange. In Missouri you can’t get them very often, and they cost a lot more than that. If you’re a Yankee like me, they’re an indulgence, but they’re a cheap indulgence down there.

If you get a place with cooking facilities, bring along some recipes and stop off at one of the many roadside seafood markets. It’s nice to get fresh seafood for what you’re probably used to paying for beef.

Lillian’s in Perdido Key, Florida (just across the border) is a good pizza/Italian place. Em and I skipped it this year since there are half a dozen places just as good within a 10-minute drive of home, but if you’re not from St. Louis or Chicago, you’ll enjoy it.

The Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida is always a worthwhile visit. It’s free. If you have any interest at all in space, the Navy, aviation, either of the World Wars, or American History, it’s got something for you. The tour of the facilities where they restore airplanes is great.

We didn’t make it to the USS Alabama, which is in Mobile. That’s on my list.

It’s easy to find country/western and classic rock stations down there. If your tastes lean more towards a AAA format (Adult Album Alternative), 92.1 FM is one of the better commercial AAA stations I’ve heard. They play plenty of unexpected stuff without being totally obscure.

We’ll have to wait longer for PCI RAMdisks

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

In case nobody noticed, it’s August. July came and went, and there’s no Gigabyte I-RAM on the market yet.

But there are a few benchmarks out there, and Anandtech has an article that, once you get past the usual rambling and over-the-top introduction, has some useful insights.I was going to say the first problem is the somewhat disappointing speed, but actually, there are two bigger problems:

Availability. Now they’re saying it’ll be out sometime in August. And they’re initially only going to make 1,000 of them.

Price. The original $50 MSRP is out the window; now this thing is going to cost $150.

Can anything else be wrong? Unfortunately, yes. The speed is a bit disappointing. The SATA interface is the bottleneck. The very newest hard drives can come close to saturating the SATA interface for short periods of time, so the RAMdisk doesn’t outperform it by much. If this drive were using an interface with more bandwidth, there wouldn’t be as much problem, but squeezing more bandwidth out of the 33 MHz PCI bus is tough. We’re at the point now where the PCI bus is a much bigger bottleneck than the ISA bus was in 1994. The theoretical limit of the PCI bus is 132 megabytes per second, which isn’t much higher than the sustained throughput of 100 megabytes per second that the I-RAM delivers.

The combination of PCI Express and a faster disk protocol has the potential to resolve this issue, but at the expense of limiting the device’s market even further.

I’m disappointed by the review in a couple of regards, though. First, they compare the I-RAM to the fastest SATA drive available at the time of the review. That’s not necessarily what every would-be purchaser would be using. I believe that an I-RAM used to replace (or in conjunction with) a drive that’s a couple of years old would be a mind-blowing upgrade.

Second, they don’t take fragmentation into account. Enthusiasts are more likely to defragment their hard drives twice a day than everyone else, so fragmentation may not be an issue for them. But my wife, mother, and mother-in-law don’t know what fragmentation is. Well, maybe my wife does because she’s probably overheard me talk about it. The thing about the I-RAM is that it makes seek times irrelevant, so it’s never going to slow down due to fragmentation. Translation: For people who have lives, this thing could be phenomenal.

The review complained constantly about the drive’s capacity. So I’m disappointed that they didn’t test the drive with NTFS compression enabled. While data compression is still taboo, and it increases CPU usage, when you’re out of room it’s your only choice. While its effectiveness is unpredictable, it’s fairly safe to bet compression will get you another gigabyte or two of usable space on a 4-gig model. But just as importantly, under some circumstances, compression can actually increase performance. I want to know if increasing the amount of data you’re flowing over the saturated bus makes up for the increased CPU usage.

Why small business is better than big business

Dave Farquhar Society , , ,

Technophilosopher Paul Graham (whose essay on Bayesian filtering spurred the development of one of the more popular methods for blocking spam) has some thoughts on what companies ought to learn from open source and blogging.

I really liked this quote: [Those who] run Windows on servers ought to be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google and Yahoo don’t know. I know Google and Yahoo are a whole lot smarter than anyone I’ve worked for who runs on Windows.

But the most poignant bit for me was this: People work a lot harder on things they like.

I believe this is why successful small businesses are successful. Millionaire owners of small businesses often work very long hours–possibly 10 or even 14 hours a day. But many of them probably don’t realize they’re working those long hours because they enjoy it.

I’ve noticed this with my wife when I work with her. She doesn’t keep track of the hours she works because she doesn’t care. And at the end of my workday when I come home, we might spend most of the evening working, but at the end of the evening, we’re no more tired than we would have been if we’d spent the evening sitting on the couch watching TV.

As I watch the rise and fall of companies in the computer industry, I see this same pattern. Why can’t Microsoft sustain the growth of its early years? There are lots of reasons, but in the very early days when Bill Gates and Paul Allen actually spent time writing code alongside their employees, everyone worked excruciatingly long hours, but they did it out of choice. Microsoft is notorious for trying to force those kinds of hours out of its workers today (the book Microserfs details this in general). Could the reason every Microsoft operating system released in the last 15 years has been delayed be because they’re just a labor, rather than a labor of love?

I think that has a lot to do with it.

And I think this is the reason why I’m not a fan of big business and never have been. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no fan of big government or big labor either. Big anything is out of touch and can’t help but focus more on self-preservation than on the things it’s doing and why those things are interesting and important. I can’t necessarily tell you why any given thing is interesting or important but I can tell you without even seeing it that it isn’t because of the amount of money it can make.

I want to believe Palmeiro

Dave Farquhar Baseball , ,

It’s all over the news. Rafael Palmeiro, the Baltimore Orioles star who just joined the elite 500 home run/3,000 hit club, tested positive for steroid use and has been suspended.

Palmeiro, of course, was outspoken on the issue when he testified before Congress earlier this year while Mark McGwire was being evasive.I remember when Palmeiro first came up with the Chicago Cubs. I was a Cubs fan back then, and since all Cubs games were televised, it was easy to follow them. I could watch their daytime games after I got home from school.

The Cubs brought him up prematurely, in 1986, because their team was ravaged by injuries. In those days he was an outfielder. He played left field, filling in for injured veterans, batted .247, and left Cubs fans wondering what the future might hold.

He came back in 1987. He only played about half the season. I can’t remember now if that was because the Cubs called him up at midseason, or if he was injured, or something else. But Palmeiro played 84 games that year, hitting 14 home runs in 221 at bats, and some of us thought we had a future power hitter on our hands.

He only hit 8 home runs in 1988, his first full season in the majors. People point back now to that as evidence that he was obviously juicing. Having seen him swat 14 in limited duty the year before, I always figured pitchers had adjusted to him. He hit .307, but he didn’t have much power. We figured the power would come.

Following the season, the Cubs made one of the worst trades of the 1980s, packaging Palmeiro and left-handed pitcher Jamie Moyer (still hurling for the Mariners today) in a deal with the Texas Rangers for notorious flameout closer Mitch Williams, Paul Hilgus (a pitcher whose career never got off the ground), and Curt Wilkerson (a career utility infielder).

The Rangers noted Palmeiro’s lackluster defense in the outfield and moved him to first base–the Cubs had experimented with him there, but really wanted to keep the position open for Mark Grace, who was just a year or so behind Palmeiro–and Palmeiro turned into a productive, sweet-swinging hitter for the Rangers. He hit 14 homers that year. The next year he hit 26, then 22. About the time Jose Canseco says Palmeiro started using steroids, he became good for 35-40 homers a year.

I always figured he had matured as a hitter. That’s what I always wanted to believe, and it’s still what I want to believe.

To me, Palmeiro became the one who got away. Even after I wasn’t a Cubs fan anymore, and even during that phase when I liked the Cubs less than the Mets, I guess Palmeiro’s success just proved to me that I was smarter than the Cubs’ front office. (So was my dog, but that’s beside the point.) I kept rooting for the guy.

I guess it helped that he was likeable. Besides being a steady ballplayer who was willing to do whatever he needed to do–eventually he honed his lackluster defense into something of Gold Glove caliber–he got involved in the community, and he was always willing to sign an autograph.

So when Jose Canseco first claimed Rafael Palmeiro injected steroids, I didn’t believe him. Drugs didn’t make him improve his defense, so in my mind, his home run surge must have been due to more work in the weight room and/or the batting cage. Besides, when you extrapolate 1987 over a full season, you get more than 35 home runs.

Canseco might as well have been claiming to have introduced steroids to Fred Rogers, as far as I was concerned.

But now, the test… Can a drug test lie?

So I don’t know what to think of Palmeiro now.

A lot are saying he won’t go to the Hall of Fame now. There’s no room in the Hall for cheaters, they say. Well, that’s not true. Gaylord Perry got to the Hall of Fame by throwing greaseballs. Don Sutton’s nickname was Black and Decker. Both are in the Hall of Fame. Neither would be if they’d followed the rules. And yes, Perry once got caught.

So we can forget about Palmeiro making it on the first ballot. That’s probably for the best. It took Ryne Sandberg three ballots to get in. Maybe Palmeiro will need five or six. I don’t think this will ultimately keep him out of there.

I’m not sure if that’s right or if it’s wrong.

I guess the steroids thing explains one thing about Palmeiro. At around age 36 or 37, Palmeiro started doing commercials for Viagra. I wondered why someone his age would have any need for the stuff. Well, maybe now we know.

Kids, keep that in mind before you shoot up.

This author says used book sales don\’t hurt authors or publishers

Dave Farquhar Writing , , , ,

In case you didn’t know it, Amazon.com sells used books as well as new books. This New York Times story (via News.com) says authors and publishers still don’t like used book sales because they say it hurts new book sales.

I happen to be a published author. I say they need to quit whining.In case you didn’t know it, here’s how authors are generally paid. Authors get a royalty on each copy of the book sold. The royalty varies. On a typical Dummies book, the royalty is about 25 cents. Other publishers pay closer to 10 percent of the cover price. When you buy a book for $25, the author will probably see $1.50-$3 of it.

When the publisher agrees to take the book, the author gets an advance, usually of a few thousand dollars. Celebrities might get half a million or more. A first-time author might get less than $10,000. Generally the advance is determined based on expected sales. So I’ll always get a fraction of what a marketing machine like Phil McGraw gets, since he can essentially turn his daily TV show into an hour-long commercial for his book until he’s happy with the sales.

The advance is paid back by withholding royalties. So, if I were to get a $6,000 advance to write a book and got a royalty of $1 per copy, I would start seeing royalties after 6,000 books were sold.

Some people say used book sales hurt authors and publishers because these books exist and are bought and sold outside of this royalty structure. If you buy a used copy of Optimizing Windows, I don’t see a penny of it. Unfair, right?

Wrong. I got my royalty on that copy when the copy sold the first time.

The only time that a used book sale truly hurts the author or the publisher is when a copy that was sent to a reviewer or an otherwise free copy ends up on the used book market. This happens, even when the free copy is stamped “Not for resale” or something similar. But even then, the harm is minimal. Optimizing Windows got a huge burst in sales when Sandy McMurray reviewed it. Thanks to him, the book made Amazon’s Top 10 in Canada and even hit #1 a couple of times. He made me thousands sales. I don’t give a rip if he resold his review copy–it’s still a huge gain for me. As far as I’m concerned, if a review results in two book sales–which it inevitably will–that free copy did its job.

And, sadly, books go out of print. Once that happens, the only way to get a copy is to buy a used one.

I have no problem at all with used books. It keeps books circulating, and I believe that people who buy used books also buy new books. They’re also more likely to talk about books, which will result in more sales of both used and new books.

Besides, if you buy a book and you don’t think enough of it to keep it, shouldn’t you be able to get some of your money back out of it?

Sticking PDFs together

Dave Farquhar Software

If you’ve ever needed to stick several PDFs together into one document (maybe your scanner software makes one-page PDFs when you scan to that format), my old friend and one-time coauthor Brian has an answer for you: PDF Append 2003.

I guess he wrote it in 2003 but wrote about it yesterday?At any rate, this is one of those cases where if you need something, you probably need it badly. Those of you who need it know who you are.

The best business book I\’ve ever read

Dave Farquhar Book reviews

I just finished reading Start Small, Finish Big by Fred DeLuca.

What I like most about it is that it doesn’t expect you to quit your job, it doesn’t assume you’ve already started a million businesses before (why would you need the book if you had?), and it doesn’t get bogged down in frustrating details.

What’s he mean by start small? Initial investments of no more than $5,000 and often much, much less, that’s what. What’s he mean by finish big? Read on.Fred DeLuca was a poor kid, living in public housing, who wanted to go to college. His dad happened to have a friend named Pete who had some money, so he asked Pete what the best way would be to pay for college, since he couldn’t think of anyone else to ask. Pete loaned him $1,000 and told him to start a sandwich shop. You’ve probably eaten there. It was called Subway.

LeDuca spends the book walking through 15 things he learned over the course of running Subway. He pulls in his own experience, as well as the experience of 14 other business owners.

One of those other owners is Paul Orfalea, a guy who barely made it through college and the only skill he had was making copies. Since he couldn’t think of anything better to do with his life, he borrowed some money and bought a photocopier. His nickname was Kinko. You’ve probably used one of his photocopiers too.

If you don’t have any ideas, this book can help you find one. If you don’t have any money, this book can help you find some. Really–there are 13 pages in the back listing organizations in every state that help small businesses get off the ground with small low-interest loans and coaching.

The book is down to earth and, at times, funny. At least I found it funny when one would-be entrepreneur pitched her idea for a consignment shop to her mother, only to be rebuked with, “That sounds like Sanford and Son. I don’t want to sell used furniture.”

OK, maybe you’ll at least agree with me that it’s down to earth?

A lot of books tell you to get a lawyer and/or draw up a business plan as a first step. DeLuca would rather see you grab a plastic bag and go hunting for aluminum cans to recycle–the only way to learn to make a lot of money is to start by making a little money, and there’s no risk involved in collecting aluminum cans. (I think it does some other positive things to you as well.)

Before I read this book, I pretty much thought the American Dream was dead. So for me, this book was 15 strong arguments why I was wrong. According to DeLuca, you don’t have to be the first guy with an idea–it helps to be early, but that’s not even strictly necessary–and you don’t necessarily have to be the best, and you don’t even have to be the cheapest.

If running your own business has the least bit of appeal to you, this is a good book for you to read.

Beware Nigerians seeking computer equipment

Dave Farquhar Spam , ,

It wasn’t really a 419 scam, but I think I came a little too close to falling for another Nigerian scam this week.

Some time back, I listed some computer equipment on Craigslist. Not really high-dollar stuff, but stuff I’m not using, and while I’m not in desperate need of the money, it would come in very handy. And Craigslist is a lot less hassle than a garage sale.I listed it about a month ago, and interest was ice cold. Then yesterday I got a message from someone named Anna Gray asking if I would agree to sell it to her. Interesting way of putting it, but at the time I didn’t really take much note. I was just excited at the possibility of turning a computer that was just taking up space into 50 bucks.

The would-be buyer wanted to use a money transfer. “Aren’t you in St. Louis?” I asked immediately. My whole reason for using Craigslist was to avoid shipping and money hassles. Women are rightly nervous to meet strange men for transactions (and when they aren’t, they probably should be), but I’ve handled several transactions like this lately. Standard procedure is to meet in a public place that’s as convenient as possible for both of you. I generally take my wife so there’ll be a female present. If you’re a woman and can’t take another person with you, make sure you have a cell phone with you, and to make sure the other person knows you have it, make sure the person sees you casually talking on it as you arrive (even if you’re faking it). The ability to quickly dial 911 heads off a lot of trouble.

“No, I’m not in St. Louis,” she responded.

Well, so much for that.

She said she would pay me using Moneygram. She would send them the money, and then when I shipped the item, I would provide Moneygram with the tracking number, and I would get the money.

I would later find out that’s not how Moneygram works, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Knowing it could easily cost more to ship the computer than my $50 asking price, I asked my would-be buyer if she was willing to pay the shipping. She said she would send me a FedEx ticket. Then she said she would send me the money via Moneygram. She asked me every 30 seconds if I’d received the confirmation e-mail yet. “No,” I said. “But I’m in no particular hurry.” It wasn’t like I could ship the laptop immediately anyway.

She informed me that Moneygram was having technical difficulties and begged me to be patient. I found it odd that she was able to ask and receive an answer so quickly. Usually when a company is having technical difficulties, their customer service is slow too. I didn’t think anything of it yet.

Then I got busy and didn’t write back right away. She got just plain rude. “Are u there? BUZZ!!! BUZZ!!!”

Obviously she wasn’t willing to extend me the same patience she expected of me.

Once I got less busy, I got back to her. I’d received an e-mail message claiming to be from Moneygram, and I’d received a shipping label from Fedex, and told her.

“Take the package to Fedex tonight and give the tracking number to Moneygram and you’ll get your money,” she said.

I told her I was busy that night. Which I was. I’d had plans for a week and I wasn’t going to cancel them over a $50 computer–especially now that I was going to have to go to the trouble of finding a box and packing materials for the thing.

“I guess it’ll be OK if you ship it first thing in the morning,” she said.

Umm, well, I didn’t know what time I would be in, and I had to be at work first thing in the morning. Besides, if I had to drive it to the Fedex station, I was looking at a 45-minute drive.

“Take it to the closest Fedex. But if there isn’t one, you’ll have to take it to the station. First thing in the morning.”

How considerate. But that wasn’t the first thing that came into my mind. Actually the first thought that came to mind is a not-so-pleasant one-syllable word.

I told her I’d do my best, thanked her for her help and her interest, and reminded myself that I was being paid to free up some clutter from the house. Emily would like that. And if I spent $10 of it on her, she’d like it even more. So I put it out of my mind and told myself I’d print off all the paperwork that night, when I went in search of a box.

And aside from telling Emily I’d sold the computer, I did put it out of my mind until late that night.

Emily had a box and packing material ready for me. It wasn’t perfect, but we could have done a lot worse. So I packed it all up, then I went to the computer and printed off the paperwork. The Moneygram e-mail said I would have to provide them with a tracking number, full name and address, and either a driver’s license or social security number before they would free the money.

I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it at all. Nobody needs that information.

Making matters worse, the e-mail included a tracking number on the cash. I followed the link in the e-mail, punched in the tracking number, and it said it had no information on the tracking number.

The e-mail from her containing the Fedex shipping label also contained a customs form. She asked me to print and sign three copies. Customs? That seemed odd.

I printed the label. It had a declared value of $1. While the computer isn’t worth much, it’s worth more than $1. A DEC VT100 terminal is worth more than $1 to someone who needs it. I started to realize I wasn’t dealing with a very honest person here.

Then I printed the Fedex shipping label. The address looked odd to me. It registered when I pulled the label off the printer.

Nigeria.

It all made sense now. The unorthodox English. The belligerence. Demanding information they shouldn’t need. Classic symptoms of 419 scams.

Another rude one-syllable word came to mind. This time I said it out loud a few times. Someone in Nigeria had my name and address!

Mind you, not everyone in Nigeria is a crook, but suddenly I had a whole host of reasons to be suspicious.

So, when I was supposed to be getting up at the crack of dawn to send a computer halfway around the world, instead I was doing research.

On Moneygram’s own site, I found this:

MoneyGram is not an internet escrow service or a shipment service. We do not email a confirmation notice to inform a person that a MoneyGram transfer has been sent to them for payment of an internet purchase. Do not believe that such an email is genuine even if it contains the MoneyGram name and logo. The MoneyGram service should not be used as an escrow service.

And then I found indication that some Nigerian scammers have an affinity for buying computer equipment, particularly Apple Powerbooks, off Craigslist, using Moneygram.

Of course, seeing as part of the process asked for my social security number, losing the laptop was the least of my concerns. Once she had my name, address, and social security number, chances are she’d be able to get lots of other things at my expense as well.

Needless to say, the computer is still in my living room and I’ve kept the digits to myself.

My Nigerian buddy sent me a number of messages in the morning asking me if I had shipped the laptop, and since I had expressed some doubt in my last message, took pains to assure me that all was well. I replied to the message that said all was well, quoting that paragraph I found on the Moneygram site and asking her to explain.

I never heard another word from her. Seeing as there was a point in time when she couldn’t go three minutes without hearing from me, maybe I should find that odd.

Unless it was a scam, of course. In which case, there’s nothing at all strange about this new silence.

Not enough IT workers?

Dave Farquhar Society

His Billness claims he can’t find enough IT workers. I think this is more posturing so he can get more visas–it’s cheaper to import labor from the Far East than to outsource, I guess.

I don’t see this shortage he’s talking about. Billy needs to read what I’m reading: unemployment is up and salaries are down in the IT field.

If he can’t find the workers he needs among the 2005 graduates, it seems to me he needs to be looking at the people who have a bit more seasoning.

And when the unemployment rate among IT workers is higher than the national average and salaries are decreasing in the face of increasing cost of living, do you think that might have something to do with why the dean of engineering and applied science at Princeton sees fewer people going into that field?

I just came off the job market. Trust me, it’s not like your phone rings every hour with a job offer or even an interview.

Either the situation is extremely different on the programming side than it is on the sysadmin side, or Gates isn’t seeing (or refuses to see) the whole picture.