Ubuntu 7.10 LAMP+ Server Update

I’ve been slow on this, but people seem to like it.  I’ve added more to the Apache Server configuration section.  You can see my additions here:

Configuring Apache Web Server

That’s it for now.

DOH! – U.S. Passport Security

America: “We’re gonna make you more secure by introducing huge loopholes in our security policies.”

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/03/27/verjee.passport.outsourcing.cnn

Filed under DOH! for obvious reasons.

Obama: Taking the Media Apart

hahahahahaha….

Dude, Obama is taking the media apart, and I love it. He’s crafted his approach in such a way that the media reporters are taking themselves apart.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/03/24/moos.touchy.touchy.cnn

Add some intelligence to politics, and look what happens. HA!!!!

Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly

My dog Alabama… She’s awesome, and she’s a pit bull.

Money 101: Paying the Bills

I have a particularly bad habit of spending what I don’t have.   When I was younger it was worse, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve developed habits that help prevent me from outspending my means.  One of the best ways I’ve found to manage this is by setting up two bank accounts.

I have broken down all of my monthly expenditures into two categories: recurring expenses and general expenses. 

Recurring expenses are any bills that recur on a monthly basis, like rent, phone bills, creditors, etc.  Generally speaking, if its not a fun to pay for, it’s usually a recurring bill.

General expenses are things that don’t necessarily recur on a regular schedule, like buying food or gas, or going to the bar.   Usually, if its fun to pay for, its a general expense.

I currently have two checking accounts, one for recurring expenses and one for my general expenses.  When I receive a paycheck, I take the representative portion of the paycheck that is my recurring expenses and deposit it into the one checking account, then take the rest and deposit it in the other.

I have access to direct deposit, so I just have the direct deposits go to the right checking accounts in the proper amounts, this help stop me from cheating myself.

I’ve also setup most of my bills to auto-withdraw from that account, so I don’t even have to keep up on managing the bills.

Then I live the rest of my life off of the other account, and when there’s no money left, there’s no money left but…. my bills are paid.

Amen Obama

Okay… this is the best speech I’ve seen from a politician yet..

Not only did he approach his critic’s attacks and accusations with grace and strength, he addressed the real issues that are plaguing this country.

Money 101: Banks and your money.

So I ended up in a conversation with a friend of mine today about some bad checks that they wrote, and I ended up spouting my usual rant about banking practices. It goes like this.

First let me say that my friend shouldn’t have been writing bad checks. I know this, I’ve done this, and sometimes just to keep your head up in this world, you gotta do it. So lets take the slap on the wrist and tell my friend (myself, yourself), you gotta manage your money better.

But … We all have this friend, possibly even ourselves, who has been in the position of having to float a check or two just to survive in this world. The banks know this, which is why they have developed their check processing systems to take advantage of this behavior.

Lets consider that my friend wrote the following checks, in this chronological order:

1) $10 on the 1st of the month
2) $20 on the 2nd of the month
3) $50 on the 3rd of the month
4) $100 on the 4th of the month

Now lets consider, that despite the fact that America’s banking system is hard wired to a huge pipe on the internet, and that transactions can be processed and accumulated in seconds, the banking system still provides the disclaimer that a check is subject to a 5 day processing period.

That 5 day processing period is designed to allow the computer system to accumulate check debits against the users account, then determine the most effective method of withdrawing those checks against the users account so as to retrieve the highest amount of fees possible.

So to continue the example, lets say my friend has $30 dollars in their bank account, and the bank takes a $20 fee for each bounced check. According to the chronological method of processing checks, the math goes like this:

$30 – $10 = $20 and no fees assessed
$20 – $20 = $0 and no fees assessed
$0 – $50 = -$50 and $20 in fees assessed
$-70 – $100 = -$170 and $20 in fees assessed
Final Balance = -$190

Okay, so our friend is in bad shape, but if you look at it, they only accumulated a mathematical overdraft of $150, with $40 in fees assessed.

Now, if you consider the 5 day processing period, and the fact that banks actually process checks according to largest sum first, lets look at the math:

$30 – $100 = -$70 and $20 fee assessed
-$90 – $50 = -$140 and $20 fee assessed
-$160 – $20 = -$180 and $20 fee assessed
-$200 – $10 = -$210 and $20 fee assessed
Final Balance = -$230

But you see, here’s the kicker, the mathematical balance hasn’t changed, they are still only $150 dollars in the hole, but the bank is now assessing $80 worth of fees against the same checks.

Of course the bank has some rationale why this better for you, but don’t be fooled. They are a business just like any other, who will use the systems at hand to provide their shareholders with the best bottom line. Why would you charge $40, when you could charge $80?

And I won’t even get into them charging you banking fees for borrowing your money.

So the long and short of this lesson is: If you’re gonna float checks, expect to pay fees on every check involved, not just the ones you assume will be over.

But what do I know?

In the News: People are Scared of Barak.

Okay… So I’m not saying anything new. But check out this site to sign the petition:

http://foxattacks.com/virus

Or view this YouTube vid:

If you think about it, if Barak weren’t a threat to the conservative regime in this country, then he wouldn’t be making news. Most importantly, he wouldn’t be the target of such ridiculous accusations and associations.

Think about it, if they can affect the primaries enough to make Hillary the candidate, they have a much easier fight for the next presidential office.

But once again, what do I know?

Beating Churchill’s Black Dog

What I have learned from my problems and where they come from is worth more to me than gold. The truth is, what I have learned is really only for me to know, because it really only applies to my life. However, from that lesson, I can extract some pieces of information that are universal to human nature:

1. When we are faced with a problem, we will protect and defend ourselves at all costs. It’s survival, its how our species got here in the first place. Anyone who says differently is either lying to protect themselves, or in serious psychological disrepair.
2. While our need to protect ourselves is instinctive, our chosen methods of protection and defense are learned behaviors. Look at the wide variety of martial-arts, weaponry, or methods of political debate that currently exist in this world.
3. We typically learn our methods of defense from the people that raise us and are close to us.
4. Finally, these protective behaviors engage themselves instinctively, which usually bypasses our conscious thought processes, and manifest themselves in immediate reactions.

Knowing these things, and believing them, provided me with a path to understanding my behavior and how I affected the world both around me and within me. This is an EXTREMELY important concept that I didn’t know or believe prior to examination:

I affect my world.

Prior to this examination, I didn’t believe that I, little-old-me, could possibly affect the world I lived in. I soon came to understand that that response to the world was a learned behavior that I got from my parents.

Why was it the source of all of my problems?

If I can’t affect the world around me, then the world around me must constantly be affecting me. This is the core of narcissism.

This made me defensive against the rest of the world… EVERYONE … even those I loved were questioned because I didn’t know how they were affecting me, so I pushed them away to defend myself. I created reasons not to like them, I made them into known enemies, and accused them of things I was doing myself. I mean after all, how could I do it, I don’t affect the world, it affects me — ergo it must be their fault that things are going so poorly in my life.

The problem with this approach, is that when I acknowledged that my life was difficult and had problems, the task of overcoming them became insurmountable. Why? Because I had no way of affecting the world I lived in. I had become completely enslaved to my own mental manipulations and was completely blind to knowing that I could affect them positively.

I was left without any answers because I had been taught to defend myself with a narcissistic downward spiral that left me completely alone and without answers … accept for one… I knew, somewhere deep within myself, that this was not the way life was supposed to be.

So I tried to fix my problems by running away. I moved out of my house to New Jersey and tried to get away from my family and friends. This approach failed. Why did it fail? Because the base philosophy of this approach is this: “My family and friends are the reason why I feel this way, so if I get away from them I can solve this problem.”

I was not taking responsibility for my actions, I was making the world around me responsible.

So I moved back home, to live with my brother. I also went and visited a good friend of mine, named Joe. Joe told me that he thought that I was depressed and that I needed to see a psychiatrist. The first definitive and pivotal moment in my adult life. I took his advice and I went. My psychiatrist was good at first, but when my insurance proved to be a problem, he became systematic and stopped really treating me. In the mean time he put me on Prozac as an easy cure all for the problem.

So I was on Prozac, and I didn’t care about anything, and nothing was wrong in my life… or was it. I wasn’t arguing with people, I wasn’t angry, and I was working at a good job that I liked. But there WAS a problem… I didn’t care about anything. Philosophically this was the opposite problem of my previous approach. No-one outside of myself was responsible for my life, but I wasn’t either, and to make it worse, I didn’t care who was responsible.

So I started experimenting with my medication (not a recommendation I would make for other people — My brother can attest that I was border-line psychotic at this point in my life). I would go off of it cold turkey, and see what changed, then go back on it. I needed to know why my life was so drastically different when I was on drugs, than it was when I was off them. This way, I could find out what caused the problem and fix it.

One day I woke up in the morning, and was hungry, so I went to the kitchen to make breakfast. I had been off of Prozac for two days, and I was feeling the effects. All I wanted to make was eggs, scrambled eggs no less. I looked in the fridge and I heard a voice in my head say “What are you doing? You can’t do this? You’ll probably just fail… What’s the point?”

Yeah… I actually heard my brain say that to me, like a person in the room.

It made me feel awful… Like there was nothing I could do to get over this problem of not having breakfast. Now you’re probably scratching your head or chin or elbow at this point and thinking… “That’s ridiculous” … well I had the same response.

This voice in my head was the thing in the shrouded box that no-body can see into, not even me. The evil blackness lurking in the closet, or what Winston Churchill referred to as the “black dog” snarling at him from the corner of the room.

So I examined this “voice” in my head, and now that I had heard it, I was able to hear it again and again and again. I had taken it out of the shrouded box, and placed it into the box that I could see into. It was that hard, but that simple at the same time. I mean after all, how do you hear a voice that you can’t hear? But once I heard it, the game changed.

Suddenly I realized that this “voice” had something to say about everything I did in my life. And every time it did, I got angry, and defensive and turned in on myself. Needing to change that, I rebelled against the voice. I shut it up, I laughed at it, and I proved it wrong.

You see, my problem was coming from inside my own head. My own head had turned against me, and was telling me the worst things that a person would want to hear. Creating a constantly defensive state of mind. Since I didn’t know it was my own head, I assumed it was the world around me, and since I couldn’t affect the world around me, I assumed it was affecting me, so I defended myself and shoved it away and wanted nothing to do with it, and then complained about why life was so hard and depressing.

Now it is true that my parents were responsible for creating this behavior within me, but that was years ago, before I was an adult, who thought for himself and lives his own life. I couldn’t blame my parents, because that didn’t change the fact that I was thinking incorrectly.

So here is the biggest realization that I came upon that changed my life. It turned my world around, from one of constant pain and sorrow, to one of constant joy:

The way I react to the world is 100%, irrevocably, my fault. No-one makes me do, say or feel anything accept myself.