The power of planting your feet

Change is exciting. Sometimes it is tempting to change for the sake of it. You realise that things aren't ideal, and then you start looking at the options. Some of us who are overly bright may spend years assessing opportunities before making a single move. I think its wild how much fun planning and preparing can be.

I'm currently paying too high a price for an underperforming mutual fund portfolio. If your objective is to meet or exceed the yield of a benchmark, and you have never yet done so, where do you get off charging 1.75% for all that wasted effort? Shame on you! Now the return lags 2.75% instead of the disappointing 1% you started with. Now it's just a question of finding an ideal match. I plan to make this move in the next few weeks. Convenience for something that can be better managed with a little effort is crazy.

Take the same point on a larger scale. Our very comfortable house is ridiculously far from a city we never see as a consequence, but we pay for its 'nearness' all the same. Although my fixed rate mortgage won't budge, and taxes are low, the interest will likely drop below the standard deduction in a year or so, so try not to get all worked up about the deductibility of interest from my taxes. The real annual difference is closer to $300 than $3000. A few trips to the pump more than drains that away. The annual return on real estate in the near term future will likely not be as great as some expect, and may not be disastrous, lets say 2-3% per year.
That's maybe a few thousand dollars, which compared to the price of gas (which will likely as not rise more than that) is still not exciting. Better to move to a rental and take some time to watch what happens.

Mexico City Day Two

Today I set my alarm early since no one had contacted me yet. I slept in, woke up to a call from a customer in Seattle, and then got ready. About 920Am I emailed the office since I don't want to pay for the phone calls and international calls are blocked from my cell phone. I got a call not 5 minutes later from the rep agancy here. The woman who called me spoke no English, and the man who she handed the phone to was not involved, so he asked me what I wanted... after another hour or so someone (Arturo) came to pick me up.

We drove through some pretty tony neighbourhoods in the hills, and sputtered along the Reforma (What lanes, oh, the white lines?) before arriving at the customer site. Every building in Mexico seems to have security guards, and patrols, and staff. Costco has a pay to park lot. Oh, we went to lunch at Costco. I had the chicken bake, Arturo had the chicken caesar.

I arrived, nothing worked, I got it 90% functional in an hour, and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to fix the rest. Scheduled some training for tomorrow.

On the drive home, it started to rain. They get serious lightening here. It was impressive. Traffic is amazing. I was giddy with terror! We stopped on Prado Norte for tortas. The sandwhiches aren't any cheaper than they are in the states, but the avocado is free. I washed my hands in a basin in the back (it was the dish sink I think). Single spigot, rinse, get some Salvo (salvo me salva!) on your hands and lather up. It was reminiscent of the granular soap from public schools. No paper towels, no tables, no counters. I had an agua fresca that was made from cranberry juice (maybe?) and was between a sloppy smooth shake and a sherbet. Served in a styrofoam cup, with a styrofoam lid, served out of a ladle!

Mexico City

Canada is an independent nation, but it isn't foreign, so long as you can overlook poutine.

Mexico City is a whole other place. Here's why:

NANP? We don't need no stinking NANP! What this means for the tourist is that if your phone works, you may need to figure out how many of those area codes area needed. Plus, my North American phone tries to mangle the numbers into what it assumes are the right groupings. I was unable to call a land line, got a try again message when I tried a cell phone-- which had an extra number. I am unable to make stateside calls.

Clean air? We don't need no stink free clean air! The whole place has a light odour of Hydrogen Sulfide (bad eggs/sewer gas). I adjusted a little too quickly to it.

Ingles? No puedo hablar esta maldita lengua! Funny, their English is almost worst than my Spanish. The 5 star hotel in the ritzy neighbourhood is plenty nice, but if I leave the front door its a whole other world.

Also, the page on blogger where this was created started popping up in spanish once I went to accederla. Lets Publicar y ver el blog.

Life in the Third World

Well, I guess it has gotten so bad here, the missionaries have offered to mow my lawn. Mormons are some great neighbors! Too bad about their "Let's go to the locked up church, we can take you in and show you around, and let you see what a service would be like before Sunday." routine.

Ennui.

It's tough to have meaningful things to say about your day when it consists of sitting in front of a computer, drinking a pot of coffee, and reading through confuscated webs of documentation.

I need to read something wittier than the man pages... but check out

man 5 sudoers

for a chuckle. I am a fan of the insult option.

Less Nonsense

Easier to deal with, Beth and I are going to see Once Upon a Time in New Jersey at the Village Theatre tonight. We'll have dinner, and see the play, and drive home, separately, as she is at work today. What am I doing today? Editing this!

Currently reading Felix Holt, Radical. Last read Crime and Punishment.

Stable

I have unfortunately been tinkering with my PC for a while. I had broken the habit for a long time, but have recently been jumping between *Nixes on a weekly basis. Currently it is Slamd (Slackware 11) but last week it was NetBSD, a few weeks back it was openSuse... it's sucking up all my time on weekends and I'm never getting beyond basic package installation and configuration before I return to a new system. It is not healthy, and has to stop.

One of the frustrating things I find about x64 based linux is confusing compatibility issues for 32 bit build and binary emulation. The fact that potentially 2 copies of all system libraries has to be maintained separately, and the loader smart enough to know the difference, is exasperating. There will be some reading necessary before I can set up wine, since it requires an -m32 flag.

I want to keep this stable and working. I like Slackware. No clutter. Easy to understand package system. No RPM's. Good.