Halloween

So I am back in Kansas.

Tuesday and Wednesday were non-stop loading of trucks. Got both the 24 footer and 16 footer packed like a chinese jigsaw puzzle. If you are wondering, I'm not refering to an actual chinese jigsaw puzzle, if there is such a thing, but I have found that sticking the word 'chinese' in as an adjective makes things sound more complicated or foreign, and I am all about exaggeration.

Then Wednesday we drove for 3 hours, then 7 hours Thursday (pouring rain the whole way), then a final 5 hours on Friday (also in the rain). Highlights of the trip were Western Kentucky, which was really foggy and hilly and fall-leafy and the Ohio River, which was just sweet looking in the rain.

So that is why I haven't updated. Because I'm sure that just bored you.

Got back to hero wars and a halloween party. Both fun. Also randomly got my laptop rebate check. Still no check from our evil ex-landlord though. Going to have to call him and hassle him again, because it's been like two weeks since I last did that.

Anyway, not sure why I am awake after four hours sleep... it just gets so hot in our apartment. I look forward to a winter with windows open!

Flossing

Kathy just compared Blogging to Flossing in the fact that it's hard to consistently do both. So, being brilliant like I am, I go and create a post about it, mainly to avoid missing a day. I guess it's past midnight so it will look like I missed a day anyway. It was worth a shot.

Back at the parents soon-to-be-ex-townhome. Tomorrow will be a fun filled day of loading trucks. I should be asleep so I can be helpful tomorrow, but instead I am up on AIM and soon to break out some hero wars if Mark and Bob are still kicking it. They are both lame and can't host, so expect me to do it. I guess I should be good for something ln life!

Nothing awe-inspiring happened in my head today. Therefore, I have nothing to report. We saw a sweet Air Force Museum and drove for most of the evening.

My mom's cat is scared to death of me.

La Playa

So I am currently down here in Destin, Florida with my parents. The beaches are very white, just like the pictures.

I managed to wake up today and log on to work. Yeah, today is Sunday. Nevermind the fact that I don't work on Sundays. For some reason it made sense in my freshly awakened mind. So after I realized no one else was on, I looked at the date. What can I say? I am brilliant.

The flights down here were interesting. My first one was at 6am, so I had to wake up at 3:25am to make it on time from Lawrence. My brother drove me so I could avoid parking up there, and I'm sure he was glad to get back to sleep. I always hate saying goodbye at airports. It's better if everyone is going to the same place. Most of the time it's not like an emotional-see-you-in-forever goodbye... but I've had enough of those to know that they suck. Ironically, one of my easier goodbyes turned out to be the maybe-forever kind. Had I known, I would've said something memorable.

Today's music will be Nine Inch Nails. La vida, a veces, es dura, pero la superamos y crecimos.

Buena Suerte.

Dilbert is Brilliant

Related to my earlier rambling about Roth IRAs, a friend pasted me a link to Dilbert's Financial Plan.

All I can say is: Brilliant!

The article has more, but the entire plan is summed up in nine points.

1. Make a will.


2. Pay off your credit cards.


3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.


4. Fund your 401k to the maximum.


5. Fund your IRA to the maximum.


6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.


7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account.


8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement.


9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.

Your Time Has Come

For the record, I love Audioslave.

Today is my last day in the office at work. From now on, I'll be telecommuting half time from wherever I happen to be. My last day has been stellar so far, but I am definitely looking forward to 5:30.

In other non-interesting-to-anyone-but-me news, I maxed out my Roth IRA for 2006 today. Yay for retirement accounts when you are 23!

Really though, 23 is probably the time a Roth IRA makes the most sense. Since it grows tax free and allows tax free withdrawals at retirement, it is relatively easier to predict final value than a taxed account. Also, since it is after tax money there isn't the headache of dealing with paycheck withholdings and changing employers. If you are older, say in your 50s, the regular IRA setup makes more sense tax-wise, because you contribute pre-tax money. However, in your 20s, contributing post-tax (especially since income tax rates are at historic lows) and enjoying tax free growth totally makes sense.

This year the contribution cap is $4000, and while you can withdraw contributions at any time without penalty, you cannot touch your earnings until you are 59.5 years old. Assuming that the cap grows with inflation, you earn a decent 8% return annually, and you max it out each year until you are 59.5, you can celebrate your 60th birthday with a cool $1.23 million dollars (around $400k in today's dollars). That won't buy you a mansion, but I figure that is not a bad deal for a relatively small annual contribution. Living on the interest alone would be an improvement on my current standard of living.

Not to mention, if you take a little risk (i.e. Invest in stock indexes rather than money market accounts and CDs), you might achieve a yeild higher than 8% ... like say 10 or 12%. This nets you $1.94 million or $3.13 million respectively. And, if you are Warren Buffett, you earn 21.5% annually with your mad skillz, giving you a silly $42.55 million on retirement day.

I'm sure everyone is dozing off about now. Or maybe just skipping paragraphs until they don't see dollar signs. I'm honestly just a big fan of the Roth IRA (and the 401k provided there is employer matching) and thought I would pimp it out a bit. So class dismissed, enjoy your weekend!

Goobacks and n00blets...

Today's word of the day is 'n00blets' ... if you haven't ever heard of 13375p34k, then you are missing out on some hilarious mutilation of English. I always got immense amusement out of l33t and general slang from teh interwebs, but reading the Wikipedia article (linked above) on it today introduced me to the awesome word 'n00blets,' which made me giggle for at least 20 minutes. When I hear n00blets I think of little whiney Hero Wars players in a bowl of milk... and I am the spoon. My goal is to use that word at least once a day from now on.

I particularly enjoyed the following passages:

Leet, like other hacker slang, enjoys a looser grammar than standard English. The loose grammar, just like loose spelling, encodes some level of emphasis, ironic or otherwise. A reader must rely more on intuitive parsing of Leet to determine the meaning of a sentence rather than the actual sentence structure. In particular, speakers of Leet are fond of verbing nouns, turning verbs into nouns (and back again) as forms of emphasis (e.g. "Bob rocks" is weaker than "Bob r0xx0rz" (note spelling) is weaker than "Bob is t3h r0xx0rz" (note grammar)). Leet, like in other hacker slang, employs overgeneralization in construction of new words. For example, if haxored is the past tense of the verb "to hack" (hack → haxor → haxored), then blowzored would be easily understood to be the past tense conjugation of "to blow," even if the reader had not seen that particular word before.

... and ...

In some cases, because the exclamation symbol (!) resides on the same key as the number one ("1") on English keyboards, over-exclamation can be accidentally (or purposely) typed with extraneous numerical digits, owing to the excitement of the typist: "This is really exciting!!!!!11". This was especially likely in the context of fast-paced online multiplayer games, where typing carefully leaves the gamer vulnerable to attack. Some deliberately type the numbers, while others take the exclamation further and sarcastically replace some of the digits with words: "This is really exciting!!!!!!11eleven1111one", or perhaps even "This is really exciting!!!!!!111onetwo".

... and this one reminded me of Hamid/DJ/Bob/lame players of Final everywhere ...

In addition to variations on punctuation-based emphasis, it is common to combine two (or more) words and capitalize them to show emphasis. Perhaps most common would be the combination of OMG and WTF to produce OMGWTF. For irony, some will then add BBQHAX to the end (BBQ refering to the word barbeque). This ending generally has the same meaning as the saying "..with gravy," commonly added to the end of sentences. This creates OMGWTFBBQHAX.

Tomorrow is my last day of work and Saturday morning I board a plane for the land of Georgia. Once there, my parents and I are headed for Destin, Florida for a few days, and then back to their place to pack up and drive everything back up to Gardner. I should be back in Lawrence by the 28th or so. Then I will have a fun filled week of getting all my work requests done for the next release, followed by a trip down to Texas to see Kathy for a week or so. So much to do!

Ademas, he escribido esa parte para Bob, para que el pueda leer un poquito español y ponerse enfadado. Gooback!

Hasta Luego.

Bienvenidos a Ronda!

So I open up my email this morning when I get to work to find an email from the Program Director in Ronda, Joaquin. I knew Joaquin decently well when I was in class there, and he wanted to tell me that my application has been accepted and that he is excited to have me back. Yay for that! Hopefully all the paperwork will arrive by mail soon enough for me to apply for my student visa.

Visas must be applied for in person at the nearest Spanish Consulate (Chicago), so I guess I have a couple trips to make in the coming months. I might be able to find a law firm to legally represent me at the Consulate, saving me a trip, but not sure the cost would be worth it. A short trip to Chicago really isn't that expensive, and there is a lot of cool stuff to see there. If any of you know someone that goes to Chicago regularly and would be willing to drop my packet off and pick it up and mail it to me, that would randomly be sweet.

I really can't wait to go back to Spain. I wonder how things will be different for me this time. There were definitely two stages to my last experience there, and I imagine this trip will give me a whole new viewpoint. For one, I won't have any pre-existing bonds with other students in English. You see, one of my observations last time was that you interact with people in whatever language you initially use when you meet them. My fellow KU students, from the last trip, and I started in English in the airport in Atlanta, and it was really hard to move past that. My roommate, Mattias (from Switzerland), and I started in Spanish, and had an easy time maintaining that, even though he spoke excellent English. This time I am hoping to meet everyone in Spanish, and force myself to use only Spanish for at least the first month, in the interest of avoiding the convenience of English. I was perfectly happy with my Spanish progress on my last trip, but there is always room for improvement!

Anyway, I should get down to the business of setting up my laptop for telecommuting. Just couldn't wait to share the good news! Hasta luego!

Ovaltine!

So after the last post, I got home, changed, and went to the Rec Center for the first time in three months. It was quite awesome. I mean, I admittedly did only a light work out of about 45 mins, but I felt great doing it. Even on only three hours of sleep. Further proof that the little naysaying voice in my head tells me only lies.

"You are too tired to work out Drew!"

"You can just start that after you quit your job."

"I need more sleep. Reset the alarm."

All lies. I am making a 2006 New Years resolution now. I know, it's only 10.5 months late. I am going to let that little voice do its talking and promptly tell it to go to hell. When it comes to accomplishing something in your life, being mad at the voices in your head can help. It's a perverse psychology, but it has worked on Day 1 at least!

Tomorrow's list of things to do includes waking up in time to eat breakfast, getting my personal laptop ready for telecommuting, working on Project CdR (which I started today), working out again, calling Stu about going out Thursday night, and fixing the subwoofer in my car. And, since I have 10 hours at work, I'll probably try to read more about Ruby on Rails and Migrations.

I just had a brilliant idea! Going to take the Magic Cards to Georgia with me so I can come back prepared to stomp Bob and Mark's respective asses into the ground with a million new decks. Yet another thing I have been putting off doing too long.

Oh, and my glass of Ovaltine should make you jealous... ahh the vitamins and protein!

Random Articles

I really enjoyed reading this article about motivation by Steve Pavlina. I particularly identify with bullets 1, 2, 3, and 8.

I have been reading Steve Pavlina articles (mostly the ones on running a business) for some time now. His hippy new age living articles I can pass on, but the entrepreneurship ones seem quite insightful. 10 Reasons You Should Never Get A Job was the article that convinced me to quit my job, for instance.

Speaking of jobs... time to go home!

Las Primeras Palabras

Ok, yeah, I have a blog suddenly. Despite my past hatred for these blog-in-a-can sites, I have decided to swallow my pride and admit that it IS easier than writing it yourself (and frankly, it's not such a glamorous project anyway) so count me as blogger number thirty six million one hundred ninety six thousand nine hundred forty two. And sadly, that is just on this site. Oh the unedited and poorly researched filth created by and for the masses! I can't wait to write stuff that no one cares about!

This is my last full-time week at work. So far, it has been a caffeine induced ethereal haze of meetings and good-bye luncheons. Free food, so I can't complain. Starting next week, I'll be moving to 20 hours a week of telecommuting... hence my blog title. I plan to use the extra free time to accomplish all sorts of stuff that I have been putting off... like the magic site, making that Warcraft III map, getting in shape, cooking food, vacuuming, etc.

Yes. Vacuuming.

In other news, there remain approximately threeish months until I once again inhabit Spain. I submitted an application to the school online the other day, but haven't heard a response yet, leading me to consider alternate plots such as illegal immigration. Well, not so much illegal as quasi-legal, but I figured I would try and work in a hotbed political topic so as to attract attention from other self-righteous bloggers who have an opinion. What a nefarious trick, luring them here with unimportant-to-anyone-that-isn't-batshit-insane topics like illegal immigration and then serving them a heaping pile of daily Drew thoughts. I am a sneaky bastard. An aspiring Fiburonsk if you will.

I was reading a Wired Blog yesterday and really liked this little tidbit (quoted for you in full).

At the bottom of the Ars Technica article, you'll find the sentence, "Since the RIAA began filing lawsuits against suspected file sharers in 2003, not a single one has gone all the way to trial." Thank you. Not enough people know about that (or, while we're on the topic, that no one has ever even been sued for downloading music, only for sharing it).

You see, I have an intense hatred for the RIAA, so can't resist a good potshot at them. It's like therapy... or something.

Other things you should know about. Google is installing enough solar panels on their main campus to provide 100% of their power needs. Also, Dolly Donut Gems are not near as tasty as Mrs. Freshley's. I have empirical evidence to support that, in the form of my opinion. Take that!

Also of note, sleep is good. I want some of that goodness right about now.

Been trying to catch up on the Ruby on Rails blog today. I have read some neat stuff about ERb Optimization and the new improved Ruby Language site. I plan to spend my remaining hours here reading up on Rails Migrations so I can hopefully work on that a bit tonight.

Well, enough of me for now. I plan to update this daily, more as a means to chronicle my day for myself than for anyone else's pleasure... but you are welcome to follow along. Adios!