How about you fire your marketing guys who cooked that up and invest in quality control instead? Maybe the next time when you “save” a few cents by importing the cheapest supply possible, you’ll at least detect the problems before vets need to alert you to them? Is that too hard a concept to grasp?

The “natural” schedule for a budget is a month - many of the major expenses you pay are on a monthly basis. Yet my paycheck arrives on a bi-weekly basis (i.e. every 14 days), and Petra has an even more irregular income. That’s no basis for planning.

So we sat down and figured out a few things. First steps, what’s the minimum income we’re guaranteed to make in any given period. For me, that’s two paychecks. For Petra, we picked the worst month in the last year and went a bit below that. That’s our ‘base salary’.

Next, we set up our ING account¹. There is a ‘Salary’ account that receives my paychecks, plus Petra’s monthly contribution from her account. From there, we have an automatic fund transfer every 1st and every 15th - into an account aptly named ‘PayForIt’. As a result, each month we have the same amount of money available.

We also save some money - a paycheck every two weeks translates into 26 a year, and only 24 of them go to the pay account. In other words, two full pay checks a year sit in a savings account - I’m automatically saving money without doing anything. Any ‘extra’ money that Petra makes above the assumed minimum also gets squirreled away.

This has the side benefit that we have to learn to live with slightly less money than we actually make - never a bad skill to have.

If you implement this yourself, be aware that the transition period to this scheme can be a bit awkward. Often, a lot of items are due on the 1st, so you’ll end up having to pay them in the month before. If you don’t plan for that, you will encounter moments where your PayForIt account is underfunded - and you definitely want to avoid that.

In the meantime, I’ll keep a log of this journey. And the first step of any journey is getting to know the terrain. Although I’ve been here for almost four years, most of L.A.’s neighborhoods are still fairly unknown to me. Thankfully, there’s plenty of information online - I started with a neighborhood map of L.A. and a pricing heatmap of L.A.

This gives me at least a good starting point - anything that’s too far away from my work and too pricey will not get checked regularly. From there, it is easy to use a site like Zillow or Redfin to get a more detailed view of what’s available at what cost.

Of course, there are plenty of open questions left:

• What are those neighborhoods like?
• How much house can I afford? What are the hidden costs?
• What about foreclosures?
• Condo or House?

And many more - so expect to see more on this topic in the near future.

There are a couple of things I learned from this:

• The famed hypodermic needles lying around - urban myth, at least in Westwood.
• There’s a reason people who do this for a living use a tong, and not just gloves - my back hurts from only doing this 45 minutes
• Obviously, people are not really interested in their environment at all. The only people who commented were old or homeless. Or, as one of my colleagues put it, they were able to move slowly enough to actually notice their environment. Oh, and one middle-aged guy thought we were a chain gang.

But the main thing to take away from this:

Seriously. The amount of cigarette butts on the streets is insane - probably 75% of our total trash haul. Often you find it even in close proximity to ash trays. Which jives perfectly what I see from most smokers - just blithely flinging their trash everywhere. Even out of the car while being on the highway. (I had a couple of those land in my car, thank you very much!)

So please, if you have to smoke, do pay some attention to your environment and put your trash where it belongs, OK?

Well, actually quite a lot. First of all, Petra and I took a dolphin watching trip to Dana Point. Which was especially fun considering we’ve just been whale watching in Mexico - I could get used to being out on the ocean.

But far from just slacking off, I’ve been quite busy blogging-wise, too. If you’re visiting this place via a web browser (as opposed to a feed reader) you’ll have noticed the new theme, result of an upgrade to the latest WordPress

And since that wasn’t enough, I’ve started a new blog - Groby’s Coding Adventures. After several people hinted that maybe I’m getting sometimes a bit too technical over here, this is the place where I’m taking all my programming ramblings, ideas, thoughts and projects.

And because that still wasn’t enough fun, I’ve started exploring “Son of iCalFix”. For various reasons, I was not very happy with the technical direction iCalFix was taking. (More on that at the new place…)

So instead, I’m exploring new ways to achieve the same result - or event better results. I’ll still keep you posted here whenever there’s a major release.

So, after all this is done, I hope I’ll now have a bit more time to post over here.

Now, there are quite a few things wrong with that:

• Is there really any computing professional who needs yet another mug?
• Do we as a society really think it’s a good idea to spend money on useless gifts? How does that jive with the “social responsibilities” in the ACM’s ethics code?
• If it has to be a mug, could we please not have it made in China? I’d rather not get lead poisoning, if possible.
• And really, if you do anything that has a visual element, try at least asking a designer. That mug definitely screamed “programmer graphics”

Either way, I voiced my opinions to my “customer service representative”. (There’s a depressing job title.) The reply?

Thank you for your comments.  
They will be forwarded to manangement for consideration.

Uh, yeah. Not only does this tell me that you’ll round-file them as soon as possible, it also tells me that my “customer service representative” is nothing more than an e-mail aggregator. I’m seriously not certain if I really want to be a member in a society that so obviously just doesn’t care.

Add the lawyer cost on top of it, and it starts being quite a bit of money. Then again, it’s definitely worth it for me. Can’t wait till I can tell you guys that I took my oath. Of course, since the government is involved, there’ll be a rather long wait before that happens… Current estimates are around 10-12 months. (Which unfortunately puts it after the presidential election)

So, “yay citizenship application!”. I’ll be celebrating tonight - have a glass too!

Unless you really don’t want people to read your old entries….

Should you dare to specify inline CSS style in a <span> tag, be sure you separate the property name and the value with a colon, not an equal sign. Especially tricky if you copy width/height from an image tag.

While saner browsers opt to treat the attribute as not specified (since it’s not well formed), Firefox treats the whole <span> definition as erroneous. Result - my beautiful pictures didn’t show up in Firefox. (Both Safari and IE did the right thing and just formatted as if I hadn’t specified a width/height)

Every day I work with it, I love CSS more…

This Christmas, Petra and I had some time to ourselves, and started sorting through old pictures and clothes. As we did that, we realized that we’re carrying around a ton of stuff that has no real use for us. In an effort to get some space in our apartment, we have been working on cleaning out unused items ever since then.

There were donations, items sold at work, items sold via eBay, you name it. But the hardest part to tackle are mementos - items that carry a sentimental value, but are really completely useless apart from that. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can say good-bye to old accolades and awards.

For example, during my advergaming years, my creations won quite a few advertising competitions. Yes, it was fun winning them - but if it’s more than a couple of years ago, it’s really time to say farewell to them. I’ve come to realize that I’d rather focus on creating new exciting things than dwelling on past achievements.

This post is a final farewell for these items - right after it’s up on the web, I’ll make a trip to the trash bin.