Author: cdwan

Looking at buying a new car. Intimidated by the complexity of the process and the number of ways in which one can pay thousands of dollars. Picking the car isn’t hard. redmed will simply do her usual brilliant thing and pick the best one. It’s the money side of the process that’s worrying me.

Looked at Howstuffworks on financing and howstuffworks on buying a car, as well as consumer reports, plus checked out the Kelly Blue Book for competitive pricing, and my bank for interest rates (6.5%ish, right now). Then I read nearly the entirety of carbuyingtips.com.

So far what I’ve got is:

• Shop for financing independent of shopping for the car. It’s possible that the dealership will have a good loan product, but it’s doubtful.
• Know the terminology (invoice vs. MSRP and so on)
• Know your credit score. There are a freakin’ lot of imposter sites out there. However, this is totally simple, you see the report instantly, and you can print it out. You don’t get the *score* per se…but you get all the information that goes into it.
• Get all paranoid and quit. No no no…but this is creeping me out.

I think that my plan (subject, of course to the other half of the plan’s approval) is to shop for all the various parts of this equation separately. Get financing, buy the new car, sell the old car. They’re distinct questions, and I can treat them as such.

Oh yeah, and: MY FREAKING ADDRESS IS WRONG ON MY CREDIT REPORT!!!! VALHALLA, I AM COMING!!!!!!!

(more…)

The report is back, fully vetted, approved, and otherwise sanitized. It’s linked from the main page (http://bioteam.net) and is also available on my private server (http://cdwan.org:8080/Intel_final.pdf). Since we’re going to be looking at who downloads the thing from the corporate page, I thought it was the better part of valor to not have a pile of “fdmts.livejournal.com” in the “referred from” column.

If you care about bioinformatics apps and how they scale on dual core Xeon chips … check it out.

–UPDATE–: HOLY CRAP! A *lot* of people are downloading this thing. Like, a very lot. Right now. I mentioned it on the bioclusters mailing list a few minutes back, and we’ve gotten 125 downloads since then!

–UPDATE–: Double poop! Went to karate, came back. Download count is up to 289. Bets? My guess is a nice clean 500 by the end of the day (midnight, EST).

–UPDATE–: Here’s a fun one liner that I use to keep track of the downloads:

watch -n 60 "grep Intel_final.pdf /home/bioteam-www/logs/access_log | awk '{ print \$1 }' | sort | uniq | wc"

Blah, blah, Japan, blah, blah, global warming, blah FOUR HUNDRED AND FOURTY POUND JELLYFISH!!!!!!!!! blah blah, fishermen, blah

There’s an idea running through my little LJ community surrounding “guilty pleasures.” It’s been suggested that I participate. The idea as it arrived at my door was this:

Ground Rules:
The first player of this “game” starts with the topic “5 Guilty Pleasures” and people who get tagged need to write an LJ entry about their 5 Guilty Pleasures as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next 5 people to be tagged and list their names.

I’m choosing to ignore the requirement of naming the next people to play. Make up your own minds.

1) Sleeping much later than redmed
2) Cheapo, formula rock
3) Calling people while I’m driving and having them entertain me to my destination
4) Playing hooky from work by lighting a fire and reading a book.
5) The occasional cigar

Seems, on reflection, that I feel very little guilt about much of anything. I’ll take that as a good thing.

This 22nd Century gadget is about half the size of your average deck of cards, sits wirelessly on any flat surface, and projects a red standard QWERTY-layout keyboard on any flat opaque surface. Using detection technology it “watches” your fingers hit the key locations it has projected, and then sends the keystrokes through to your PDA, smart phone or pocket PC via Bluetooth.

Canning my sauerkraut this evening. While I’m happy to share the beer experience with anyone who wants to come down, salted cabbage is still sketchy (and smelly) enough that I do it solo and late at night. This stuff has been fermenting in a crock for about two weeks. Cabbage and salt. Plus time. That’s it.

The canning procedure is different than most stuff. Instead of bringing the mix to a boil and then plopping it in jars in the boiling water for 5-10 minutes, you fill the jars to about 1″ from the top and set them in a water bath up to the shoulders of the jars. You then heat the water to boiling, which causes the kraut to expand and “urp” into the water. Ick. Once you’re close to boiling, you wipe the jar lids, put on the rims and lids, and add water to cover them. After that it’s a 30 minute process.

Smells like salted cabbage in here.

On occasion I’ll link to something that I put up on the server in my basement. One advantage of doing this is that I can gather statistics and see who’s actually reading this junk, and who makes with the clicky clicky. Here’s what I learned:

I am my own biggest fan, by an order of magnitude. 2000 hits from 192.168.1.1 (anything inside my house). 200 to the next biggest consumer which was … googlebot. Ick! Ick! Away, googlebot. I just made a robots.txt file to exclude you. Away!

After that it’s someone on RoadRunner in MN (Hi Tim!) and someone at Oberlin (hello?), someone in New Hampshire (hello?) and someone at “oshean.org”, the ocean state higher education thingamabob (hello?). Falling below the “hundred hits so far this month” mark, we have elessar.engin.umich.edu, a baby bell on the west coast (), and a comcast customer in MN (Hi Todd!).

I am my own biggest referrer (most hits come from this very journal). Duh. After that it’s redmed and rev_e‘s friends list. Maybe lots of people read the good Rev’s friends page. Maybe he just makes with the “reload” with inhuman speed and fury. Below that is something called “fuzzysquid.com/LJ.php”. I am so not looking into that right now. Away, robots.

You people are active at 9am, and again at 7pm. It’s a nice clean bimodal distribution. Wait, that probably means that *I*’m active at 9 and again at 7 … since 95% of the hits are me.

Other than that, the only really noticeable thing is that the three PDFs that I’ve put up lately got the most unique hits of anything I posted … and most of those were legit (i.e: non-googlebot). So, I should write more. Go me.

Valhalla, I am … well … actually I’m not going anywhere right now. In fact, I’m quite surprised and delighted.

Got my bill from Verizon, and it’s exactly right. Keep in mind that I made massive changes to my service, including the purchase of a new phone, removing several options, and adding several options.

My monthly bill is $30 lower than it was before. W00t.

In the spirit of documenting the good as well as the irritating.

New essay for the week is posted. Two for two weeks. Go me.

Since I’m having a low energy day, I’m playing with numbers again. The DOE energy conversion page still rocks my world.

fun with math