Mikey to WA campaign

This is the start of the Mikey to Washington state campaign.

Reason #1
Casinos and card rooms are readily avalaible:
ExperienceWA.com

Smarter Shopping

Most of the time when I but things online, I will just Amazon because they seem to sell everything for good prices, so I usually look at them and buy. I think I have found a good alternative to look at before purchasing from Amazon.

One of the reasons I shop at Amazon is because they sell mos things, I only have to keep my billing information at one place instead of all sorts of stores across the internet.

I have recently found RetailMeNot.com, which can be used with Google Shopping to find out deals.

1. Search Amazon for item.

2. Open new tab or window and do a Google search for the item then click shopping or go directly to google's shopping search.


3. Select Google Checkout option


4. Use RetailMeNot.com to see if there are any coupon codes available to get a better deal.

5. Compare with Amazon for best price with shipping.

The solves the potential issue with worrying about your debit card (I don't use credit) information being sotrewd at various places and helps find the best prices.

Dave Ramsey on Hulu.com

The Dave Ramsey show from Fox Business Channel is now on Hulu.com
http://www.hulu.com/the-dave-ramsey-show

Hulu is great, I like how the have RSS feeds to subscribe to. If only they would add Robot Chicken.

Quantum of Solace

The James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is the second outing for Daniel Craig as agent 007. I enjoyed the movie, and I think it was a better than average Bond movie. I want to focus on some of the changes with the new Bond

The Gun Barrel: They put this at the end of the film, and I wish they didn't. This sequence takes about 5 seconds, and I feel this is the distinct part of the bond films.

Fight Sequences: This is a good change for the films, and I think this is a response to the Bourne movies. When Bond is fighting someone, it is not a simple punch or two to knockout the bad guy. When he fights, he gets hit, cut, and bruised.

Personality: It seems Craig plays a brooding spy with some emotions. I like how each actor brings different traits. They also seem to have less of the imnuendos, but he still seems to have plenty of good one liners.

Financial Peace class

I have been teaching Financial Peace at my church this fall, and we are just about done. My brother got married in Tennessee this weekend, and my brother's friend took me to Financial Peace plaza, where Dave Ramsey's studio is located.

Why Obama?

We are now a few days away from the election and it appears that Obama will have more than enough electoral votes to win. This leave me wondering why?

I think the main reason is the Iraq war. Many Americans, myself included, we scared into thinking it was a good idea to take out Saddam because of WMDs. This turned out to be largely bogus. This left Democrats pissed off and many Republicans just wanting Bush to go away. I think John McCain hitched himself to Bush's wagon on this issue, so there is relatively little excitement for him.

On the other hand, Obama was against Iraq from the beginning and vows to leave. If that is your biggest issue, then your decision is easy.

I'm not sure I understand what gets people gets excited about Barack Obama. He speaks well, but his ideas aremostly bad. He talks about change and then voted for Telecomm immunity this summer after saying he was against for a long time.

At least Hillary won't be president.

Ron Paul - The Revolution

I have been a big fan of Ron Paul for some time. Anyone who wants to abolish the IRS and the awful income tax is someone I can get behind. I am a big fan of the Fair Tax, but Ron Paul takes this a step further by eliminating the income tax by drastically reducing the size of our federal income tax.

I never understood much about some of his other positions and philosophy until I read his new book The Revoloution.

It is less than 200 pages, and gets right to the main points. Our federal government has run amok, and the Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats. The Republican party has been lead (myself included) into a stupid mess in Iraq and in other areas.

The way to resolve this is simple - go back to the constitution. This means a drastic reduction in the federal government, especially the president. This means a reduction in the US military where we have troops in over 130 countries. This means reduction entitlement programs at home and returning power to local governments.

This book gave me a lot to think about, and hopefully other people will enjoy it and start taking our leaders to task.

Michael bay is awesome.

There has been a lot of fun with Michael Bay. Yes his movies have little to no plot, but at least his movies are entertaining.

His infamous Dark Knight script



His twitter feed
I liked - Boom. That's it. That's all you need to know.



South Park


Robot Chicken

Funny Verizon Fios commercial

Book Reccomendation

I recently read the book In the Grip of Grace by Max Lucado. I found this book very insightful writing on the concept of grace focus on the book of Romans.

One of the most interesting points was that serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer reportedly accepted Christ before he died in prison. The author talked about how this made him angry. I felt the same way, but the point was that no one was beyond grace.

The other thing I liked was that it discussed the idea of saying, I am better than this person, so I can do something wrong. This notion is busted pretty thoroughly, and I have always hated people that use that excuse.

Financial Peace University

Tomorrow night I begin teaching Financial Peace University at my church, Evergreen Christian Community. I am very passionate about the material, and I know it will help many people in our community.

Dave Ramsey's program has made a big impact on the my life and for some of my friends and family. I can't wait.

The Dark Knight

First off, if you haven't seen The Dark Knight yet. Stop whatever you are doing and go see it. It has reportedly broken the opening weekend record topping $155 Million.

The newest Batman movie features the late Heath Ledger as the Joker. He is clearly the star of the show providing a fiendish villain. I loved his performance, and all of the other actors did a good job as well. I won't go into the story too much, but most of it revolves around the joker creating havoc and Batman chasing after him.

The thing I liked about this movie is that it was very mature, dark and realistic. I say realistic in the movie sense. Characters make choices that real people would make, and Batman's gadgets seem somewhat plausible for a high tech guy. The whole movie was the perfect foil for Iron Man (awesome movie).

Michael Bay's Rejected "The Dark Knight" Script

I found this yesterday and I found this hilarious
Michael Bay's Rejected "The Dark Knight" Script

American Flag (CGI)

Euro 2008 Semifinals set

There were some surprises in the Euro 2008 Quarterfinals with 3 group winners going out. Spain escaped in a penalty shootout. I thought Germany had a good chance of beating Portugal, but I thought Dutch would be to much for Russia.

Semi Finals picks:
Germany over Turkey
Russia over Spain

Euro 2008 Group Stage complete

I correctly picked 6 of the 8 teams to advance, and I think that was good.
Now we have the 4 quarterfinal matches to look forward to:
Portugal v Germany - Thursday ESPN
Croatia v Turkery - Friday ESPN
Netherlands v Russia - Saturday ABC
Spain v Italy - Sunday ESPN

I find it hard to pick against the group winners, but I thought Germany would win their group and play Portugal in the semis. Ronaldo can carry them to the title.

My Picks Portugal, Croatia, Netherlands, and Spain.

Euro 2008

Euro 2008 is coming up. For more indepth coverage check out soccerbyives.net and ESPNsoccernet.com. Stephano and I are in a Pick'Em game at espn, so we will see who is smarter. Hint - me.

My predictions
Group A: Portugal, Czech Republic
Group B: Germany, Poland
Group C: Italy, Netherlands (I think france is overrated, but I suppose we'll see)
Group D: Span, Russia

Semis: Germany over Portugal and Netherlands over Spain
Champions: Germany

Obviously there will be an upset or 2 along the way. Look for lots of drama in Group D.
We'll see how this works out.

Nike+test

Understanding the Economic Stimulus Rebate

ESPN airing Euro 2008

ESPN announced it's coverage of Euro 2008 this summer. Most of the games will be on ESPN2, but the final and several others will be on ABC.

This is good news for soccer fans.

http://www.espnmediazone.com/press_releases/2008_05_may/20080508_ESPNsEuropeanChampionship2008Schedule.htm

UEFA Champions Leauge Semifnals recap

I got the ManUtd Barcelona series right, though it was only by a 1-0 margin. I got the Chelsea Liverpool wrong, but this series was indeed close and took a wild ending to settle the tie.

Chelsea winning setups a great final agains Manchester United. The top 2 English teams will square off after the leauges has been decided, quite possibly tied on points with ManUtd winning on goal differential.

Currently Man Utd has a 3 point lead and has 1 game remaining. Chelsea has 2 games to play. If both teams win out, which is likely, they will be tied on points.

Prediction, Man Utd 3 Chelsea 2 in a very hard fought match.

Iron Man

I saw Iron Man this afternoon, and I am happy to say it was quite good. Robert Downey Jr. plays the billionaire playboy who decides to become a hero after he is kidnapped by terrorists and sees how his companies weapons have caused harm. Downey is funny and credible. The other actors do a great job, and put in very solid performances.

The plot moves along quickly, telling the story of his kidnap, escape, and how he makes his suit. It uses a good amount of humor to break up the action scenes. This contrasts with Batman Begins, and I think it works well in this case. Batman is very dark, and the mood is quite different.

The actions scenes are all well done. They are don't take too long, and all showcase different abilities of Iron Man. In comic book moves, the action sequences can take over the movie focusing on special effect and after time dragging down the movie - think Spider-Man 3.

This was great 4/5.


Trailers:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/ironman/

UEFA Champions League Semfinals

Manchester United plays Barcelona while Liverpool while play Chelsea. I think we will see a Man Utd/Liverpool final.

ManUtd will beat Barcelona because Bacrelona has injury and some other off the field issues, most notably with Ronaldinho. ManUtd has been playing very well and is sitting on top of the EPL after some comfortable victories. Bacrelona, however, has slipped to 3rd in La Liga and just squeaked out a win against Schalke in the Quarterfinals.
Man Utd 5-1 Barcelona over 2 games.

Liverpool seems to have the edge over Chelsea in the Champions League. The have played several time in the last few years, and liverpool has always found a way. In the EPL, Chelsea done better. I give a slight edge to Liverpool 3-2 over the 2 games.

New job start Monday

On Monday I start my new job with Franciscan Medical Group as a systems analyst. I am excited, and I can't wait to get going.

Audiobooks and iTunes

I love iTunes for Podcasts and playlist sharing, but I have come to love it for another reason - Audiobooks.

You can acquire books from Audible, the iTunes store, or from Audio CD. I used audible for a while, but my library has a good collection of Audiobooks. My library also uses a service called Overdrive media to provide downloadable Audiobooks, but these are in an encrypted WMA format. There is a way to remove the encryption and then import to iTunes, but I won't be going in to that here. Also, there is BitTorrent. Since this isn't a legitimate way of getting Audiobooks, I won't cover that either.



Prepare iTunes - This only needs to be done once.
Click Edit, Prefernces. Click the Advanced tab, click the Importing tab.
Choose these options:
On CD Insert - Show CD
Import Using - AAC encoder
Setting - High Quality (128 kbps) - You can use a higher quality, but I can't tell the difference

Uncheck the box Play songs while importing or converting.

Click OK.

Step 1 - Insert Audio CD and edit disc information
iTunes will try to get the CD information, but I have noticed that is wrong sometimes for Audiobooks.

If information needs to be updated, Click on a track, then click Edit, Select All. Then right click on a track and click get info. I try to have the Artist, Album, Disc Number, I use Audiobooks for the genre, and uncheck compilation.

Click ok.



Step 2 - Import CD
Click Advanced Joinc CD Tracks. This will have a line go down from from track 1 to the last track. Then click Import CD at the bottom. This will import the CD as 1 track.

This is desirable if the CD would have 20 tracks, and the book was 15 CDS. This makes the tracks more manageable.

Repeat this process for all CDs for the book.

Step 3 - Finish editing book info.
Now that all the discs have been ripped, you can finish editing the info. I update the track information to indicate the number of discs, and the track number to be the disc number. For the track title is use "Book Title - Part XX" where XX is the disc number

For an example, see the screen shot.



You can also add the Album art if you wish. There is a site called thejosher.net or you can use amazon to get the artwork. I won't go into all the steps, but basically you save the art to your desktop, then while you have a get info window open in itunes, you drag the picture to iTunes, then click ok.



Step 4 - Convert to m4b.
The CD will be imported into your Music library in iTunes. It it is better to add them to the Audiobooks library. The best way to do this is:
Make a folder on your desktop - for example book.
Select the track of the book, then drag them to that folder.

Mac - There is a program you can use called Lostify to convert the type to Audiobook.
--Add more?

PC - Open a command prompt. This defaults to your directory, so we need to navigate to the book folder.
Then type the command - ren *.m4a *.m4b and hit enter.
Then type exit, hit enter to close the command prompt.




This renames the files with the extension m4b. iTunes uses this extension or the metadata that Lostify on the Mac to put the tracks into the Audiobooks library.


Step 5 - Import to iTunes again
Delete the track for the books in iTunes, then re-import the new tracks. The books will now be in iTunes correctly.

An advantage to this is if you have an iPod. There is a setting for playing books at a faster speed on iPods. Also, it helps keep iTunes organized. It is lame to start a book, while listening to music.

JungleDisk

The issue of backing up files has become complicated. I found out about a cool program called JungleDisk to handle this.

JungleDisk uses Amazon's S3 storage to mount a network drive to store files. The files are encrypted, so Amazon or anyone else can access your data. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Amazon S3 is a cheap network storage service provided by Amazon.com

Go Jungledisk!

Personal Finance

Before I got married, I realized I was a grown up and needed to start providing for my family. One area of this that interested me was money. I read many books about personal finance, and I learned things but nothing gave a clear plan or convinced me of what to do. I'll go through some of these books and my thoughts.

David Bach - Teaches to automate saving, investing, and giving. He teaches to use automation to make things easy. For example, pay off your mortgage by having the mortgage company do automatic withdrawls.

Suse Orman - I read her book The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke, and I was more confused. She teaches people how to improve FICO scores and use debt 'wisely'. I liked this book at first, but I realized there were some problems. I'll go into those at a later time - but it amounts to she doesn't really say anything except how FICO scores work.

Robert Kiyosaki - Rich Dad, Poor Dad. This book is great. He talks about how owning a business, being an investor will lead to success. He is big on owning real estate. I like the philosophy of the book a lot.

A read a few other books, but none were notable. My brother recommended The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and I was hooked. This book offered a nearly complete plan of handling money and how various financial product like life insurance should be done. The plan is stop borrowing money, get out of debt, and the build wealth.

The other books are more palatable to most people because it means making small changes, but they also have small effects. The total money makeover can result in significant changes with huge results. Sacrificing to win is often required, and I agree that it is worth it. I soon read another book of his, Financial Peace, checked out his radio show, and learned about his more in depth course Financial Peace University.

After hearing his show and so many real life examples, I know that this is a plan anyone can do to be successful. On the other hand, the plan in the Automatic Millionaire might work for some people.

Another part of Dave's plan is to become a better person, this includes church life, marriage, family, work and many other aspects to your life. He recommends books on various topics.

more to come...

Science vs. Religion

There seems to be a lot of discussion about Religion and Science recently, and I wanted to throw my 2 cents in the ring. I am Christian, but I believe that science doesn't conflict with my religion. I also believe the extreme views on either side of this issue is where the problem is.

Evolution and the Genesis creation - The story of creation in the book of Genesis declares that everything was created in seven days. This is a story to help us understand how the world came to be, but shouldn't be read literally. Our concept of time has no meaning to God. I think 7 days is simpler than 15 billion years for a story.

I am reading a book called What's So Great About Christianity, and the author goes into depth about these issues. I agree with about everything he discusses, and it is a very interesting book.

I'll post more about this later.

Why things happen

I was married on August of 2006, and I was living in San Diego. My wife and I investigated buying a place to live. We quickly learned that a house was out and a condo would be the only possible option. We soon learned that a condo would be at least $350k. Needless to say that convinced us that buying there wouldn't happen. Furthermore, financially succeeding would be almost impossible there due to rent and hosuing costs.

Before we were married we discussed moving up to Washington, where her family lives. We intended to move up there in 3-5 years (2009-2011). Around March of 2007, we decided to move up to Washington that summer. This was a difficult thing to do because I was leaving my friends and a great job, but I was confident that I was doing the right thing.

We moved in with my wife's parents in June and soon both of us were becoming frustrated by not having found jobs yet. It took us a little while, but we both ended up finding jobs we like. Now to to last week and my post about providence. I was offered a position as an analyst and this included a significant pay increase.

I am convinced of a few reasons why things seem to be going my way. These are in no particular order:

1. I am committed to learning and self improvement. I read books, fiction and nonfication, about various topics to learn new things and encounter new ideas. I disagree with some things, but the discussion is good.

2. My relationship with God has dramatically improved. I started attending Chruch again about a year ago, I pray more, I am reading the bible completely, and I am involved at church. Evergreen Christian Community in Olympia is an incredible place.

3. My wife and I want to start a family. Nothing seems to motivate you like a baby.

4. I am on the road to financial freedom. As I have posted before, I follow Dave Ramsey's baby steps. Currently we are on step 2. I also listen to the radio show as a podcast every day. It is about 40 minutes long, and I am amazed by people's story of stupidity and then hope when people call in debt free. I want coordinate an FPU class at church to extend this.

5. My wife is incredible. We always make decisions together and we both have a vote. She also makes good food.

6. At work, I strive to take responsibilities and lead. At USD, I got 3 pay increases and 2 promotions in 2 years. At FHS, I got a promotion after 7 months.

The common themes here are self examination, improvement/change, and commitment.

Providence

What a week. A lot of things happen, and I can only praise God for all he has done for me. There is a lot going on, and things all seem to make sense all of a sudden.

We are following the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps to get out of debt, we are looking to buy a house soon, and we want to have kids. My wife told me earlier in the week that she thinks she is pregnant (we won't know for a few more weeks), and this is wonderful news. However, it makes me think about how I will be able to provide for my family.

Well, on Tuesday I was presented with a new job opportunity at work, and this seemed came out of the blue. By Friday, I had interviewed and was offered a job. This came with a significant salary increase. This f course means we will be out of debt sooner, and I will be in a better position when m wife stops working.

Another cool thing happened this week which some of my last posts were about. My Mom's quilting group was featured on Friday's ABC World News as the Person of the week. Her group at church quilts blankets for cancer victims. I didn't even know she was doing that.

On Friday, the Universty of San Diego beat U Conn in the NCAA tournament which was a huge upset. Go Toreros!

I find this very interesting that this is happening at the same time as Easter and when we are finish up a class at church about our talents and God's gifts.

Praise the Lord!

More from ABC News

Here is the clip of my Mom's quilting group on ABC.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4499198&affil=whtm

USD beats UConn

I was able to watch the end of the USD-Uconn game in th 1st round of the NCAA tournament. We score with 1.2 seconds left in overtime to beat powerhouse UConn 70-69. It is pretty amazing when a little school like USD can win one of these games.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/recap?gameId=284000036

Mom on ABC news

My mom's quilting group will be on ABC World News tonight. There is a story on ABC News right now, and she in the photo for the article.

US Soccer games

Some good news today for US Men's Soccer fans. USSF announced a friendly with England at Wembley today.I want to go big time, so we'll see if there is a way to make this happen.

If SoccerByIves.net is right, they will announce we are playing Arenitina soon. THis means we will play Poland, England, Spain, and Argentina in the coming months.

Finally we are starting to play decent teams on a regular basis.

3-10-2007

Student loan balance $38,313.18

Cloverfield

I saw Cloverfield a couple of weeks ago. I was pretty excited to see this one, and I like the way the trailers and other promotions didn’t give much away about the plot. A lot of movies show too much in the preview thus partially spoiling it. I remember seeing the trailer for ‘The Italian Job’ a few years ago and thinking, “why would I go sees this now? I know exactly what happens.” I did in fact watch the movie at some point and knew exactly what was going to happen.

So what is this movie about? It’s about a monster attack in New York City, and the journey of a group of friends after the attack. It is from the perspective of an amateur cameraman who is recording a going away party for his friend. When the monster appears, he leaves it rolling to capture the events.

When I left the theater, I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. There were some things that were very unsatisfying about it. JJ Abrams is the creator of Lost, so I’m not very surprised it went the way it did. I actually enjoyed the fact that wasn’t a typicall Hollywood style move where the hero tracks it down to kill it while his ex girlfriend is the scientist who knows how to stop it, and the military is bungling things. This is not that movie, and thanks the heavens for it.

Some people won’t like the camera style. Since it is from the perspective of an amateur, the camera is very shaky at times, and I saw reports where some people were getting motion sickness. It may be distracting, but it definitely helps the movie. The movie is tense and suspenseful the moment the monster appears, and doesn’t stop until the movie ends.

The movie also feels very real. If you can accept that there is a monster walking around, then the confusion and fear of everyone makes sense. In one scene, they start talking to a soldier about what’s happening. Instead of an explanation, they get a short nonhelpful comment. Of course a low ranking soldier wouldn’t know much.

Another things is you don’t get any clean long looks of the monster. The people we follow in the film don’t exactly want to get near it, so you mostly see walking between buildings or from distances on rooftops. This just added to the tension, and it worked for me.

It would be great to see this story from the military’s perspective, and I hope that is a direction they go for a sequel or any follow material, like on the DVD perhaps. I liked this a lot, and while some may want to know where it came from and what will happen at the end, lifen isn’t tied up nicely.

4/5 Stars

Ensign Ricky

Amazon MP3 and iTunes Plus

Until today, I hadn't paid for music, minus gifts for others, in years. This was mainly due to the higgh cost of a CD when I only wanted 1 song, and then the advent of DRM for individual songs.

When iTunes launched a couple of years back I was happy that a good way for purchasing music was created, but I thought the cost of $.99 was too high. Alogn with (almost tolerable) DRM, this meant I refrained from using iTunes to buy music even after I bought an iPod.

2007 brough some changes to the music world with the launch of iTunes plus. iTunes offers some music DRM free at a higher bitrate and a cost of $1.29 in most cases. This is a positive step, but everyitme I have looked for a song it hasn't been available this way. Now, I certainly don't look for a lot of new music, so I doubt my few searches are representative of what is available.

The new player in this area is Amazon. Amazon MP3 has a simple interface and seems to have more label support from the music industry. I heard this is a pushback agains Apple's dominance with iTines from the labels, but it is still good for consumers to have some competition. I just purchased 2 tracks from them and found it very easy to use. It even added them to my iTunes library for me.

So I am now going to start paying for music now that there are decent options. I still think $0.99 per song is a bit high, but I can deal with it. As we all now, music was perfected by Huey Lewis, so there isn't much new worth getting.

Brady

This video was made last year, but I still love it. Here it is before the Patriots play tonight.

ourTunes

There is a program called ourTunes that lets you copy music from iTunes. Article from lifehacker.com


Or go to the ourTunes site

NFL Divisional Playoffs

The NFL Divisional Playoff games are this weekend.


Jacksonville @ New England - Saturday 5 PM CBS
I want the Patriots to lose, but they are too good.

Seattle @ Green Bay - Saturday 1:30 PM FOX
I grew up in Minnesota, so I hate Brett Favre. I live in WA now, so I have to go with the Seahawks or my wife won't be happy.

San Diego @ Indianapolis - Sunday 10 AM CBS
What can you say besides "San Diego Super Chargers". I heard gates will be out with a toe injury, but Lorenzo returns to kick ass. Chargers in a nail biter, and Marty Schottenheimer cries himself to sleep wondering why he can't win in the playoffs.



New York @ Dallas - 1:30 PM FOX
Tony Romo and the Cowboys will TCB as Homer Simpson likes to say. Dallas wins big, Eli Manning can suck my balls.

Picks not based on football knowledge, but what teams I cheer for (if I am wrong).

Fair Tax

I love the image on the cover of the Fair Tax Book.

Shoot 'Em Up

I got Shoot 'Em Up from Netflix the other day and this movie was evrything it advertised to be. Gratuitous violence, cheese one liners, ridiculous plot developments, death by carrot - it had it all.

Shoot 'Em Up stars Clive Owen as the mysterious Smith. Smith sees a pregnant woman being chased by armed thugs and helps her out. After she gives birth, more bad guys show up and Smith then spends the rest of the movie evading the bad guys, let by Paul Giamati. Giamati was hamming it up as the sadistic bad guy trying to kill the baby.

This movie is a totally over the top action movie, and doesn't try to pretend to be anything else. This is kind of like Crank in that sense.

4/5