It’s been almost a week since Daylights Saving Time ended and I just realized I forgot to update the most important clock of them all — the clock on the coffee maker.

I tried to fill my coffee cup while holding the cup upside down.

30 seems like the sophomore years of life.

You’re too old to be a young, but too young to be wise.

So your
20s are your freshman years,
30s are your sophomore years,
40s are your junior years,
50s are your senior years,

After that . . . maybe grad school - MS, PhD.

And, of course, like any sophomore, I have to say,

Sophomores Rule!

One of the reasons Fall is my favorite season is the event I call “The Winter-Coat Dig.” The first time I put my winter coat on, I stuff my hands into all the pockets looking for anything I accidentally left there last Spring (money). This year I was a little bummed out because all I found was a wad of receipts and a tube of chap stick.

However, I had a unique experience this year I had never considered before: digging through my son’s coat.

Among the nicknack’s was one item almost as good as money. . . the mp3 player I lost last Spring.

So, I had a good “Winter Coat Dig” after all.

1) High Speed Internet
The reason I gave up on Linux five years ago was that I couldn’t get my dial-up modem to work. I have high-speed now, but I tried to set up the modem just to test how difficult it was. After failing with three different distributions of Linux on four different computers I have to recommend that new Linux users make sure they have high-speed. I’ve never had any trouble getting my Ethernet to work.

2) Double whatever RAM the distro claims you need.
I’m putting Linux on my older computers, and I assume most new converts are going to try to do the same. That usually means we’ll be working with slower computers. One of the selling points I came across when I started reading about Linux was that it works fantastically on older computers. However, I’ve found this isn’t entirely true. I tried Ubuntu, Xbuntu, and Damn Small Linux on an old lappy that had the supposed bare minimum RAM, but nothing worked quite right. I eventually just installed Xbuntu and had it boot into text-only mode (and that’s how I discovered the joy of the command line). Recently, I installed Fedora 9 on a 3 year old desktop which meets Fedora’s minimum requirements for RAM, but I’ve discovered it’s safer to stay in CLI, and I’ve ordered more RAM. Whatever the distribution you’re using says you need, go ahead and double it, and you’ll enjoy yourself a lot more.

3) Terminal Skills
The best way to prepare yourself for the trouble you will have is to learn some basic Unix commands. Most of the on-line help discussions use terminal commands, so you must learn your way around a terminal if plan on fixing any of the problems that come up. (These problems happen on M&M too [that's Microsoft and Macintosh] but I’ve found fixing problems is easier when working in a terminal.)

Don’t stress out about this point; learning these commands won’t take much time. I went to the library and got an old book on Unix that had most of the information I needed. I spent about an hour scanning the book and picked up most of the basics and a couple cool tricks. Every new Linux user must do this. Eventually, you will read something that will use these commands and if you have a basic understanding of them, you’ll be able to follow the discussion more easily. Spend an hour learning these commands now, and it will probably save yourself several hours in the future.

It feels like it’s time for a deep though, but I’ve got nothing.
. . .
so I want to make a joke. But my brain’s not in joke mode.
. . .
maybe I could steal someone else’s blog but not give them credit, then when they discover I stole their blog they could do something funny like change the image that I hot-linked too which would be hilarious and they could tell all their friends to visit my site and see the funny picture they put on my site, and when I discover that I got busted, rather than owning up or at least removing the post, I would just delete the image from my main page but leave the stolen blog, and of course I would leave the image my archives because the software I’m using to run by blog is poo and I don’t really know what I’m doing
. . .
there’s some potential there, but that’s a topic for another post.
. . .
I miss a lot of people right now, and I don’t know if I should be serious or funny.
. . .
am I using to many ellipses . . .

I just read some stuff I wrote in 10th grade and I found this idea about dragon mythology. I remember feeling particularly proud of the idea back then . . . The idea still amuses me, so I thought I’d share.

The basic idea is that dragon mythology began when someone found a dinosaur fossil. If you’d never heard of a dinosaur before and you stumbled upon a 25 foot long T-Rex fossil with 6 inch teeth, how would you explain it? And Pterodactyls had wing spans of up to 40 feet. In an unscientific world, I think a Dragon is a reasonable explanation.

I just visited a web site that had a pop-up window display when the page loaded. The pop-up window informed me that I needed to enable pop-ups to use their site . . .

Um, a pop-up window might not be the best place to notify users that they need to enable pop-ups.

Have you ever had your blood pressure taken or heard a nurse say something like “100 over 40″ (I don’t actually know if that’s a good blood pressure or not . . . someone with 100/40 blood pressure might be dead for all I know)?

I propose that we begin a Budget Pressure system. This would be a simple and quick way to assess financial health. The basic ideas is that there are two key pieces of financial information that reveal how well a person handles their money.

Here’s the equation:
Consumer Debt / Percentage of your take-home pay you’re saving per month.

Consumer Debt is credit card debt, car loan debt, or rent-to-own stuff debt. Basically, it’s how much money you’ve borrowed to buy things you don’t really need, or things you could get by with a lower-quality product (like a cheaper car).

I searched the web and here is the average American’s Budget Pressure:

$20,000 / 1%

So, the average American is $20,000 in debt and only saves 1% of their monthly take-home pay.

Here’s our Federal Government’s Budget Pressure:

9.6 Trillion / -12.5%

So, our Federal Government is 9.6 Trillion in debt and is spending 12.5% more than it takes in each year (Yearly budget divided by budget deficit: 4 trillion / 600 billion = 0.125 = 12.5%)

Is anyone really surprised by the recession? Granted, I don’t believe it’s appropriate for the government to constantly save money, because it’s not theirs to save it’s mine, but I’d be okay with an emergency fund of some kind.

Here is what I would consider a healthy Budget Pressure
0/10%

Here’s my family budget pressure: 0/5%

What’s yours?

. . . the Chrome icon kind of looks like the old Simon Says game

To protect reputations, I will not be using any names.

Two months ago, we moved out of our old apartment into our new home.

We left the apartment in good condition, so we’ve been waiting for them to return our deposit check of about $600. After two months with no word from them, I started preparing myself mentally to go talk to them (I don’t like confrontations, and avoid them whenever possible).

My wife and I agreed Monday was their deadline. Monday’s mail came, and we got a little surprise from our old landlords.

Now, I know we gave them our new address at least twice. I wrote it down for them when I told them we were moving out, and I watched them write it down on the day we actually left.

But, when we got the check in the mail, the envelope had gone through the Post Offices’ mail-forwarding system. Why? Because my old landlords had mailed the return-deposit check to our old address at their apartment complex.