Our payment obligation?

Like most Americans, we owe some money. We are slowly paying it back, and making some progress. What we try to do is keep current on things and periodically pay things off in one big lump sum, since that gets us around the issues of murderous interest. Even bills without interest, I do a similiar thing, paying small bits of the amount owed, just to show them that we know they are there and we intend to pay them off.

In the case of most of these owed bills, I'll pay them $X amount every time they send me a notice. I do that because the notices come about once per month, and they provide an envelop. We've got a ton of timeless stamps, and I figure I might as well use them up while we are transitioning back to completely electronic banking again.

So imagine my surprise when one debtor, in their letter to me, state that my due payment of $X is due on October 15th 'per my obligation to pay $X per month'?

This is really funny. I owe these people money and that is not in doubt. What is in doubt is that I ever entered an obligation to pay a specific amount each month. I never did that with anyone and yet these people claim that I have agreed to an obligation.

Of course I'll keep paying because its good to clear this thing out, but I find it amusing that they noticed my ongoing constant payments and changed their nastygrams to reflect it.

Vacation this fall, winter, or spring? Or not...

So my staycation sucked. I guess it could have worked, but really I want to be away from home, be pampered, and see water or something else but this area. Our finances aren't bad right now, so we've teased the thought of doing something fun away from home, and bringing our 16 year old son with us.

We've thought of the cruise thing. They are inclusive, in that that include room, board, and lots of food. I like the sea to boot. The problem is that the local cruises out of Baltimore and Norfolk are not cheap. Its cheaper to fly down to Fort Lauderdale and sail out from there. I've found a couple Royal Caribbean cruises that are six days and five nights that seem very affordable. Then tack on the $10/night per person per day fuel surcharge and the cost balloons.

We are also looking at renting places in out of season locales. Go to the beach or non-skiing mountains in winter, find a nice hotel, house, or bread-and-breakfast and you can get incredible deals. Think $500/week for everyone! However, I'm hesitant. I want to be able to hit a pool, run outside barefoot, and feel the wind on my face. I'm afraid this will turn into another staycation experience. Bleah.

Or maybe I ought to just wait until Pycon and bring the family. Then we can stay at the hotel a few extra days and see Chicago properly. I really did like the pizza there, and the architecture was to die for.

Finally, we might just not do a vacation, or send the kid off by himself, perhaps on a school trip? That would be the responsible thing. Our finances are still not in perfect order.

Hrm...

Farewell to Michael Hammer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hammer
http://www.hammerandco.com/about-obituary.asp

I had the pleasure of first meeting his daughter, Jessica Hammer, back in 2004. She credits a lot of herself to her father. Since she is one of the most intelligent, funny, compassionate, Jewish, wonderful people I know, I can simply say that I really wished to have met this man.

There is much I owe to Jessica and her circle of friends and family. I've only met a few of you, and thanks to my own nature, I'm often distant. I miss you guys and pray that there might be something I could do.

Nixed Technorati link off this blog

Why?

I added Technorati back in October 2007 because someone had the bright idea of connecting all Plone Conference 2007 with Technorati links. Seemed like a great idea! Since we already had a flickr tag for the event, why not Technorati?

Well, its been rather pointless.

If I search in Technorati for ploneconf2007 I get one post by the excellent Lennert Regebro. Where are the other posts? Where are my blog posts listed?

Other people question Technorati's design for this and similiar issues. Having done some work with social bookmarking recently for NASA, I can say that tying your blog to Technorati is a pain unless you use their special bloated size in-line HTML scripts.

So why waste my screen real estate on a system that doesn't care about me? At least with the google ads I can, in theory, make money. Not that it has happened yet...