In my mind, practically all the reasons you’d want to own a house instead of rent an apartment lie in the back yard: a grill, a small garden, and space for a dog to run around during the day. With it being Memorial Day weekend, I couldn’t wait any longer to knock item #1 off my list. I’m from Atlanta, birthplace of the Big Green Egg–and my dad has had one for probably 10 years now. They’re expensive, but they pretty much blow all the other grills I’ve seen out of the water. I was lucky to find a BGE store locally (the aptly named Eggs by the Bay). The BGE corporate website listed a few distributors that were closer to my new house in Redwood City, but for me it was worth it to drive a little further to give a sale to a small business. The extra driving was rewarded, incidentally. The owner had the large Egg I wanted, but but not the large-sized table for it. He was nice enough to loan me a nest (basically metal legs for the grill) until he could get the table in–plus a few days to allow me to paint and lacquer the new table. I sincerely doubt that any large specialty retailer would’ve been willing to do the same. The Eggs by the Bay store is actually having a sale later in the summer for gently used demo eggs (basically used for their one-day barbecue festival), but forgoing any grilling for an entire month+ just to save $100 or so wasn’t quite worth it for me. Besides, my economic stimulus check was burning a hole in my pocket (though that only covered about half of it…).

Though I keep telling myself not to make frivolous purchases, this is a product I’m so familiar with that it’s a necessary luxury. While I don’t like gas grills at all, I probably could’ve made do for the first summer with just a little Weber for $100 or so. Those tiny little grills are best suited for hamburgers and hotdogs, though, and having a real cooker out back sort of opens up the arsenal of what I can grill. At least that’s what I’ll be telling myself all summer long. I did a Boston Butt on it the night we got it home, then hotdogs + burgers + corn for a crowd of around twenty on Memorial Day.
With around $1300 worth of grill/table sitting on my back patio now, though, talking myself into my next big purchase is going to be an even tougher sell. When I first moved to California and started my new job, my apartment was 4 miles from my office. I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was around eight years old, so four miles seemed pretty intimidating at the time. In the end, though, I talked myself out of an electric (it was ONLY 4 miles…), grabbed a cheapo off of craigs list, and dove right in. It was such a success that I upgraded bikes in a few weeks and continued biking in to work a few times a week… until I busted my ankle back in January. The ankle was just getting healed enough to ride in again (okay, it was probably good enough about a month before that) for me to bike in to work one last time before moving. I’ve done some weekend biking since we moved, but the commute (now 9 miles, with a few fairly steep grades) is just a little too intimidating. Even at four miles, I’d come in drenched in sweat. If only there were a way to take that 9 mile one-way commute and shrink it down…

The first thing I did was check out CalTrain. The Redwood City station is around 3 miles from the house, and the San Antonio station is around three miles from the office. Six miles each way isn’t so bad–especially with an 18 minute break in between. Solid plan, then… but wait. Though the two stations are only two stops apart, they cross zones… which means it’s a $4 ticket each way. So instead of an 18-mile round trip by car (just under one gallon of gas at around $4) which takes around 15 minutes each way, the commute is now a multi-leg affair which costs twice as much, takes around three times as long, and makes me a slave to the Caltrain schedules. I’m a big fan of public transportation, but clearly this wasn’t the solution in my particular case.

And that’s where all my prior research into electric bikes really came in handy. Having already invested $600 or so into a bike and getting very comfy with it, I wasn’t super-keen on buying a second bike just for commuting. My girlfriend and I go on weekend bike rides when possible, so I wanted to be able to use the bike as a normal bike without having 50 lbs of electronics all over it. After re-reading all the stuff I read when I first decided NOT to buy an electric, I think I’ve settled on the bionX kit, which a local eBike evangelist sells through his shop just a little ways down the bay. It’s pricey (~$1500 for the PL350), but it’s incredibly light (~15 lbs.) and has regenerative breaking. When looking at the stats on these things, I have to pretty much throw all the distance metrics out the window. I’m pretty sure they do their “performance” testing with guys who are 5′8 and 150 lbs riding a performance bike with slick tires on flat terraion, while I’m closer to 6′3 and 235 lbs riding a not-aerodynamic cruising bike with fat tires on hilly terrain. They claim 28 miles on the greatest assistance level, but I’d be thrilled with half that (I could always recharge at work if I had to). The bionX kit also has a regenerative training feature, which means you can actually crank the friction up and recharge the battery while getting a better workout. This seems ideal for commuting–I can crank up the pedal-assist as high as it will go for the commute TO work, which will hopefully keep me mostly stink-free (if not, I’m going to bug the gym down the street for a shower-only membership). After work, I can not only pedal unassisted the whole way home… I can actually crank up the difficulty to make it as much of a workout as I want. The best thing about it, basically, is how many options you have. I used to average around 10 mph based on my own output, so if this thing can effectively double that I should be able to get to work in about the same amount of time I was doing before.
I guess it’s pretty obvious that I’ve already sold myself on getting one. My inner financier will probably be successful in holding my inner gadget-nerd off for another month or so, though, just so I can really decide if I’m buying it because I really want to bike to work or if the purchase of the Big Green Egg has kicked off some sort of crazy high-dollar spending spree.

1. All my various registration fees, hosting fees, PayPal transfer fees, outsourced sound/artwork fees, etc. In other words, the standards “small business deductions.”
2. This one’s still up in the air, but I might actually incorporate all my little side ventures into a legal business–which means I can also deduct incorporation fees.
3. New computer time. Hey, my hobby’s paying off–time for it to reward me. AFAIK, so long as I use the new machine for game/web development, it’s a business expense.
4. RENT! This won’t really be an issue for another month or so, but my girlfriend and I just bought a new house. I’m going to set aside one of the extra bedrooms for use soley as an office, which means the square footage of the room will be another “expense.”
5. Solo-401K. Since all of the game money is essentially play money anyway (my day job certainly pays enough to live on, though don’t we always want more?), I’m going to sock away as much as possible into a Solo-401k plan. The $15,500 contribution limit will eat up a fair share of my taxable profits, and I can stash away another 25% of my net profits as a “profit-sharing” move that’ll also come off as a business expense.

Keeping up with just those few should save me a bundle in the long-run, even if it means I don’t actually get to spend my hard-earned game money on shiny new toys in the short-term (spending it instead when I’m old and fat in Bali). Number 5 on that list is probably the MOST vital, as otherwise I’d probably make too much money to keep contributing to my Roth IRA.

After Uncle Sam takes his chunk out of what’s left, I hope to use whatever’s left over to continue paying down my credit cards, my car, and my student loans. And, okay, maybe finally get that surround system to complement my 50″ DLP, blu ray player (*cough* ps3 *cough*), and a Big Green Egg for the new house. My girlfriend, of course, has other plans–besides the demand for all-things-shiny, she quite sagely things it would be a good time to go ahead and buy a second house back in Atlanta. Besides the market being pretty good for buyers right now (though we may wait for it to get just a little bit worse for our second house), we’d be able to deduct the cost of flying out to check on the property a few times a year (which my parents would love).

The down payment, the new car payment (around $400/month), and the insurance hike (9 year old family car -> brand new 4-wheel drive SUV) will set me back a bit in getting debt free, but the most important thing in this case was that it was the car I wanted–it’s been a real hassle toting my kayak around on the Buick. I’m not a big believer in soccer moms driving giant SUVs, but I think I have a pretty legitimate need for some utility and the occasional 4-wheel drive action. I was planning on making the jump to a new car any way once my credit cards were paid down, so for now I’ll just look at it as an acceleration of the game plan. On the plus side, if I hadn’t made Filler–and if it hadn’t been as successful as it’s been–I probably would’ve gotten another used car in the $5-$10 grand range, and I would’ve likely driven it until it died another 4-5 years from now.
The best part of all this (if there is a best part) is that I made the decision at exactly the right time. I drove the Buick in to pick up the new car this morning. While going over a speed bump in the parking lot, the transmission went completely out and the thing wouldn’t budge another inch (I had to get a couple of guys in the dealership to help me push it into a space). Their wholesaler passed, so I’ve got one of those “Cars for Charity” groups coming to pick it up tomorrow or the next day.

In short, I lead a pretty charmed life. I was trying to think up resolutions yesterday and all I could think of was to keep on doing what I’m doing. After sleeping on it, I figured I could enumerate that a little better. So here are some concrete goals for 2008:

• Finish paying down my college credit card (high interest), which is still sitting at around $1800.
• Put as much into my Roth IRA as possible before April
• Max out the full amount for next year.
• Put $100 a month into Prosper
• Bike to work at least two days a week on average (but aim for three)
• Catch a fish in California
• Release six flash games (including the one I’m hoping to publish later in January)
• Work on a design document for my first downloadable game (more on that later)

I could do a whole other set of goals for Piqqem, but I’ll leave that for the bosses and just focus on making my stuff work great (though we’ll be having a planning meeting sometime after everyone on the team gets back to California).

The sign-up process is a major chore.  I’ve never done it at another broker, so I don’t know if it’s this bad everywhere or this is a “you get what you pay for” scenario.  I actually filled out all the paperwork back in August, but I never got around to mailing it off and faxing them my info (yes, MAIL and FAX–I didn’t realize anyone still used either).  I got a little more motivated last week, so I checked back in with them.  Because I hadn’t mailed my paperwork in by their 30 day deadline, I had to fill everything out again from scratch–there was no record anywhere of the application I’d previously filled out.

Once I got everything filled out, I headed over to Fedex/Kinkos, figuring I could make copies of my driver’s license, fax them the sheets they required, and mail everything in one stop.  No such luck.  Their mailing address for paperwork is a P.O. Box, so after standing in line for half an hour (December, go figure), they told me I’d have to take it to the post office.  After standing in line again at the post office, I finally had everything sent off properly.

I got the email saying the account had been a few days later–and that I could go to the site and log on using a combination of random personal info and the last 4 digits of my account number.  I tried to do so, but I didn’t actually have an account number yet.  When logging on to their site, it just said “Roth IRA–Account set up in minutes.”  It said that for a few days.  After it finally went through, I was able to log in and take a look at their trading platform.  In a word: ugly.  It looks like it was designed by programmers, with no real care paid to user experience.  I’ll hold further comment on it until I’ve actually used it some (though if the ACH-setup interface is any indication, it’s going to be a major chore).

Then my next issue: management fees.  Somewhere in the paperwork I filled out, I remember reading  that they charge you $30 a year to manage your retirement account (though, as far as I can tell, it’s still up to me to make all my own trades and pay trading fees of $4.50 until my balance hits $2500).  The yearly fee hits in February, and if you fund your account after February they charge you immediately.  It’s now December.  I called their customer support (and, to their credit, actually got a real person within 5 minutes) and asked if this fee was pro-rated or I was really going to be charged $30 so they could manage the couple of hundred or so dollars I’m likely to put in before February.  Their response: full $30.  I asked them if it was a specific date in February (I’d hate to put money in Feb 1st only to get charged again Feb 10th) or if I could safely put money into the account any time in the month.  He didn’t know.  He said it was usually a certain week in February, so if I wanted to be absolutely sure it was best to wait until March 1st.
So I’ve got a Roth IRA now.  I’m just not going to put any money into it until March. That’s not so bad, I guess.  I’ll just have to do a good job of mentally earmarking money in my checking account as “IRA money” and not “shiny new toy” money.  The game I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post got a really great sponsorship offer, so once I polish it up to their specs and finalize the deal I should have a pretty nice chunk of change to act as seed money (though I still don’t see myself maxing it out for 2007).

• May: pre-work, graduated, moved cross-country (I’m sure that was a few hundred at least)
• June: Apartment deposit (~$950)
• July: T.V., Bed, Couch, and Dining Room table… for which I probably paid around $500 cash and financed the rest (minus $500 my dad gave me for the TV as a graduation gift).
• August: Car insurance came due to the tune of around $500
• Sept: It turns out I forgot to send the state of Georgia a tax check back in April (right around thesis time–I thought TurboTax did all that for me), so I had to send them a check for $560 (And I’m not even gonna mention my vacation)
• Oct: My bike was around $525
• Nov: My plane ticket home for Christmas was $499 exactly

What’s the moral of the story? Plan for something to come up. Except for the bi-annual car insurance and the yearly plane ticket home (if not at Christmas, then Thanksgiving), I’m hoping these sorts of suprises will eventually drop out… though I’m not going to hold my breath. My girlfriend’s car got hit while parked on the street (no note, $1600 in damage), so she’s got a $500 deductible to look forward to.

When I first started the job, I figured I’d sink all that left over money at the end of the month into paying off my credit cards early. That end-of-the-month windfall just keeps finding a way to vanish, though. Because I originally decided not to start putting money into a retirement until I paid off my credit cards, I’m six months on the job and haven’t even started my IRA yet. Time for that to change.

After reading up on Prosper, I’m going to start pumping $100 a month into that (at least until I get burned). Once all the paperwork for my IRA goes through, I’m going to put $200 a month into that. Both will be automated. Why, you ask? My general philosophy so far is that if the money is there, I’ll spend it. If the money’s not available for me to spend, I’ll be more frugal when it comes to things like eating out, going to the movies, and going out to bars. That’s the hope, anyway. We’ll see if it pans out.

I’m glad to see that someone thought it would work. The interface is pretty clunky, and they were asking me for bank account details before they even really told me how the site works (which has got to turn a lot of people off…). I filled everything in just to see what kind of interest rates I might expect… they gave me a B grade, which isn’t so bad. Most of my credit card debt is sitting at a fixed 9.9% from a balance transfer, so I wouldn’t be doing any better by using their estimated 12-13% for a small loan. I’ve still got around $2000 on an 18% card, though, but I’m not entirely sure I want to bother with setting up yet another “credit” source to pay it off (especially since I’m planning on having it paid down in a few months anyway).

It’s a cool idea, though. I remember seeing something awhile back where individuals could fund small business loans to third-world entrepreneurs (where $250 might be enough to start a business). Prosper strikes me as the free-market, 1st-world version of that. The thing seems most useful for small amounts, though (like: “I need $500 to fix my car.”). I wonder if anyone is using it for small business loans, or if that would need an entirely different setup.

Back in June, I got a Circuit City card (well, really it’s a Chase Card) for a promotional purchase (an HDTV). Knowing full well that most cards apply payments to promotional balances instead of interest-carrying balances, I wanted to do some checking before ever using the card on a “normal” purchase. If the repayment order stood, my plan was to never use the card again (at least until the promotional period ended in January of 2009). So, before making my first payment, I gave the Chase customer service a call.

The woman I spoke to said that while it was normal for the payment to go to the non-interest-carrying balance first, it would be no problem to switch it over and have payments go to the interest-carrying balance. I could use the card like a normal card, pay it off plus a little extra for the promos each month–all the while earning Circuit City Rewards points. Sweet, right? And also a complete and total lie.

I’ve been using my card like a normal credit card since then–making gas and restaurant purchases and then sending a monthly payment roughly equivalent to what I’ve been spending. I even put my bike on it a couple of weeks ago. After sending in payments of around $600 last month, I noticed something odd on my statement: my promotional balance was getting lower and I was being charged a finance fee.

Whaaaaat?

I called customer service back. It turns out that you can only have ONE (1) payment applied to a non-promotional balance per year. One. Not every payment like the first moronic customer service rep told me. Even after speaking with a manager, there was no way to get around this (though she’ll get a reprimand if she’s even still working there). Even though I called in SPECIFICALLY to prevent this, even though I did everything exactly right, I’m now stuck with an interest-carrying balance around $1500, sitting squarely behind my promo purchases of around $2500.

This is what I like to call extortion.

Until next July, when they’ll allow me to make another payment to the interest-only part (never mind the $1500 I’ve already sent them which they applied to the TV), I’ll be wracking up interest at 19.24% per month–around $300.

If the bike shop’s cool, they’ll issue me a refund and charge my debit card, so that’ll knock 1/3 of it off. But this is absolutely ridiculous. I know it’s not Circuit City’s fault, but if you get into bed with soulless, bloodsucking corporations like Chase, this is what you can expect. Until Circuit City or Chase makes this right (which will likely be never), I’ll be doing my electronics shopping at Best Buy.

1. Deposit some money before it posted (~300 miles away)
2. Wire some money into the account (~$30 wire transfer fee)
3. Convince the charge to credit the account back.

On Wednesday, the guy would’ve been all too happy to close my account–saying something to the effect of: “That money you sent out hasn’t cleared yet, so if I close the account now they’ll get a notice saying the funds were denied.” Essentially, as if I’d never made the transaction. Why they couldn’t do the same thing with this one… who knows. With options (1) and (2) both being pretty undesirable, I was left with option (3).

To be fair, I like Yahoo!. Their hosting plan is way too expensive for my needs–the smallest one is the “Small Business” plan for $11.95 a month (meaning I was scheduled to be overdrawn by $11.70). I use about 1% of my disk space and usually use up about 1% of my transfer–overkill big time. I really don’t like Geocities, though (which has one for around $8 I think). I’m actually using Dreamhost (aka creepy pyramid-scheme host) now for another project, and while the price is right and the service is pretty decent… the speed just sucks. That’s fine, though, I just wanted to prototype a project in Ruby on Rails (which Y! doesn’t support). For my every day needs, the $11.95 a month buys me laziness. Yahoo!’s interface is pretty easy to use, they support in-browser editing of files, in-browser ftp (under 5 megs anyway), and it always works–fast.I don’t exactly need fantastic reliability, but it doesn’t hurt. I even dumped my crappy old layout and used one of their “sitebuilder” templates, which at least looks pretty decent (even if it’s a major pain in the ass to customize).

The problem with any large company, though, is that they’re not really set up for personal transactions. Because it’s Yahoo!, though, they at least have live customer support over the phone–unfortunately, it’s the kind of typically incompetent outsourced customer support most of us have come to know and love. Before I called, I went online and updated my credit card information so that it would bill my new checking account. When the woman answered, I explained that I was in the process of closing that account and switching banks, and that I needed her to refund the account that had been charged (Wachovia) and re-bill the new account (WaMu). After putting me on hold for 10 minutes, her response was: “We don’t have that capability here.”

My response was simple–I called her bluff: “What happens if I just cancel my service?” Well then, yes, that would give me a refund. The only hitch is that all my data (this blog, all my old school projects, my databases) would be wiped. At that point, I was pretty pissed off at the whole situation–so I told her to just do it. Cancel everything and issue me a refund. She said that she couldn’t do it from there, but that she could walk me through the process on the Yahoo! web site. So… if they can’t handle billing matters, and they can’t modify accounts… what the hell are they there for?

Finally fed up with Yahoo! (after all, I’m only willing to overpay as long as it’s EASY and CONVENIENT), I asked her how I transferred my domains (I registered two through Y!, though they don’t allow you to host multiple domains under one account–something they didn’t mention until AFTER I’d bought the second domain) to my new host, Dreamhost. Her response was to put me on hold for another 5 minutes. After asking around, or maybe just taking a smoke break, her response was this: “I’m showing that the domain is registered through March of 2008. After that, there is a 75-day waiting period, and you could then try to get it again.”

What!?

As calmly as I could muster, I explained to her that this was MY DOMAIN that I had BOUGHT (okay…registered), and that I just wanted to TRANSFER it to my new host. Apparently if you cancel your service plan, Yahoo! just decides they’ll hang on to your domain for you until it expires. She put me on hold for another five minutes. By this time, I’d already come to the conclusion that this chick was completely incompetent. When she got back, she at least had an idea of what was going on. If I wanted to keep my domain, I couldn’t just cancel my account. I had to DOWNGRADE my service from the “Small Business” plan to the “Domain Hosting Plan” ($9.95 a year). And then, calmly as an aside (as if reading from a piece of paper and not actually comprehending what she was saying), she finally said something helpful: “You will be refunded the pro-rated amount of your current plan and then re-billed for your new plan.”

Wait. Rewind.

They’re going to refund the current charge…and then rebill me. Which is EXACTLY what I had asked her to do in the first place. I pointed that out. Her response: “Oh, yeah, I guess that might work. I never thought about it.” But I’d still lose all my data. I asked her what would happend if I UPGRADED my account (the next one up is $19.95/month plan). She had to put me on hold for another 5 minutes. When she got back, she said it worked the same way–a pro-rated refund and then the new charge. So, in other words, it did exactly what I wanted in the first place (before being on the phone with a nitwit for 30 minutes). Could she do it there, though? Nope. I had to hang up and log in to do it from the web control panel.

Then the waiting game began. Yahoo! billed me on Friday (07/13) and I upgraded that same day. Had they billed me on 07/12 and issued the refund on 07/13, it would’ve been pro-rated–that is to say, 30/31 * $11.95, or $11.57. Meaning I would’ve still been overdrawn by $0.13. Yahoo! doesn’t update their billing history for at least 24 hours after the payment was made, so I could do nothing but cross my fingers. Luckily, I went camping all weekend and could at least forget about it. Yesterday, I checked my billing history on Yahoo!. It showed that they had indeed refunded the entire $11.95 and then re-billed my current card $19.95. I immediately downgraded back to the Small Business plan (meaning that this month I’ll probably pay something like $12.50). Yesterday, I called Wachovia–they showed no record of the refund, but the charge still hadn’t posted either.

I checked my balance this morning, and it was as it should be–$0.25. With no more incoming charges. I called Wachovia immediately and had them cancel my account. Their policy is to mail the remaining funds (which is why I’d wanted to empty it out in the first place–I didn’t want a $500 check getting lost in the mail). I told her that $0.25 was less than the cost of a stamp and they could just put it in the Wachovia piggy bank or donate it to charity, but apparently their policy doesn’t allow for that sort of thing. So I’ll be getting a big fat check for $0.25 and, more importantly, a little piece of mind.
Re-iterating the moral of the story from my banking woes a few weeks ago… if you’re ever moving cross country, find a bank that exists in both places and sign up for an account three months before you go. Your life will be less stressful that way.

I’ve also been thinking about other ways to do the tagging. Traditional tagging works pretty well, but I want to have the ability to create as many interesting charts as possible from one dataset. The system should be smart enough to know that pizza is Italian Food. It should know that Italian Food is food. After searching for various things like “complex tags” and various synonyms, I found nothing. My friend Annie recommended the search string “hierarchical tagging” and that at least yielded a few cool resources. There’s a guy at Stanford whose doing research on it, though after reading his paper it seems like he’s trying to detect the structures from an already existing set of tags.
I don’t really care about generating this data after the fact…I’m fine with doing a little legwork up front. It gets kind of messy, though (can you say many to many relationship?). Should it also know that Pizza Hut is a type of Italian Restaurant which is a Restaurant? Should entering Pizza Hut automagically enter a tag for pizza?

The other big question… is this relationship something that exists only in the database? Or does entering the tag for Pizza automatically populate it with the superTags? This seems like it would certainly make simple lookups quicker.

I’ll have to noodle it for awhile longer.