~ytjohn

I agree we need health care reform, but not necessarily a single payer system. In fact, health care reform doesn’t need to come from the Federal Government — health care is heavily regulated at the state level. These regulations effect price.

http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/cda05-07.cfm

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/13/health/webmd/main2923760.shtml

http://www.smartmoney.com/breaking-news/?story=20041207014549

So, if we look at the states with the “best/cheapest” health care (The CBS article says Hawaii provides the “best” while eHealthinsurance.com/smartmoney show MO having the “cheapest”), then we can pressure our local state legislators to make insurance work for your state. It can probably be done faster and easier than any sort of reform at the federal level.

I really don’t know why the choice is either “single payer” or “our current screwed up system”. The system is screwed up at the state level because no one looks at the state level anymore. People immediately look to the executive branch of the Federal government, which really has little to do with the issue.

You claim not to be a search engine, I understand. You claim that you take data sets and interpret them. So, I see you can look up names based off of the 2000 census data. I can find results for Miller and Smith of course, but you claim to know nothing about “Hogenmiller”.

I too can reference Census data:

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.all.last (1995)
http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames2k.html (2000)

1995 info:
NAME (last) %FREQ CUMM FREQ RANK
HOGENMILLER 0.000 89.998 83714

2000 census (in excel spreadsheet):
HOGENMILLER 64186 290 0.11 84385.36 96.21 0 (S) (S) (S) (S)

I did a quick bit of checking and it seems that you stop after rank 2500.  The surname “HIGH” shows up, but NEWBERRY does not.

So while there may have only been around 290 Hogenmillers in the year 2000, they are still in the Census bureau’s list and you should really index that.  By failing to include us, you indicate that Hogenmillers are statistically insignificant.  We will not stand for it! Just wait until all 290 of us (except for those that have either died or changed their names in the last 9 years) begin a nationwide protest!  Then you will see just how statistically insignificant we are!

Regards,

A Hogenmiller

So it hasn’t been working out too well. Running off of the floor fan and no A/C, the room still closely mirrors the outside. It was making some difference, but not enough. Yesterday, I turned the exhaust fan down to low (instead of high) as an experiment. Initially, I had the exhaust fans on super-high, hoping to suck as much hot air out of the room as possible. I’m now going with a low exhaust speed with an idea that maybe that air I’m pumping into the room from the basement needs to stay in the room longer. Today, with a temperature of 84F outside (in the shade), the room is holding around 78F inside. So, that is some improvement.

I also believe i need to pump *more* air from the basement into the server room. Before I rush out and purchase a bigger fan, I am trying a cheaper experiment - removing the filter from underneath the fan. If that helps, I will look at different filters to see what provides the highest air flow.

Despite the ineffectiveness in the server room, some floor fans could still do a good job in other rooms of the house — they don’t have as many “heaters” running all 24×7 during the summer.

So the NY Times has posted an article about people that tried to “do-it-yourself” and ended up costing themselves more money.  It lists several examples:

• Carol tried to replace a toilet by herself.  It fell through the floor into the room below.  Rushing to the store, she clipped her own garage, tearing off the bumber and a shelf of potted plants.  Eventually, she ended up paying $3,000 to a contracting firm to fix everything.
• Ramon Estrada accepted 2 dozen uncooked steak and fish leftovers from a friend for free.  They cooked it up, ate it, and 4 hours later there was cramping.  Mr. Estrada became so dehydrated that he also had to see a doctor a few days later, at the cost of at least $400 for drugs and treatment and four days of missed work.
• One person put bleach on her scalp and pulled it through to the ends and left it on for an hour. She had hair down past the middle of her back and now she’s sporting a chin-length bob because her hair broke off.  “We had to go in and do corrective color,” Ms. Brewer continued. “I charge by the hour, and I worked on her for four hours. So by the time it was over, she ended up spending close to $1,000 to have her hair corrected when it could have been $175.”
• Ms. Bernstein, 26, decided she would save $60 a month by buying an at-home kit and waxing her own bikini line. All she can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
• The Shermans were hanging molding when they punctured a water pipe.  Ms. Sherman plugged the hole with her finger until the plumber arrive.  The cost to fix the pipe was $250.  Ms. Sherman: “Now I have to say, we don’t do things ourselves anymore.”

I had to read this article several times to really absorb everything.  I still can’t believe half of what I’m reading.  Ms. Brewer makes $250/hour doing hair?  Someone would normally pay $175 for highlights (so a 30-45 minute job)?  I can certainly applaud the anonymous client for deciding not to pay Ms. Brewer $250/hour on her hair, but she obviously didn’t take the time to think through how to get highlights (and for a cash strapped person, how necessary are highlights?). I’m not a hair person, but I have three sisters, a string of girlfriends during my life, and I am currently engaged.  I’m fairly certain you pick up hair-safe highlights at a price considerably less than $50.  It may not be as great as your $250/hour professional does it, but for a first-timer, it’s a better bet than using bleach.

Everyone should be wary of seafood, especially leftover seafood.  If there’s a food in the world that spoils easily, it’s seafood.  The steaks were probably not the cause of their bellyache.  Mr. Estrada should have known better, being a culinary student.

Carol — according to the article, you had the toilet hooked up before it fell through.  That means it must have been occupying the same space as the previous one, so my guess is that whoever installed your toilet before did a bad job of framing the original in place.  Unless you replaced a small toilet with something much larger (perhaps fashioned out of lead) and heavier, it shouldn’t have fallen through the floor. However, I don’t think it would really have been cheaper to replace the toilet than to replace the toilet’s insides unless the ceramic was falling apart, which would be the floor shifting.  In your case, I would have found a handyman forum on the Internet, or at least talk with some friends that have done this kind of work before.  It sounds like the real problem was the toilet shifting around on a weak framework.  If you had let it sit, your old toilet may have done the same.  Talking to an experienced person might have caught the problem, and you probably would have needed a professional to handle redoing your floor.  The article makes it should like you rushed to the store with water leaking out.  Your first priority should have been to turn off the water using the house’s shut-off valves and drains.  I don’t know you personally, but the article really makes you sound like a ninny.  What were you rushing to get — towels?

The Shermans — you have run afoul of a common issue.  Unless you built the house and have a good memory, puncturing a pipe is something that even a professional can do (for a much higher price).    Hanging molding is definitely in the realm of stuff you can do yourself, and I would let a badly-placed pipe prevent you from doing home repairs in the future.

Anyways, the article seems to be targeted towards scaring people away from doing anything themselves.  From home repair to cosmetics, horror stories abound.  They quote a mechanic about people replacing car batteries.  The way most car batteries are setup, it would be hard to even put a battery in backwards — the wires don’t reach!  National chain stores like Advanced and Auto Zone will put the battery in for free if you ask.  How is the battery the most common issue?

I am solidly an amateur in a lot of things home repair centered, and I am completely incompetent when it comes to car repair.  However, if I don’t know how to do something, I keep asking more knowledgeable people until I know what needs done.  I also search for guides/videos about it.  Google/Youtube/howcast are very useful in this.  There is also the library with entire sections devoted to DIY projects.  With this, I can either figure out how to do something, or I take it to someone else that can.  With vehicles, I usually end up taking it to someone else.  With the exception of Carol, everyone in this article was dealing with a project that could have been done by themselves with just a bit more forethought.  Carol was almost certainly dealing with a structural issue and the leaky toilet was the sympton.  A bit of research could have revealed that. “After making sure the bolts are tight,  can you move the toilet?  If so, you may not want to sit on it”.

Above and beyond saving money, people should at least attempt to be familiar with the things they use, especially those without moving parts (which are easier to understand).  If a contractor is going to work on your house, you should know what they are going to do (even if you can’t do it yourself).  People shouldn’t be scared to hang molding in their house.

One quote in particular stood out to me:

“We’ve been seeing a lot of musculoskeletal problems from people lifting heavy things, maybe moving or doing things they’re not accustomed to,” Dr. Lamelas said. “A lot of back injuries, shoulder injuries. Lacerations all the time.”

Well to me, the bigger issue isn’t the the musculoskelatal problems so much as the “things they’re not accustomed to”.

We are becoming a helpless society.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, cone a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.” - Heinlein, Robert

No, I’m not saying I’m a fan of floor (though they are pretty nifty and useful), but rather that putting a fan in a floor is a nifty idea.

I have this room that I call the “server room”, mainly because it is a room that contains servers.  I have been experimenting with different ways to keep it cool without running the air conditioner.  With the door and windows closed, it can heat up to 80+F in the room, even in the middle of winter.  During the winter, I had no actual windows in the room and one air conditioner in the wall.  This meant that with -7F outside, I had to run the air conditoner to keep the room cool.  No, at those temperatures, what really happened is that the A/C unit simply acted as a fan and probably never ran the compressor.  However, as fans go, the one in the A/C unit is fairly inneficient.

At that time, I cut another hole in the wall and installed a dual-window fan.  One fan was set to suck air into the room.  I angled that one to blow towards the wall.  The other fan is angled to blow to the center of the room and works as an exhaust fan.  Between them, they kept the room around 50F throughout the winter.  Up until this week, the room has been staying around 65F (On a side note, this room is somewhat insulated from the rest of the house).

Starting yesterday, the room started mirroring the outside world: 80F outside = 80F inside.  I tried switching completely to exhaust with no change.  Therefore, the A/C has been on again, at least during the day. Today however, I have implemented my new plan.

This room sits directly over the basement, which stays relatively cool year-round.   So step one was to pick up a floor-vent, cutting a matching hole and dropping it into place.  Step two was to create a wooden box big enough to hold an 11″ x 11″ box fan.  I then screwed the box fan into this box and attached it flush to the floor underneath the vent.  The final step was stapling an air-conditioner filter to the underside of the box, keeping basement dust out.  There were a few minor details — I had to remove the louvers on the vent so that the fan would fit up close to the grill, as well as cutting a hole for the plug in the box.  Since the server room is trafficed only by me, I decided to run the plug up into the server room, across 1.5′ of floor and plug it into the server room wall.  Otherwise, I would have plugged it in under the floor.  I also moved the server rack in position between the floor fan and the exhaust fans in the window.  My goal is to have cold air from the basement being blown up into the server room and then pulled through the server rack by the window fans.

Immediately, cold air started flowing up into the server room.  In the last half hour, the room temperature has come down from 83F to 79F, which is a nice 4 degree drop. According to my thermometer in the basement, it’s currently 70F down there, which kind of surprised me.  It feels much cooler.  So, it’s still to early to tell, but one would like to see the server room drop down to under 75F.  Most people like to keep these rooms around 65, but my servers are operating in acceptable ranges:


Sensor Location Temp Threshold
------ -------- ---- ---------
#1 PROCESSOR_ZONE 38C/100F 62C/143F
#2 CPU#1 37C/98F 73C/163F
#3 I/O_ZONE 48C/118F 68C/154F
#4 CPU#2 37C/98F 73C/163F
#5 POWER_SUPPLY_BAY 31C/87F 53C/127F

While it’s still too early to tell, I could see putting these in a couple other rooms.  Of course, these would have to be plugged in in the basement, but with the option to flip an on/off switch from upstairs.  I sniffed around the air coming into the server room and I’m not getting any sort of wet basement smell.  We’ll have to check again after a good rain.  I could see two of these in the front room (pool table room), one in my office, and one in the work shop area.  The living room just got new carpet, and I don’t want to cut it up anytime soon.

The cost?

(1) 10″ fan — about $12  at most dept stores (I had a used one)
(1) 1×6 wood, about 5′ long ($3 at YBC)
(8) 1.25″ screws dug out of a screw jar (< $1) - these are used to build box
(4) .75″ screws dug out of a screw jar (<$1) - these screwed the fan to the box
(1) 4 angle braces + screws, sold complete for $6 at Zimmermans
(1) air conditoner filter - $1 at most dept stores
(36) staples to staple the filter to the box.  $0.10?

Not counting the fasteners, you’re looking around $22 in parts.  If you have a cool basement, this provides a cheap source of cold air. You know.. to offset the carbon footprint of running behemoth servers 24×7.

I am in a position where I have 3 or 4 days each week with an incredible amount of downtime.  I also have a number of activities I’d like to complete.  Now these activities are of a more academic nature.  There are things I want to learn such as investing, system administration, and programming.  I also want to write about the things I’ve learned.  I’ve noticed (and people have pointed) out that I have a talent for technical writing.  In my communications with other people, I tend to write many paragraphs of text in a very methodical manner.

So, I have these things I want myself to learn and do, and I have the time to do it.  But what happens?  I find myself reading websites like reddit and commenting on people’s facebook profiles.  I watch movies to while away the time.  Sometimes I will start reading up on a certain stock or an investment strategy, but after a while I veer off and go on to something else.  Other times, I will start looking at some pages about getting started in Python, but again I will veer off.  The end result is that I can go weeks without accomplishing anything new.

If I make a todo list, I will work on that todo list for that day.  However, I can’t list everything on the todo list because once the list goes beyond something you can reasonably accomplish in one time period, it becomes a long-term plan.  Once it becomes a long-term plan, it falls to the wayside.  So, I’ve been thinking on this issue, and I’ve come up with a piece of the puzzle.  My focus is just too scattered to accomplish any of my goals.  Instead of making a todo list every once in a while when things pile up, I need to take my known downtime and make a schedule.   Assuming I have 10 hours available each of the 3 days, I can allocate a certain amount of time to each area I want to pursue.  The amount of time I allocated to each area can change over time, as long as I can maintain a habbit of allocating time each and every day (of downtime) to these pursuits.

My initial schedule contains two activities my friends know of, but I can’t reveal to the world at large (client confidentiality and such).  I call these my “secret projects”.

• 1hr = finance/investing research
• 1hr = studying for RHCE
• 2hr = studying and documenting certain aspects of system administration
• 1hr = working on secret project #1 (which also deals with system administration)   — this is an ongoing project with no immediate end in site that I can see.
• 1hr = documenting secret project #2 — this I hope to finish up within a few weeks of actually working on it.  Once this is complete, I hope to fill this slot with a programming concept I have in mind.

That would take care of 6 hours of my supposed 10 hours of downtime.  Downtime is also important to a well-balanced lifestyle.  I can take breaks between each task, or consolidate my breaks into watching a movie.  If I get really involved with any one task and run out of time for the others, that will still be more productive than spending 6 hours filling my time with 72 “5-minute activities”.

Today I took my first forray into the world of micro-lending.  Otherwise known as peer-to-peer lending, micro-lending is the act of lending small amounts of money to an individual.  These micro-loans are combined together into one larger pool of money which is lent out. I am using lendingclub.com.  The way this works is that someone seeking money puts in a loan request.  They list how much they need and what they need it for.  Lendingclub pulls their credit history and assigns them their interest rate and repayment terms.  If the borrower accepts, the loan is placed on lendingclub.com for funding.  People like me search through the various loans until we find one we like and then we buy into it (we buy “notes).  Once the loan is funded, the money is sent to the borrower, and the game is in motion. Lendingclub processes payments from the borrower, subtracts 1%, and credits the noteholders (like me) based on how much they bought in.

The first loan, I put $50 into.  The total loan is for $16,500 to pay off a Prius loan, plus consolidate some other loans.  Repayments are for 3 years at 9.32%.  Assuming they pay it off, I should earn just over 8.32% on that $50.  The borrower has a credit score of between 714-749, no delinquencies and they claim that they are moving into an apartment that will save them $800/month.  Overall, this loan seems fairly solid.  The other loans are still solid, but in one, the borrower has a delinquency in the last 2 years.  The third loan has no delinquencies, but the borrower is using 94% of their credit line (which could be attributed to their mortgage).  On these loans, interest is over 13%.  I put $25 into each of them.

All of the loans are over 95% funded and I believe that they will be fully funded in the next 24 hours.  If they don’t get funded, the borrower can either lower their requested amount or cancel the loan.  If they cancel, that money gets returned to us.  Once the loan becomes active though, that money is “gone”.  Altogether, I have $100 spread between3 loans, averaging over 10% (after lendingclub fees).

The downside is that one has to wait about 3 years to truly see if the investment will pay off.  In that regard, it’s like a CD but without the bank guarantee.  Working through lendingclub seems to be a safer bet than dealing with stocks over a three year period, the drawback being that you can’t pull your money out like you can with stocks.  So, this will most likely be a very small part of my investing practice, but I can always be surprised.

I’ve decided to go ahead and take the One Hundred Pushups AND the Two Hundred Situps challenge.  The idea behind each is that in 6 weeks, you will build up to 100 pushups and 200 situps, respectively.  What I like about these two exercises is that they can be done just about anywhere, at any time, without equipment.  Running requires either a nice outdoor area or a treadmill.  However, I do hope to get myself back into running/cardio with a hope of getting below 21-minutes for the 3-mile run.  I think if I did that run today, it would be 27 minutes or more.

Now, for me, I have a few advantages.  I’m out of shape now, but I’ve been close to these levels before, thanks to my time in the Marines.  One tricky thing is getting used to “civilian counting”.  In the Marines, one pushup is counted as “down up, down up”.  In civilian counting, this is two pushups.  So in reality, I am taking the Fifty Pushup challenge.  Situps are counted the same way.  One advantage of the situp section is that I don’t have to time it, I just go till I stop.

Today I did my initial test.  I did 22 “military count” pushups or 44 “civilian count” pushups.    On both excercises, this puts me slightly ahead, meaning I can start on week 3, 3rd column for each excercise.

Today I took care of quite a few things I’ve been putting off.  It feels liberating.  I canceled my business insurance because I am not doing enough business to justify it.  For what I pay in vs what I actually do anymore, I can self-insure the little bit I deal with.  I spoke with Comcast about reverse dns (it wasn’t setup before) — they will actually let me have my own reverse dns entries, which is amazing.  They are also going to send someone out tomorrow morning to deal with my 30-second disconnects throughout the day.  Feeling encouraged, I canceled my unused Embarq business DSL, as well as my unused gym membership (I now have my “office gym”).

So let’s see:

• Insurace = $500/year
• DSL = $190/month, $2280/year
• Gym Membership = $20/month, $240/year

So in one afternoon, I saved $3020/year.  Not bad.

From another angle, I installed “FoxFilter” which is a personal content filter.  I got rid of the default entries and added the urls for reddit, slashdot, and digg.  I have been using these sites a lot recently as a sort of mental distraction.  I’ll be sitting around and start craving some mental simulation and instead of diving into one of my projects, I end up bringing up one of those sites.  Sometims you get a rather interesting article, or one of the articles has a really good comments thread.  The problem is that the whole experience is mostly a waste of time.  Maybe you might get some small insight that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, but generally you get just stimulated enough to think for a few moments, then you start diving in for more.  Once you exhaust the 2-3 (tops) worthwhile stories on the frontpage, you still aren’t satisfied so you start clicking on the other stuff — a funny picture, a funny video, someone’s pointless ramble.

My goal in blocking these sites is to hamper my efforts to waste time.  I’ve been telling myself and some of my friends about certain projects I’m going to work on in my “downtime”, but after a few months of distracting myself, no work has been done.

I’ve only heard of lentils in passing.  Before yesterday, I don’t think I’ve ever actually noticed them sitting on a grocery shelf.  Once in a great while I’ll see someone mention them, usually something like “when I was in college, I lived on lentil soup” and I believed that they were a type of noodle, similar to ramen.  Despite the occasional off-hand comment, I never put much stock in anyone ever eating these voluntarily.  However, I was doing some grocery shopping in the Dollar General (or the “DG” as we call it around here) and saw a bag of them next to the dried beans - $1/lb.  I figured “why not” and picked up a bag.  They are not noodles of course, but look more like dried peas.  Like rice, these things take a 2:1 (water:product) ratio (or higher) and will swell up to aroundt 3 times their size.  So a 1lb bag should come out to around 3-4 lbs cooked.

The bag had instructions on making some monster soup including 40 different vegetables and seasonings, but I wanted to try something much simpler that didn’t involve a trip out again.  Searching the Internet, I discovered that these things were incredibly bland and you used them as a base for some other kind of soup.  I finally found a recipe on about.com that stayed fairly basic.  I did 2 cups of water to 1 cup of lentils and boiled away.  I added some salt-free garlic+herb, as well as some Italian seasoning, some salt, and some ground peppercorn.  After cooking about 10 minutes, it became apparent that I needed to add another cup of water, so in this case it was 3:1.  Unlike rice, you can apparently open the lid and stir these as you cook.  With rice, if you mess up your water:rice ratio or open the lid, your rice is ruined.

After 20 minutes, they were much more tender, but even with my seasoning, very bland.  I added some tuna fish which did just about nothing for the flavor.  Finally, I added a can of diced tomatoes and simmered them for another 5 minutes or so.  This plus some more peppercorn did the trick.  I had probably 2+ lbs of something that tasted incredibly good.  I figure the tomatoes were $1/can and I used just under half a bag of lentils (1 cup), so add $0.50 and I have several meals here.  The tuna did nothing either way,  so I’ll leave that out next time.  I’ll just guestimate and say I used $0.10 in seasoning (though it probably works out to much less if I buy in bulk).  I believe this 2-3 day supply of food could be had for < $2.

John Tomatoe Lentil Soup Recipe #1

• 1 cup washed lentils (wash in cold water)
• 3 cups water
• 1 can (1.5 cups) petite diced tomatoes or similar
• Ground peppercorn and other seasonings as desired

1. Boil lentils and water together
2. Reduce heat, add some seasoning - this will get the seasoning into the lentils
3. Simmer for 15-20 minutes or until tender — feel free to taste test as needed
4. Add tomatoes and simmer for another 5 minutes
5. Add more seasoning as needed

The Internet recommends adding salt in towards the end as salt will harden the lentils, causing them to take longer to cook.

Dried lentils can apparently be stored indefinitely in an airtight container in a dry environment, as can canned tomatoes.  If you are preparing for some sort of post apacolyptic scenario, you wouldn’t be too bad off to store this stuff in bulk, assuming you can find a way to boil water in your underground bunker.