Stuff

For those of you who are keeping track of my roadmap posted a little while back, you may have noticed one or two ‘complete’ flags listed.

I’ve gone and done a full update on that map to bring it up to speed here, so that you can see where I’ve gone, and where I’m going to go from there. Once I get the stability portion handled, then I can add other things that I feel that I need to get done to the list.

Right now, biggest priority is to get a vehicle, to make it easier to get to and from work.
I’m currently paying a coworker to get me back and forth on four days of the week, leaving me to my own devices on Mondays (usually a taxi).

When my schedule rotates next month, leaving me off on Sundays and Mondays, it may become easier with a bicycle, which I intend to purchase soon (unless I can find a car with what I *do* have saved).

I just need to see how this will pan out.

Okay! Just to give you an idea of how I’m planning to handle the next six months, I’d like to present to you my mental roadmap. It is open for interpretation, suggestions, and the like.

1. Get fully into the Transitional Program at Salvation Army
   — COMPLETE!
   • Status: Paperwork is turned in, and currently #3 in the transitional queue. Holding for an updated employment verification, with an ETA of Wednesday, 11 April 2007. and as of 18 April 2007, I am in the program, living upstairs with far more freedom to come and go.
2. Save funds for a vehicle. — IN PROGRESS. Currently, ~66% complete.
   • Preferred budget for vehicle replacement: ~$600 $1,000 for vehicle, ~$300 for insurance.
3. Assign all checks for direct deposit, with special setup. — COMPLETE!.
   • I have two savings accounts, and one of them requires a phone call, an internet connection, or an actual trip to the Credit Union to interact with its funds. I cannot withdraw from this account without either a physical visit to the credit union, or logging on to the CU website, moving money from that account to the primary. This one will receive $100 of each of my paychecks automatically.
   • After bills are accounted for from each check (phone, transitional housing, and eventually car insurance, as well as fuel), 75% of the remaining balance in the savings account that I have full access to will be transferred into the account that is my special savings (see above).
     • So, if I have a $700 paycheck, $100 goes into that account automatically, leaving $600. $140 would go to Transitional Housing, leaving $460. $35 per check goes to Sprint (bill is ~$70 after taxes, estimated), leaving $425. Assuming insurance for a car would cost me $130 per month (fingers crossed), then $65 would come out of that check, leaving $360. This gets rounded down to the nearest $100, making the balance $300, with that $60 buffer just in case of miscalculations, and for any other purposes such as my monthly bus passes / fuel for car, etc. 75% of that remaining balance, in this case, is $225, which is what would get transferred over to the special savings account.
4. Repay the people who have loaned me money prior to my going homeless. — Holding for higher priority tasks that will allow me to get sorted and settled first.
5. Search for an apartment after the saved balance reaches $1800, or I reach the five month marker in Transitional, whichever comes first. (Going by the above numbers, assuming that my wages aren’t suddenly assigned off to some company that wants me to repay my debts, and assuming that I can repay the people who have loaned me money out of their own pocket before this goal marker comes up, I’ll be able to pull this off by month four or month five like I planned.)

I’m going to post this list for now, and show you where I’d like this to go.
Anything I’ve missed? Any suggestions?
(slight update: direct deposit is very go. car is current goal.)

I’ve always had this thing for crafts done by hand, beyond someone smearing colors on a piece of canvas, or someone else with an unbelievably expensive camera snapping images.

When I was very young, one of my older aunts (now deceased, sadly) had, instead of photos or paintings on her walls, wrought iron wall art. I would sit in a chair in her living room, just eying these pieces, letting my eyes follow the intricate shapes that the bent metal bore, because they were just interesting in their own right.

Wrought Iron goes very well on solid colored walls, to break up the monotony of that wall’s appearance. It also stands to be a conversation piece of its own right, as people — family, friends, and guests alike — might ask you where you found such beautiful craftsmanship.

I hope to have something like the Salinas Wrought Iron Candle Holder, once I get an apartment of my own. It would go great with my habit of using aromatic candles, thus bringing a little functionality into an otherwise purely artistic wall hanging.

[tags]Wrought Iron, Wall Art, Metal Crafting, Home Decoration[/tags]

I’d like to preface this entry with a short note to Ryan Boren:
It’s not you or your fault, Ryan. You just happen to have posted the relevant entry to my rant in your blog, and the comment submission form there has some kind of unfounded hatred for me.

I’m logging in earlier this evening to approve a comment, and double-check a few settings that I wanted to change in WordPress, and on my dashboard, I see “In the Trunk“, coming from boren.nu.

Of course, being the kind of person who usually grabs WordPress from Subversion instead of the release tarballs, I go to have a look.

Before I continue, I should mention:

• I’ve had to use a ‘dirty hack’ (read: an outright file replacement of a core file that is guaranteed to be overwritten almost EVERY TIME I upgrade WordPress) to get Atom 1.0 support for Eau Salée Lunaire.
• I’ve been AdBlocking this new AutoSave script that WordPress uses while writing my entries. I don’t really like it, and would rather be able to just flip a switch to kill it.
• I like, and I dislike all the AJAXy features being added in to WordPress. While it’s nice to be able to reorganize the bar to the right of my entry box, to get things put in the sequence I like them (cats on the top and expanded, post slug underneath and expanded, post status following that, with the rest of the stuff folded, because I almost never use these and wouldn’t object to hiding at least the post timestamp when composing a new entry), and it’s nice to be able to reorganize the Sidebar widgets in a convenient way… There is still room for things to be desired.

I go to read this list, and find myself ticking off on my fingers every thing that I’m thinking about the new trunk changes:
* TinyMCE 2.0.9
– I’ll switch that off in a heartbeat in my profile. Raw XHTML or bust.

* Prototype 1.5.0
* script.aculo.us 1.7.0
* jQuery 1.1.1
– Lovely shiny AJAXy things. Will they make WordPress work faster? I’m living in a cloud of doubt, but we’ll hope.

* WP XML-RPC API (WP-specific API for working with pages, authors, and categories)
– I’m hoping to see an explanation of this, since I’m not entirely sure what this happens to be.

* Atom 1.0 Feeds
– IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME! (I actually said this one out loud. Very loud.)

* Atom Publishing Protocol support
– Won’t affect me adversely. I don’t have any clients that I use for this, and I doubt I’ll even find a client worth my time to use for it, either.

* Better MySQL UTF-8 support
– Yay!

* User cache streamlining
* Improved options caching
– Caching sounds good, especially when it works.

* Plugin sandboxing
– “O RLY?” I’d love something like that. YEARS AGO. There are plenty of broken plugins out there that won’t work for everyone. One might have a hidden PHP5 dependency. Another might require a blood sacrifice gained from a smashed coffee cup to the forehead.

What bothered the hell out of me on this whole list is, there’re two things that should have been implemented no later than WordPress 2.0, and one that should have followed right up or been on the list for 2.0, and yet these things won’t hit the table until WordPress 2.2.

Atom 1.0 should have been a major priority for WordPress, if they are such a major blogging/cms platform. After all, just how long ago did they deprecate Atom 0.3? (Here’s a hint: Mid-September 2006 = 1 year.)
It’s bad form, and a bold lie to claim that “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability” (quote taken directly from wordpress.org homepage) when it takes SEVENTEEN MONTHS to get Atom 1.0 FINALLY into svn trunk!
I can understand a month, to give them time to solidify any other changes they might want to offer, but seventeen?
How much longer do the regular end users have to wait to even get this particular development!?

While we’re AJAXing up the place, it’d be nice to have a built-in mouse-over menu for all the stuff at the top, rather than relying on userland fixes (plugins) for this.

For users who have numerous plugins installed that offer options, or a small number of long-named plugins (Google Analytics, CC Content License being a pair of long-named ‘offenders’), clicking on “Options” and waiting for it to show that list of plugins is a bit slow, and not so friendly on the screen real estate. My monitor is 1280 x 960 pixels. I run with my fonts slightly larger to help my eyes, since I read text on screen all day. The result is, with the number of plugins I have, on top of the general Options that come with WordPress, the options bar actually wraps over to two lines. Aesthetically, it does not make any sense.

With all the nifty slide-a-block, fold-a-block AJAX that’s been thrown into WordPress, one would hope that they would actually add something that can prove itself to be genuinely useful, and add a toggle switch for those who could care less.
As much as I like being able to reorganize the bar of crap to the right of my post here in the WP Admin center, I do this perhaps once every few months! The order of these blocks could have been set on the options page, allowing me to set it and forget it, going on with my day to day life.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me miss the old admin interface — the one without alll of this browser-based detergent.

I have the distinct feeling that I will be adding to this in the future, once I feel like ranting on what else in WordPress is making me hate it.

It is with great happiness that I inform everyone of these news tidbits.

First: I have been struggling with my practice exams, with the Superman class exam consistently knocking me on my arse.
It is with great delight that I inform you of my passing that practice exam on Sunday. I am currently waiting for my paperwork in the mail, so that I can move on to take the state level exam for becoming a [tag]Life Insurance[/tag] agent.

Second: This one pertains mostly to you LiveJournalers, and anyone else that participates in OpenID.
Thanks to the WPOpenID plugin, I am now able to support users using OpenID for comments.
I’ll need to update my comment form slightly to show support there, but for now, please use the sidebar to log in via [tag]OpenID[/tag]. You may comment this way, with relative ease.

I just have three practice exams to take (two of them are for the guarantee that the company I’m taking my practice exams from — should I fail, they’d reimburse me for the test).

Here comes the stress, baby. Here comes the stress.

Someone buy me some ice cream, right? :b

As of 2 PM today, I am 84% done with the curriculum for becoming a Life Insurance agent.

I will attempt to finish the other 16% tonight, once I have eaten, for all I need today is chicken and (root)beer.

The curriculum isn’t too bad, though it is a bit tedious. I had to learn about COBRA (the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1984), as well as what the difference in a PPO and an HMO is in one of the most recent parts of my curriculum, and I do feel smarter for taking this class. I actually know a little something about Life and Health insurance, as a result.

(PPO gives you more freedom, and HMO takes that, in exchange for more cost control, to oversimplify.)

I’ve been playing Anarchy Online when I take breaks from the work, to give my brain a break and think on non-serious things. It’s helping me out in retaining more material: On Friday, I burned through over half of the work, but on Monday, I had to go back and review the last couple of chapters — I couldn’t remember anything from them!

The good thing about the module tests is that I can print a copy of them, and use that for review. I’ve always been stronger at shorter explanations for reviewing than digesting long passages of information, if only because I don’t have to recall all the data and extract it mentally to get an answer. It also lets me assign key words and key phrases in my head for mnemonic recall of things, such as “COBRA drives the Omnibus” — the way for me to remember what COBRA stands for when reading the test, or, “Variable = Multi-socket, Universal = Infinite socket” — to remember which of the two policies is looser in its terms.

I should go eat, smoke, and finish this stuff.