Northwoods Ice

As part of my 30th Birthday Party I rented the an ice skating rink for an hour at Northwoods Ice. I confirmed by phone the date and time with David Ramsey the manager at that time and then went in to pay a few days later.

Upon arriving David told me that he had accidentally scheduled me for the wrong day and that the day that I wanted was already booked. I was disappointed, but understood that mistakes happen.

While I was there I told David that I wanted to bring in a laptop and play music that we could skate to. I also specifically asked if we could pump up the volume because I remember the fun days as a child having roller-skating parties with fun DJ'ed music.

When the time rolled around, I brought my laptop and one of the young workers there tried to assist me in setting up the system. Neither of us could get the system to work. After I had spent about 15 minutes of my hour goofing with the system the assistant came up to me and said that one of the other workers told her that the system hadn't worked for a few months and that they didn't tell her about that because they wanted to see if she could get it working.

So... we finished our skating and games in dead silence. I still had fun, but was disappointed.

Upon complaining to David and asking for a small refund in the amount of *his* choosing, I was dismissed. He informed me that the sound works on both rinks and that the music working is not part of what I rented even though we had a verbal agreement. It would have been nice if he had told me that he would ask his staff about the problem or that he would make sure that his staff was properly trained so that this wouldn't happen again.

I just wanted to skate to music and renting the rink wasn't cheap. It's frustrating to me that people have so little common sense and business sense when it comes to dealing with people. I understand that I signed a contract and I'm sure legally I have no recourse, but that doesn't mean that its in their company's best interest for their customers to walk away with a negative impression.

Atlanta Trip

I went to Atlanta to meet with the owners of Geo Product Solutions and they let me stay over an extra day to check out Atlanta. I made a video of my trip and used the theme of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou given the awesome aquarium there.



This is a beefy video, if your internet connection can't handle it, you can try the lower bandwidth version I posted on youtube.

Shiner B.A.S.H 2007

I did it. I signed up with Team in Training to cycle from San Antonio to Shiner, TX. It's called the Shiner B.A.S.H. It's about a 90 mi ride which is why training begins next week if I'm to be ready for the ride in May.

Team in Training provides coaches and extra vehicle support during the ride in return for raising funds for cancer. I probably don't give enough anyways, so I signed up knowing that I would get coaching and encouragement for an amount I was willing to give anyways. However, if you would like to donate to blood cancer research and relief, you're more than welcome. Team in Training must give 75% of what's raised, but I'll contribute at least 25% of what's donated so that 100% of your donated dollars goes to the cause.

Donate Now

Personal Finance / QIF / Scottrade Rant

I signed up with Scottrade months ago. Now that I have several accounts (bank/401k/trading), I figured it was time to setup a money manager like Quicken or MS Money. I'm running a trial edition of MoneyDance because it's pure java, cheap, and has the features I need.

Anyways to set fidelity NetBenefits, my 401k provider, I had to download the qif files and import them. The file is text based that lists transactions broken into action, amount, security(text only no description), ... Unfortunately, the Buy action "NBuy" assumes that you are taking money from the account and buying shares, but since there is no money balance in my 401k, the correct action should be ShrsIn or BuyXfr. ShrsIn worked for me so I just replaced all and it's relatively accurate. The other trick is to input the ticker symbols into the securities that are created so that the yahoo stock price plug-in can update the value of the holdings. This must be done from Tools edit securities in MoneyDance.

Scottrade on the other hand is designed to fund and buy from the funds you've deposited. They have two history files, one for financial changes and one for trading changes. After importing both into my account, it was perfect except for $150. After looking through the data I guessed that a redemption fee was charged that accounted for the difference. After talking to the representatives at Scottrade a fee was applied but no transaction was logged for that fee.

I'm a realist so I figured that these types of accounting errors are going to happen so my main intent in talking to them was to alert them that not logging a transaction in that case was likely a programming mistake and to make them aware that it was important to their customers. Their response was unfortunately that redemption fees "don't work that way" and therefore will not be included in the log. Furthermore I should be aware of the fees and adjust my program manually. I told her that I thought it didn't make sense to provide a list of transactions if some are omitted. She agreed in general, but gave no indication that the issue would be given any further attention.

It's not worth the fees for me to switch brokers, but I would definitely prefer my financial institutions to accurately report the history of the account. I don't know if other brokers have similar problems or not, but in case anyone is considering scottrade, they should know about this deficiency.

In summary, I was able to get a lot of this setup because of my technical know-how. In general I think it's a shame that this isn't all worked out by now. I think the main issues are a lack of a well defined public standard and poor implementations. It's almost not worth having it setup because you have to double check the numbers against the website anyway.

My first road bicycle

Well, it's done. I bought my first road bicycle. It's a 2006 Fuji Roubaix Pro.



I may not get it for a month since I'm trying to make it to Kansas for a while. I bought it from a very small shop near rudy's on I-10 called Joe's Pro Bikes. Joe is the only one that works there which makes it nice because I can always deal with Joe. Joe has a ton of riding experience and is very vocal about what he thinks you need and don't need.

I probably am just going to ride for recreation, but I like going fast and want to see improvement in my abilities.

Beach To Bay

Just ran beach to bay this weekend. I enjoyed it a lot. There were between 6 and 7 thousand people that participated. It is a relay marathon with six legs. I ran leg 5 (the shortest one which was 4 mi) in 45 minutes. I'm pretty happy with that result since I'm not a distance runner and didn't train that hard. Actually I only ran once and I'm not sure how far. Anyway it was a lot of fun hanging out with friends on the beach. We got in some great sand volleyball. Our team (ROAMINS 5:8) finished in 687th place according to the results.

Financial Sites

Get Rich:I will teach you to be rich.

Get Poor:Give Us All Your Money.

Any more, please share in the comments.

USB Autorun.inf

I've had some issues in getting my USB key to automatically run programs when it started. Once I put Autorun.inf in the root of the USB drive Windows XP would recognize it but ask me what I wanted to do instead of running what I had for open in the [autorun] section. After hunting around on the net and a little trial and error I settled on this.

I want to have pageant and KeePass loaded off of the drive, but if I've removed the drive and the programs are still running, I don't want to re-run them anyway. In stead I just click on startup.bat which I created that starts both programs.

I found that using shell would this allows me to selectively run one program that's on my drive by right clicking on the drive in My Computer. Here is my Autorun.inf

[autorun]
open=
shell\KeePass\command=programs\KeePass\KeePass.exe
shell\KeePass=KeePass
shell\putty\command=programs\putty\putty.exe
shell\putty=Putty
shell\tw\command=programs\ShellRun.exe tiddlywiki\index.htm Running TiddlyWiki
shell\tw=TiddlyWiki
shell\pageant\command=programs\putty\pageant.exe \rsa\putty.PPK
shell\tw=pageant

here is my startup.bat file

start \programs\KeePass\KeePass.exe
start \programs\putty\pageant.exe \putty.PPK

Utilities - KeePass/Tiddly

Just wanted to mention that I've found two other utilities that I like enough to use.

The first on is KeePass. It allows you save your usernames and passwords in an encrypted database. The program is small and can be run off of a usb key. You can save what the window title is that needs a particular password and if you have it running it will automatically enter in the username and password with any combination of tabs, spaces, enters and static text; just by hitting CTRL+ALT+A. If the title of the window isn't specific enough, you need to maximize the program from the systray and select the account and click CTRL+V which will type the login and password.

The second utility is called tiddly. It's a wiki that doesn't require a server. You just need you allow ActiveX in FireFox or IE and it will resave itself. That's right all of the code is in one html file and each wiki "page" (tiddler) is just a div in that file. It doesn't save versions of each page, but it keeps track of the date each tiddler is added. Each tiddler consists of a title, the body and a del.icio.us style tagging field. You can then open all of the tiddlers that contain a particular tag. This would be a good idea for mainstream wikis! Plus you can edit a tiddler with a quick double click on the text. Saving is just as easy with CTRL+ENTER.