So we had a good time on our trip to MD. Thanks to everybody who showed up for Friday’s dinner… it was simply awesome realizing that there are still some really good friendships with people who knew us when we knew nothing. Special thanks to Justin & Kelly, Jon & Michelle, Jen & Andy, Patty & John, Andrea & Genna, and those who made it to J & K’s house after the dinner to just talk the night away. You guys all rock.

I have more pictures than the ones below (many more!) but I think I want to just get the gallery module working on my blog to make this easier… converting each photo to thumbnail and web-reduced version by hand takes too much time.

1. Our first night in town, we sit down to sing through “Once More With Feeling”, the score to the Buffy The Vampire Slayer musical of the same name.
2. Justin sings his heart out as Giles. I believe this was “So tell me… Where do we go from here?”
3. Tickling ivories.
4. Christy went to the DC Mormon temple on Friday morning.
5. Self-portrait. I’ve gotten uglier with time.
6. She’s gotten prettier.
7. The dinner gang relaxes. Missing from picture is Kelly, at bottom left. You can see her and the bun in the oven in the first picture.
8. Andy & Jen strike a pose for the camera.
9. Relaxing at Coldstone with Andy, Jen, Justin, and Kelly.
10. This was the majority of the attendees at the 2006 QOHS 1991 15-year high school reunion. Can anybody name everyone from left to right? (Check it out in hi-resolution. 1.6 megabytes.)
11. A Real Wild Child. I won’t identify who she is online, but I just love this picture.
12. Christy, Laurie, and Bryan.

We also got a little video of the blackmailable “Chicken Dance” at the QOHS 15 year reunion for the class of 91:

Watch the silly 2 minute video. It is rather large, and is NOT a streaming video; dialup users beware.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit hits a pedestrian. — Frank Herbert, “The White Plague”

Pat and Jim were a couple of drinking buddies who worked as aircraft mechanics in Eagle Pass, TX.

One day the airport was fogged in and they were stuck in the hangar with nothing to do.

Pat said, “Man, I wish we had something to drink!”

Jim says, “Me too Y’know, I’ve heard you can drink jet fuel and get a buzz. You wanna try it?”

So they pour themselves a couple of glasses of high octane hootch and get completely smashed.

The next morning Pat wakes up and is surprised at how good he feels. In fact he feels GREAT! NO hangover! NO bad side effects. Nothing!

Then the phone rings . It’s Jim.

Jim says, “Hey, how do you feel this morning?”

Pat says, “I feel great. How about you?”

Jim says, “I feel great, too You don’t have a hangover?”

Pat says, “No that jet fuel is great stuff — no hangover, nothing. We ought to do this more often.”

Jim says, “Yeah, well there’s just one thing.”

Pat says, “What’s that?”

Jim says, “Have you farted yet?”

Pat says, “No…”

Jim says, “Well, DON’T, ’cause I’m in Denver!!!!!!”

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: I went over to my friend, he was eatin’ a pickle. I said “Hi, what’s happenin’?” He said “Nothin’.” Try to sing this song with that kind of enthusiasm; As if you just squashed a cop. — Arlo Guthrie, “Motorcycle Song”

Happy 4th of July, everybody!

July 13-16, 2006 is the annual Hellfire Rocket Launch from the Bonneville Salt Flats 90 miles west of Salt Lake City, UT. I don’t know if any Barnsonians save me are going to be in the area for it, but these launches are simply awesome. This year, they’re cleared to 15,000 feet for standard flights, and have launch windows to 25,000 feet.

For those unfamiliar with “model” rockets, this is some serious altitude, exceeding that of some surface-to-air missiles.

For all registrants, there will also be ample opportunity to fly all the “small stuff”, from 1/2A size on up. Although this is a regional launch for UROC, Hellfire has grown in popularity largely due to the unique setting: an enormous dry lake bed at over 4200 feet elevation, almost perfectly flat and smooth. It draws high-speed racecars and rocket-launchers alike because, well, where else can you launch a rocket to 25,000 feet and then watch exactly where it lands without it being over a hill or something?

The downside? Salt is intensely reflective… enough so that you’re likely to burn the underside of your chin and ears if you aren’t careful. Bring on the sunscreen!

Anyway, I’m excited. Gotta see if my daughter wants to register and set off her rockets at this event.

Here’s a video (warning: large) of what happens when you combine rednecks, fireworks, and boredom…

http://members.cox.net/thebrinkmans3/fireworkprank.wmv

My wife recently went out and bought a great, big bag of Jolly Ranchers from the store to use as “potty treats” while we are training our two-year-old in how to use the restroom. Of course, being who I am, I had to raid the bag a bit. I tried the cherry, which was OK, the watermelon, which was as good as always, and then started digging around for the lemon ones.

You see, when I was a kid, one of my favorite candies were lemon Jolly Ranchers. I’d tuck them way in the back corners of my mouth and they’d make my jaw ache, they were so sour. But I’d eat them until I got canker sores, because I liked ’em so much.

But alas… digging through a 5 lb bag of Jolly Ranchers… There are no Lemon Jolly Ranchers anymore!

The pain! The horror! In haste, I checked the Hershey’s web site:

http://www.hersheys.com/jollyrancher/hard_candies.asp

ERASED FROM HISTORY! An entire chapter of my youth, gone. My kids will have a hard time believing such a delicious, jaw-lock-inducing treat ever existed now. Lemon Jolly Ranchers are no more, and aren’t even given the decency of being included as part of the “Original Assortment”. The Original Assortment was five flavors, NOT FOUR!

To even get close to it, now I have to buy the “Tropical Assortment” and make do with “Lemon-Lime”.

You know, if I’m gonna enjoy a candy once every decade or so, I’d like for it not to change, plzthxu.

Man, if you think your job is boring, watch this video. It’s not too long, so it should be a short download even on dial-up…

Recent research indicates that you are most likely to win an eBay auction if you snipe, and less likely to win for every bid you place on a particular item. Important stuff to know, particularly for my wife, the eBay queen! Love that gal 😉

Here’s a letter I sent to my former Internet Service Provider this morning. What fun.

Dear Fortress ITX,

I have cancelled my subscription to your service for my VPS at 69.72.159.11.

Let me be very clear on why I did this: you have gone from being a reliable provider with decent customer service and a responsive support staff to a clueless band of wannabes with horrible uptime, overwhelming turnover, and a technical support staff second to EVERYBODY.

You started as jvds.com, a service by geeks, for geeks. It was cool, you kept up, and problems were resolved quickly and personably.

Now you’re just another corporate face without accountability, respect for the intelligence of your customers, or the ability to, at a minimum, keep your machines running without crashing on a daily and weekly basis.

Goodbye.

Sincerely, Matthew P. Barnson Former customer

Recently we’ve been inundated with “0% APR” offers from various credit card companies. After trying two of them out, and being very disappointed, I finally sat down and read all the fine print. And I figured out what should have been obvious at the beginning:

0% APR is only good for the credit card companies. It’s very bad for an individual consumer’s financial health.

Today, before I shredded it, I read in detail the terms of the new “0% APR” Discover Card we received in the mail. Unfortunately, it’s mulch now, so I can’t refer to the exact verbiage, but here are the terms they are not specific about:

1. Your billing cycle is a 25-day cycle, not 30 or 28. This means that, even though they offer a low “0% APR” on purchases, that only applies for the first 25 days of the purchase. I’ll show you why, in combination with the “balance transfer” deal, this is a racket which enormously benefits the credit card company. But at the heart of the system, if you pay your bill on the same day every month, it’s impossible to avoid paying interest on purchases.
2. That billing cycle gives you a moving target for payment every month. Some months, you’ll be paying early in the month, some months, you’re later in the month. Some months, you’ll have to pay TWO payments (one towards the beginning, one towards the end) in order to keep current and avoid late fees and immediate invalidation of your 0% APR! Can you afford two credit card payments a month? This keeps you off-balance, and more likely to lapse into the “default” terms of your credit card, which will usually double or triple your monthly payment.
3. Balance transfers. Oh, these seem like a holy grail for people who, like us, ended up owing a lot on a credit card due to medical expenses while uncovered by health care, and have yet to dig themselves out. Here’s how they actually work, and how that “0% APR” offer is a sweet investment for your credit card company.
4. The 0% APR, even if it’s “for life”, is actually for a limited period, no matter what. You have to jump through some extraordinary minutiae to keep that APR… minutiae which involves racking up consumer debt without any way to pay it off until your 0% APR loan is paid off.
5. There’s a minimum $5.00 to $50.00 balance transfer fee which is immediately applied to your credit card at the CASH ADVANCE rate. That’s 28% interest, and since it’s at the “cash advance” rate (the highest rate), it will be both the first loan taken out, and the very last one paid off.
6. The terms of this Discover card specify that, once the “term” ends, in order to keep the low APR, we’d have to make THREE minimum qualifying purchases or cash advances every month. A minimum qualifying purchase is one that is at least $50.00, and has a rate around 10%, or 28% for cash advances. So you have a $150 minimum purchase requirement every single month.
7. The heart of the racket is this: you always pay off your lowest-interest loans first. Let’s say you have a $10,000 balance to transfer. At “0% interest”, you’ll have a payment around $90 per month, which includes a little interest on that $50 “cash advance” you took out to get the balance transfer in the first place. That little bit of interest is basically the equivalent of the fees they aren’t charging you. It’s only a few bucks a month, but it pays for itself for the credit card company.
8. Balances which carry a 0% interest rate aren’t subject to the same restrictions on payments that balances with interest are. Nice little loophole in the law: they don’t need to make you make 3% minimum payments! This means that, if the rates we’ve seen before are any indicator, at the default payment rate, it’s going to take you TEN YEARS to pay off that 0% interest balance.

Add it all up: you have $50.00 which is going to sit in there for probably the life of the loan. Once your term expires, you have to spend $150 a month on the card, which you aren’t allowed to pay off until you’ve paid off your 0% loan. This means that your monthly rate is going to keep creeping up until you’ve paid the thing off! If your “term” is, say, three months, that means that for the first three months, you are going to have a nice, low $90 payment. Then every month thereafter until you have paid off that balance transfer, your payment is going to creep up by about $5.00. Since you are not allowed to actually pay off those high-interest balances until your low-interest balance is paid off, you’re screwed.

Here’s the math on this one. You do a $10,000 balance transfer at “0% APR”. You fulfill the bizarre payment requirements to the letter, and you start out your loan with what you think is a sensible payment of $170 a month… WELL above the minimum payment they expect. This would pay off that $10,000 in five years, right?

Sure. The first year, everything is going well. You make your fifteen payments (remember that 25-day billing cycle you have to remember?) Heck, you overpay, because like most sensible people you assume $170 a month, and actually end up paying two extra payments in the year. “Cool,” you think, “my balance is down to $7960”.

Well, not really. You have that little $50 that you’re forbidden to pay off. $8010. Plus interest on that $50 for the first year, which adds another $66.00 to your balance (well, it fails to subtract $66.00, so the same difference). $8076. Well, it’s not such a bad deal. For $116, you just paid off a year of debt interest-free. Woohoo!

Then the “three purchases a month” rule kicks in. OK, you’ll play their little game. That second year, you rack up an extra $1800 in consumer debt you’re not allowed to pay off until you’ve paid off the stuff you aren’t getting charged any interest for. You’re still kicking in $170 a month, but the equation has changed: in that time, you just racked up an extra $2K on your credit card, and…

…Congratulations. You are now in the hole $1,000 more than when you started. And your “generous” $170 a month contribution towards your 0% debt now barely covers the interest on your loans.

What a scam.

So put yourselves in our position: a substantial amount of consumer debt, which is mostly because we converted medical debt to credit card debt, along with substantial periods of unemployment during the “bust”. Believe it or not, we got better terms from a credit card company for paying off a massive hospital bill than we did from the hospital.

What strategy would you take to getting rid of that debt in 5 years or less?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a new video called “The Corruptibles“. The major point to this video is one we’ve discussed here many times before: how laws are being shaped by wealthy recording and movie conglomerates to eliminate fair-use rights and ownership of digital media.