I am now blogging at blairchristensen.blogspot.com

How To Choose Life Insurance

One Caveman's Financial Journey:

I prefer blending whole life and term life policies into a larger insurance coverage plan. My personal insurance “standard” is to have enough whole life coverage to completely pay for the funeral and let the term coverage pay for other expenses, such as mortgages, auto loans, future child care expenses, and possibly college for the kids.

After meeting with our insurance agent yesterday, we opted for a $25,000 whole life policy for my wife and $300,000 20-year term life coverage for each of us. This amount should more than pay for any end-of-life expenses for my wife and the $300k will cover the house, our debt, and about 10 years’ worth of child care. We could have opted for more and also covered the kids’ college, but we’re leaning more toward helping them pay but encouraging them to find ways to pay for it themselves.

Kiplinger's Investor's Manifesto

I am an investor. I do not trade my assets frequently. That's speculation, not investing.

I am also a saver, fueling my investments with continuous savings from current income.

I know that every kind of asset entails risk -- even cash, which can be eroded by inflation.

I know that higher returns entail higher risk, in every kind of asset.

I accept those risks, but I mitigate them by owning a diversity of assets.

I regard my home as a place to live, not as an investment. It is not a substitute for retirement savings.

I have an investment plan and a plan for asset allocation, in consultation with a financial adviser.

I invest regular amounts every month, in both rising and falling markets. I know I can­not gauge market tops and bottoms. If I receive a windfall -- a bonus, bequest or gift -- I gradually feed it into my regular investment mix.

I don't pour more money into hot markets nor completely cash out of plunging markets.

I spread my investments among several asset classes, in a mix fitting my age and risk tolerance.

My share of bonds roughly equals my age. I will allocate to stocks a declining portion of my financial assets as I get older.

I rebalance my portfolio every quarter. If the stock market plunges, pushing my stock allocation way below its target percentage, I sell bonds and use my cash to buy stocks.

I force myself to sell high and buy low by periodic rebalancing - just what is temperamentally difficult for most investors to do.

I know that stocks are risky in the short run, so I hold in equities no money for which I have a likely need in the next three years.

But stocks are not too risky in the long run. They have outperformed all other commonly traded assets over periods of 15 years and longer.

Foreign stocks account for at least 15% of my stock allocation. I believe that developing economies will enjoy much higher growth than the U.S. in the decades ahead.

I never borrow against my stocks. Margin calls could force me to sell good assets at a bad time.

I stick with my game plan. I do not check the value of my investments every day or even every week.

I try to keep my cool when other folks are losing theirs.

I remind myself often: I am an investor.

Interesting mix of both good and dubious advice.

Top 100 Blogs For The Frugal Gourmet

These blogs offer some great tips, recipes and ideas for eating well while saving money.

vi cheat sheet

Ruby: Upload file with Net::FTP

Net::FTP documentation:

require 'net/ftp'

Net::FTP.open(@host) do |ftp|
  ftp.login(@user, @pass)
  ftp.chdir(@target_dir)
  ftp.put(@src_file, @dst_file)
  ftp.close # Probably not necessary...
end

How Neil Gaiman Writes

For screenplays, I work directly on screen – novels I write in longhand. For novels, I like the whole first and second draft feeling, and the act of making paper dirty, whereas, for screenplays, I value the immediacy of a computer. I’ve often thought, when I’m writing a screenplay where I’m six drafts down the line with loads of notes and inputs, that it’s interesting to read the first draft again. Often you realise it was more alive, so you go back and take stuff out of it.

I try to change my superstitions with each project. Working in fountain pen is good because it slows me down just enough to keep my handwriting legible. Often I use two pens with different coloured ink, so I can tell visually how much I did each day. A good day is defined by anything more than 1,500 words of comfortable, easy writing that I figure I’m probably going to use most of in the end. Occasionally, you have those magical days when you look up and you’ve done 4,000 words, but they’re more than balanced out by those evil days where you manage 150 words you know you’ll be throwing away.

12 Exercises For Mental Creativity

The Happiness Project:

1. Spend an hour each day without saying anything except in answer to direct questions, in the midst of the usual group, without creating the impression that you’re sulking or ill. Be as ordinary as possible. But do not volunteer remarks or try to draw out information.

2. Think for 30 minutes a day about one subject exclusively. Start with five minutes.

3. Write a letter without using the words I, me, mine, my.

4. Talk for 15 minutes a day without using I, me, my, mine.

5. Write a letter in a “successful” or placid tone. No misstatements, no lying. Look for aspects or activities that can be honestly reported that way.

6. Pause on the threshold of any crowded room and size it up.

7. Keep a new acquaintance talking about himself or herself without allowing him to become conscious of it. Turn back any courteous reciprocal questions in a way that your auditor doesn’t feel rebuffed.

8. Talk exclusively about yourself and your interests without complaining, boasting, or boring your companions.

9. Cut “I mean” or “As a matter of fact” or any other verbal mannerism out of your conversation.

10. Plan two hours of a day and stick to the plan.

11. Set yourself twelve tasks at random: e.g., go twenty miles from home using ordinary conveyance; go 12 hours without food; go eat a meal in the unlikelist place you can find; say nothing all day except in answer to questions; stay up all night and work.

12. From time to time, give yourself a day when you answer “yes” to any reasonable request.

Criteria For Greatness

Zen Habits:

1. Go for broke - If you are going to do important science, do it.

2. Have a way to get the answer - If you haven’t a clue, you’re going to waste time.

3. Be obsessive - He not only knew DNA was important, but it was all he could think about night and day. “Did you see Jeff Goldblum play me in the BBC film? Crick didn’t get cast right; he didn’t come across in any way as obsessive, whereas I did. It was DNA or nothing for me.”

4. Be part of a team - Working with Crick, he had a partner to bounce ideas off and a pal to support him.

5. Talk to your opponents - A lot of scientists are afraid to share their ideas. But by cooperating with Maurice Wilkins, a scientist at a rival lab in London, Watson and Crick learned of experimental evidence that enabled them to clinch their discovery. The person who actually took the pioneering photograph, Rosalind Franklin, never shared her research, and died before the 1062 Nobel Prize was awarded to the three men. “Generally it pays to talk,” says Watson. Oh… and, another rule:

6. Never be the brightest person on the room; then you can’t learn anything.

Lump-Sum Allowance

WSJ:

I remember the first time I heard someone at school talking about how his parents used this idea of an allowance for necessities. The kid got all the control over what T-shirts, toothbrushes or shoes he wanted; his parents got to dole out money all at once and then never stress about what to pay for.

I was jealous. I thought it was a great method and would have loved to have the same degree of financial responsibility.

Years later, I can see even more benefits to a system like that. The parents spend the same amount of money, without the constant hassle of transferring money from parent to kid. And it teaches the kid some valuable lessons: How to be smart with his money and get the most bang for his buck. With his whole budget in his pocket, a kid has to be a conservative shopper.

This method could also help steer clear of unpleasant financial arguments, like the ones my dad and I have had about which of us pays for, say, clothing, tickets to the school play, or running shoes.

Last Chance Harvey

The Good: I only superficially watched this but it was better than expected. Plus: Dustin Hoffman didn't annoy me.

The Bad: Every last plot step was completely transparent in advance. I was beginning to think that I wrote the script given how much I knew in advance.

Transporter 2

The Good: When you're sick and nothing else is on, it is entertaining and passes the time even if it is completely ridiculous.

The Bad: I thought the first Transporter was ridiculous. This one? Oh my. My standards are low for this sort of film but I do have standards. The airplane? Too much.

Brian Aker on the state of Drizzle testing

One of the most important rules I have learned over the years is that anything that is not automated and not required, will get skipped.

Today Drizzle runs 213 tests, the entire MySQL test suite minus tests that are for features we don't have. We don't allow for any regression, meaning that no one is allowed to disable a test in order to get their code pushed. Our test suite was also modified so that we can run all of the tests against a particular engine. Today we do this with both Innodb and PBXT. So instead of having "engine specific" tests, we can test everything. Feedback we are getting from storage engine vendors is that this is golden. Even if they never release for Drizzle, they can use it to vastly increase the testing they do today.

We also do not allow any code to be pushed that causes a compiler to toss a warning. We do this for a wide set of versions of gcc, and also for Sun Studio. We treat warnings as errors :)

Imagine Breaking Up The United States:

Remember that classic Beatles riff of the 1960s: “You say you want a revolution?” Imagine this instead: a devolution. Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society.

There might be an austere Republic of New England, with a natural strength in higher education and technology; a Caribbean-flavored city-state Republic of Greater Miami, with an anchor in the Latin American economy; and maybe even a Republic of Las Vegas with unfettered license to pursue its ambitions as a global gambling, entertainment and conventioneer destination. California? America’s broke, ill-governed and way-too-big nation-like state might be saved, truly saved, not by an emergency federal bailout, but by a merciful carve-up into a trio of republics that would rely on their own ingenuity in making their connections to the wider world. And while we’re at it, let’s make this project bi-national—economic logic suggests a natural multilingual combination between Greater San Diego and Mexico’s Northern Baja, and, to the Pacific north, between Seattle and Vancouver in a megaregion already dubbed “Cascadia” by economic cartographers.

Black Swan Investing

The Simple Dollar:

One particularly interesting point in The Black Swan comes when Taleb briefly discusses investing. His suggested portfolio for taking advantage of black swans is very unusual, yet it makes some sense.

He advocates putting 85-90% of your investment money into something extremely stable, like treasury notes. The other 10-15%, invest it in the riskiest things you can find - things where a black swan might make it go crazy.

So, let’s translate that into dollars. You have $10,000 to invest. You put $8,500 of it into treasury notes, which return 2% annually. You put the other $1,500 into Bangladeshi startups (for example).

At the end of the year, even if you lose all of the Bangladeshi money, you still have $8,670 - your total loss is only 13.3%. On the other hand, let’s say that your Bangladeshi startup goes bonkers and you get a 900% return on that investment, turning $1,500 into $15,000. You now have $23,670 - a 136.7% return.