One of the goals that I’ve set for myself for 2009 is to be a more social person. I’ve always had a problem making “small talk” in situations where I’m not entirely comfortable. If the topic or situation is one that I’m extremely interested or discussion is in an area I consider to be myself well versed in, I usually don’t have a problem speaking up and being heard. However, if I’m in a completely social situation or there are discussions of a topic that I don’t know very well I tend to clam up and just listen.

This tendency that I’ve noticed in myself also extends to online conversations. I tend to be more of a lurker and rarely jump into the conversation unless I can speak with absolute authority on a subject or I know lots of people from the community really well. Out of the dozens of forums I formally belong to, I post on two of them with any regularity. The same goes for Twitter and Friendfeed; I lurk and rarely jump in with my own comments.

I have sat down to write a new post at least a dozen times since my last post and probably a dozen times before that. The main reason I never did it was because I found myself wanting to discuss the election or politics since that was what was mostly being discussed anywhere. I am very confident in my beliefs and thought processes about politics, but that is the area I feel the least comfortable discussion with total strangers. So, I opted to keep quiet and just listen instead.

It’s not that I’m shy, if someone asks my opinion I’m glad to give it. It’s more of a control thing. I want to know how each person is going to react to what I say. If I know the subject really well or I know the people really well, I can gauge their reaction and make my response as non-controversial as possible. Otherwise, I feel out of control of the situation so I’d rather not saying anything.

I’ve come to realize that I’m probably missing out on some great opportunities to learn new things, explore ideas I’m not familiar with, and most definitely I’ve missed out on some great networking opportunities.  I attended a training class in December and won a book on breaking the ice. The book made some great points on what can come out of being bold enough to break the ice and talk to total strangers.

I plan to start slowly and working to increase my comfort level with jumping into the fray with people I don’t know. I hope that will translate into blogging more often (maybe starting a new blog), posting more meaningful posts to twitter and friendfeed, and even striking up conversations with random people I meet on the street. What trouble could that possibly get me into?

Money matters are certainly on a lot of people’s minds these days. Concerns about a recession and possibly a depression, government bailouts of financial institutions and automakers, the holiday retail season , and a dozen other things. Our household has been no different.

It tough for me to admit that we’ve made lots of financial blunders, even the same ones over and over again. Of course, I thought I had it all figured out in college until the credit card offers started coming in. I fell into the trap of thinking that I needed a credit card to ‘build credit’ to buy a car or a house later. That’s where it all went wrong.

The Debt Myth

Dave Ramsey points out that credit is one of the most aggressively marketed financial products ever. It is so pervasive in our society that most people could not fathom living without debt of some kind. The reason is that it plays to our instinct that we’ve got to have more stuff. We’ll figure out how to pay for it later, just give me more stuff. Think about all of the “0% interest” and “No payments for until 2040″ ads you hear or see on a daily basis.

I’ve talked to people who have elaborate systems for transferring their debt from one credit card to another every few months so they can keep paying low interest. No doubt it works, but it’s clearly walking a tightrope and eventually you will make a mistake and fall. A lot of people are finding themselves in similar situations because they bought way more house than they could afford at low interest rates thinking they would sell or refinance before the interest rates went up. Only the value of their house went down faster than their equity went up and they’re upside-down and default.

Is Debt Free?

I’ve been ‘debt-free’ several times in my life. I’ll work like a dog to pay everything off, but because my spending habits and basic philosophy about money hasn’t changed, I end up doing it all over again. It’s like a smoker claiming that they quit every time they extinguish a cigarette.

This time, though, I’m vowing that it will all be different. After reading, The Total Money Makeover, my wife and I sat down and discussed the principals and our goals of where we want to be. The first goal is to be debt-free except for the mortgage and the student loans within 12 months. This is quite aggressive when you consider that this includes some medical bills, a loan for a piano, and two cars.

Fortunately, we already recognized that we were getting killed by credit card payments and took steps to consolidate those earlier this year with a 401k loan that is paid directly from my check. This may not have been an ideal move and one I may not have done if I had been listening to Dave Ramsey before I did it. However, the 401k loan has a definite end date, a significantly lower interest rate (which I’m paying to myself), and the payment is less than 1/4 of what the combined minimum payments were. I’m not counting this loan in my ‘debt-free’ goal as it’ll take care of itself.

The Budget

Before we could start the baby steps, we had to do two things: commit to never using credit ever again and develop a budget.

I’ve done budgets before. Simple, right? Take a guess at how much you need to spend in each category and make sure you don’t spend in total more than you make. Doesn’t work, I always overspend. The trick that no one ever tells you is that I need a 0-sum budget. Every single penny of income must be earmarked for something.

What we discovered works for us is that we first make sure there is a minimum amount in the savings account for the emergency fund and a minimum amount in the checking account so we don’t have to worry about overdrawing if we get stupid for some reason (shouldn’t happen, right?). If either account is below the minimum, we get them to the minimum before spending anything.

Then we start subtracting committed expenses for the month (electricity, mortgage payment, water, cable TV, cell phone bill, etc). Then we budget for items that we will need to spend (gas, groceries, entertainment, etc). Then we take out minimum payments for debt (piano, student loans, medical bills) so they all get paid. Then, and here’s the important part: anything that’s left gets added to the Debt Snowball.

Cash is more painful to use than writing a check or swiping the check card. So, anything that we’ll be spending throughout the month is taken out in cash and placed in envelopes marked with what they are for. If we run out of cash in the grocery envelope, we either have to take it from another envelope (e.g. entertainment) or not buy groceries until the next month. The result is that no one needs to carry a checkbook or check card around with them for any reason. Anything in the budget that can be paid through online billpay is directly taken out of the account and everything else is taken out in cash.

The main reason budgets didn’t work for us before is that we tended to leave a ‘cushion’ in the account to make sure we had enough to get by until the next paycheck. The only problem was that as the next paycheck got closer, this cushion became ‘free money’ and tended to get blown on things we didn’t need. There’s no way to do that when you are budgeting every penny.

The Debt Snowball

We’ve taken all of our debts and listed them smallest balance to largest balance regardless of interest rate or other considerations. When we complete our written budget for the month, we take anything that is left and send it to the smallest debt. Once that debt is paid off, the minimum payment that was going to it becomes extra and gets added to the debt snowball.

If I’ve done my calculations correctly, we can easily make our initial goal of paying everything off except the mortgage and the student loans within 12 months. We will continue the same process and I’m hoping it will only take us another couple of years to get the student loans paid off. Once we do that, it’s off to baby step #3.

Intensity

As I mentioned, we are in a slightly better position than a lot of people starting this process because we already had an emergency fund started and we had recently reduced credit card payments to the point where we could actually start a debt snowball just by creating a budget. However, we were fully prepared to get extremely intense and we had worked ourselves up to quite a state before we actually sat down and realized that we just needed a proper budget.

We were prepared to cancel all forms of entertainment except for the Internet, sell one of the cars, turn off the cell phones, and seek additional employment to make this work. That’s how committed, intense, and fired up we got after reading what’s possible by following this plan and becoming debt-free.

We’re still having to make sacrifices and plenty of them, but fortunately we don’t have to go to quite the degree we thought we would. That makes the victory that much sweeter.

I’ve known my wife now for 15 years. One of the things I love about her is that she is a talented story teller and writer. Whether it’s a fictional story or a story about a funny thing that happened to her that day, I think she has a knack for unfolding a story in a funny and entertaining way. She tells me I’m biased, but I’m not the only one to tell her that she should be writing for a living. She also has a pretty healthy ego and confidence about herself, but when it comes to her writing she just refuses to put herself out there in any real way. I’m not sure if it’s the fear of rejection or whether she really doesn’t have confidence in her work, but she will only share her work with a few people and some of her writing she won’t even share with me.

I’ve tried for years to convince her that the Internet is a good place for her to familiarize herself with sharing her work in a semi-controlled way. Several years ago, I set up a completely anonymous website for her to post her stories and get comments and feedback from people. No one would know it was her work, but she could get some valuable insight into whether her stuff is any good beyond what her loving husband says. As blogs, podcasts, and social media sites have come along, I’ve tried again and again without much luck to convince her to give it a shot and go “online”.

The closest I got was for her to agree to record an audio version of one of her books and let me serialize it on a podcast, but in the end she backed out when we started discussing technical details like what to call the podcast. For someone who will tell every stranger we meet on the street our life story, she claims she doesn’t want to share anything about herself online. She refuses to sign up for Facebook, saying that if she wanted to connect with someone she knew, she’d just call them (yes, honey, I know). Even dismissing the whole writing angle though, I just think it would be cool if I could send her messages on Twitter.

So, the other day when my lovely wife walked into my office and announced, “I want you to set me up with a blog,” I think you can imagine just how long it took me to recover and pick my jaw up from the floor. Even more shocking was that she passed the “what do you want to call it” seriousness test. So, I helped her create a WordPress.com account and configure her very first blog.

I can’t promise you’ll get to see the results of her great American novel, but she’s already posted a couple of stories. One is the background story for the name of the blog and the other is her take on a funny incident that happened last night. Before I sent you off to read it, let me give you something to compare it against. My post to Twitter regarding the incident last night was, “just spent 20 minutes chasing a small bird around the house. Caught him with a towel over the cat litter box and let him go outside.” Now, keep in mind that Twitter purposely limits messages to 140 characters (why it’s called microblogging) and go read my wife’s tale of the same incident. See if you can’t see what I see.

The other day I watched the video for “It’s Pitch Black” by MC Frontalot which is a tribute to text adventure games. The chorus is, “You are likely to be eaten by a Grue. If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose fault it could be. Not a torch or a match in your inventory.”

This brought back some of the old text adventure games I used to play. I remember Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Goddess of Phobos, and several others I remember but don’t recall the names. I remember sitting for hours every day after school trying to solve the puzzles and typing endless commands like, “pick up book” and “put book in backpack”. It was like reading a book, but one that you could interact with and control the outcome of to a degree.

In some cases, I bought the Infocom hint books. These books contained clues to get you past the more difficult parts of the game, but they allowed you to control how much information and how quickly they gave you hints. Each question was answered first with vague answers and then they got more specific, finally just outright revealing the answer. The innovative part is that you’d use a marker to reveal the answers one at a time as you needed them.

When I was in college, the Internet was more widely available to me, and I discovered multi-player text adventure games like MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and others. One particular MUD was responsible for me ducking into the computer labs between classes to kill goblins and shrews. I spent many, many hours building and scripting objects in more than one MOO and even ran my own MOO (LynxMOO) where I met some lifelong friends.

If you Google my name, you’ll find me listed in the credits for enCore, a distance education project using MOOs. If I remember correctly, I scripted an overhead projector object which the professor could load with pre-prepared slides and as she advanced to each one the text would be displayed to all of the students at the same time. The enCore project still exists and they have switched their focus to providing a web-based interface for text-based MOOs.

I suppose you could say text was the basis for my fascination with MMORPGs. I’ve played at least a dozen different MMORPGs over the years and I’m currently active in two. I play Tabula Rasa every day with a great group of friends from my time in Neocron and Neocron 2 (where I was also a volunteer GM for 2.5 years). I also casually play Eve Online. Tabula Rasa is very fast paced and intense so Eve provides a calmer, more social experience when I’m in the mood for that.

Back to text. Surprisingly, text is not dead. You can find plenty of places to play text adventure games online, including the original Infocom games. There is still an active community for MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes. In particular, I revisited a MUD a co-worker introduced me to almost 5 years ago called Medievia. They just celebrated 17 years of being online and they are still adding features!

They now have a special font which allows them to easier draw ASCII maps of the world and sound triggers that can be configured to play specific .wav files when certain events happen in the game.

I was surprised how quickly everything came back to me. I remembered where things were in the world, how to cast specific spells and when. What dangers to avoid and where to go to level. Strangely enough, it was like picking up a book you haven’t read in a while and finding new details you never noticed before. I think I’ll pop in from time to time to see how things are going and maybe kill a goblin or two.

For at least 6 months, my family has been harassed by one very persistent telemarketer. I have received postcards, letters, and flyers in the mail. My wife and I have received calls on at home, work, and cell phone numbers (home number registered with the Do Not Call Registry). Most recently, they somehow got my son’s cell phone number which was just activated with a brand new number less than a few months ago. The cell phone was intended for limited use by family and for emergencies and we haven’t given it to anyone. That means Verizon Wireless either sold the number to them or they are war dialing known wireless exchanges (most likely the latter).

The amazing thing is that I was not able to get the company’s name until today. They are using an automated system to call and play a message informing you that your automobile warranty will expire (it’s always the 2nd and final notice) and you should contact them to secure a renewal right away. If you listen to the message, you are given an option to talk to a representative or have your number removed from their records. If you choose the second option, the call immediately terminates (and obviously doesn’t remove your number).

Both of my vehicle’s factory warranty expired some time ago and I have an extended warranty through my credit union. I have no need for their services, but I have talked to a rep numerous times to find out who they are and why they won’t stop calling. If you talk to a rep and start to inquire anything about who they are, they hang up on you. If you ask them to remove you from their list, they hang up on you. If you ask to speak to a supervisor, they hang up on you. If you say you want to buy their service they ask for make, model, and VIN number and have no idea who you are otherwise. If they are supposed to be renewing an existing contract, why don’t they ask for my name or other information to lookup my account?

The calls started out weeks apart, then became several times a week, and now they are several times a day to different numbers. I recently had another run in with another telemarketer who wanted to give me a free cruise which followed the same pattern, but after yelling and screaming and threatening lawsuits they have finally stopped calling (so far). The numbers which show up on caller ID are always bogus – if you call them back, it’s a disconnected number.

The rep my wife talked to today apparantly wasn’t informed that he was supposed to hang up on anyone who asks what the company name and/or business location is, because he actually gave it to her after giving him enough fake information to make him think she was really interested. They are National Auto Warranty Services out of St. Lous, MO.

It would appear that National Auto Warranty Service is already in a bit of trouble with the Attorney General of Missouri for calling people on the Do Not Call list, providing misleading and false information, and failing to honor requests not to be called. It would also appear that things were going so well in Missouri that they have now branched out nationwide. You know it’s bad when people leave comments on your company’s job postings.

If they’re sales and marketing tactics aren’t bad enough, I’m sure you won’t find it any surprise that even if you do buy one of their warranties you may have trouble getting your claim paid or cancelling your policy.

(Click on the photo to view the larger version or here to view the album)

As if finishing up my final semester of grad school wasn’t stressful enough, the professor for my Capstone class went missing around the beginning of March. He posted our mid-term exam on March 5th with the due date to be prior to the start of Spring Break a week later.

At the same time, we had two major assignments due – a research paper due on March 31st and a case study on April 16th. Students had plenty of questions about both assignments, but professor wasn’t responding to e-mail or questions in the (online) classroom. He did post an announcement on the 30th that we could have a deadline extension for a week and the Powerpoint in the syllabus was optional and required only for the face to face class. WHAT? Why couldn’t we have known that before we did it?

As the deadline for the next assignment started to get closer, the students were wondering why we hadn’t been assigned a case study to work on or assigned to groups. The assignment was supposed to be a group project and we’re supposed to be assigned a case study to bring up to date. The deadline for the assignment came and went with no word.

Finally, this week we heard from the professor that he was on an emergency business trip to the UK and Ireland and he had no Internet access. That’s a relief that he’s okay and that he’s back now. I just curious how this will all be resolved. As it stands, I have no graded work so far in this class and the final us coming up in a week or so. Am I passing? Am I failing? I don’t know.

I wouldn’t be so worried, but I’m flying out to Maryland for the commencement and I’d really like to know I’m going to walk the stage.

I’m pretty active on Twitter (mostly lurking anyway), but it’s taken me a while to really get into it. For example, tonight we had a large storm come through the area. I’m also a ham radio operator and I’ve been to weather spotter training, though I haven’t volunteered. I prefer to stay home and listen to the other spotters on the ham radio. So, tonight I decided to twitter what the spotters were saying since I knew a few people from the area had started following me on twitter.

It was a really cool experience to interact with other people in the same area and having the same experience. Afterwards, I noticed that I gained several new followers all from this area. Maybe I’ll do more weather spotter twittering in the future.

My biggest challenge has been explaining to friends, family, and co-workers what Twitter is and why they would want to use it. Fortunately, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com has done a better job than I ever could. Have a look.

Beginner’s Quick Start Guide and Tutorial to Using Twitter

Infected Novel