Almost everyone has a computer, but only a small percentage of those people backup their files. Why? Most people don’t think about backing up their data until it’s too late. A family member recently lost all their photos because their hard drive crashed on a name brand computer that was not even a year old. Stuff like that happens all the time. Also, it’s generally a pain in the neck and quite complicated. Maybe you do back up your files, but do you do it in a way that they would still be safe if your house burnt down? Probably not. How much are your family photos worth to you?
This is where Mozy comes in. It’s an offsite backup service that’s completely automated. You just set it once and then forget it. Some of my readers may know that I am an IT Professional by day. Mozy is the backup service that I use for all of the work computers and servers. I trust Mozy implicitly. Mozy Home is the exact same service as the professional product I use at work except much cheaper. For free you can have 2 GB of back up. For just $4.95 you can have all your pictures, documents, music, videos, and everything else on your PC backed up. If you decide to pay annually or biannually Mozy will give you 1-3 months free. I use Mozy for work, and I use Mozy at home. Give it a try today.
Mozy Unlimited Backup - what I use at home
Mozy Free - limited to only 2 GB
MozyPro - what I use at work
For the year I have been living in a 600 square foot apartment. Carrying all of my belongings up three stories and then trying to fit them all into my tiny apartment really made me realize just how much I had. I have a huge problem with electronics, books, movies, and CDs. The worst part about it? I hadn’t used some of my stuff in so long that I had forgotten that I even had it. Fast forward to now, one year later, and I have purged quite a few of my extra items. Surprisingly to me, I have yet to miss anything.
The hardest thing for me though is the sentimental value that I have attached to so many meaningless items. Things I don’t use and don’t really care about I have trouble getting rid of because I feel that I am throwing out a memory and not just an object. I have to force myself to realize that I can hold on to the memory without having to hold on to the object. It has gotten easier as I have been doing this for a few months.
The more stuff that I have purged, the happier I have become, and the easier it has been to keep my apartment clean and neat. The thing that makes me real sick to my stomach is how much money I have wasted over the years on things that I did not need or have never even used. I sold some of my DVDs to Moviestop yesterday. A few of them were unopened. Movies that I have had for over a year, and I had never even opened them, much less watched them. I will try to keep that in the back of my head for anytime I feel the need to purchase something that I don’t really need.
This evening I am going to my dad’s house to go through some of my old stuff. My bedroom was left untouched after I moved out, but now my younger sister is going to be taking my old room, which is fine by me. However, it forces me to have to go through a lot more stuff that I don’t need. I really don’t want to end up bringing a ton of stuff back to my apartment where it will sit and collect dust until the next time I move. A couple of months ago I would have just boxed everything up and moved it to my apartment. Now however, I think that I will be able to objectively go through everything and hopefully I will be able to put some cash in my pocket by selling most of it.
If only I had come to my senses sooner I would not have had to go through the hassle of selling all my useless stuff, and I would have been able to keep a lot more money in my pocket. I guess it’s true what they say, hindsight truly is 20/20.
I was pulled by over just shy of two months ago for an expired registration. I moved last year and immediately updated my address with the DMV. For whatever reason I never received a property tax bill or anything about my registration in the mail. The cop still decided to give me a ticket for “driving a car while knowing the registration to be expired” totalling $146. I did not realize it was expired or I would have already taken care of it. Plus, it was only a month overdue. I thought, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to go to traffic court and have it dropped.”
Oops, I missed the court date. I wrote it down as the wrong day in my calendar. As soon as I realized this I called the Police Department where I was directed to call the County Clerk. The county clerk told me that i could still come down to the courthouse and have it taken care of. Cool, I still won’t have to pay the ticket. I went downtown to the courthouse and was directed to the basement to speak to someone under a “Criminal/Traffic Records” sign. They took my info, handed me a sheet of paper, and sent me upstairs to a courtroom. It’s now 8:15 a.m. and the court room is locked. I wait outside. At 9:10 the court room is unlocked and I take a seat inside. The room fills up with a lot of shady looking characters. Roll is called, but my name is not. The Assistant D.A. announces to the room that for anyone for which this is not the correct court date their name will be called later. The morning waxes on. It seems that everyone who has been called up to the bench has committed several drug related crimes. No traffic tickets. At 11:30 I walk out, I have to get back to work. What a waste. I left with the intention of coming back on a day in which their are holding traffic court. I went my down to the basement and spoke to the same person that helped helped me earlier that day. They said that it might still take just as long. I decide to think about it. That night I decide to just fork up the dough since I don’t really want to have to miss work.
Fast forward two weeks to yesterday and I suddenly realize that I forgot about the ticket. I happened to get off a couple of hours early, so I was able to make it downtown before five. I walked to the courthouse and proceeded to the basement. Odd that it is, I only had to pay $146, no late fees. However, the cashier suggested that I come back in a week on the next traffic court day and in all likelihood it could be taken care of in 2 hours or less. I paid it. I was afraid something would come up and I would not be able to make it. She then told me that if I if I didn’t take care of it in the next week the ticket would go up by $100. Whoo! Glad I remembered it before then. Well, I lost $146, but I learned a lesson that my wallet won’t soon forget and I certainly will make sure I don’t let me registration lapse in the future.
My primary goal was to find the highest interest account that would be FDIC insured, very liquid, and easy to use. High interest savings accounts are pretty much non-existent in the current economy. My primary bank is USAA and they typically offer higher than average rates. However, my current APY is less than 1%. Not great considering that’s still higher than average. I’ve heard great things about ING Direct so I decided to open an account with them. Interest is a flat 3.00% regardless of the amount. ING Direct has a very simple and clean interface. I set up an account in under 10 minutes. That account I nicknamed my emergency fund. I then setup an Automatic Savings Plan that would automatically draft my checking account every time I get paid.
I have heard great things about ING Direct. Especially in regard to their subaccounts. Turns out that subaccounts are actually separate savings accounts with their own account number. I guess the reason that they are referred to as such is that they earn the same interest regardless of the amount, so unlike most banks you will earn the same total interest if you have $10,000 in one account or $2000 spread out over 5. I did go ahead and set up a “subaccount” that will be used to save for a specific goal. The setup used all the information that I had entered in when I first signed up and did not have to be entered again. It took a total of 30 seconds to setup and fund the second account. This is great for creating savings goals or buying things on reverse credit (making payments to yourself until you have enough to buy the item in full).
There is one more thing that I like about this setup. My checking account is still with USAA, my primary bank. With USAA I can instantly transfer funds between my savings and checking accounts held there and have those fund available for use the instant I transfer them. This is true 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. I am constantly abusing this by taking money out of savings to make impulse purchases. Moving the majority of my savings over to ING Direct will make it harder for me to access my savings. All deposits I make to my ING accounts will have to be held for 5 days before I could possibly transfer that money back to USAA. After initiating a transfer it will take a few days for that money to be available for me to spend. While this may seem like a step backwards to some it will make me think twice about withdrawing money from my savings, especially my emergency fund. I have a feeling that I will have a lot less “emergencies” from now on.
Growing up you always hear how important it is to have a budget. Sure most of us have scribbled something out on the back of a napkin or on a scratch sheet of paper, but how many of us have actually made a budget and stuck to it month after month. I can remember creating many budgets, but I cannot remember following one ever. Over the last week I have been working on a budget that not only accounts for my bills, groceries, other monthly expenses, but also allocates money each month to savings.
Over the last few years my practice has been either transfer whatever money I deem as extra in my checking account to my savings at no set frequency or just to put everything in savings and make the maximum number of transfers each month out of my savings and back into my checking to cover necessary and extraneous expenses. Neither one of these ways have worked as well as I would have liked. Therefore, not only am I allocating an amount in my budget, but I have also set up an automatic transfer to take place the day after my paycheck is deposited so that my savings will happen every pay period without having to be initiated by me.
Over the last month I have spent significantly less than I spent in the preceding months. However, I don’t feel like I have made much headway due to the fact that I didn’t really have any specific goals. Utilizing a budget will allow me to have goals. I can feel good about achieving those goals or spending less than I have budgeted, and if I go over I know by how much I went over. Instead of feeling bad about every time I eat out, I can eat out and be happy as long as it will not put me over my food budget for the month.
Once I finalize my budget I plan on at least partially posting it and at the very least showing how well my progress has been at the end of every month.
I am in need of a new set of tires for my aging 1996 Mercury Grand Marquis. I have put almost 40,000 miles on it in the two years that I have owned and have neglected to rotate the tires during this period. Luckily, my back tires are in great shape so I will only replacing the two front tires. I think that I will be better about rotating my tires in the future. Still, I am lucky that I got so many miles out of them considering that they were on the car when I bought it.
In light of this event though, I have realized how poorly I allocate my income to account for car expenses like this. Do I have the money to do this? Yes, but if (or when) my car starts having some problems I might have difficulty paying for everything while still being able to save. I have been doing a very poor job of saving, and there is no reason I should be saving a lot more and there is nothing preventing me from doing so except myself. So in light of this I have begun to go about fixing my finances. I think that I am going to make this blog more personal and I hope to be able to share my financial progress as well as continuing to offer helpful computer tips.
I don’t have an N network and I was experiencing some connectivity issues so I decided to swap the stock wireless card for a spare one I had lying around. It’s very easy, but I decided to post some pictures and brief instructions in case anyone had any reservations about doing this themselves.
Continue reading ‘How to change the wireless card on and Asus EeePC 1000H’
Back in 2004, when I started watching a lot of video on my first laptop I was using Media Player Classic. I really liked the no-nonsense, all business interface. Two years later and I was using VLC because I liked the idea of not having to deal with any codecs. Now I am watching a lot of 720p MKV videos and I have found that even the most recent version of VLC has trouble playing these files on my aging desktop. I also just traded my desktop replacement laptop for and Asus EeePC 1000H. Turns out with Media Player Classic I can watch 720p video on my little netbook where VLC didn’t even begin to work. For my MPC setup I am using the Combined Community Codec Pack and CoreAVC.
Continue reading ‘Why I dropped VLC for Media Player Classic, or how to play 720p on an EeePC’
Pixlr is an online image editor that looks a lot like Photoshop. It runs completely in your browser. While this is not the image editing powerhouse that Photoshop is, it is still quite powerful. For the average Joe, Pixlr can do just about anything that you’ll need. Best of all, it’s free. Read on to see Pixlr in action.
Continue reading ‘pixlr - The Net’s Best’
Last week on the Net’s Best I featured Slickdeals. To follow up I am featuring a site that is actually run by Slickdeals called Slickdeals. To follow up I am featuring a site that is actually run by Slickdeals called Slickfillers. You’ve probably bought from Amazon before, and you probably now about Amazon’s free shipping on orders of $25 or more. Anytime your total is less than $25 you can use Slickfillers to find you items to bring your total just high enough for free shipping. Just visit Slickfillers, enter the amount you need to reach $25, and voila. Slickfillers lists items that will do the trick. The best part is you can even limit your results to try to find things that you might need anyway. Last time I used it Slickfillers found me some $3 Rain-X tire cleaner.
Slickfillers
