Frenzied Daddy

Thanks to K and C, we have a new clothes washer. They bought a new house and moved their washer/dryer. Which means I’m no longer lugging six loads of laundry to the ‘mart. It’s amazing how many clothes we have around here. Thanks K!

It was one of those times where everything’s coming together. We had a dead washing machine in the basement. We had a dead Christmas tree in the living room. K and Cr were moving on a day Ms B was off from work, so I rented a u-Haul cargo van to take the trash to the dump and then help K move, and then bring home the washer. Well, it didn’t quite go ‘like buttah’; the first problem was that the U-Haul place had a $500 fee if pine needles had to be cleaned out of your rental (aiee!). I lugged the washer up the 15 steps out of the basement and ran it up a door to get it into the cargo van (My brother’s response to seeing my ramp? “Dude, that’s a ramp? It still has the doorknob!”). I threw some more crap into the van (some sodden rotten magazines, etc) and took it to the dump; 450 pounds of stuff (and a discount for recycling the washer?). After helping K move (hoping to save him some money on the mover bill), I lugged home the washer and thunked it down the 15 steps into the basement. Luckily I didn’t break it (grin: yeah I know I should have braced the tub. Sorry.) Amazingly, it ran!

It’s that time again. I’ve been using free hosting from a previous employer (Hi Mike), but that’s coming to an end. It’s been free since 2004, and it’s time to move on. The problem I see is that DotManiac’s hosting plans are stupidly expensive. My plan here runs out at the end of the month.

So I’m looking for a new hosting company. I’m going to pay for it out of ArghWebWorks money, and move that site over as well; that way, the new hosting plan is tax deductable. I’m thinking, certainly more deductable. Frenzied Daddy gets more traffic than I feel comfortable putting on the server I maintain for Bill. Shared hosting is O.K. with me; that’s cheaper than renting a server or even a virtual server.

I’m looking at BlueHost, Site 5(that’s an affiliate link. I’ll spend the money wisely, I promise) and Dot 5. Do y’all have any opinions on them? I’m sort of leaning towards Site 5 because of their huge $5 deal; the only drawback is the two year contract (paid in advance). I don’t like that; in technical terms, 2 years is an eternity. However, at $120, that’s not a big barrier (as opposed to the 2 year contracts on a lot of cell phones).

I was looking over my traffic stats for my various sites. Typical end of year stuff, you know how it is. I saw something there, in the Adsense totals that surprised me. Generally speaking, I don’t do too much worrying about the adsense details, and when I get a check from Google, it’ll be “extra money.”
Last year, Portland Parents netted me roughly as much as Frenzied Daddy. In the same ball park (You know that Google doesn’t allow us to discuss specifics). The readership for PP though is much lower; in the same span of time, FD got about 2000 hits while PP got about 200. What this tells me is that I’ve been basically right all this time; what’s important in Blogging (particularily if you’re aiming at either audience size or cash) is that you focus on your subject matter, write coherently, and use common sense when you’re chatting things up.

Portland Parents is a site where I’m trying to … build a community of parents, uh, in Portland (well, the Pacific Northwest). It was originally a forum site, but with the limited traffic, a blog works better. I’m totally open to the idea of other contributors; the crucial thing to me on that site is the sense of community. Everything on there connects to parenthood (which sort of explains the long spaces between posts; I haven’t seen anything interesting lately that works for the site). Whereas, on FD, I’ve gone from employment/business issues to technical issues, to parenthood, to complaining about banks.

Which leads me to my title. I’ve been reading the Simple Dollar. I have a few of Dave Ramsey’s books, and I’m trying to figure this money crap out. I was hurting for ideas for the PP site (and generally speaking, am always open to suggestions), and over the Christmas Season, I wrote a series of “stuff to do with your kid(s).” After reading so many other serieses (serii), I’m not sure why this was my first ever “Serial” set of posts. It was interesting to do; and I was able to do them all at once and have them trickle in over the span I set up (the magic of post-dated posts!).

conkedout

Originally uploaded by rgilmanhunt.

Does this kid look relaxed or what? Would you believe that three minutes before this picture was taken, she was running around in circles?

Miss K was very funny today; er, it was funny because I ignored her. I can imagine some child-hater getting uptight about it. I went into the kitchen, and she followed me and yelled “Dinosaurs, Now!!” and pointed at the empty box of (dinosaur) fruit treats. Poor kid- now we know better than to leave the empty box on the counter.

Nobody wanted to explain loan amortization to me, huh?

So the formula for calculating my monthly payment is: monthly = (amount borrowed) * (interest*(interest+1)^periods ) / (interest+1)^periods -1… or, with the values I’m working with, monthly= 900 * (0.04 * 1.04^13)/1.04^13 -1, or about $90 dollars a month.

You can do the same math using a spreadsheet, or you can use the handy-dandy loan amortization calculator. Oddly, the results I get aren’t even as close as my second try at approximation. I must be doing something wrong. And those numbers don’t really jibe with the one I get from the Amortization Calculator link above (which gave a monthly payment closer to $82).

Working at home, I get a lot of time alone. I take Miss B to school, and take Miss K to the sitter, and then I’m alone. I’m supposed to be working, but once in a while I get distracted. Also, Mrs B has been taking the girls to bed when she retires for the night; I stay up until eleven (when I’m on call) or midnight (when I’m not); again, I’m supposed to be working, but sometimes I’m working on my Everquest 2 character(s).

When I’m working from home, I’ve always got the phone to answer, email, IM, and I’ve got an open chat window to campfire, our discussion tool. That’s not really solitude. I get my best “me time” at night between Mrs B’s bedtime and mine.

I need a lot of me-time. I always have. Reading that article reminds me that books and other engrossing activities also provide me-time. Mrs B gets way, way more into a book than I do. Ever since Ms B was born, it’s been a lot harder for me to give up on keeping tabs on the outside world. Lately, I’ve been annoyed at how easily Mrs B gets sucked away from us- but she doesn’t get as much time by herself as I do. We can cohabitate a room, companionably, and since we’re each doing our “thing,” we’re both relaxing and in solitide. Maybe this is one reason why our relationship is so strong- we can give each other some space. To keep our relationship stronger, I should run interference with whatever’s pestering her for attention, rather than trying to help it (case in point: when Miss B is trying to get Mrs B’s attention while Mrs B is reading a book, sometimes I’ll poke Mrs B to pull her out of the book)

When we were married, part of our vows came from Kahlil Gibran:

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

It’s a fairly common reading, but maybe it’s helped us stay strong.

The guy who writes FoxTrot is cutting back to a weekend-only schedule. He thinks he’s going to find something else to do and get out of the house. I’ve always liked FoxTrot, and of course I empathized with the youngest child, even though I am the oldest and don’t have an annoying sister.

In this strip (from 12/17/2006), I’m sure his inspiration were these cookie cutters; or maybe great minds just think alike.

Let’s say, for sake of argument, that I have a $900 credit card bill. (this one, the whole thing is $900, not a monthly payment, mmkay?). I want to pay it off in 2007, and I want to pay it in even amounts over the course of the year. My first thought was “hmm, pay the remaining balance divided by the number of months left in the year.” And that works ok, except for compounded interest. Look at “try one” on this spreadsheet. The interest is calculated as 0.04*the remaining balance after the payment is made. The first column is how much the payment would be, how much interest I’d pay that month, and the remaining balance. The payment amount keeps going up!

Well, so much for that. So in my second attempt, I used the average of the interest gains and added it to the payment. The payment amounts go up a little bit (close enough for me) and then go down a little bit. That happens because my interest adjustment is the average of the interests, and some of them are below average and some above. But it doesn’t hit 0 in December. And the difference is enough that it doesn’t look like a rounding error to me. So… what gives? And I’m sure there’s a more mathematical approach to solve this; anyone care to share it?

One of the developers in our daily meeting yesterday announced that he had found the perfect present for my kids, well, “for kids” and I am the only developer with kids. He steered us toward the shocking roulette. He had been given one for Christmas, and had played roulette seven or eight times. He thought it was the “best toy ever.”

I laughed. I literally laughed out loud. For several minutes. Because it’s totally a guy toy- and I have girls. My girls might try it once, but I’m pretty sure that after getting shocked once they’d be done. The developer got shocked four times. Yeah, I’m being sexist and over-generalizing, but … I think girl kids are smarter and don’t like getting nearly electrocuted.