Yak shaving, but who doesn't love that? Note: I realize this is possibly the worst organized collection of posts you've ever found. I often think I should straighten up around here, but I haven't done it yet. So do accept my apologies and think of this place as a junk ...
I like gnome-do. I know people who don't, but that's cool. However, gnome-do's files and folders plugin will only index 3000 files. It complains if it is indexing more than that, but doesn't offer any insights about why it is complaining. More exasperatingly, the error message says something like ...
J handed off his Eee to me today. He's studying for finals and also moving and his laptop choked. Machines always fail when you need them most: so back your shit up, okay? He said it was only booting to a command prompt, which isn't quite accurate. It boots into ...
I knew what I wanted: a way to define a "weight" column that would tell me how many times a particular pair of values appeared in my spreadsheet. I spent some time (a lot of it) searching the web using various sentences about frequency and counting. I read a lot ...
Plenty of people are asking good questions about whether social media matters. So I'm putting a couple of studies on my reading list. Soupsoup (via Kenyatta/Elspethjane/Tumblr in general, speaking of social.) Two interesting reports out today. One from Aol/Nielsen shows that 66% of content is ...
A bit of a brain dump here. My phone started misbehaving earlier this week and I thought I'd try to root it and upgrade it instead of just restoring it to it's original factory settings. I got pretty far, in terms of understanding what is going on, but kept hitting walls. Come bedtime, I finally settled on a factory reset. Here's what I tried first, though:
Megan moved. The new blog is better. Even though (perhaps because?) you can't comment on it. Also, someone gave us a jar of cherries in brandy and they're great. And almost gone. And it is too hot. Also, I'll stop with this eventually, but I've been stuck on a question Jon G asked over a year ago, about whether I was ignoring the mortgage tax credit for a reason or just because. I was ignoring it because I didn't understand it, and I didn't really understand how to compute interest paid on a loan. That whole part about how, with each payment, you pay a little less interest and a little more principal. The interwebs are full of people who can explain to you how to derive an equation. You don't need me for that. Suffice to say that you are trying to spread your payments out over some number of years, so that when you get to the end of your some number of years (thirty, probably) you've paid off the whole loan as well the interest accrued on the loan while you held it. These same inter web tubes are full of calculators: punch in some details (term, APR and principal) get back a table of interest and principal payments over time. What I couldn't seem to find was any sort of explanation of how to compute this for myself. I don't mean how to derive the equation, I mean how, without deriving an equation, to spit out a table of payments over time at different rates. As it turns out, OpenOffice secretly has a handful of financial functions available to us. Notably: PPMT, which takes your interest rate, loan term and principle and returns the capital repaid in a period for a fixed rate loan. If you're trying to understand the mortgage tax deduction, you need to know how much of what you're paying out this year is interest, vs capital. Only the interest is deductible. Alternatively, IPMT, returns the interest paid in some period. As long as we're on the subject you shouldn't be surprised to learn that PMT will calculate your payments for you. Magically, IPMT and PPMT add up to PMT, month after month. No messy math!
I'm monkeying around with OpenOffice and VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP and just LOOKUP. I have a spreadsheet with a column of values like: FRIENDS OF REESE BERMAN COMMITTEE TO ELECT MIKE FLYNN COUNTY CLERK LIMA DEMOCRATIC PARTY FRIENDS OF ANDY TORRES COMMITTEE TO ELECT PETER A TULIN COMMITTEE TO ELECT PETER TRIPODI FRIENDS OF ROBERT ...
Okay, I won't pretend anyone but me myself and I asked me this, but three people tried to explain points and they all made my head spin by talking to fast and throwing out numbers without explaining where they got the numbers from. Basically paying "points" is the equivalent of ...
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