Archive for 'General'
Missing-Children RSS Alerts by State
Posted on January 12, 2006, under General.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has state-specific RSS feeds for missing children.
Christmas Thanks
This Christmas, I am thankful for..
- A challenging job at a growing company who cares about people.
- Good friends, whom I can trust and laugh with.
- Family who cares for one another.
- A wonderful daughter who steals more of my heart every day.
- My wife who loves me inspite of myself, and whom I wouldn’t trade for anyone.
- Most of all, I am thankful for God, choosing to come to earth as a baby, to pour out his earthly life in love, that I might find forgiveness and friendship with my Creator - for all of eternity.
Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before God made anything at all and is supreme over all creation. Christ is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see - kings, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities. Everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything else began, and he holds all creation together.
Christ is the head of the church, which is his body. He is the first of all who will rise from the dead, so he is first in everything. For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and by him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of his blood on the cross. This includes you who were once so far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions, yet now he has brought you back as his friends. He has done this through his death on the cross in his own human body. As a result, he has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.
Colossians 1:15-22, NLT
One day in November..
I personally met Ravi Zacharias. What a blessing to be able to meet and speak with such a man.
I also had the pleasure of meeting many members of the RZIM Atlanta team. They are wonderful people. I’m glad I was able to meet each one of them.
Where have I been?
Flight layovers are a weird concept. Not in how flight plans work, or anything like that, but in how I could have this conversation:
“So, you ever been to Memphis?”
“Yeah, I used a restroom there once.”
Debt is dumb!
I’ve been reading the book The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. This is the first personal finance book I’ve actually enjoyed reading! Mr. Ramsey is a great author and his passion for good money management shines through the book as a he deals with serious subjects in a practical, but enjoyable way. You can read a sample chapter of the book online, although I would say the most enjoyable chapter so far has been the one dispelling common myths about using debt and trying to ‘game’ the system for personal gain. It’s well worth the read, in my opinion.
So we are now working our way to being debt free. We plan to have all our debt (including both cars), except the mortgage, paid off in 2006. Then, we’ll build up our savings from there and keep working on the “7 Baby Steps” path:
7 Baby Steps
- $1,000 to start an Emergency Fund
- Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball
- Three to six months of expenses in savings
- Invest 15 percent of household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement
- College funding for children
- Pay off home early
- Build wealth and give! Invest in mutual funds and real estate
Gaining personal wealth isn’t complicated, it just takes self-discipline and work. The great part about Dave Ramsey’s show is that he helps you have a fun time doing it.
You can catch the “Dave Ramsey Show” on your local radio station, listen online, or subscribe to the 1-hour podcast.
Who masters the Task Master?
Over the years, I’ve discovered my personality type really struggles with task lists. It’s not that I don’t like accomplishing tasks; There is a great feeling in marking something off and seeing progress. I just really struggle with task lists. Finding a way to keep track of tasks that I enjoy or at least will find that I consistently use has been hard. This was made more obvious to me when I married a woman who was raised on Franklin planners. I’ve come to think I need a task manager that isn’t invasive, and let’s me focus on getting stuff done, rather than focusing on entering tasks.
E-mail
I’ve gotten in the habit at work of just using my inbox as a task queue. This works pretty well. If something is in my work inbox, in theory, it’s something I think I need to reference in the near-term future, or it’s a task/issue that needs to get handled. I generally am able to keep my inbox clean and prune out old stuff to file away or delete. I am in my e-mail everyday, which keeps reminding me of existing tasks. So using my e-mail inbox at work as a task queue ends up working out decently for me.
My personal e-mail client on my home machine is another matter. Personal e-mail is different in nature, in that a lot of the e-mails are conversational rather than task driven. Also, once I download my e-mail to my machine, I can’t access it anywhere else. Just on my home PC. Plus I don’t prune my personal inbox out as much, because I usually want to do something else with the few waking ours of the evening at home. In that environment, e-mail doesn’t serve me well as a task list manager.
Handspring Visor (like a Palm Pilot)
The Visor was somewhat handy. It was mobile, you were able to have categories, due dates, priorities, sync it up with your PC at home and work, etc. On the downside, it didn’t quite fit well in any pockets, so it was hard to carry around. Plus, the core software started acting up, crashing the system and eating batteries. Too valuable to lose, too hard to carry, and it just finally became a portable canker sore.
Mozilla Sunbird
Mozilla Sunbird definitely has potential, with its task list and calendaring combination. I got into using it for awhile, but there were still bugs in the software due to it being an early beta. I generally liked the interface, but once again, it wasn’t mobile. There was work starting to make it so you could sync up with a server, so I could access it from home and work for instance, but there was some issues at the time. I ended up scrapping it for the time being, but as it gets more mature I might revisit it.
Tasks Jr
Tasks Jr is a web application focused solely on handling personal tasks. What I liked with Tasks Jr is that it seems to have a good developer behind it, and I could install it on my personal home web server. No installing it on my main PC and dealing with software crashes or messy registry junk. Drop in the web files, hook up a database, point a browser to it, and you’re off. The interface was fairly snappy, and overall I liked it. The downside for me was that Tasks Jr is the free version, and doesn’t come with any login authentication/protection. This meant I didn’t feel safe enough to put it up on my public web server, because anyone who found it could have read it or even created/deleted tasks! That doesn’t quite fit my goals of getting things done. There are pay-for versions that support this, but I still struggle at this point (being a family guy) putting money down for a task list. I might put money down on a software app that included a task manager, maybe, but I just can’t do it for a lone task manager.
Nag
Horde is a set of free web applications anyone can download to their own server and use if they wish. IMP is the name of the webmail piece of Horde. Recently, I switched over to use IMP as my personal webmail client. Once I made that change, I realized I could check out Horde’s task manager, called Nag. Nag is now my task list manager of choice. While supporting categories, priorities, and due dates, the interface is pretty simplistic. It’s not noisy, and doesn’t get in my way with all kinds of options that probably aren’t that relevant to my normal to-dos’. For me, Nag has several things that make a match with my schedule and personality type:
- Normal Task Junk: Categories, due dates, priorities, task description, etc. I can also search my tasks based on the descriptions and keywords.
- It’s a Web App: I like web apps. I’m a web developer. Computers are a hobby. All make for an odd combination, I know.
- Mobility: I can access Nag anywhere I have an internet connection, and expect it to be reasonably protected from prying eyes and hands. So if I have a task come to mind at work, I can quickly add it to my personal task list for later. Beautiful.
- Simplicity: Nag just handles tasks. The interface doesn’t get in my way.
- In-my-face-ility: I’m in my e-mail every day, and since Nag is basically integrated with my webmail client, I see my tasks every time I log into my webmail. This helps me remember things I want to get done, or reminds me to add a task I’ve been mentally backpacking around.
So for now, Nag is my.. nag.. of choice. I know there are several other choices out there, but I like owning the data on my own server, and not paying for it. If some of the newer choices fit within those criteria, I might consider moving to one of them instead.
For now, I’m happy.
As an aside, if you are someone who likes paper task lists, you might check out PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer. You can design and print out your own little planner, all from a web page!
Tips to Increase the Value of Your Home
Looking to one day sell our home, these seemed like decent tips on How to Inexpensively Increase the Value of Your Home that might sometimes get overlooked.
Tracy Roberts (2005)
Tracy Roberts died this weekend. He was a teammate of mine on the trip to El Salvador this year. I really enjoyed getting to know him. He had a heart that cared for others, and had a wonderfully contagious laugh. He was in the Big Brother program, as well as being involved in an International Students ministry. He had taken his Little Brother and two international students out to a lake-side cabin for the weekend to teach them how to fish. He drowned as he was trying to fix the engine on the boat. He died while loving others. That’s the Tracy I got to know this summer.
Find Cheap Gas
Someone has tapped the Google Maps API and made a web site to find and rank cheap gas in your local area. Try a search and save a couple bucks!
(Thanks Dad)
Google Moon - Lunar Landing Sites
Google has a mapped satellite image of the lunar landing sites. I didn’t realize they were all so close in proximity.