I haven’t written to give an update on my MBA in quite some time so I figured this would be as good of a time as any. The spring semester of the part-time program at San Jose State University begins right after the new year, so I am already midway thru the two courses that I am taking. Both classes are core requirement classes:
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Spring cleaning starts a little early this year
So it is only the end of January, but Stacy and I decided to do some elbows-deep spring cleaning on Sunday. We went thru each of our closets, pulled out the items that we don’t wear anymore, and this went into two piles. Goodwill and eBay. Actually only my things went to eBay, and the rest of my stuff and all of her stuff went to Goodwill.
We dropped off two large bags of clothes at the Sunnyvale Goodwill location, and the rest is now bagged up and waiting to bring it over.
Continue reading
Weekend links – 01/22/10
This weekend I will be suffering through a midterm for my Law and Ethics class, so I am posting my weekend links today instead of Saturday.
- A short post on making healthcare better by AJ McGuire
- Indie Relief raises $143,000 for Haiti
- A review of the new Domino’s Pizza recipe
- Getting busy with jQuery
- How to make freelancing easier, stop caring
- 365 Ampersands
- Building beautiful business cards
- A video of Invasion
- How to make a Heatmap in R
So that’s it for this week. Read and enjoy the links while I am toiling away in a classroom all day and taking my midterm.
New for 2010 – Rollover to Roth IRA conversions
This may not be of value to very many, but for those few it may be VERY valuable. For those with a “traditional” IRA or a “rollover” IRA, you may be one of the people that it’s VERY valuable for. As we’ve covered before in our “Do the minimum” retirement post, there is one major difference between a traditional (or rollover) IRA and a Roth IRA. With a traditional, the earnings of the money in the account are tax deferred. With a Roth IRA, they are tax free. This is a large advantage of the Roth for those that will have large amounts of appreciation in their IRA accounts. The traditional IRA does have something in its favor however, and that is it reduces your taxable income for the current year. For example, if you make $50,000 and contribute $5,000 to your traditional IRA, you will pay taxes on $45,000. Continue reading
On Tragedy
Throughout my life, there has been no galvanizing force, no emotional punch in the face, no dose of true reality on the level of a tragedy. Growing up in the 1980′s and 90′s, the largest tragedy we had was Pearl Harbor. My grandparent’s generation would all remember what they were doing that day. The same can be said for the assassination of president Kennedy. Every teacher I had from grade school up to professors in college could tell you what they were doing the day that Kennedy was shot.
Our generation hasn’t been so lucky…
The past decade has had, what it seems to me at least, a heaping dose of epic tragedies. From 9-11, the Tsunami in the South Pacific, Hurricane Katrina, and now the earthquakes in Haiti, the past ten years have had their fill of tragedy. And please believe me when I say this is by no means an exhaustive and definitive list of the tragedies we have faced as a world, but they are some of the ones which had the largest effect in recent time.
I will never forget where I was on 9-11. I was driving up I-93 to Andover listening to the radio when Howard Stern got a call about it. I made the mistake of switching to a news station thinking that they would have more information, when it turns out Howard stayed on the air and had callers giving eye witness testimony for the rest of the morning. When I got to work, some co-workers had found a TV and I was able to see exactly what was happening. I had, unsuccessfully, been trying to get a hold of my sister Laura who lived and worked in Manhattan.
Chuck from Black Flag selling his record collection
I just found out that Chuck from Black Flag has decided to sell his record collection. The first few records including an obviously rare “Slip it in” test press are available here.