January 9, 2010

• Random thoughts and stuff...

  - Yay! My wife is back home from Taiwan! Woot! Right when I finished all the leftovers too. =)

  - You know what the biggest time waster for me was these past two weeks that my wife has been out of the country? My PC. I mentioned that I installed Windows 7 on my PC, and had to re-install all my programs again. That took time, sure, but what caused the majority of all the wasted time? Two problems I ended up having when I installed Windows 7 to my Toshiba laptop, that needed my attention to fix. Specifically, it was the fact that my DVD/CD drive is not acting right, and that the media extender to stream stuff to my xbox360 needed to be reset. Well there were actually three problems (I mentioned that on my previous blog post), but the third one is ignorable. So in comes google, to help me figure out how to solve my problems. I googled, got a link, read the link, looked for another link, read that link, and repeat that for several more hours. Eventually the media extender thing miraculously is working again, kinda, but thanks to my researching I found a software alternative to that problem (TVersity.com) just in case it breaks down again. As for the disc drive problem, I found A LOT of solutions that didn't work for me, but one answer that involved changing the drive letter is actually working for the time being(changed it to "A:" for now), however it's quite possibly just a temporary solution. I could have spent all those hours on something else... like other time wasters...

  - I went to get my car's 100,000 miles service. It was going to take about four hours, so I took the shuttle they provided and spent those hours at the mall. The shuttle picks up at every top of the hour, and I planned to head back at 2PM. I showed up at 1:58PM and waited and waited and waited.... you know what time the shuttle arrived? 2:50PM. I told the driver if there was some kind of delay and he said "not really," and then I told him how long I waited. All he could say was "oh." He offered to take me back right away, but I told him that he should probably wait until 3PM before he leaves, because MAYBE leaving early is what happened to me. We waited until 3:02PM.

  - It figures all three of my shoes are breaking down at the same time. There's the one for work which sole is peeling off, there's my casual shoe that has a tear on it's side, and semi-casual shoes where it's color is completely fading out. So I spent about $200 to replace those three shoes recently. Kinda feels nice to have new shoes, and it's making me have the urge to buy just one more pair of shoes... hehe
  
  - Speaking of expenses, it's come to my attention that maybe young kids don't realize how much they'll have to save up just to buy a house. You want to buy a $200,000 or $400,000 house? You're going to have to save up at the very minimum 10% of that cost for the down-payment ($20,000 or $40,000 respectively), and then afterward pay about $1,300-$1,500 a month to the bank where you got the house loan. The reality is that you should save up at least 20% of the house's cost for the down payment, even if it means you have to pay about $2,600-$3,000 a month to the bank. That's a lot of money right? I'm not even including utility costs like electricity or water. I don't think kids realize how important it is to save money, until they know exactly how much they are saving and WHY they are saving that money. Unless they don't want to have their own house that is.

  • 7:45 pm
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