Come On Already!!!

Why in the HELL haven't The Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman DVD's been released in the U.S. yet?????????????????

By the way, did you know that the first appearance of Bigfoot on the show was played by Andre the Giant?

What'chu talkin' 'bout Willis????

A few days ago, I saw my favorite 70’s child star actor Gary Coleman on TV pitching a website called callcash.com (www.callcash.com). This appears to be a website offering unsecured personal loans. Now I’m not a banker or financial wizard of any type, but from what I can tell, this means that they will loan a person money without any collateral, such as a house or car or other item. When I see commercials like this I usually try to take a quick peek at the fine print, just because I know they don’t want me looking at it. Well, in this particular ad I could have sworn the fine print stated something about a 99% interest rate. The information wasn’t displayed very long, and it was printed awfully small, so my first thought was that I had seen it incorrectly. Of course, at that point I became curious. I know home and car loan interest rates have been creeping up, but I figured they are still in the 6% to 8% range. Credit cards are known to have pretty high interest rates, and I’ve seen them as high as 29%. So I figured that callcash’s rates would be comparable to this rate considering that these types of loans probably have a lot of risk involved for the lender. Still, I must have read that wrong…99%???? It was time to check out their website.

Here is the link to their rates page:

http://www.cashcall.com/General/Rates.aspx

As it turns out, my eyesight is still pretty good. Using Michigan as an example, here are the published rates…

Loan Product-Interest Rate--APR---# Payments--Payment Amt

$5,075 Loan....... 59%......59.95% ....... 84 .........$254.03

$2,600 Loan....... 96%..... 99.25% ....... 42 ..........$216.55

$1,075 Loan....... 89%..... 96.78% ....... 42 ..........$83.89

Hmmm…. Let’s think about this for a minute. For a $2600 loan:

42 payments X $216.55 per payment = $9095.10

WHAT'CHU TALKIN’ ‘BOUT WILLIS?????

Am I missing something here? Again, I’m not a banker, or a lawyer, and I certainly don’t try to play one on TV (or the internet), but isn’t there some sort of legal limit on interest rates? If anyone knows the legal loophole, please let me know because I’m curious. I mean, hey, I can scrape together $2600 to loan if I knew I’d get back nine grand after 3 ½ years.

I have been lucky and very thankful for the fact that I have never been in a position where I needed a cash advance or short term loan such as this. If there is ever a point that I need to, I’m sure I’d find some sort of alternative. Apparently there must be someone taking out these loans, otherwise callcash.com wouldn’t be able to afford to pay top notch stars like Gary Coleman.

Let the buyer, or in this case the borrower, beware.

Excel Tip... Alternate Row Shading

More tech stuff… God I need to get a life.

There are a lot of powerful computer programs that can be very frustrating to use. It seems that software companies expect everyone to become an expert with their program. Don’t they know that there are a lot of people that just want to be able to use the program without having to get a degree in technology? Here is an Excel tip that may make life a little easier.

Have you ever been working with a sheet in Excel and thought how nice it would be if the lines in the sheet could alternate shading between and white and gray? You know, just to make it a little easier to read. Sure you can fill the cells in yourself, but when you add a line, everything is out of whack and you have to redo the whole thing. And if the sheet is more than a page, well… just forget about it.

There is an easier way to do this using the conditional formatting option. Let’s go through a simple example…

Start by getting your data entered into the spreadsheet and formatted…

Next, select the area where you want the alternating lines to appear…

By the way, if you want the entire sheet to have this alternating effect, click the empty cell heading between Row 1 and Column A. This will select all of the cells in the entire sheet…

Now, click on the Format Menu pull down, and select Conditional Formatting…

Set Condition 1 so that Formula Is = MOD(ROW(),2)=1

This basically tells Excel to get the row number and divide it by 2… If there is a remainder after doing the division, that is an odd numbered row and it is shaded. Otherwise Excel leaves it unshaded.

To actually set the shading color, click the Format… Button

Pick the Patterns tab, and then select your fill color (I usually just select Gray)

Your conditional formatting box will look like this…

For this example I decided to highlight only the rows in the table, not the entire sheet. The final result will look like this…

Now you can add rows within the table, and everything will automatically highlight.

By the way, once you have used conditional formatting in a cell, you can copy and paste that format anywhere you want. Select a formatted cell, then copy. Next select the cell needing the format applied to it, and select Paste Special… from the Edit pull down menu (you HAVE to do it this way… the Enter key or Control-V won’t work). In the Paste Special box, click the dot next to Formats

Then click OK. The conditional formatting (and any other formatting applied to the original cell) is now applied to the destination cell. You can even do that to a whole range of cells.

See... didn't Microsoft make that nice and easy?

Nice Freebies

Ok, another boring tech entry... but hey, maybe it will be useful to someone...somewhere... Oh who am I kidding, no one is reading this.

Anyways, I like free stuff. But when it comes to computer programs, I am usually pretty conservative when using free software. I am always suspicious that there is something nasty hidden inside that great free application. However, there are a few programs which I really like, and they actually are free and safe. Most, if not all of these are free for personal use, not corporate use. Be sure to check the details of each program before you use it.

If there’s a free application that you just can’t live without, let me know. Maybe we can add it to this list.

Audacity
Audacity is a nice, fairly powerful yet easy to use audio editing program. It can be used to record, edit, and manipulate a wide range of audio files.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Firefox
Get it… use it… leave Internet Explorer alone

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

Gimp
A very nice alternative to Photoshop

http://www.gimp.org/windows/

AVG
Anti-Virus software from Grisoft. Includes regular free virus signature updates, which is very nice.

http://free.grisoft.com/

Ad-Aware
A nice and fairly effective Anti-Spyware software from Lavasoft.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

Google Sketchup
Fairly powerful yet relatively easy to use three dimensional sketching program from Google.

http://sketchup.google.com/download.html

Zone Alarm
A nice software firewall with many more features than Microsoft’s built in Firewall

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,7228-order,1-page,1-c,firewalls/description.html

Young and Alive... Millsers in the 80's

Life was so simple...

• Drinking all night by the bonfire, Hank Jr and Alabama keeping us company
• Jumping over the bonfire
• Waking up in the ditch, with scorched shoes
• Cruising McDonalds parking lot... in third gear
• Seeing just how deep into the woods we could get that truck by making our own trail
• Riding in the Chevelle, with the soundtrack to Christine blasting
• Beer can be used as brake fluid, in a pinch
• Finding someone with cable, or a NASA sized satellite dish
• Hitting every graduation party we could find...and staying all night
• Sleeping til noon
• Taking bets on who would be next to lose their job
• The biggest fear of getting pulled over was that the cops would take our beer
• Getting shot at, twice in one night
• Hiding the cars from the cops, and doing a good job of it
• Signing the contract, and then asking for someone to buy for us right afterwards
• Camping at the fair, with the strobe light tent
• Hot tents filled with beer soaked moving blankets mixed with Hai Karate... enough said
• Having more people at our tent than were out on the midway
• Getting kicked out of the fair
• Fishing and drinking all day...then playing ball that night
• Free pizza after the games
• Watching Strange Brew over and over, and thinking that it’s not just for Canadians
• Full contact tackle football, with no pads
• Full contact tackle hacky sack, with no pads
• Redneck Croquet
• John Cougar, Night Ranger, Huey Lewis, Van Halen...
• Not realizing that The Boss' "Glory Days" would be so prophetic
• Casey Kasem's sappy long distance dedications
• Aloha, Mr. Hand.... Spicoli rules

"Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then" - Bob Seger

Those were great times... a different world... so far away. I wouldn't have missed it, but I wish I had known the ending before it began...

Life happens... and it can follow a strange course... Make the best of it. Cherish the memories, old and new. Hopefully someday it will all make sense.

Someday this will be the great American novel that I write... or at least a really good "B" movie

Definition: Millser

You sunk my....heat sink

OK, work related, tech related... very boring stuff, but maybe useful to someone, somewhere

In the fall of 2004 we bought 20 Dell Optiplex GX280 PC's (Wow, has it really been almost 3 years now?). Other than an initial hard drive issue, they have worked relatively well. This morning, however, one of the PC's was running sluggish, and the processor fan was as loud as a 747 during take-off. This is actually the third computer in this batch which has had this problem. Since I've been through this process a couple times before, the solution was fairly simple. However, the first time this happened, it took several calls to Dell tech support, and a couple of different replacement parts sent before we actually pinned the problem down.

For some reason, don't ask me why, the cause of this problem is the processor heat sink. Luckily I now have one of these computers currently unused, so I can swap parts out to troubleshoot. I've also been lucky enough to find a support technician at Dell that agrees with this diagnosis without making me jump through too many hoops.

So, if you are having a similar problem, most likely the cause is not the processor, processor fan, motherboard, power supply, or even the fact that you use the computer as a foot rest. If you can convince Tech Support to start with the heat sink, you will probably save yourself a lot of time. Oh, and be sure to tell them you will need a few extra tubes of thermal grease... and don't forget to use it.

Remember... I'm the first to admit that I don't know much about anything. If you find something that I got wrong, or some different way of thinking of things, please let me know.

About Me

I'm a lost soul... a dreamer... a thinker... trapped in the pigeon hole of a very conventional life. I have wandered down this course because I always seem to take on the tasks that no one else can do, or wants to do. One of my self inflicted struggles comes from the fact that I am typically successful at most everything I attempt. This fact has resulted in another character flaw; a schizophrenic tendency. As a result, I still haven't decided what I want to do when I grow up... and I'm trying to avoid growing up at all costs. In reality however, that is something I probably should have done 20 years ago. But dammit, I'm gonna hold onto it as long as I can.

I was born in the 60's, and I'm a child of the 80's. I slacked too much in high school, and I worked too hard in college. I haven't taken enough time to smell the flowers, and I'm getting old enough to realize some regret because of it. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know. I don't know if I was meant for such a conventional life, but I've always done what was expected of me. So that sums up in a nutshell the disjointed nature that will be apparent in this blog. Please bear with me while I sort all of this out.

Some of my entries will be technical, because that's what I've convinced everyone I do (for now, anyways). I run an Information Technology department at a small company. Well actually I am the Information Technology department... It just sounds better when people think you have some clout. A good majority of what I do is not technology related... I usually work on problems other people need help figuring out, regardless of the topic. As a result, I know a lot about all the different areas of the company. I’m a "Jack of all trades" in effect, which makes things very interesting, and frustrating at the same time. At least I always have something new to deal with on a daily basis.

As long as I don't get bored and move on to something else, I will use this blog to talk about fun things, useful things, pointless things, and maybe philosophize once in a while. Besides, no one will read it but me, so if nothing else, it will be a cheap form of therapy. If you do happen to stumble across this garbled disaster of words and have any thoughts, please leave me a comment. I'd love to know if there is anyone else that connects to anything I have to say.

-Chock