The Saddest Day of My Life

I've spent the past few weeks searching for something at Walmart, Target, Kroger, at various shops online, researching the history of this product's design.

Tonight, all of my hard work has come to fruition: I found that for which I have been searching.

Why, you might ask, the sad post title? Because it's all been for a toothbrush. A crappy, out-dated, plain-old toothbrush. And I am just so excited about it.

See, our house was built in 1960, right at the peak of awesome ceramic fixtures-- including toothbrush holders. And just like the one-car garages that barely fit a mid-sized sedan, the builders of the day didn't anticipate the SUV-like growth of toothbrush handles. (An interesting side-note: There are six places to hold toothbrushes, which highlights significant societal difference from the present-day 4)

Lo, toothbrushexpress.com, which helpeth me taketh better care of my teeth and gums, and also offers this cute little guy on their front page:



So, I have ordered two different types of Ultra Slim Classic Toothbrushes in order to pay homage to 1960. Thank you.

Rules of Life

Here are some things I've learned.

1. If you work harder, you will get better. I applied this to college and graduated with honors. I have applied this to my profession for 10 years and have gotten (if I don't say so myself) pretty dang good, although I see tons and tons of room for improvement.

2. The faster you drive on the highway, the angrier you make yourself.

3. A lack of subject on a blog makes for boring reading and boring writing. Natalie and I rarely write on this because there is no thrust. I'd like to start having a little bit more of a focus on this blog. Inspiration for us is here... this blog is great and Natalie is getting a little obsessed with finding ways to decorate our home. Unfortunately, she's not allowed to start yet, because...

4. Paying interest sucks! Our mortgage payment each month is ~$1000. Most of that right now is going to interest. We only put 10% down on our house since we fell in love with it before we could scrape up a full 20%, so I am working on paying down the second mortgage we got to avoid PMI. We now have about 15% equity in our house and should be at 20% within the next two months.

5. Be honest and friendly to your customers and they will just love you. I really love my job because every day I get the chance to interact with about 25 businesses' staff and it is really a blast.

Couldn't sleep. :)

My Latest Project

For my job, I have to keep track of mileage in order to be reimbursed for gas/wear&tear/etc. This is the hugest pain in the butt I've ever experienced. I've been trying several different solutions for the past year, and they've all worked reasonably well, but they were still a pain in the butt.

Here are the past solutions:

1. Print out a blank mileage spreadsheet every month, write down destinations and date, at the end of the month add up mileage using Google Maps. I didn't like this one because I didn't always have my bag with me which had the spreadsheet in it.
2. Use a mileage journal. Write down beginning odometer, ending odometer and destinations+date. I didn't like this one because it was extremely difficult if I made a personal stop in the middle of a trip. The first method was far better at accounting for those because I could just leave the destinations out of the spreadsheet.
3. Currently I am emailing myself from my phone with 2 destinations at a time and adding up the mileage at the end of the month a la method #1. This is the best so far because I have all of my mileage emails automatically go to a folder in my inbox called "mileage" (clever, eh?). Still, it's a pain in the butt to add up my miles at the end of the month, but this is the best so far.


So here's my ultimate scalable mileage calculator solution, in a series of steps.

1. From my phone, I will send an email with the subject of "destination1 to destination2" to mileage@minditbilling.com. These will be client names, "home", or a full address if it's a new client or random trip.
2. mileage@minditbilling.com will be restricted to only receive mail from internal sources so other people can't send in random mileage for fun.
3. Our Exchange (email) server will receive the email, and once a day will save the inbox to text files-- one for every message it has received.
4. The server will then go through each of the text files and do the following:
a. Note the sender
b. Note the "from" destination.
c. Note the "to"destination.
d. Cross reference each of the destinations with a list of common destinations held in another text file (e.g. "home" for graham@minditbilling.com = 3307 Chadwell Dr, Farmers Branch, TX 75234)
e. Open a Javascript webpage and get directions and distance information through the Google Maps API (e.g.)
f. Write the distance to text file directly from the webpage using an ActiveX control.
g. Server waits for the distance text file to appear, then gets the value contained the file and appends it, the date, and the destination names to another text file named "graham@minditbilling.com.mileage.[month name].txt", then deletes the temporary text file.
5. One the first of the next month, the server runs a script that emails my boss (in the future, another cross reference driver with boss) the previous month's text file for each email address (to start, just graham@minditbilling.com) and moves the mileage for the previous month to an /archive subfolder.

So far I have steps 4e and 4f done. I'm excited! I like projects. It will be based in VBScript because VBScript is easy and I know it.

Our house is a very very very fine house

1. We got the house! We closed on May 4th, got the keys May 5th, and we officially (depending on how you define it) own our house! We're been spending our Saturdays cleaning up stuff and tearing stuff out. Amazingly fun!

I filed for the $8000 tax credit yesterday and that should be here shortly. Unfortunately, we weren't able to put down 20% when we purchased (only 10%). In order to avoid paying PMI, we have a piggyback 10% loan... which should be paid off shortly before our first official mortgage payment in July.

Natalie and I worked really hard to get our student loans paid off last year and I'm just as excited to get our full mortgage paid off as well. Natalie really wants to work on the house and make it real nice, so our interests are slightly divided since there's only so much to go around... which brings me to my second point!

2. 15 minutes after we closed on the house I got a call from my boss and he told me he was resigning effective immediately. What a gut-wrenching call to get after making such a huge financial commitment. Anyway, two weeks later things are going fine without him-- I got a 30% raise and his old position. Turns out I knew more about my job than I thought.

With this new raise, and some kind circumstances in our favor, I think we could get the house paid off in under 3 years.

3. We are also considering renting out a room. Because a) It would be fun to have a friend around, b) we have TONS of extra space and c) it's a good financial decision for both sides (cheap rent and a little extra to throw at the mortgage).

So... who wants to live at 3307 Chadwell? :)

Don't don't don't do it, Charity!

I figured I'd look this up since my wife was walking around the apartment singing "Don't, don't, don't do iiiitttt, Charity!" and she has never heard the song. I probably sing it too much.




My brothers and I grew up listening to an audio tape of this. Psalty the Songbook (yep, always thought he was a Bible...) isn't quite as hip as I hoped he would be.