Cost of a College education

Does it concern people that the cost of a college education is rising faster than inflation?  (and by a lot).  My children are 6 and almost 4 and I wonder a lot about what it’s going to cost for them to go to college (don’t even get me started on the cost of weddings ).  I’d love to be able to save money for them to goto a good college but the reality is that at today’s rate of increase it’s an uphill battle to save.  The frustrating part is that I make a pretty decent living, yet if I want to save for their college I have to sacrifice the present and potentially what I’ll have available when I retire. 

I’m not sure what to think about this and am struggling with it a lot.  On the one hand, I got scholarships and financial aid.  In all I ended up paying for about 1 year of my education, and my parents paid for about a year.  Is that a more realistic expectation of what I should plan for?

 How do you budget for your children’s education (if at all)?

 

Security and your SSN

I don’t know about you but whenever I have to enter my SSN or Credit card into a website, I get downright paranoid and use tools like Fiddler to ensure that the sight is secure.  So just this morning I went to my benefits website for my FSA (flexible spending account) so that I could re-enroll for next year and I realized that I left the password at home (in an encrypted repository).  So I clicked the link titled “click here to get your login password if you forgot it” (or something like that).

The following window popped open:

Notice the URL just below the title bar.  It’s http  not Https!  I used fiddler to confirm that the page was indeed transmitting everything in clear text!   (for those that don’t know Fiddler is essentially a traffic sniffer that looks at HTTP)

So I called the company and let them know that they were compromizing people’s SSNs!

rrrr. 

The benefits company manages FSA and 401K benefits.  How freaky is that!?

 

Roundup

On the way into work this morning I was listening to NPR and I heard an article about the plant/weed remover called Roundup.  Have you heard of it?  I’ve used it at home.  Apparently Roundup is very popular in the Agricultural world.  Instead of plowing fields, farmers just spray roundup to kill all vegetation and then they plant their seeds.  They were saying that this is actually more environmentally friendly than plowing the fields, and apparently Roundup is actually a pretty safe chemical.  And it’s been around for 20-30 years.

Even better (for the farmer) is that Monsanto (who created Roundup) also helped engineer roundup resistant soybeen and corn seeds.  This way the farmer plants his seeds then sprays roundup and lo and behold no weeds. 

But something interesting started happening around 2000.  Certain weeds (horseweed being one of the more virulent) have become resistant to Roundup.  And they are starting to spread.  Know what Monsanto’s response is?  (Monsanto stands to lose BILLIONS if farmers stop using Roundup) enhance roundup with more toxic chemicals and then reengineer the seed stock to be resistant to that… Can you see a theme here?

I’ve been trying to eat more organically these days… It’s stories like this that make me think that NON GMO food is a good thing….

 

XBox 360… Game review…

Ok… I’ll now admit that I have an XBox 360.  I find it lots of fun… Although I don’t play it SUPER often, it was well worth the price.  (Hit me up for my gamertag if you have one).  Recently I picked up a game called Guitar Hero II.  And I gotta say… It’s a blast… It’s a game I can play with my kids around.  They want to play too and my oldest likes the whammy bar, so we play together, I play the music and she whammies when it’s time.  The guitar controller also came with a bunch of stickers so my girls helped me decorate it.  My oldest’s favorite song is the “Mommy’s allright, Daddy’s alright song”  (surrender by Cheap trick).

Onto describing the game:

It’s really pretty neat the guitar controller has 5 colored buttons on the neck, a “pick” plate that you can strum up and down, and a whammy bar.

When you play the game, you basically select a song and you see a vertical representation of the guitar neck.  As the music and lyrics play, colored notes (representing the 5 colored buttons) scroll from the top to the bottom, as the note hits the bottom of the screen you have to have the corresponding button pressed and you need to “pick” to hit the note. 

If you can do this with enough success the crowd cheers you and ultimately you finish the song.  However if you miss a lot, you don’t even get to finish the song as the crowd “boos” you off stage.  As you successfully hit notes your score increases and if you hit 10 notes in a row you get a 2x score multiplier 20 notes in a row gets you 3x and 40 gets you 4x.  (If you miss a note though… you lose the multiplier).

There are 4 levels of difficulty.  easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert.   Easy starts of with 3 fret buttons and the levels quickly get really hard if you are musically challenged like I am

The game also comes with a practice mode where you can slow songs down in order to get the fingering right

 Overall I give this game high marks.  It’s a lot of fun.

 

Hi!

It’s been hard to log posts lately… I’ve been working pretty hard.  I have been thinking about posting tho … does that count?

At work we were finishing out a sprint and I took some vacation so life was pretty busy. 

For vacation we took the girls north and when camping in N. Conway NH and went to Storyland.  Much fun was had. 

At work I’ve been working on a big State machine that was written in C++ … been a while since I’ve done C++ but it’s coming back pretty quickly.

 Anyway I hope to post a bit more frequently than I have been.

 

Conversation with my 3 year old:

Last nite I’m sitting in the family room and from the top of the stairs I hear:

“Daaad,  Daaaaaaaaaaaad,  DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDDDYYYYYYYYY!”

So I go to the bottom of the stairs, it’s my 3 year old and she says “Well, my blanket fell off can you put it back on?”

So I trundle up the stairs and say to her “I’ll help you but it’s late and you now have to stay in bed for daddy ok?”… “ok”.

Into bed she goes blanket on, quick goodnite kiss, I start walking away… “Daddy?”, “Yes?”… “Can I have a hug”

“Ok honey”.  Hug ensues my 3 year old says:  “I love you” and gives me a hug and a kiss.

 DAMN Kids can just melt your heart

 

Is our society a little out of control?

So I was just reading on Boston.com that the NFL fined Brian Urlacher for wearing a hat (vitawater or something like that) with a logo on it at an NFL event.  This company is not an official sponsor of the NFL.  So apparently this is against NFL rules and such… I guess I don’t have too much of a problem with having rules… But Mr. Urlacher was fined $100K.  HOLY CRAP!   Does this say something about our society? 

 Yeesh!

 

Spring is fun

So I thought I’d post a picture of my girls here. I’m playing with a feature of Flickr that allows me to cross post to my blog. This picture it taken outside my mom’s house. It’s some kind of fruit bearing tree I think, and the girls were loving climbing in it.

 

Why does Customer Service have to Suck? (especially at Sears)

So as you may have read here a few weeks ago, our washer went and our dryer was on the way out.  So being fine upstanding Americans we went out and bought new ones.  Having bought our dishwasher at Sears and getting recommendations from friends on Washers and Dryers… off to Sears we went. 

There was a sale going on and we got 15% off if we signed up for a Sears credit card.  So, being out a boat load of cash 1hr later we had scheduled the deliveries (washer and dryer had different availabilities).  Being “Eco conscious” we decided to go with the front loading washer and dryer pair.  (the kenmore HE3 adn HE3t).  So 4 days after our order our washer arrives… Everything went smoothly, and Heather was enjoying being able to do laundry again (I’m not sure I understand that last part… Is there something theraputic about doing laundry for some people?).

About 1 week later our dryer arrived and that delivery went off without a hitch… until (You knew there was an until coming, right?)  we went to dry our second load of laundry.  The bugger wouldn’t start!  Not matter what we tried.  So off to the phone Heather went (I wasn’t home at the time).  After 20 minutes of trying different things the Person at the other end says “I need to send out a technician, they’ll be there sometime on Friday, we’ll call you the nite before to give you a time window.”  I can’t remember if they called the nite before but anyway friday morning the repairman shows up and after about 20 minutes… he says it’s the control board on the Dryer.  It’ll take 2-4 weeks to get a new control board or we can get you a new dryer next week.  New dryer was our choice.  So he gets us on the phone with someone at Sears, after we get her to agree to get us a new dryer she says that someone will call within 24-48 hours with a delivery date for next week.  So Sunday afternoon comes and we are over the 48 hour limit and no call.  So we call them… Lo and behold there is no record of this in the system!!!  We are annoyed and have to call the local store (Nashua NH) and get in touch with someone there and we did… the store manager there said he’d look into it and get back in touch.  He calls the next day and says that wednesday is the soonest they could get it to us.  We were hoping for sooner but we had to deal with the cards we were dealt. 

So wednesday comes and the dryer arrives (I was at work), when I got home, I looked at the installation and realized they did a bad job installing it.  They broke the outlet cover for the 220 plug that my dryer plugs into (admittedly a 90 cent piece to replace) and they managed to pull the dryer vent tube that connects the vent hood to the dryer exhaust ductwork  (The tube is like 1.5 feet long and goes into the wall) clean out of the wall when they changed the dryers (I don’t think they disconnected the ducting from the tube).   Then they just haphazardly put it back in so that instead of part of the tube sticking out of the wall straight it was tilted at a 45 degree angle!  Thus the dryer would vent into the insulation of my wall and not to the outside world.  I was pretty annoyed so on the phone I get and get in touch with someone from sears.  After explaining the situation, she says someone will be out friday to fix it.  So thursday nite comes and no phone call with a time window estimate.  So I call again… and lo and behold… the person I talk to says there is no record of this and that there is no way someone could come out friday.  So after voicing my displeasure, I get my delivery fee refunded and a giftcard for 70$.   So friday nite comes and I call and get the same treatment!  and there is no record of the gift card and refund and now they can’t get a repairman out until sunday! So saturday comes and I fixed the exhaust tube myself.  We called the manager at Sears to let him know our whole story and wanted to ensure that our “refund/gift card” wasn’t forgotten about.  After a week of him not returning our calls our refunds came in the mail.  Then he called to say they were in the mail. 

Thanks Sears… you’ll not be seeing my money ever again!

 

Gone Fishin

So my 2 daughters and I went fishing last weekend.  It was a beautiful saturday morning and my friend Al who lives over on Nabnasset lake in Westford let us come over and cast off his dock.  He even supplied the rods, hooks and worms.  After spearing some worms onto the hooks we helped the girls cast away.  After about an hour we had caught and released 7 fish!  It was quite fun.  Shannon caught a blue gill (sunfish), and a perch, while Mary Anna caught 5 fish, 4 bluegills, a Black Crappie (or calico bass).  It was great fun.  Then Al took us on his boat and we tooled around the lake for a little bit.

The most fun part of the morning for the girls was digging the worms out of their container  

I gotta invest in a mobile phone with a good camera….