Small Fish, Big Pond

One thing I miss from Japan was the themed restaurants bars shopping centers pachinko parlors love hotels gaming centers.

The weird drinks in the bottom right looks like the strange “cure all” vitamin C drinks they sell there. The commercials claim results similar to taking some Mentats.

via gizmodo

Inspired by posts from “Get Rich Slowly“.

“The charge is bank robbery. Now, my caddie’s chauffeur informs me that a bank is a place where people put money that isn’t properly invested. Therefore, robbing a bank is tantamount to that most heinous of crimes, theft of money.” – Judge Whitey (Futurama)

Maybe that quote is a bit extreme. It is after all a joke made by a fictitious pompous rich WASP judge from the future; but it sticks in the back of my head when people tell me they plan for their future by stashing money under their mattress or buying gold coins.

I’m not a fool when it comes to money. My parents had a lot of financial issues while I was growing up and through their mistakes I was able to learn how to be responsible with my money even before I had enough money to worry about.

But one thing I always dragged my feet on was planning for retirement. What kid in their 20’s plans for what they’ll be doing half a decade in the future? We’re worried about getting a cool car, socializing with beautiful women, and finding out where the party is at Friday night (new lesson learned, the appeal of a cool car wears off early but the need having reasonable transportation will stay).

There is a lot of good financial advice out there but let’s face it, your attitude to financial planning at “25 and single” is a worlds different from your financial planning at “45 and married with kids”. I even try more than my peers to listen to all the advice given but retirement seems like such a small problem when I’m busy trying to figure how to get the bank to give me a loan so I can purchase some transportation to work. I’m not worried about retirement if I can’t even maintain my job to begin with.

A few years ago when my father was trying to organize his financial mess I learned a key item about retirement accounts I never knew. My parents had been slowly digging themselves out of decades of debt and the future looked bright but some emergency issues had cropped up and the only way to cover them had been to pay by credit card (new lesson learned, keep a healthy emergency fund for emergencies over $1000). It would take over a year to make up the credit debt and the 25% interest rates in that time would be murder to the newly balanced budget. My dad told me he was going to take money out of his 401k.

I didn’t know much about retirement accounts but I did know that pulling money out early leads to massive fees. I told him that losing money in early retirement fees wasn’t any better than losing money in credit interest, plus with retirement only a few years away it was damaging for his already small retirement (he had started saving late, another lesson learned), and that if he could just hold out a few years he’d have more help.

Then he told me he wasn’t withdrawing his 401k, he was pulling out a loan against the 401k.

It’s a key difference. In one case you completely remove the money, it’s taxed; and if it’s early additional fees are tacked on. The loan is not taxed, and there are no fees; the key point being that you will pay it back into the 401k like any other loan.

This allowed me to see retirement accounts in a different light. I’d always thought of them as basically like a big savings account that you can put money into but you can’t touch until you’re 65. And while treating it like this is ideal for retirement, when you’re 25 taking $60 out of your paycheck and not seeing it for another 40 years is a big deal. I could seriously use that money now.

So dad got the loan, there is no approval process and no loan officer to beg for money. If you want it it’s yours so long as you pay it back before retirement. Having learned this I finally took the plunge and started my retirement account while in my 20s. Of course now that I’m in I don’t know why I didn’t start earlier, I barely miss the $60 a paycheck and employer matching has caused the 401k to balloon faster than I ever imagined. And the fact that I now have a pool of money I can responsibly loan to myself makes it mind boggling that people still don’t immediately start building their own retirement accounts.

The loan is really like any other (I have Fidelity but most companies are similar):
-You arrange a payment plan of X dollars a month over Y years and the money is automatically deducted from your paycheck before you touch it, removing the temptation to spend it and the problem of not paying on time.
-You still pay interest but you get a decent rate, usually better than any bank will give you.
-The interest you pay goes back into your own retirement account.
That’s worth saying again.
-The interest you pay goes back into your own account, not the bank and not the company holding your 401k. It goes back into your own pocket, even if you don’t really get to pull it out of that pocket it until retirement.
-Than means that the only money unrecovered is the ~$30 processing fee to make the loan.
-And depending on who your 401k is through all this can be done online.

Now obviously this isn’t something you want to make a habit of using but it’s an excellent tool to have at your disposal when compared to paying 25%+ interest to a credit card or paying hundreds of dollars in interest to a bank loaning you money.

There are caveats of course:
-You can only have two loans at a time.
-You can’t take out more than 50% of your 401k in loans.
-If you lose your employment with an outstanding loan the company holding the account has the right to demand immediate payment (but will usually work out a payment plan with you).
-You can’t make extra incremental payments, but you can pay the entire remaining balance early.
-Unless you stop it, you will still be withdrawing X percentage to you retirement as usual, in addition to the loan payment.
-While your loan is out that money is not invested, same as if it was withdrawn from your 401k completely.

A lot of people say that that last caveat is the reason you should avoid 401k loans, as the money that is loaned out it is not invested, thus hurting your future retirement.

However the door swings both ways in this case. In the summer of 2008 I had my own emergency; a few weeks before a 3 week vacation to Japan a relatively trivial medical emergency cleaned out my vacation fund. Rather than let a poor healthcare plan stop me I pushed onward and went on my trip…
Paid mostly on credit.

I got home and had my chance to put the 401k to the test. In less than a week had tapped my now $8,000 401k for a $4000 loan avoiding the interest fees from the credit card. Before you freakout I knew I had about $1500 in reimbursed school funds coming soon, and calculated the other $2500 could be paid in about 8-6 months if I buckled down. I had set my repayment options to the bare minimum stretching out the loan to a few years but with small withdrawals per paycheck but planning on paying it off early. Various things cropped up and I still had a lot of that money out on loan in September 2008 when the market nose-dived.

I decided to follow the old adage of “Buy Low” and waited till the market plunge leveled out in April before paying off the loan with money I had been saving in the intervening months. As the market bounced back that $2500 loan pay off multiplied along with it.

So yes money on loan isn’t invested but in some cases that’s not a bad thing, especially if it’s being put to good use eliminating a more pressing financial emergency. Obviously I was lucky in my circumstance and nobody should try to game their retirement accounts playing with loans to get the same outcome. But it does prove that a negative can be turned into a positive with a little bit of planning.

The main thing I hope people take away from all this, especially those of us in the under 35 age group, is that not only is it good to plan for retirement now but that your retirement account can still be useful in the intervening 40 years. The quicker you start the bigger that cushion will be to help you out of a jam.

As long as you’re responsible and don’t abuse it you have a source you can loan to yourself, pocket your own interest during the payback, and have it all waiting for you as a retirement account when you reach 65.

I think Glenn Beck and people like him are what are destroying our nation (USA).

Terrorists may kill a few people and temporarily scare everybody but it’s fear mongers like him who allow the “Terrorists to win” by keeping that fear and hatred alive and strong far longer than it would normally exist. Now our great country is a laughing stock where people coming from dictatorships are shocked at how many stupid ineffective hoops we have to jump through in the name of “national security”. I mean we can’t even bring nail clippers with us on vacation because they’re afraid we’ll use them to hijack a plane. You know what you do when somebody with nail clippers attacks you?
Anything.
Anything will do more damage that nail clippers. Punch, kick, even screaming is a better attack.

That’s why as a decorated war veteran and proud citizen of the United States I’m happy to see somebody hoist Beck on his own petard, making obviously baseless claims to put somebody on the defensive against something that doesn’t exist. If only it would teach him to shut the hell up about how we can never trust another living human being (it won’t).

Ars has a nice writeup of the Glenn Beck issue that Glenn Beck hasn’t denied that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. Currently he’s trying to get the domain to the above site shuttered to try to eliminate the issue because it makes him look bad worse.

I agree with most people that regardless of the truth or satire, bullying domain registrars into shutting down websites that compete with you for making the most idiotic baseless claims on the net is the wrong way to deal with everybody’s opinion that you’re an asshat.

The bad news is that pundits like Beck love this attention, especially when it’s negative, because it makes them finally feel like the victim they always pretend to be. It’s likely that now they’ll just sue the owner of the website or drag him through enough court cases that even winning will leave him penniless.

If you still get your news from 24 hour news stations, you need to stop.
River drill shakes up DC on 9/11 anniversary

But the exercise, involving speeding boats and at least one helicopter, probably would have passed unnoticed except that two TV networks confused simulated chatter over a Coast Guard radio for actual events and reported that the Coast Guard had opened fire on a suspicious vessel near ceremonies attended by President Barack Obama.

Here’s the simple version:
The Coast Guard was running a routine practice drill.
CNN and the news media overheard the drill while eavesdropping on scanners.
Rather than verify what was going on and providing proper journalism they jumped to conclusions and claimed that a possible attack was happening.
Other equally lax organizations copied the erroneous news creating a false mass hysteria.

The best way to deal with this is boycott Cable News stations. I’m sure you’ve already noticed they don’t really provide you with anything of use. They blow small things out of proportion and make things that shouldn’t be a problem into an actually problem.

The Principality of Zeon caught wind and blasted the Gundam at Odaiba in half.

Actually it was scheduled to come down but I don’t think undoing the bolts around the middle and knocking it over was how they were planning on doing it considering how it went up in many pieces like a giant constructor set.

Via Danny Choo and Hatimaki.

I mentioned it once before in a blog post, and I’ve also said it in numerous forum and blog comments. Deep Packet inspection is not new, it’s not rare, and it’s not limited in scope. Ars Technicia reports that OpenDPI an open-source DPI engine has revealed their source code to allay fears that personal info is retained. To give you an idea what protocols were talking about here:

The OpenDPI engine will identify a huge list of non-encrypted protocols, however:

• P2P File Sharing: BitTorrent, eDonkey , KaZaa/Fasttrack, Gnutella, WinMX, DirectConnect, AppleJuice, Soulseek, XDCC, Filetopia, Manolito, iMesh, Pando
• Voice over IP: SIP, IAX, RTP
• Instant Messaging: Yahoo, Oscar, IRC, unencrypted Jabber, Gadu!Gadu, MSN
• Streaming Protocols: ORB, RTSP, Flash, MMS, MPEG, Quicktime, Joost, WindowsMedia, RealMedia, TVAnts, SOPCast, TVUPlayer, PPStream, PPLive, QQLive, Zattoo, VeohTV, AVI, Feidian, Ececast, Kontiki, Move, RTSP, SCTP, SHOUTcast
• Tunnel Protocols: IPsec,GRE, SSL, SSH, IP in IP
• Standard Protocols: HTTP, Direct download links (1-click file hosters), POP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, BGP, DHCP, DNS, EGP, ICMP, IGMP, MySQL, NFS, NTP, OSPF, pcAnywhere, PostgresSQL, RDP, SMB, SNMP, SSDP, STUN, Telnet, Usenet, VNC, IPP, MDNS, NETBIOS, XDMCP, RADIUS, SYSLOG, LDAP
• Gaming Protocols: World of Warcraft, Half-Life, Steam, Xbox, Quake, Second Life

BitTorrent, DirectConnect, ORB, VeohTV, SHOUTcast, IPsec, GRE, SSL, SSH, RDP, WoW. I know a lot of people who don’t think these can be identified but they can. This is also connected directly to your IP address so they will know that YOU sent it, what it program it was, and where it went. Using DPI they may not know what you sent over Bittorrent, but they will know that you did torrent something from point A to B.

I first began learning of DPI when I was on the security team working for Cisco in 2004, Cisco’s implementation is called CBAC and at the time is was installed in most currently sold routers and switches. Now it is in most all Cisco devices and added into many old ones through IOS updates.

DPI isn’t a way to reconstruct data streams and recover files that cross the internet, it’s simply the act of opening up the packet further, more than just seeing the IP addressing or what port it is destined for. DPI looks close enough to see what type of application the packet is used with. Imagine it as opening a traveling packet enough to see that it is a “.doc” file; you can’t tell what the doc files says from this one chunk, just that part of a doc file crossing the net from point A to B.

While this may allay fears that ISPs are reconstructing your data as it passes through their devices it’s almost equally alarming how much control ISP can use to rate limit and control what traffic you send and receive.

Like I said, most all Cisco devices can now check and filter this traffic; even my little 871 at home can do this so you know the big backbone routers can do it too. And being that Cisco devices make up 86% of the internet it’s virtually guaranteed that your data will pass through a CBAC capable device at some point. ISPs currently have the ability to pick and choose what you send over your connection and drop the rest if they want.

The saving grace is that DPI is more processor intensive than basic routing. The more inspection they do the higher the overhead moving data across the network. And as it stands now they’re trying to cut overhead as much as possible. Most backend routers don’t even act as routers so much as highspeed switches, they check once to see the layer 3 IP address of a packet then send the it and the rest of the datastream on it’s way.

Hopefully most ISPs will keep their lines an un-policed cloud where people can use the connection they pay for in the method of their choosing. But as the backend gets filled with bandwidth intensive Hulu streams, and torrent downloads they may put filters on these kinds of traffic to allow only permitted traffic through. The point is that everything is already in place, the only thing that need to change is ISP corporate policies.

Never take being healthy for granted!
And don’t order Chinese from the cheapest place possible unless you want to try your hand at fighting off e.coli.

Two statements of wisdom from me today.

In other news I’m on vacation this weekend so I REALLY need to fight off this bug! And my new job is paying for my Cisco certification tests the week after that!
Yay!

Now maybe they’ll let me go home so I can curl up in the fetal position under a pile of blankets.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is a great place to buy things here in America, they have good deals and prompt delivery. But alot of my purchases are for the Japanese Music I listen to and once I purchased from Amazon.co.jp and after being torn apart by there overseas shipping I’m never doing that again.

I got this Early Singles Box for about $40 at the time, and was charged another $30 in shipping!!!!

Nuts to that so I’m signing into the Yes Asia affiliate program because believe me I speak from experience, if you’re going to buy Japanese products they’re the way to go. For one thing the price is about the same you’d get buying from a commercial store in Japan, and if you spend more than $20 the shipping is automatically FREE!!! Not even amazon.us is that good.

Again speaking from experience a newly released Japanese single costs about $10-$11 from HMV or Tower Records. The same single is available on Yes Asia for about $12 with the same release date and it’s the Japanese version, not some Hong Kong overseas version or a bogus Taiwanese bootleg like you get on eBay (I should write a blog entry on that whole world…).

Anyway I finally have a way to recommend legal Japanese items of stuff I review for less than the 500% markup it would cost to purchase them through amazon!

Speaking of which here are a couple so I can test the system out:

The one of the CDs I purcahsed a few months ago was SCANDAL – “Doll” which although being very “poppy” is a great song with a ton of energy.

And one I just got done listening to right now that I was impressed with is Orange Range – “Oshare Bancho”. Like most Orange Range stuff it’s very rock/hip-hop that is well done. The show has a great music video too.

Good Stuff. And it has that one taranto in it, I call him “Annoying McShouts-alot” (You’ll know who I’m talking about if you’ve seen him before.

Finally a banner test (will it survive when the promotion ends??)

And their main banner:

EDIT: Hmm. Seems to work, but I like amazon’s tools for building links and sidebars better. Definitely need to explore this some more.

Geek time!
This post was posted on 12:34:56 7/8/9 (if you don’t see the significance look at the numbers).

The next time this sequence will come up is in exactly 100 years (hope I make it).

Ignore the blog timestamp. Their server is east coast, my reality is that 12:34 is right now!

I love seeing new inventions that are incredibly simple but absolutely genius. No matter how advanced and technological our society is there is always room for improvement.

Spilled food is a given for any yard party or get together that involves loading up a plate of food and taking it to your table. How can you hold a drink in one hand and fit a hamburger, hotdog, handfull of chips, and two servings of Pork and Beans on one plate without spilling it?

At family parties I love to watch people do the paper plate balancing act from the food table back to their seat while a bunch of 4 year old kids run around their legs screaming. It’s like cirque du soleil with the possibility of somebody getting a facefull of potato salad and ranch veggie dip.

Hamburgers and Hotdogs at the park on a hot summer afternoon is about as American is it gets (eat that Baseball and Apple pie!) And now there is an invention that will keep people from having to hose off the grass when the party is over.

Viva the 4th of July!

From Uncrate via gizmodo.

I’ve decided to start writing a blog again.

It’s going to be a bit different this time, not about politics but more about me.  What I’m doing, my philosophy (if you wanna call it that), and things that interest me that others might want to know about.

Beyond that I’m still not really sure what exactly this is.  Hopefully things will get more interesting as I go on or maybe people will find interest in something I talk about.  I know that sounds kind of conceited but in these days where reality TV dominates the airwaves and people subscribed to twitter accounts to keep up on the banal minutiae of eachother’s lives, maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

Personally I’m at one of life’s little crossroads right now; I’m trying to move up in life and make some changes but the economy in my job are working against me.

As of May 29 I won’t have a job anymore so I’m currently looking for a new one.  I’ve been testing for my CCNA certification to get a better, higher paying job.

I also recently downsized my car from an SUV to a smaller road friendly car that gets better mileage but the timing of the payment doesn’t play well with my recent job loss.

Also out of personal interest I set up a hydroponic garden this year.  Partially for personal knowledge, partially to save the world, partially to make money, but mostly because it sounded fun.

And as usual I’m still struggling at learning Japanese, and wishing I could go back to Japan for some time, listening to music, attending concerts, hiking in the mountains, playing video games, tweaking and upgrading my techno-gadgets, etc. etc…