Moral-Flexibility.Net

The virus that claimed our machine affected the boot sector of the old HD, making recovery of the data on it difficult. After much too-ing and fro-ing I succeeded in extracting approximately 5gig of pictures, tax records, resumes and financial spreadsheets (this thanks to an 8gig usb stick I picked up for $20 for my car stereo yesterday).

The new machine (with a much larger HD - 320Gig compared to the previous 40Gig, and upgraded RAM) has been set up as a dual-boot (WinXP and Ubuntu) with a common partition for moving data between the two. This took some doing (although it’s painfully simply, much easier if you ACTUALLY INSTALL SP2 once you’ve installed XP), but now works ok.

I’ll be mucking around with the two desktops a bit, but the clean install of two operating systems should keep us going for a while.

We’ve got Jillians 4th birthday party shortly, otherwise I’d blather at some length about this. I did want to let ya’ll know I was back online, and things were returning to normal.

Cheers!

So last Thursday on the way home the car began acting strangely. When accelerating away from a dead stop hardly any power would reach the wheels, after two or so similar malfunctions I had to conclude that the vehicle had some sort of transmission problem.

Friday was spent off work and waiting for the diagnosis from a local transmission shop. Finally, later that evening they called… $1400 to get the old Taurus up and running again. Being absolutely clear with the shop I told them to stop any further work and I’d get back to them on Monday.

Vehicular triage. If after $1400 the car would be tip-top I’d have no problem dumping more cash into it, but truthfully we were hoping to limp the car through the winter and find another one come spring. The decision was an unhappy one, but not a difficult one.

We have a new(ish) car now, and I’d post more about it except that last night (having just gotten home from collecting the new car) my computer died, the victim of some sort of massive virus. I have a new hard drive and I’ll be fixing the computer tonight, so hopefully proper pics and a description of our vehicular adventures will follow soon.

Fingers crossed!

I’m not going to repost In Flanders Fields this year, instead I’ll just post that bumper sticker that always gives me pause.

“If you don’t want to stand behind our troops, you’re welcome to stand in front of them”

Something to that.

I’ve received about $40 in referral fees from ING Direct (use my referral orange code and both of us receive a bonus $13 when your account balance exceeds $100). That’s cool, free money is always good and I have no trouble (money or no) recommending ING Direct to those trying to save, here’s why.

1. There are no fees - Yes, perhaps the most important reason to use them is that they charge you NOTHING. So if you save only a little bit of cash each payday your savings won’t be eroded by the usual list of fees charged by the big banks.
2. They pay relatively high interest (currently 3% but better than the big banks). There are online or virtual banks that pay slightly higher interest rates, but they are not as user-friendly as ING and are not recommended for the less techno-savvy.
3. Their online banking interface is user friendly, intuitive and allows you to push/pull money into other (less user friendly) high-interest accounts with ease, even for the less computer savvy.
4. They unlimited accounts within your main account to sub-divide your money, and each account can be “nicknamed” so it’s purpose is clear.
5. Automated savings plan - have them withdraw a specified amount from your main account at specific intervals (bi-weekly, weekly, monthly or daily), make this coincide with your payday and you won’t even notice the money disappearing from your main account.

Most importantly you can use the online banking system to increase, decrease or cancel the automated savings plan at any time (with a few clicks of the mouse). I usually contribute more mid-month than I do at the end of the month simply due to the bills I pay, but your mileage may vary.

You will also receive a bank card for this account, although if you are serious about saving I recommend that you cut it up. It’s important not to think of your savings as money waiting to be spent, and accessing it should be just difficult enough that you don’t explore that option each time you see something shiny.

The money takes time to build, for example $25 saved every paycheque will add up to $600 in one year, hardly enough to retire on but $600 more than you would have saved without it, and at the cost of $25 every two weeks it is hardly lifestyle changing.

More later….

So I have finished my first game of FO3, I ended up ignoring a bunch of side missions and ruined a few more with my random exploration of the Capital Wasteland (I also launched a nuclear strike at one point, then went back and restored a savegame just before the strike and continued playing from there - anyone know what the strike hits?),

Excellent game, some minor problems with the game crashing if the PS3 was left running during the day, but otherwise an entertaining romp through a post-apocalyptic nightmare (lacking in some of the black humour and random encounters I remember as my favorite part of FO1 and 2 however).

No regrets here, except perhaps that I don’t have the time to commit to a marathon session like I would have in the good old days.

Mike wrote about it, Piets been playing it, and even I reserved a copy of the collectors edition and have been hammering away at it with every free moment I have (not so many as it turns out).

Yes, it was the long awaited Fallout 3.

You see I’ve played Fallout 1 and 2 for years, I have nice shiny copies of the games and an old laptop I use exclusively for playing the older games (it has nothing but Windows 95 games installed on it) and Fallout was one of my favorites (I never did play Fallout Tactics), wandering the wastes and doing as you please and damn the karma.

So far this version hasn’t failed to deliver. The change from aerial view to first person isn’t as jarring as I’d expect and the VATS system can be used nicely in conjunction with the less familiar “blast and run” FPS style.

I’m, best estimate, 75% complete on my first play through and there are a great many things I wished I had tried differently, but generally speaking I’ve no serious complaints with the game and I don’t regret the money I spent on it.

Our house is rather old, ranging between 90 and 110 years old dependant on the source. The precise age is a matter of detail only, the important part is that the house does not really have anything approaching modern insulation and the house radiates heat during the winter.

This is a little more expensive for us, but not a deal breaker (as we reno we’ll properly insulate the walls). When you combine this with our Canadian winters and our neighborhood history of minor power interuptions, however, it is a definate cause for concern.

I explored a few options to keep the furnace running if the grid drops. My “hail mary” option was to run the car and my 300 Watt inverter to power the furnace only. This was as far from optimal as I could get (well, just slightly less far than the other alternative of “no heat”) and lacked any elegance at all.

Continue Reading »

I am typically (these days anyway) careful with my money. I have an aggressive savings program, utilize high interest no-fee accounts and have reduced my day-to-day spending significantly (if we don’t count fuel for the car, I get by on less than $50 every two weeks).

Today I stepped out of that role a wee bit, and plunked down my cash for Fallout 3 - Collectors Edition (I just had to have the bobblehead).

Looking forward to Tuesday!