alienated

So, Liam's almost 6 months old now. We've been feeding him cereal for a little over a month now, but we finally decided veggies were in store. We decided to start with carrots. Thinking we'd sneak them in after a half bowl of barley, he caught on quickly and showed just how much he didn't enjoy the taste change. Luckily he's scarfing them down now!

Occasionally, I am asked the question of what my typical workflow is. While it has changed many times over the years, this is the latest iteration. Mind you, I use this setup for my photography and my "day" job as well.

It consists of the following:

17" Intel Macbook Pro - 1680x1050

   - 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
   - 2GB DDR2 SDRAM
   - 256MB ATI Radeon X1600
   - 2x250GB Accomdata External Firewire drives for cold backup and Media (RAW Photos and Music)

21" Samsung Syncmaster - 1600x1200

It gets the job done.

I Love my kid!

To those of you that didn't know, I spent some time banging skins for The Shut Up Shop. Though we did not play a phenomenal amount of shows, we were blessed to play with some great bands. Sitting here at work, Do The Leg by Eaton Lake Tonics cycled onto the trusty ipod. The more I hear this music, the more I enjoy it. It's catchy and has some great hooks. It's hard to describe what genre it would fit in, but I'd file it under indie/pop.

I digress. One of the bands that we were fortunate to play with was ELT. They were a blast to hear live. If you get a chance, catch up and lend an ear to these fine fellows. I insist you'll have an enjoyable experience.

p.s. This was filed under blog as it's not really a review. In case you were wondering

Let me preface this with a brief disclaimer. When I speak of The Invasion, I am not only speaking about illegal immigration from Mexico. As well, I have no problem at all with immigration as that is what our beautiful Country was based on (Land of the Free? Maybe.) I will, however, like to provide an idea as to how we might be able to quell the effects of illegal immigration stemming from our neighbors to the South.

There have been many theories on how to stem the flow illegal immigration coming across the USA/Mexico border. Of these, two in particular stick out. First, the dreaded "fence". I recently read an article in the latest edition of National Geographic about this very subject. It detailed a border town in Arizona by the name of Nacos. There is an ongoing border fence project being erected in this town. It currently spans 11 miles and cuts directly through the middle of the town. 800 Residents on the US side and 8000 on the Mexico side.

Scores of residents (on both sides) actually support the idea of the fence, yet hate how it looks. To many, however, it brings back memories and visions of an infamous fence in Berlin. The argument has been made that the fundamental difference in the two fences are that while the Berlin Wall was designed to keep people in East Germany, the US/Mexico fence is designed to keep people out of the US. Sadly, looking at it from the other side of the fence (pun intended), the opposite of keeping people out, is keeping people in. Of course, the argument will be made that the fine people can leave their country another way (Central America?), but for what? Is the quality of living in Central American countries anywhere close to it in the United States or Canada?

The second theory / application took place years ago. It was a method employed by the Government in which all illegal immigrants being deported would be detained near the border until such time the numbers would fill a steam ship that would then carry them to the Southern tip of Mexico. The idea being that it would be so difficult of a journey back to the United States, many would not risk the trek. While this solved a lot of problems, the issue still remained. The border was open and (as an illegal immigrant) you were fine until you were caught. I don't specifically remember which administration backed this method, but I want to say it was most likely either Eisenhower or Truman.

As you can see, there exist fundamental flaws in both of these ideas / plans. Now, to the meat.

I had an epiphany yesterday. I have determined that we are going about this all wrong. The fight the invasion, we must use a combination of the same tactics and tax reform to fight back. This will not work with just a few individuals. It will need the backing of both Governments and citizens as a whole.

The first step is Tax Reform. Currently, the inherent flaw with an Income Tax is that only those that actually pay are punished. Of course, there are those few tax offenders that actually get caught, but for the most part, by the time their fraud has been investigated, they have already fled the country. This is precisely the reason I am for a flat sales tax. Sure, the cost of consumer goods would rise significantly, but think about the offset of sales vs. income tax. In Texas currently there is a 7.25% sales tax for the State and an optional (up to) 1% for local governments. Making the maximum sales tax 8.25%. I propose that a flat 30% sales tax be had. This would include the 8.25% maximum tax for State and Local governments, making the Federal income tax 21.75%.

Yes, that new camera would cost you $1000 instead of $700, but how much would that extra $300 mean if your paycheck was 20-30% higher? As well, people who buy more expensive consumer goods, pay the "luxury" tax. You want a new $50,000 Mercedes? You pay $65,000 for it. But you could also buy a $20,000 VW Rabbit and only pay $26,000 for it. This also provides solution to the problem of undocumented workers not paying income tax. I don't have specific numbers for this, but pose the following question. If the 20 Million illegal immigrants in the US payed income tax, would the country be in as much debt as we are now?

The second step is to open the border 100%. Of course, this would be a logistical nightmare, especially with security these days. The key is to take land as it becomes available. Start expanding South. People complain about border towns and how poor they are. If we move the "logical" (not physical) border further South, cities and towns will start expanding further southward to make use of natural resources still available. Mexico is extremely rich in natural resources, up to and including black gold (oil), natural gas and coal. Let's move the good things about the USA southward into Mexico. Clean water, readily available food and jobs. This was of course what NAFTA was supposed to introduce, but hasn't. I find it ironic that the passing of NAFTA has only made things worse.

I realize this is an extremely unorthodox recommendation, but at least it's a fresh idea. We haven't had many of those recently. It's a terrible shame our government spends so much time policing the rest of the world, and still cannot manage to make a decent change to our own Country.

--M

Sherri and I have owned our house for right at two years now. During that time, we have made it ours by making many improvements. When we bought the house, we wanted something we could upgrade and customize to our liking. Not quite a fixer-upper, but something that definitely needed some TLC. This time I am going to focus on the outside landscaping we've been working on. Next up, I will detail the interior upgrades.

Trees not only add significant value to property, but, if placed properly, can lower electric bills year-round. We recently planted four new trees. Two 3" caliper Cleveland Select Pears (15' tall each) and two 6" caliper Red Oaks. The oaks were planted in the back yard, while the pears went up front to go with our large Bradford Pear.

When we moved into the house, the fence was in terrible shape. It seemed that with each passing thunderstorm, another section of fence blew over. We decided to have on 110' section on the west side of the house replaced first. About 6 month later, the fence on the east side of the house (85') blew over as well. We ended up replacing it with the same 6' board on board capped fence as was on the west side. Just last month, we had the back fence (north) replaced as well. While this is a different type of fence (per the neighbors request), it also has metal polls sunk in concrete and should last us for years to come.

Additionally, I recently planted 13 red-tipped photinias along the back fence. Right now they are only about 12 inches tall, but they grow quickly and can get up to 25' tall! This should definitely add a lot more backyard privacy in the coming years.

Below are some before/after shots of the work we have done.

Backyard: West View

Backyard: East View

Frontyard: Before

Frontyard: After

Sherri and I have recently been watching the "flip-this" shows about house-flipping. A group of the more successful "flippers" have managed to land their own show on The Learning Channel called "The Real Deal". Aside from it the concept of flipping being so damn cool, and the amazing work they are doing with those houses, Sherri and I have noticed that the soundtrack to the show features none other than DFW's own The Deathray Davies and Valve! I absolutely LOVE both of those bands, and am happy to hear they are having success even after calling it quits (going on a hiatus in DRDs case).

Edit: Add our friends DARYL to the list. Some producer or directory has got to be from around the DFW area.

Sometime in the late 90's I, as did many others, got tired of updating my content on my website manually. I had done some perl development with my first tech job and was a huge fan of /.^slashdot. As a result, I decided to contribute a little code to their backend in return for having my own copy of the code to serve up my websites (early a.o, and wtlug.org). This lasted for all of two weeks until I decided that slashcode was a huge hack and not worth the hassle. Luckily for everyone, it has come around and is now a very viable CMS for running high-volume websites.

I stumbled across a package called MyNews on Freshmeat. It was written in a language I didn't know yet, and had barely heard of: PHP. It was written by a fellow from Norway named Stig. Stig got what he needed out of it, and pretty much left it at that. I downloaded, installed, and began hacking away daily to beef it up for my needs. Eventually, I contacted Stig and asked him if I could release a new version of it with all of my changes. He agreed, and I became the maintainer of MyNews-1.0. Over the years, as I saw new functionality show up on the web, I did what I could to incorporate those new technologies into MyNews.

After many point releases and complete re-writes, my budding family and deeper focus on my career began to take focus. My plan was to keep slowly contributing to the project, as time permitted, and release MyNews-5 for public consumption when it was ready. I announced, and made available, a few *pre-release* builds and was happy with the stability and functionality of the new code. A few sites ^[1][2] were running it and seemed to be happily plugging along. Unfortunately, a job change and impending addition to the family prevented me from fixing the few bugs that were left and releasing the Gold (read: final) version of MyNews-5.

Unfortunately, with the slow development cycle, I have not been able to keep up with many of the new features/technologies available in many of the major CMS available these days. Sadly, if released, MyNews-5 would still be light-years behind many of the other offerings ^[1][2]. Therefore, I have decided to discontinue development of MyNews. I have removed the main website and directed all content to this article.

If you are interested in taking over the project, please contact me and I will do every thing I can to transition it. I would love to see MyNews become what I always wanted to see. Unfortunately, I just don't have time to do it myself.

I have officially migrated my site over to Drupal-5. I have written a migration script for personal use to convert data in the MyNews database to Drupal's DB schema. If you are interested, I will provide you with a copy of this script.

--Mike

A couple of weeks ago, I brought to light the rather astounding cost of sending my child off to college in 18 years. To recapitulate, the average tuition increase for public universities is 6% per year compared to the current rate of inflation at 2.42%. Doing some basic math (or using an ), this comes out to roughly $170,000 for a 4 year education. In that article, I brought up a couple of options for college savings. For the sake of research, I have decided to look into and compare UGMA/UTMA accounts to the aforementioned 529 Plan.

Let's begin with a rehash of what a 529 Plan is. Per wikipedia, a 529 Plan is described as an "..investment vehicle designed to encourage saving for the future higher education expenses of a designated beneficiary". There are two distinct types of 529 Plans.

1. A 529 "prepaid" plan. This allows a person to buy tuition credits at "today's cost". These credits are in turn used in the future to pay for education expenses. Texas had/has a plan, called the "Texas Tomorrow Fund", that allows this. Unfortunately, as of today, enrollement for this fund is closed.
2. A 529 "savings" plan. This savings plan is contributed to and in turn, with market performance, returns interest to the account. What makes this account different from a regular investment account is that earnings on the account are not charged capital gains tax. The downside is that since this is based on market performance, the 8% return we need to realize our roughly $170,000 is not guaranteed. Although, if we are lucky, it could be significantly higher. Though this is doubtful due to the rather conservative nature of the fund's investments. I don't want some schmuck investor get risky with my kids college fund!

Alternatively, there exists a different type of "savings" account for use with higher education expenses. Commonly lumped together, the "Uniform Gift to Minors Act" and "Uniform Transfers to Minors Act" are not actually savings plans, but rather a set of laws drafted to allow for gifts (money) to be "made to a minor without requiring the presence of an appointed guardian for the minor". Of note, the UTMA is actually an extension of the UGMA.

Now, on to the nitty/gritty. UGMA/UTMA or "Custodial Accounts" only allow for $12K/year ($24K/year per couple) to be counted towards tax credits. Meaning that if you got a whopping $50K bonus that year and wanted to contribute all of it to your child's "Custodial Account", $26K of it would still be taxable. Contrary to the 529 Plan which the contributions are $60K/year or $120K/year per couple.

Another kicker is that with the "Custodial Account", only part of the earnings may be tax-exempt. Meaning you might still have to pay capital gains tax on a portion of it.

Doing a direct comparison, it really looks like the only benefit of the UGMA/UTMA "Custodial Account" is that of use. When the benficiary turns 18 or 21 (depending on State of residence), they are awarded the money and can use it as they see fit. This wound up being the proverbial "straw", as Sherri and I will be using the money as a reward, rather than a "free gift".

As for us, we have decided to stick with the plan outlined in the original article. We will be contributing $200/month into an INGDirect "Orange" savings account with APY of 4.5%. After 18 years, this will leave us with roughly $68,000, of which $23,700 of it will be earned interest. As well, we will be contributing $350/month to a 520 Plan "savings" account. Provided we get an annual return of 8% on that money, after 18 years we will have the $170,000 it will take to send Liam to school.

I sincerely hope this helps summarize some of the options available when making the not-so easy decision to invest in college fund(s).

For Now,
-M

Until recently, the extent of my money savings and investment was the meager 6% (5.5% Matched) to my company's 401k. What I had not taken into consideration, however, is how to make sure my kiddo will get their proverbial foot in the financial door.

Do not mistake me. My child (we will use the singular form as there is only one currently) will not be spoiled, spoonfed, or otherwise have his life handed to him on a silver platter. I do, however want to make sure that he has his education paid for. I was not fortunate enough to have this done for me, and while I still turned out pretty good, it would have been nice not to have $20k worth of student loans for only 2 semesters (yes, you read that right, 1 year).

Sherri and I have decided to look into State and/or Federally backed 529 College Savings Plans for the little Sprout (He is due in 4 weeks). Additionally, we are toying with putting $200/mo. into a separate account that we will roll into multiyear CD's annually.

Until the past week (I know, late bloomer) I was under the impression that the $200/mo. would most likely cover his tuition. I was ecstatic. Under the impression we would have a significant sum of money left over when we finally ship him off to school. With dollar signs covering my eyes, it was easy to picture the brand new 2025 year model Tige boat.

Much to my dismay, I was forcibly whipped back to reality this morning. I decided to get off my duff and do some in depth research into college tuition and savings plans. According to several ^{1 2} reputable plans, college tuition rates are growing faster than the standard rate of inflation. In some cases, 6-7% annually. I decided to use the College Tuition Calculator on the Enterprise529 website just to get an idea of what the monthly/yearly/total costs might be.

I chose the state of "Texas" being as that is where I "hang my hat". Then selected the University of Texas (Wife is an alum. I am a wannabe). Picked the "In-State tuition option" (see explanation above). Assuming he goes to school at 18 and spends 4 years, I have used all of the default criteria, sans the "Amount currently available for investment" where I selected $1000.

Now, given the average increase in tuition costs this "calculator" estimates that it will cost Sprout a total of $169,668 to attend college for 4 years. If I add up the $200 monthly and contribute it to a 5 year CD with a decent return (4.7%), this leaves us with roughly $68,744.37 after 18 years. As you may notice, this is significantly less than the projected $169,668 it will cost.

Analyzing the investment schedule provided by the College Tuition Calculator, it would cost roughly $357/mo. with $1000 down to accumulate the $169,668 needed. Even then, this is a with a theoretical return of 8%.

So, now what is the answer? There isn't a specific answer. I suppose the "lesson" is to do as much research as you can, and make your decisions wisely. Speak with a financial advisor if you must, because some of us just cannot grasp the concepts involved.

We have decided that the best option is to do both. Sure, it will be the cost of another vehicle monthly (payment + insurance + maintenance), but it is man than worth it to offer my child the opportunities we were not afforded.

Of note, we have made the decision not let him know about the "other" accounts (CDs). He will have to get a job and pay for the supplementary costs of college (room/board, transportation, etc...) on his own. Once he graduates, we will pay him back by giving him the money we put back for that cost. This should provide him with a nice nest egg to start his own life with.

Plus, if he decides that school is not for him (as was the case with myself), we can look foward to that new boat in 2025 AND maybe a nice motor-home to go with it.

Keep an eye out for the second part of this article that will be coming up in the next couple of days. I will compare/contrast the 529 College Savings Plan and the UGMA/UTMA "Trust" accounts.

For now,
Mike