07.30.06 Hangover

There is no clearer way to state it than this.

 

Tracy = 11;  Ean = 9 + 3 (handicap) = 12

07.24.06 Final Touches

The last week at Wamu is here.  We had a launch this weekend, which will also be my last.  I’ve been helping out with a few items here and there, but everyone is so busy, they really don’t have time to give me anything to do.  Funny.  At this point, I’m mostly shoring up the business contacts, resume items, old emails, etc. 

 

Would You Like to Join My Totally Fake Seeming Business Contact Network?

Today, I got my Linkedin changes updated, and sent invites off to about 90 colleagues, business contacts, friends, and etc.  Of course, if you’re reading this and I forgot YOU, please forgive me, and add me to your Linkedin contacts, my email is eanhernandez@eanh.net now, as the wamu.net address will be shut off at the end of this week.  I also got all my contacts off of my work laptop and got them nicely backed up.  If you don;t know what Linkedin is, basically it’s an easier way to maintain contact with your business network, and also lets you network with people at your company or school, or in your industry, etc., but does a reasonably good job of isolating your from out and out spam.  You can read all about it here.

 

False Advertising or Good Marketing?

While I was updating my Linkedin profile, I found out that I could enter in my school, if I’m in school.   I’ve actually been wondering for quite a while what…

2006 – MBA, University of Oxford, UK

…would look like on my resume, but have been kind of freaked out that I would jinx things if I gave it too much thought.  I certainly never would have posted my resume with Oxford listed on it, I felt like I have to earn that right before trumpeting even the fact that I’m attending.  But then all of a sudden, after putting “attending Oxford” on my Linkedin profile, I was staring at a very resume-like web page that clearly indicated that I’m going to Oxford.  So, I was a bit weirded out.  Thinking about it a bit more, I reasoned that:

 

a. Having a 1 year gap on Linkedin or my resume probably looks worse than having the name of a school that I haven’t graduated from yet… what am I going to put?  “Chillin”?

b. Linkedin provides a facility for showing that you are currently at a school, so I can’t be doing something all that uncommon.

c. You don’t wait until you leave a job to list the fact that you were employed at it.

d. I actually AM going to Oxford for school this fall, so what’s the harm in noting it?

 

It still seems a bit like cheating to have Oxford on there before I’ve even moved to the UK, let alone graduated.  I still need to think about this.  You can see the profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/eanhernandez …tell me what YOU think.

  

 

Super Totally Hardcore Kickass No-Way-Can-Fail Data Storage

Sounds pretty dorky, right?  Here’s the thing: if you have a shit-ton of data, and to make it sound less totally lame, let’s not call it “data”, let’s call it “pictures your wife took” (and will lose her mind over if they get erased), “your whole frigging music collection” (because dragging 800+ CDs to the UK seemed like a really bad idea), instead of “data”, “all the software” (you ever bought), (your grandiose)“financial plans” and “all the emails” (you got over the course of the last 4 years).  So, as I was saying, if you have a shit-ton of “data”, and want it to be around after your laptop dies, you back it up to somewhere.  But what if your obsessive music collecting and photographic tendencies leave you with too much “data” to keep on one paltry laptop hard drive?  I don’t know what normal people do, but what I did was buy a 250 gigabyte network hard drive from Ximeta.  Network storage is a big big deal in the IT world, but I think that it’s a really good idea for small time users too, on a much smaller scale, of course.  There appear to be two main ways of handling network storage for the small time chump:

 

1. Hard drive with a network card. 

This approach is the one I went with: basically, it’s a hard drive with a network card, and is not smart enough to do anything further, including actually be accessed by a computer using standard networking protocols on a network.  So, you have to have some kind of special custom made networking software that runs on your computer which handles the networking bit.  This isn’t a BIG deal, it’s just a minor pain, especially since the networking software doesn’t handle wireless as well as it could, tends to be finicky about having multiple computers attaching to the network drive, requires patching, isn’t as mature/robust as standard networking protocols, etc. etc. etc.  The upside is that you don’t have to deal with the issues presented by option #2.

 

2. Really simple computer which is mostly just a hard drive and network card.

This approach is the approach I think I should have gone with.  The way this works is: you have a butt-simple computer with a network card and a big hard drive, and connect to it from any computer on the network (just like with any other computer).  The upside here is that you don’t have to monkey around with special networking software.  The downside is that since you are dealing with a computer, you have all the joy of maintaining and administering an operating system.  Oh how very nice for you.  This blows, because you’re going to need to either deal with learning to administer a standard, simple operating system like Linux, which I’m really not interested in if I can avoid it; or deal with a standard, really complex operating system like Windows XP, which just SUCKS, because you’re going to be dealing with automatic updates, reboots, virii, etc. etc.  The other possibility is dealing with some kind of stripped down special custom made operating system software, which sort of gets you back into the reliability issues associated with option number 1 above.  I’ve even heard of people building these network storage drives from some old shitty PC, and running some small footprint version of Linux to maintain the system.  That sounds like a science project to me, and the only science projects I’m interested in are made in Belgium with 8% or more alcohol by volume.

In the end, option 1 seemed less shitty at the time of purchase, so I went with that.  And, Frank had one of these that he liked, so I figured it couldn’t be all bad.  In retrospect, I’ve had enough trouble with the networking software at this point that I’d be willing to give option 2 a try if I were doing it all over again.  However, I’ve already spent the dough ($180), so I’m committed.  I had all of my music, photos, downloads, files, old emails, etc. safely backed up onto this drive when I had a scary thought: “what happens if the network drive dies?”  This actually happened to Frank after about 4 years, so I know it can happen.  I’d be in the soup if this drive died, because not only would I lose my stuff, I wouldn’t even be able to start moving stuff to somewhere else (like my or Reba’s laptop) when things got sketchy, because there’s so much data on the network drive. 

 

Solution: Just Buy One More!

It probably sounds dumb, but I decided that the only way to be really safe with all this precious data would be to buy a second network drive.  There is a technology called “RAID” which basically takes anything you put onto one drive and then automatically copies it to an identical drive, without you ever having to worry about it.  This is pretty neat, and if something should happen to my main network drive, I’ll have another backup of it.  The backup came today, and I am getting ready to RAID it up with my existing drive.  This is a little more complicated that it would seem, because I actually have to re-format the existing drive in order to RAID enable it with the new one. 

This requires moving the 62 gigabytes of backed up data from the main drive to a temporary location, which of course required finding a temporary location with 62 gigabytes free, which of course required that I take the old desktop computer out of the storage unit, plug it back in at the house, and clean some space off of it. This represents a step backwards with regard to the general “moving out” plan, but that’s a separate issue entirely.

 

I bet NO ONE actually read the whole thing this time.

 

e

 

 

 

07.20.06 Sell sell sell

Endgame

We are now in the final phase of our US tenure... we both quit our jobs next week, the big going away luau is next Saturday, the house has been sold (still sorting some closing details), the cars go up for sale shortly, the financial plans have been laid, and the 1 way plane ticket has been bought!

It's sad leaving this house. It's such a great place, and we have taken so much time and consideration to make it into a home that really feels like we belong to. Summer days here are just so very pleasant and breezy, and the garden looks so beautiful with it's lavender and dahlias. With the UK having record heatwaves, I'm sure that I'm in for a bit of a shock my first few weeks in the new flat. Sigh.

 

 

Bubble?

 Luckily, the house sold for the asking price, and we have made a reasonable rate of return on our money, although not the extravagant proceeds housing boom-ists would have you dreaming of. The figuring exercise was kind of fun: assuming that I treated the money I put into my house as an investment that I could have put into a stock or mutual fund or whatever, I tried to figure out what interest rate I got on the house investment. Making an apples to apples comparison was a bit difficult, but I think I'm close...

 
1. I assembled the following values:
 
 
* down payment
* improvements (paid in cash out of pocket, not including HELOC)
* extra monthly payment (mortgage payment + interest only HELOC payment - rent payment I would have had if I stayed at my old rental)
* income tax saved (due to income tax deductions)
* final takeaway (cash left after selling house, paying HELOC, closing costs, realtor costs, etc.)
 
2. I figured out my "investment" as: investment = down payment + improvements + extra monthly payment - income tax saved
 
3. I figured out what yearly compound interest rate would result in my investment growing to my final takeaway over 3.75 years...
 
4. the rate worked out to ~9.8% each year for almost 4 years straight, which is 2.3% better than my stock broker did for me just last year. Not quite the "double your money" type of return that people in Seattle seem to think they are going to get on a house, but still, nothing to sniff at! obviously I didn't take sweat equity into consideration, and I don't have to buy a lawnmower to keep my stock portfolio saleable, so there are probably more hidden costs to be exposed. But then again, you can't throw a cool cocktail party on the deck at your wachovia securities statement either. :)
 
 

 

 

Updated Schedule 
 
 The current plan is as follows:
 
July 28 - quit jobs
July 29 - BIG luau at Tasha's
August 1 to 30 chillllll
August 30 - vacate house, fly ONE WAY to the UK
September 4 - meet mom at Heathrow
September 15 - Reba comes out
September 19 - Reba goes to Greece with Leah, Austen, Marshall, and others
October 2 - EAN STARTS GRAD SCHOOL
October 8 - Reba comes back to Oxford Mom Trip
 
The regular reader might notice the Sept 4 entry in the list above... YES, my mom can come on the trip! This is an absolutely awesome turn of events. I was worried that her health issues would prevent her from coming out, but the trip is totally set. We're going to do all sorts of great UK and Ireland stuff: Oxford museums, British Museum, Tea at Fortnam's, Stonehenge, Parliament Square, visit Swinford (ancestral home of the O'Donnells, my mom's family), Aran Islands, and to top it all off, we'll stay a few days at a fancy old country house come hotel on the west coast of Ireland. This is the trip that mom has wanted to do forever, and it's going to be a real honor to be able to be the one who took her on it.
 
 

Luau Rising 
 
Tasha is famous for ragingly good Luaus. She really goes nuts for them too... decorating the yard in tiki stuff and bamboo; Hawaiian shirts, pulled pork, enough rum to choke an alcoholic Titanosaur; she even flies flowers in from Hawaii (actually cheaper than local wholesale prices, for whatever reason). The Primate 5 (http://www.myspace.com/theprimatefive) are playing, as is my band, Tales From the Birdbath (http://www.neatshows.com). Today we bought something like 4 gallons of rum. This will be in addition to the 3 kegs of beer and whatever else folks bring. This should be a whopper, and in all likelihood should get totally shut down by the authorities. Yahoo! Evite claims there are 96 confirmed attendees, 22 maybes, and 178 undecideds, adding a touch of apprehension to the air. This should be a blast!