Wow, a semi-regular posting.

The Iron Giant

Small town america in the late 50s doesn’t know what hit it. Science fiction is in it’s hayday and the nation is on a hairpin trigger when a big robot falls from the sky and is discovered by a small boy. I had heard much about this movie and everyone I knew who saw it liked it. I have to tell you: the hype is well deserved. The story is compelling and heartening, good for children and adults alike, and the humor throughout is well done. Characters are voiced well. The story obviously revolves around the giant. Most of the story is centered around keeping the monstrosity hidden, which doesn’t succeed for long. The government eventually figures it out and starts shooting, and then things really get interesting. The ending was just as fun to watch as the beginning, although I think they copped out on the very end, leaving it with a light note. It would have been really nice to see it end in a bitter-sweet tone. The Giant gets a 9. (imdb)

Brazil

One of the things I remember hearing about Brazil is that it was “Terry Gilliam’s Directorial Masterpiece”. It certainly is at that. In the 20th century somewhere, a clerical error causes a great movie plot. A futuristic society is thrown into disarray by a simple error in typing, starting with the death of an innocent man, and then the coverup of the century. The protaganist is in a dead-end job, but seems to be perfectly fine with it, until the girl of his dreams literally walks into his life. Gilliam and his cinematographer create a beautifully blocky and dull grey industrial wasteland set in stark contrast with the beautiful dreamland. The subplots don’t obscure the main line which is compelling and kept me wanting more even though it clocks in at over 2 hours. The ending was unexpected and well done at the same time, and I couldn’t see it done any other way. The directors cut is the only way to go with this one, and I haven’t even seen the studio cut. Brazil is berriffic, and scores a 12. (imdb)

The gift which I bought Di last week came this Thursday - a iRobot Roomba Sage. So far we have ran it about 4 times - the first three times it’s bin filled up completely, today when it was finished it wasn’t even half full. The robot is really maddening to watch, because the pseudo-random walk that it uses doesn’t seem like it is covering the floor that well. The roboticist in me knows better though, and the proof is in the particle-free floor which our apartment is now sporting.

It’s not to say that there is no setup before turning the Roomba on - you need to clean up the floors just as you would for any low-powered vacuum, picking up pieces of deitrius which will not be picked up. The Roomba doesn’t deal well with the type of rugs which we have in apartment either, so those need to be picked up and placed somewhere while it’s running. After these steps, it’s just turning it on and waiting basically. It easily gets to the 3 rooms which we have it vacuuming in (living room w/attached kitchen, bedroom, bathroom) multiple times in one cleaning cycle, but our apartment is not that large. After it’s done you need to empty the bin and clean the brushes of hair and other debris, which takes about 2 minutes. All told I would say that using it takes about 10 minutes total interactive time.

Other than that, this week has been pretty dull actually, work and more work. Completed some code for Marsupial Player/Stage but it doesn’t quite work the way I want yet. Monday went out with Di to look at couches and found a great table for the dining area. You can see pictures of it on my flickr page.

I need to install a backup system which works on Windows, OS X and Linux on the server machine, and figure out a network file system which works with all of them as well. I’m fairly sure that I am going to use Samba as the file serving capabilities. The machine has been rock-solid stable since the removal of the DWL-G520 which was providing network for it before the upgrade to a wireless bridge. I suspect that the madwifi drivers were not playing well with the amd64 architecture.

Brewster’s Millions

Richard Pryor and John Candy in a classic story retold many times. I had seen parts of this movie on TV or in the background and thought I should give it a try all the way through. Spending lots of money isn’t quite as easy as it should be in this comedy directed by Walter Hill (48 Hours). I thoroughly enjoyed the story as much as is really possible in this type of plot. I thought that the acting was somewhat over the top and the main plot meandered a bit, but at 101 minutes it never went too far off the mark. The payoff at the end, even though it was obvious and expected, left me smiling while the credits rolled. I give it a 8.

All That Jazz

Life is not normal for Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) in this foray into the backstage of directing and coreography directed by Bob Fosse. In a setting where the only normal part of life seems to be the morning wake-up routine, a duality of mind and reality appears in the beginning. There is also a great interplay between Gideon and his daughter. I was dissappointed to continue on through the ending, which was completely flat leaving me wishing I had hit the back button on the remote and watched the first half over again. A fascinating tale of the struggle between personal and professional life turns into a disaster of an ending. It scores a 4.

Recently I was working on an application for ICRA2006 and I needed to output some data to be read by Excel. This would seem like an easy problem, just output in CSV and Excel can open the text just fine. Unfortunately Excel has one of the most backwards implementations of international character support that I have ever worked with. Being nieve to this, I simply tried UTF-8. I was greeted with multiple strange characters in the place of my normal umlauted and tilde-d letters. A quick search turned up that when Excel reads a CSV, it assumes that it is in ASCII or . However, you can import the CSV as a text file and select it as unicode. This is where my real pet peeve is: You can’t select the character set of a CSV in Excel. You have to rename the file as a .TXT file and go through a wizard, basically spelling out that yes, it is comma separated and yes, this is the data I want to import. There’s one drop down box which specifies the character set. Of course Unicode is supported there.

In the search for a solution to this problem which didn’t involve a 10-step process for the customer, I discovered the Unicode marker which is supported by Wordpad, but amazingly, does nothing but add a bit of garbage in Excel. The sad part is that I can be almost certain that the next version of Office will continue to have this problem. My only hope is that somehow the XML format will be open enough to just create a native Excel file.

Life has taken a turn for the busy lately, which means of course that this space loses a lot of content. Things have slowed down a bit now. Things which were taking up my time before were being basically one of the only technical staff for ICRA2006 (with one other who helped enormously), a new job at Honeywell Labs, and actually getting some research done on my thesis.

ICRA2006 was basically amazing and horrible at the same time. The amazing parts: meeitng people who are famous (a.k.a. “respected in their field”), eating a ton of fancy food on the dime of the conference, being at the first conference of my academic career. The horrible: working 18 hour days, being the go-to guy for practically everything, painful feet from walking most of those 18 hours. All in all, the amazing outways the horrible by a long shot. I also couldn’t make it to DebConf6 because of it, and it was in a country that I might have actually made it to this time. Next year I guess.

The new job at Honeywell is going decently. We have a target in July which is probably going to have me pulling long hours. The best thing about the new job is of course pay-related though - I am going to be consumer-debt free by the end of this year. I hope that I can finish the nameless financial web application before my finances improve enough that I don’t need it anymore.

I have narrowed in on my thesis more, which is an improvement at least. Now I need to actually write papers and do research while avoiding too many duties in other areas. I’ve got a couple of blog postings in the queue which should show up soon, and hopefully I will re-enable myself on Planet Debian.

I also bought a present for our apartment, and she hasn’t guessed exactly what it is yet. This is me taunting Di a little. :)

Never before have I cohabited with another person for a year. Never before have I visited another family for christmas. Never before have I yearned for someone while away. Never before have I been happy for more days together. Never before have I loved a person like I love Diana.

As of today it has been 2 wonderful years.

I recently bought a Samsung ML-2010, which is a nice laser printer for home use, and tried to set it up on Debian, only to discover that Samsung wasn’t hip to my architecture, namely amd64/x86_64. It’s no matter, their printer drivers still work, but you have to hack around a bunch of their checks. I’m documenting them here because I’d rather not forget when I reinstall, and it’s probably useful for others to know about it.

Step 1 - Install the necessary packages - In my case all I needed to install was ia32-libs, because I already had all of the other packages needed installed. The samsung tool uses cupsys, so you may need to install the cupsys package and it’s dependencies.

Step 2 - Unpack the driver - Get the driver from Samsung and untar it, producing a directory called “image”

Step 3 - Hack around the glibc detection - The setup program is “smart” and tries to detect if there is a GLIBC with a high enough version. The bad news is that it uses the wrong version, because it is not familiar with the ia32-libs positioning of it. Luckily, it uses a script to do it’s dirty work, so I just changed scripts/test-libc.sh to this:

[cc lang=”bash”]

!/bin/sh

#

Test the Libc version and make sure it is > 2.0

# exit 0 [/cc]

Mostly because I know that we meet the requirement of glibc > 2.0.

Step 4 - Run the setup program directly - The setup script (script.sh) doesn’t like to run on x86_64 architectures, because of it’s architecture checking. This is annoying, so looking into script.sh, find the program that it runs and run it directly, that is, run ./setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/glibc-2.1/setup.gtk as root (it will be putting things in /usr/local).

Step 5 - Add your printer to the setup utility - run /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config and add the printer. It’s pretty straightforward, and actually follows the docs which Samsung gives out from here on.

A couple weeks ago I was going to lunch and met up with one of my friends who I hadn’t seen in a while. I had to wait for her to finish her TAing job, in the same lab that I once taught in. I was surprised at my reaction - I wanted to jump right into the room and start helping out. I restrained myself, but it gave me a good reminder of what my actual goal is in grad school. I want to be a professor - I wasn’t sure when I started here at the U of M, but after two or three teaching sessions I was certain I was going to teach. It probably helped that it was a class which I have a good amount of experience teaching, being one of the classes I helped with for 3 semesters.

Lately I’ve been trying to remember why I am going through with it all in order to get the Ph.D, and seeing that class was a good reminder. It makes me think that I might want to request a Teaching Assistant job every year or so just to keep me on the right track towards something. Unfortunately, I think if I want to finish in a reasonable amount of time, I will need to focus 100 percent on the thesis before long.

Throughout the last couple of years, I’ve had some bad decisions. I decided to start using my credit to work for me, and to buy things which I couldn’t afford. Partly this was because I had a horrible ex, who I thought I should do things for, and partly because of just living outside of my means for a certain period of time.

The long and short of it is, I’ve gotten myself into a bit of credit card debt. I’m not in any big trouble, just needing to pay it down so that I can get on with using that money for other things. There is a couple of web applications that I have in the works which will help me remind myself, but that’s neither here nor there at this point. So, I have all of this credit at high interest rates, surely there is someone out there that will look at my credit and finance it at a lower rate, make some money off of me, right? I’m thinking that what I need is a consolidation loan - something to lump together my credit card debt and give me one monthly payment. What I call this, is debt consolidation.

Thinking we are in the age of the internet, I type “debt consolidation” into google and give it a try. This is my first mistake. Apparently “debt consolidation” doesn’t mean that you are consolidating your debt, it instead means that you are going into what I would call debt negotiation. This means you decide of your own volition that you are going to stop paying your bills, and try to negotiate with the credit card companies to pay off your debt at a fraction of your actual debt. But I don’t know this, so I nievely fill out a couple of forms at “debt consolidation” sites. This gets pretty long, so I put in a break. Read on, MacDuff.

The Scam

The first people who got in contact with me were some people from Credit Solutions. Let me be clear on this: I’m not making broad generalizations about the company here - I can only speak of my own experiences. The person who I got on the phone went through a whole spiel, “explaining” how it works. He was very high-pressure and very fast talking, just from the start I didn’t want to buy anything from him because he seemed like a used car salesman who decided that it was better to make money from nothing than from goods.

Here’s the explanation he gave me: You’ve probably been paying your cards down already, so you’ve paid 70-100% of the cost of your original loan. You stopped paying your cards, wait 3 months, and then they start negotiating with their “powerhouse lawyers”. Then they negotiate you to pay your debt at 40-60% of the current balance, and the credit card companies get to take the remaining 40% as a tax loss.

Now is when the math gets strange. The man on the phone attempted to say that this meant that the credit card company got 140% of the current balance. This doesn’t make sense to me, especially because I’m a smart credit card consumer, and most of my debt is on 0% APR promotional rate cards. This means that they have made at most 3% of the balance from me, based on balance transfer fees. The man on the phone tried to dance around the issue, saying that they actually will get the 40% tax loss and that means they’ll still get 140%. 140%? This doesn’t make sense - 60% plus 40% is 100%, not 140%. Lets add to this that a tax loss is not the same as profit: a tax loss only gets you like, 30% of your loss.

At this point, I’ve decided that I’m being taken for a ride already, but I ask how it works anyway. Here’s how this particular company is setup: I pay into a savings account (of my own), automatically deposit around $200 a month, and they take money out. For the first three months, they take the WHOLE amount. After that, they take half the amount, and leave the other half. They then start negotiating with your creditors, and when they make a deal, they tell you “pay them now”. In the end, they take 15% of the settled cost of your debt. On $6k settled debt, this is another $900.

I really didn’t want to do it now, mostly because of the high cost. The man kept coming back to my objections with “you can’t borrow your way out of debt”. Of course you can’t borrow your way out of debt. That’s stupid. I wasn’t planning on borrowing money and then ending up with less debt. I was planning on borrowing money so that I’m not paying so much in order to have the debt. Apparently he thought I was an idiot, because he kept repeating it to me.

He sent me a little packet of stuff, which laid out the whole plan. After that, he gave me a call back. This is when I got really defensive. I asked him point blank: “What is the worst thing that can happen to me if I go with this plan?” His answer: “You stop paying your bills.” On the surface, this is true. The worst thing that can happen is that I stop paying my credit card bills. He neglected to mention the fact that ceasing payment on my credit cards would ruin my credit, cause insane fees for lateness, and possibly send me to forced arbitration with the creditors. Every creditor that I have ever had since 2002 has had an arbitration agreement, which basically would end up in garnishment of wages.

The Scum

About a week after my first bad experience with a debt “consolidation” company, I got a second call from a completely separate company. They introduced themselves on the phone as “Christian Financial Services” or some such. Basically the same deal, but this was a low-pressure sell instead of a high-pressure sell. He was much more reasonable, and talked me through the whole thing at my own pace, taking his time to lay everything out that I could understand it. It was basically the same deal, 15% and they negotiate for you, but they set up an escrow account instead of you doing it yourself.

When I asked the same “worst situation” question, he gave me a realistic outlook, and this company is in a much better standing. If the creditors don’t like their negotiation and take you to arbitration, you actually get representation from their company to help you out. I was almost willing to do it.

Then I went and looked at their actual company online, and discovered that they are a chamelon of some sorts. They were originally called something similar to “USA Debt Consolidation” or something otherwise patriotic. Apparently they decided that God could be on their side, at least it’s good advertising. What good company has to change their name to get religion on their side? A good company would not need to change it’s name.

The Sweet

Some people have gone with these companies, and they have actually negotiated with the creditors in order to pay off your debt at a fraction of the price. If it happens, that’s the sweet part of this. Just given an example of $10,000 credit card debt, it is possible to pay around $6,000 and have all of your debt paid off. It’s basically saying that you can spend money that you won’t have to pay back, ever. There is some hit to your credit rating in the short term, but in the long term, it starts going the other direction. The hard part is finding a company who will do this and who you like.

I had an even harder hurdle to surmount - I don’t really believe that it is ethical to do this. I spent the money, I should pay it back - that’s the deal I made with the company when I signed up for the card. To me, I need to go through with paying them back. Luckily, I came into this with a decent credit rating, and will probably go out with a similarly decent one. Right now, I am a prime target for anyone who wants to give me a large loan at a decent rate - if I can pay less for the money I spent, I’m savvy enough to do it.

The Alternative

There is one other option which I looked into, and will represent the only company that I will link through this diatribe: Consumer Credit Counseling Services or Money Management International are truly non-profit and have good word-of-mouth from anyone I have talked to. They will not negotiate to settle your debt, but they will work with the creditors to get lower percentage, and help you through your budget. The couple of talks on the phone that I had with these people were very productive, and I got some stuff in the mail to help me out. You pay down the entirety of your debt. The downside is that you get a good size hit on your credit rating.

My Choice

In my position, I decided that I was on a good track myself already - I’m paying off my cards smartly, taking the highest APR out as quickly as possible. On my current plan, I will be completely debt-free in 3 years, less if I get some windfall of any sort. One of the bonuses of having a good credit rating is that people are willing to loan me money at promotional rates for some amounts of time. When my promos run out, I play financial musical chairs and get the lowest rate on all of my money. That’s just for me though, to each his own.

The most important part in all of this is that I got control of my budget, and started living within my means. My punishment for living outside of my means for so much time is that now I have to live well within my means. I have to live within the means set upon by having to pay a large chunk of each paycheck to the creditors. Once I’m outside this, it will be much easier for me to have lots of happiness and savings.