Deezil.us

Top Ten E-mail Faux Pas

1.) Setting the High Importance flag on EVERY E-mail

2.) Replying to an e-mail thread with a totally different conversation

3.) Doing 2 without changing the subject of the e-mail

4.) No subject

5.) Using the same subject for 3 different e-mails on three different topics

6.) Including too many people in an e-mail chain

7.) Having to retain e-mail forever because the documentation doesn’t live anywhere else

8.) Those damn e-mail forwards

9.) Signatures that are longer than 3-4 short lines (just this week, I got a signature with 12 lines and with 8 )

10.) Calling or stopping by less than a minute after sending an e-mail to talk about the e-mail

Old media is old

Today, I deleted my MySpace and LouisvilleMojo accounts.  Good riddance to awful rubbish.

When I’m not posting here, you may find me at these other wonderful sites

I’ve been working on some other sites lately. First, one site I help administer when Allison is not available: http://www.cuteonthecheap.com . Second, my buddy Jeven needed a place to host a website, so I’ve hosted him here with my hosting plan: http://www.xsmootx.com . Third, a project from Dr. Crystal Rae Coel Coleman a professor that I’ve been helping out with as she publishes a second edition of her book, The Presentation Guide Book: http://thepresentationguidebook.com .

It’s a momentous day.

All the archives are back on line.  ALL of them.  Proudly blogging since March 3, 2004.

How I’m making my money work harder for me

Like lots of working Americans, I have a 401K that both I and my employer contribute to.  Also, like lots of working Americans, I had really no idea how to make that money work for me.  I just get in my quarterly summary of what happened to my money, chuck it in the file pile, and go on with my life.  When the last one came in last week, rather than just looking at the bottom line gain, I looked through the details of what my money was in to see how it was performing against the other things I could put my money in.  What I saw there was interesting, and has led me to change how my money is investing, and will lead to bigger gains as our economy is finally coming out of its funk.

Before making my change, my money was going into two categories of mutual funds: Short-Term Fixed Income and Balanced/Asset Allocation funds.  The Fixed Income fund is known for a low risk and a low return and there’s never much activity with the rate of return.  It has stayed around 4% since the inception of my 401K.  The Balanced/ Asset Allocation fund is one that Principal sets up based on your projected retirement date (mine being 2050), and it is a medium risk and a medium return.  This is a safe way to play investments, but without great risk, there is no great reward.  I’m stockpiling cash for free, and based on that (and the fact the balance on my 401k has never went below what I’ve put in it), I decided to get a little more aggressive with my investing setup.

To figure out what I wanted to do with my money, I turned back to the statement I got in the mail.  I took all the funds and compared them on a basis of how they had done over the past 10 years.  In the past 10 years, we’ve had a bubble burst on us (2000) and we’ve had the current recession we are in.  That says to me if the funds can perform decently over that 10 year period, they’re bulletproof to near anything.  I also listen to Dave Ramsey, and follow his advice on the subject of how to do mutual fund investing (even though re recently has changed his stance to a 5 year track record and not a 10), so that helped me set my time table.  What I found was that the Short-Term Fixed Income fund was at around 4%, and that was the lower of the two funds I was in.  I made that my baseline for what funds had to have done over the past 10 years in order to qualify it to get my money.  I looked through all the other funds and found 8 funds that had been around for 10 years and had a track record of 4% earnings or more over that time frame.  I took each of their 10-year return percentages, and summed them up, and then got a percentage based on (fund return / total of fund returns).  I made that the percentage I based my investment in the fund upon.  What I found is that most of my money went into the higher risk, higher reward fund categories, with five funds in the Small/Mid U.S. Equity category and one in International Equity.  Some may see this as a fairly aggressive stance, but for a man as young as I, I can afford to take some risks because I won’t need that money for quite a long time.  In crunching the numbers some more along with reviewing past statements, I realized that if I had done this same analysis even 6 months ago when the market was at the absolute worst, I would have earned a 90% return on a significant portion of my money.  There would have been no more risk, and there would have been much more reward.

The moral of the story is to make sure you are watching your money so it can work harder for you, and don’t be afraid to take more risks, especially when things don’t look the greatest.  You may just make a decision that gives you the leg up on the pile you need.

First paragraph from the book I’m writing.

To the person who knows this story is about her, you told me to write the story. My take on it starts like this:

My son helped me get my bow-tie all straightened out since my hands were dancing all around my body. “Don’t worry,” he says, “you weren’t this nervous when I got married. No reason to start now.” I couldn’t help but agree with him, but after 35 years of pain and toil and heartache, the original dream I had in my mind was finally coming true. I was going to watch her walk down the aisle, hold my hand, and we were going to be one. That fateful day in college, had anyone told me the hell she would put me through to get me the heaven, I would have laughed and said that no woman was ever worth that. Yet, she grabbed my heart and soul at every opportunity and made sure that it was hers. Maybe just for those briefest of moments, but when she saw the opportunity to pounce on me she did. And now, she was going to get me for her own for the rest of my life.

This by no means is finished or even fully fleshed out, partly because the story hasn’t finished yet. We’ll see.

Form letter for all situations

Dear <group of people doing something that upsets you>,
<Fact of some sort that you need to relay to make you not upset>.
Thanks, <People not in group>

Example:

Dear everyone,
There is only one way to spell Casey.
Thanks, Me.

Another example:

Dear Murray State,
One domain, unlimited subdomains.
Love, Students, Faculty, and Alumni

Steel trap mind: DOS Boot disk edition

It’s a joke between myself and friends or myself and coworkers that I can always recall random facts at odd points of time and help them get out of a sticky situation. One thing I get called on for often is how to make a DOS boot disk, with the difficulty of having to use the boot disk for a firmware load, so it has to be lean and mean. That said, here are the files you can remove from your boot disk as long as you are only loading firmware/drivers/doing low level stuff:

Delete all files dealing with MOUSE. There should be a Mouse.COM, and a few others. Delete. Get rid of QBasic.exe and QBasic.hlp. You won’t be programming any QBasic stuff today. Scandisk and chkdsk are usually both on there, might leave one, but if this is solely for a driver load, kill both. Also, look for any .hlp files. If you’re still making a boot disk in this day and age, you’re far from needing “help”. That usually clears half of the disk or more. After that, start nixing the CD*.sys files. And if you still need space after that, complain to the manufacturer that what they are trying to have you do is impossible.

The kindness of strangers.

Those who know me know my almost-zealotry for using Linux, especially the Ubuntu distribution.  Those who know me also know that I’m a caring, generous person that will support a cause that appeals to me.  I may not give much, but I give what’s affordable and proper.  Well, recently I sold a lot of cool stuff I had lying around on eBay, and I had a little cash to play around with.  Around the same time of all the sales, I read this post, as I’ve read dozens of others on this site.  The HeliOS foundation had done some excellent work at getting people around the Austin, TX area hooked up with a computer in their home.  They take donations of old machines and parts and make working machines out of it.  They then take a Linux distribution and install that as the operating system, in order not to have to pay for a copy of Windows, and to allow Linux and Free Software to enter these people’s lives.  I looked at what I had, looked at those who had not that the HeliOS guys service, and looked at the two cool laptops that they’ve had donated to raise money for those families and communities that can’t afford to have a computer of their own.  The decision was pretty obvious.  Even if I don’t get a stinkin thing from the raffle, I know that I’ve chipped in for at least one part for one machine so that another child, another working single mother, another family can have a computer to use and enjoy the wonders of the Internet.  And for me, that kindness is its own reward.  Shortly after I got my reciept from PayPal, I got an e-mail with the subject of ‘Thanks Daniel’ from some person I had no idea who it was.  Opened the e-mail, and there, in about three short sentences, a load of gratitude poured out.  It was from Ken who is one of the HeliOS guys, to me.  Simple, pure words giving thanks for what I had given.  And I want to thank you again, Ken, for doing what you all do.  Take care out there.

Dear Facebook:

One small request:  For the friends you may know feature, take a cue from MySpace and give me people that are friends of my friends, and show me those connections rather than just sending me someone random from my ‘network’.  MySpace has helped me connect with people that I’ve lost along the way just by making that feature available for use.

I’ll step off my soapbox now.

While discussing the upcoming Conficker worm…

What’s powering your Firefox experience?

Adblock Plus 1.0.1 – Perfect show of what Firefox developers are capable of. Subscribe to EasyList, and AdBlockRules.org. Trust me, worth it.
AutoPager 0.4.1.1 – Recently turned on to this by Andy. Automatically paginates things like search results or blogs that have multiple pages.
Better Gmail 2 0.7.3.2
Better GReader 0.5.2
Better Lifehacker 0.4 – The Better series, started from Lifehacker, just plain rocks, especially the flagship Better GMail 2. It’s Greasemonkey scripts rolled into an extension. Makes GM easy.
Delicious Bookmarks 2.1.018 – If you use delicious, this is for you.
Download Statusbar 0.9.6.4 – Keeps all your downloads handy at the bottom of the browser rather than a second small window. Keeps things nice and tidy on the taskbar
DownThemAll! 1.1.1 – Ever have to download all the PDF manuals on one page? Get this and it will cure your rapid onslaught of cursing.
Google Gears 0.5.4.2 – Get this to take Google offline.
Greasefire 1.0.3 – Finds Greasemonkey scripts for pages you are on.
Greasemonkey 0.8.20090123.1 – The end-all extension. You can take any site and modify it with javascript to make it do whatever you want.
InfoLister 0.10 – The cool extension that lets you print off your list of extensions to paste on your website to dote on .
Novell Moonlight 1.0 – Microsoft’s Silverlight ported to Linux. Not everyone needs this, but for those running Ubuntu, it’s wonderful.
RetailMeNot 2.2 – Trying to shop cheaply? Install this, it will alert you to coupon codes for the site. Great to save a couple of bucks.
Tab Mix Plus 0.3.7.3 – Tabs, the way you want them. This extension can do anything you want with tab actions or display of the tabs.
Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.6 – Firefox standard in Ubuntu. Makes things work all shiny.
Woot Watcher 1.0.6 – For Wootheads like me, this puts it down in the corner for you. And will pop it up at midnight if you’re awake.

What about you, what do you use?

Reading the other side of the meter.

http://www.theflynnfile.com/2009/03/lge-billing-changeor-how-e-on-will-fund-kentucky-derby-festival-sponsorship.html

Saw this shared in items from my Google friends inside of Google Reader, and I couldn’t read it without shouting things at my computer screen. A transcript of the shouting follows.

First off, the author makes several good points, and I feel that the objections are warranted. No one likes having pay a bill on a faster schedule than they have before. But for me, I also get a sneak peak into almost 300 utility districts and their monthly rituals. So let me enlighten you as to what I see on a monthly basis.

For most utilities I know, the bills are due in anywhere between 10 and 20 days, with the majority falling at 15 days / 2 weeks, but as I’ve seen, several of our customers are going with 10 day billing cycles, especially if they are smaller. With that, I don’t think 12 days is unreasonable. Sure, E-ON/LG&E is a huge corporation with lots of customers, so why the need to run things tighter? They want what everyone else does, a steady stream of revenue so that they don’t have surges and droughts in the income, when the out-go is fairly even throughout the course of a month.  As for them not being able to tell you what your bill is by looking it up on a website, that’s ridiculous.  Some of the most sophisticated adoptions of technology I have seen in my line of work have come from the most inept of people.  Tell LG&E to get their shit together.

Something not mentioned directly in the article as a point of contention was the late fee. When I saw 5%, I laughed. In my experience again, 5% is a godsend of a late charge. Most I deal with are 10%, and another common trend I am noticing is 18%. And yes, these are on bills as large as what LG&E are charging.

And the third thing on this is the issue of LG&E paying for a main sponsorship of Derby, and then complaining they have no money. This, I have a problem with, and rightfully so. Don’t blow everything you have, complain you have nothing left, and are left with a massive pile of debt when it’s all said and done. If everyone did that we’d have total economic collapse. Oh wait. Shit. Already happened.

The spring TV schedule

Monday: House @ 7, WWE RAW @ 8

Tuesday: WWE ECW @ 8

Wednesday: LOST @ 8

Thursday: Burn Notice @ 9

Friday: WWE Smackdown @ 7

I’m sure there’s something I’m leaving out here.

The crud.

I actually have a few blog entries in the works, I just need to get over the crud first. It’s a little less severe than last years’ plague, but more than just a minor sniffle. But I have things to write about.

And now, a picture of my cat.  If you are reading this on RSS or from the fromt page of my site, you may have to click through to see the picture.

All together now

Here’s to hoping that this new theme with the new shinies that it brings will be more what I want for this website.  It puts my twitter, my Google Reader, my delicious, and coming soon a couple other feeds to the side, to bring it all into one place.  I’m going to have to work on the background, but I like the rest of it so far.

Today is weird.

So yeah.  Copying and pasting from IM is probably the best route to go.  It’s one line, written by me:

“so I just went to bathroom, was ready to pull horse out of barn, and realize barn doors aren’t opening. I had put my underwear on backwards this morning and just now noticed.”

Yep.

Story of the year

For those that don’t know me in real life, I’m often told I have some of the most random stories that have ever been found.  Last night was no exception.

I’ve been having issues with my car lately.  It doesn’t like to start from time to time.  Sometimes I can let it set and try again 5, 10 or 20 minutes later, and then it will crank.  Last night it decided to be stubborn.  I was out at my company Christmas party, and after coming back out to the parking lot, car refused to start for me.  Fine, I’ve got plenty of co-workers, they can jump me, as I had just gotten the battery tested, and it was on the verge of failing.  Hook up another car, try the jump, and no dice.  At this point, I watch all my co-workers leave, and call AAA.  Waited an hour out in the car in the cold twiddling my thumbs and finally the tow-truck driver pulls up.  Tries one more jump, then onto his rollback to take it to his shop.  Get to his shop, he starts to take me home, we stop at a stoplight, and someone walks up to his window on his truck and starts talking to him about trying to get his son a job.  This guy came out of nowhere and I almost pissed my pants.

Anyway, more on down the road, we see this car with it’s hazard lights on. The car is sitting to the right side of the southbound lanes, and we get in the left lane to give it a wide berth.  As we enter the lane, our headlights focus on a tire sitting in the middle of the lane.  So we swerve to miss it, and the tow driver stops to pick it up and make sure the guy is okay.  Turns out, the guy his the concrete side of a bridge that we had just passed over and had not only screwed up his front end of his car, but has lost the tire off the front driver wheel, and has sheared the rim off of the axle on the back driver tire.  So that was just comical.  He’s also an employee of Wendy’s, and was bringing products between the store he worked at and the store in my hometown.  So we had to load up boxes of burgers as well as bags of ketchup and pickles, all cram in to the single-cab F-150, and take off back to Benton.  I finally get home, it’s 11:15, I’ve been done with the Christmas party for 2 hours and 15 minutes.  I crack a beer, check my e-mail, and head to bed.

Today, the car got fixed.  New fuel pump, new ignition control system, new battery.  $Texas.

FYI

Coming soon, you’ll start to see lots more items come up on here.  I’m making it so my google shared items will pop up on here as their own posts.  They’ll do it every day about this time.  I want to start sharing what I have with people that don’t necessarily have me in their shared friends on Google Reader.  If it gets annoying, I’ll remove it.

Republicans, you should be ashamed of your party.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/10/obama-bucks-and.html