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Sure, You Say That Now…

Ron Paul on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policy of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.

Of course, he said this in 2003.  The guy really is a kook, huh?

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I Would LOVE to RTFM

So I’m working on a project for my job job (I’m not quite able to support a family on blogging–yet), and have been wrestling with a biggish enterprise software package.  As you’d expect, there’s quite a bit of convolution to it–things like hundreds of database tables with nondescript names like T001, T0043, H3222, etc.  (Was this thing designed to run on AS400?)  It’s actually not that big of a deal.  A part of me secretly enjoys stuff like that.  It’s like a giant sudoku, except instead of 1-9 the numbers go 1-100.  And no matter how much of the puzzle you solve, there’s still more to work on.  That means no boredom, provided you like puzzles.

Most packages of this size were designed and coded up long long ago in a galaxy far far away.  Any growth, expansion, or enhancements they’ve undergone were probably done piecemeal with who knows who taking over and steering the thing onto the latest technology at each fork in the road.  That’s bound to happen to any project this size I guess.  It’s sort of like what you’d expect to happen to a person who was reasonably good looking in their youth and, as they aged, had countless plastic surgeries performed by different doctors of varying abilities.  The individual pieces may be really nice, but put them together and you have an odd colored face mess.

Usually these type products involve a lot of RTFM.

Don’t get me wrong…I like to RTFM.  My willingness to RTFM means I’ll probably never be out of a job for long unless I want to be.  You could say I make a living Ring-TFM.  But please, large software corporations who charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for your products, make the manuals readily available.

One of the manuals I was reading this morning referred to another manual–the “Installation and Tuning Guide”.  Like any good manual reader working for a company that’s shelled out some bucks for this pricey behemoth, I used the login for our company (they don’t give the info to just any old body), and searched for this manual on their site.  No dice.  So I searched the support base to see if anyone else had trouble finding it.  That didn’t work either.  I did find two other manuals–one which whose title led me to believe it was relevant but wasn’t, and the other to the last version of the same product.

So I asked my boss if they’d provided a DVD, pack of CDs, or even physical books when we bought the product.  Nope.  But he was able to find the manual I needed nonetheless.  Guess where…

Google.

Freaking Google found it, even though their own search engine on their own site that is available only to customers who paid for support couldn’t.  Now, not only am I irritated that it couldn’t be found on their site, I also feel like an idiot for not trying Google FIRST.

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LaCie’s 2Big Network Accessible Storage

Over the last few years I’ve recommended external USB drives to friends as a way to backup the photos, video, and music they store on their PCs.  It’s a really cheap and easy way to back everything up, and it served me really well for quite a while.  However, I eventually outgrew this solution, and I’m sure a lot of other people are in the same boat or will be soon.  With the addition of a couple of extra computers it was a hassle to constantly move the drives around to access stuff, and I don’t have a single drive inside a machine that’s big enough to hold everything.  As a result, I was having to maintain two separate external drives and having to keep them synchronized–HASSLE.

What I needed was a central location to store everything.  I needed every computer on my home network to have access to the data.  I needed the data to be automatically backed up in case a drive failed.  I needed to set up roles for different users so that guests could read some directories and not others.  Mostly, I needed it to be cheap.

I think I’ve moved almost everything over to the new LaCie NAS I bought a couple of weeks ago, so I figured it was time to give it a little review.

I’m usually slow to make decisions on these type purchases, and it usually pays off, as I think it did here.  I looked for about a year at various solutions, and I almost pulled the trigger on a RAID 5 terabyte last fall, but at ~$1k (which was a great deal) I couldn’t do it.

I ended up paying $311 for the LaCie 2Big at Amazon with free shipping.  I did have to make a couple of compromises, but I think the savings justified it.  First of all, this system comes with two 500 Gb drives to make a full terabyte.  That means there’s not chance to run RAID 5.  The only option to safely store data is to run it at RAID 1, which keeps a copy of the data on each disk separately. It’s plenty fast, but splitting the disks means that you only get 500 Gb of storage instead of the full terabyte.  However, I think this is justified because I could have bought two of these for $600, and still come out cheaper than buying the RAID 5 terabyte.

I’ve read some other reviews that say this NAS is noisy, but I don’t find it to be an issue.  Sure, you can hear it, but it’s not loud.  I have an old junk PC that I use for a web and database server, and the fan on it is much louder (and much more annoying).

Setup could not be easier.  It’s very simple to set up shares, users, and user groups.  Security settings are very intuitive, and the web server that controls the NAS seems reliable.  It is about as plug and play as I can imagine a system like this being.  Even the agent that runs on  machines that access the drive is lightweight.  As I said before, it’s also plenty fast.  Copying all of my music over to the drive from an old external USB drive took quite a while, but I think that had more to do with the network load than anything else.

The only real issue I’ve had so far is that I can’t seem to maintain a connection to the drive on a PC while opening a VPN tunnel open for work.  I’m sure I could fix this, but it’s not a huge deal since my I don’t use my work computer for playing media anyway.

Overall–extremely happy with this product.  On one hand I wish I’d made the jump to NAS earlier, but on the other hand I’m glad I waited and got so much solution for my money.  If you’re starting to run out of space with your media files or if you’re looking for a safe way to maintain backups this is a great system.  There are other options such as maintaining backups on an external server, but the solutions I looked at weren’t very cost effective.  JungleDisk, which comes highly recommended, was an option for me, but it was going to cost about $74 a month to store all of my data.

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Let’s Call it Two Million Hundred Dollars

Maybe that would have been an easier PR sell for the UT Athletic Department. Then they’d only be dealing with hundreds of dollars instead of millions. That may be a little easier for people to swallow.

And this facility is used how many times a year? Seven? Let’s be generous and call it ten since the Knoxville Marathon finishes in the stadium and there’s a chance Kenny Chesney may play there. And let’s assume that the investment is stretched out over ten years, or 100 days of use.

That means these upgrades will only cost $2,000,000 for each day they are in service.

“We’re being as careful as we’ve always been to make sure we spend these dollars wisely that Tennessee fans and donors invest,” Currie said.

It must be nice to have money.  I’m just glad it’s not my money they’re spending.

Neyland face-lift: $200M.

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What The World Needs Now–Bubbles

That’s right.  Bubbles.  Do you have a better idea?  What better way to fix long term economic issues than by the use of short term economic solutions fixes schemes.  Sometimes I forget how much I love  The Onion

The most support thus far has gone toward the so-called paper bubble. In this appealing scenario, various privately issued pieces of paper, backed by government tax incentives but entirely worthless, would temporarily be given grossly inflated artificial values and sold to unsuspecting stockholders by greedy and unscrupulous entrepreneurs.

It’s funny.  Because it’s true.

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Rules of CoWorking

We’re putting together some structure and a website for our local coworking group, and were kicking the idea around about how to include people (or not). I’m a big fan of keeping rules as simple and minimal as possible. I figured eight rules were plenty…apologies to Chuck Palahniuk.

  1. The first rule of coworking is that you must talk about coworking
  2. The second rule of coworking is that you MUST TALK ABOUT COWORKING
  3. If someone brings in a box of donuts or pulls up a cool new website, work is over
  4. Any number of people can work at any time
  5. Any number of projects and businesses can be worked on at the same time
  6. No shirt, no shoes? Well, can you at least throw on a t-shirt and some flip flops?
  7. Work will go on as long as it has to
  8. If it’s your first day coworking, you have to work
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How Much Schooling is Enough?

I was listening to Dave Ramsey this afternoon and he fielded a call I’ve heard him take several times in the past–“Should I quite my job (or sell my house, or cash in my savings, or sell my kid, etc.) to go back to school and get a master’s degree?”  I think this is a pretty tough question to deal with.  On one hand, there’s a ton of knowledge to be gained by going back to school, and the fact that you’re paying to learn in an intense environment means that at least some of it will soak in.  On the other hand, is there any information they are giving you in school that you can’t get in a book or online?

I’ve considered an MBA several times.  It’s easy to talk myself out of it since my brother-in-law is storing his entire Duke MBA experience in our garage right now–all I have to do is open up boxes and start reading books.  But the advantage I see of going back to school, especially for business, is the connections you can make; the people you meet.  Those connections are a little tougher to make out in the real world, but it can be done.

I guess I tend to believe that the value is in the information you have and the people you know, not in the piece of paper you earned.  A degree doesn’t always imply an education, and an education doesn’t always imply a degree.  There’s no denying the fact that the degree can open some doors that the knowledge itself can’t.  Then again, the people you know can probably open more doors than both.  However, in the long term, it seems like knowledge and talent are ultimately going to trump everything.  As Dave Ramsey says, “Your raise will be effective when you are.”

And if your abilities are going to be discounted based solely on the fact that you don’t have the right degree, you probably aren’t keeping the right company to begin with.

At this point, more school almost seems like a luxury purchase to me.

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New Round of Purchases

It seems like I buy stuff in bunches, especially computer stuff. And I’m always looking for bargains, especially when I’m upgrading my old stuff. I may be a nerd, but I’m frugal–i.e. you won’t see me talking on an iPhone anytime soon. Here’s a quick rundown of the things I’ve purchased most recently…

Network Accessible Storage–I got this 1 terabyte (1,000 Gigabyte) network storage solution at Amazon last week for $311.50 with free delivery. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll give it a full review when I get it all set up. Up until now I’ve been using external USB drives to store everything, and it was time to upgrade. The problem with the USB storage is that I could only connect it to one computer at a time and I had to have one drive back up to the other every night. This device connects to your network, just like any other node. That means any computer in your house (on your network) can access it. Also, there are actually two 500 Gb drives in the enclosure, so you can set it up as RAID 1, which means you actually only have 500 Gb of storage, but it is automatically backed up to the other 500 Gb drive.

22″ Monitor–I watched the prices on these things fall until I couldn’t resist getting in. Buy.com has a ton of big monitors at cheap prices. I paid ~$200 for a Soyo 22″ monitor. On things like this, I don’t worry so much about brand name. No matter the brand, chances are most of the parts are made at the same factory, and at $200 I can afford to buy a 24″ later if this one blinks out. In fact, I may actually prefer to do that.

Logitech Webcam–Under $50 (also at buy.com), great for talking with video over Skype (free), and does pretty well for capturing video as well.

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Teleprompter Por Favor

Prediction:  As this Presidential campaign continues, Barack Obama is going to continue to get himself in trouble by being asked simple questions and making impromptu statements. In Georgia on Tuesday he gave us all some great advice on raising kids:

Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.

Really?  Is that what we should be doing? Is that what you’re doing Mr. Obama? Do your kids speak Spanish? (Disclaimer:  Our kid is learning Spanish from her mom, but not because Barack Obama or any other asshat running for public office thinks it’s what we should do. It’s mostly so she and her mom can tell secrets and make jokes about me behind my back–at least that’s what the voices tell me.)

Seriously, what the hell does this have to do with running for President? Is this part of your platform–a mandate that everyone should teach their kids Spanish? Is this really part of your stance on immigration? Does it really consists of a component that tells parents which and how many languages their kids should speak?

Some advice–stop improvising and get back to your bread and butter–saying “change” every other word without any details about what this change will entail.  When you start going off on random tangents about trivial things like policy you just confuse everyone.

Anyway…

It’s not fashionable to say so in the circles that Obama travels in, but the power and universality of the English language confirm and strengthen America’s way of life.

Exactly. And Obama is actually right about one thing–immigrants to the U.S. should learn English. But not because of some moronic legislation, and not because some politician suggested it. They should learn English because doing so gives them an economic advantage.

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Fed Plans to Meddle…Again

Because further regulating lending is the best way to protect consumers from predatory lenders who are in danger of not being paid.  Who are they trying to protect again?  Sure some people may lose their homes, but they are still free to go rent.  Last time I checked there were still plenty of houses and apartments for rent, and there’s nothing in the Constitution that guarantees us home ownership.

The real losers in this situation should be the institutional lenders who were handing out money like it was popcorn.  The people running these companies are supposedly educated and able to assess risk.  Of course, there really isn’t a need to assess your own risk if you know the tax payers are going forced to assume it for you courtesy of your old college classmates and buddies in the gov’ment.

Washington is so afraid that Wall Street may have to suffer through a bump in the road that they are willing to sell us down the river to keep it from happening.

Hell, why not take over the FICO and every other credit rating system while you’re at it?  You could tie it to income tax returns, making sure that only people who filed taxes had the opportunity to even rent.  And why not handle payroll for every company in the country while you’re doing that so that you can make sure that everyone’s being paid fairly?

More regulation=more expense for the consumer.  Thanks gov’ment!  You’ve effectively made yet another thing more expensive.