Dawn of the Geeks

Kmart Layaway for the Holidays is a great program for people who want to shop now and pay later. Every Christmas there are hot items that are available now but may not be available as Christmas approaches. Layaway ensures that you’ll be getting the gifts you want without having to find the cash right now.

To take advantage of this program simply shop for the gifts you want, take them to the Layaway counter and make a down payment, make your payments every two weeks at your Kmart store and then take home your items once the items are paid for in full. It’s an easy way to make sure you get everything you want for Christmas.

Sometimes the hardest part of Christmas is paying for it. Our family starts writing the lists and sharing them with extended family in November around Thanksgiving. That doesn’t give much time to plan out what you’re going to give everyone and save up the money to pay for it. With all the family we buy gifts for its common to spend several hundred dollars in gifts. That can be a lot of money to spend all at once.

Layaway takes the worry out of paying and let’s you pay off those gifts 25% at a time. In 8 weeks you’ll have everything paid for. It’s hard to find $500 right now. It’s much easier to find $125 every two weeks.

Give your wallet a break and still buy everything on your list. That’s the advantage of Kmart Layaway for the Holidays.

Sears2go is a new way to shop provided by Sears.

With the holiday season fast approaching Sears2go makes it even easier to get all your shopping done. Often times while out holiday shopping stores are on opposite ends of town. Sears2go makes it easy to shop at Sears and get that holiday shopping done no matter where you are by making it possible to purchase select products using your mobile phone. This is the first on-the-go technology offered by a US retailer.

After purchasing an item on Sears2go, you will receive a text message alert when your merchandise is ready for pick-up. With Sears’ best in class in-store pickup you’re going to experience great customer service from purchase to pick-up.

Sears2go provides many of the same great features already available at Sears.com including the ability to easily browse and search for products, view product reviews and find where stores are located. You will also be able to view the latest special offers so you won’t miss out on any great deals while out and about.

To take advantage of Sears2go on your mobile phone you must have text-messaging enabled and be registered with a text-messaging plan. Sears is offering this service at no charge to you but your carrier may charge standard SMS/data rates.

Stop running around town to get all of your shopping done. Pull out your phone and use Sears2go.

People who want to be smart go to college. Or at least educate themselves. Some people think that they can just read books and they’ll know something. That’s not actually true. You can’t just read books or just observe others doing things. You need to apply your knowledge to really learn things. You have to read the book and apply what’s in the book to really learn. Otherwise all you have is a bunch of theories about how things are but you don’t really know. Many times the theories are nice but they aren’t entirely accurate when it comes to practical application. Also, if you don’t apply your knowledge to practical applications you won’t learn when it is appropriate to apply certain ideas to various situations. Knowledge that cannot be properly applied is useless.

You also will never be smarter than a book if you only do strictly what the book tells you to do. You have to color outside the lines or you will stifle your ability to learn and grow. By applying the book to the real world you will see that how the book tells you to do it may not be entirely accurate. Now you know more than the book is telling you.

When it comes to finances there is probably a book that will tell you anything you want to hear. If you want to believe that you can get rich flipping houses, a book exists that will be more than happy to take your money in exchange for telling you that. If you want to believe you can get rid trading on the foreign exchange (aka forex) there are books and programs that will take your money in exchange for telling you how you can get rich doing just that.

There are also books that will explain why you can’t get rich on the Forex markets or by flipping houses.

The fact of the matter is; they’re both right. The forex market contains a huge amount of risk. You can get rich and you can fail. Same with flipping houses. The key factor is you. The amount of effort you put into doing those things. You can’t just throw money at a problem and expect more money to come back.

So you need to educate yourself. If you’re not willing to learn and educate yourself then you really should stick to just reducing spending and putting your money in safe places like high yield savings accounts and bonds.

Your biggest financial investment is you. Educating yourself. Spending the money to learn. Get the information and get the tools to apply it. Don’t be the idiot that risks their life savings on their first time out playing poker. Be the smart player that finds ways to play for free and then goes in with some beer money to see how they can do once real money is involved.

There’s not a day that goes by that there isn’t a great opportunity. Smart people don’t bet on the “once in a lifetime opportunity” they learn how to find opportunities every day. And once you realize that, you don’t mind taking your time to learn because you know you’re not missing out on anything you can’t get when you’re really ready.

http://www.savingsbonds.gov/indiv/products/prod_eebonds_glance.htm is the government web-site where you can learn all about Savings Bonds. Savings Bonds are a government backed investment with a reasonable guarenteed return on investment.

You can purchase a paper bond at half of the face value. So for a $1000 bond it will cost you $500. These bonds are guarenteed to be worth their face value in 20 years regardless of the interest rate. After the bond has reached its face value it will continue to earn interest at the fixed rate when it was purchased. Currently the rate is 1.3%. For those 20 years you will be earning 1.3% each year for $1000 compounded every 6 months.

So we earn $295.84 in interest over 20 years.

Let’s calculate the effective interest rate assuming that a $1000.00 bond matures (reaches face value) in 20 years. The interest on Treasury Bonds is compounded every 6 months so in 20 years there will be 40 periods.

We multiply the result by 2 since there are two periods per year making the effective interest rate about 4.8%. If we were to compound interest monthly it would be an effective interest rate of about 4.77%.

About a year ago ING was paying about 4.0% for their savings accounts. Now they are paying 2.75%. You can see that a Savings Bond provides a stable long term investment. However, because you can only purchase up to $5,000 per year (investment value) of these savings bonds you are limited in the amount you can invest.

An advantage of savings bonds is that the interest you earn is only taxed federally. They are also tax free if used to pay for an education. This makes them great gifts for babies. By the time they are ready to pay off student loans their bonds will have matured.

With a savings account the interest is counted as income and both the state and federal government take a piece of it.

A savings bond can allow you to make more and keep more of the return that you earn on your investment. The trade off is that it is very long term and you have very restricted access to the money until it matures.

The Sunday Paper is one of the most valuable papers you will find. In it are contained dozens of coupons for products you already buy. The Arizona Republic costs $2 a week for Sunday only. The East Valley Tribune is $240.24 for 52 weeks or about $4.62 per week. The East Valley Tribune doesn’t have a Sunday only subscription like the Arizona Republic does. Research major papers in your area to find the cheapest way to get the Sunday paper. You may even save money by just walking down to the local convienence store and paying the newstand price.

In addition to the Sunday paper there are a number of sources to find coupons on-line including http://www.coupons.com. The selection of on-line coupons tends to be very small compared to what you can find in the Sunday paper.

Often grocery stores will multiply coupons up to a certain amount so for example a 50 cent coupon could end up saving you a dollar or two dollars. Lose any concept you may have of store loyalty. When prices are comparable, fine, go to the store you like most. But don’t pass up savings just because it’s not the store you usually go to. Stores don’t have customer loyalty. There’s no point in being loyal to stores.

With only a few coupons a week you can easily pay for the paper and then some. One of the tricks with coupons is that coupons tend to come out when the item is not on sale but do not expire until after the item goes on sale. Unless you need an item now, keep the coupon until the item goes on sale or use the coupon on the last possible day. And if the last possible day rolls around and you decide you don’t need the item, throw the coupon away.

Part of the purpose of coupons (from the marketing standpoint) is to get you to muddy your view of wants and needs. Buying items you wouldn’t normally buy just because you have a coupon is a good way to lose money. Buying an item that isn’t on sale just because eyou have a coupon is a good way to spend more money than you need to.

Buy only things you need and try to minimize the price you pay by waiting for sales and coupons.

You will find that the Sunday paper will save you hundreds of dollars per year for a very small investment.

A Certificate of Deposit or CD is a product a bank offers that allows you to earn a larger interest rate. A CD uses Simple Interest to calculate how much you will earn over a certain period of time. In exchange for the higher interest rate the bank typically requires that you leave the money in the account for the entire duration that you agreed upon when signing up for the CD. Taking your money out early could result in penalties.

Currently ING is offering a CD with a yield of 4.00% over 12 months. So if you deposit $1000.00 into this CD you will make $40.00 in interest at the end of 12 months.

Since a CD is simple interest, let’s determine what the equivalent compound interest rate would be assuming that the interest is compounded monthly.

PV is the present value which is the amount you start with. In this case we started with $1000.00. FV is the future value or the amount you will have at the end. In this case we will have $1040.00. N is the number of periods that we are compounding the interest. Since we’re compounding monthly for a year N would be 12.

However, “i” is the periodic rate. We multiply by 12 to get the annual rate which is about 3.9%.

So you would need to put your money into a savings account with a 3.9% rate in order to match the return of a 4.00% CD.

Currently ING is offering a savings account with a 2.75% APY. So you can see that in exchange for keeping your money in one place banks are willing to offer a higher interest rate. When deciding whether or not to put your money into a CD you need to consider the return compared to a regular savings account and the potential need to have access to the money.

So with compound interest over 12 months at 2.75% you would end up with $27.85 in interest; $12.15 less than the CD.

So in effect it costs you $1 per month to have unrestricted access to your money.

The potential money you make in a CD over what you would earn in a high yield savings account may not justify locking your money away. If you think you may need the money prior to the end of the period required by the CD then you should not put it into the CD.

Error in my_thread_global_end(): 1 threads didn’t exit

If you get an error like that you need to upgrade your installation of MySQL to the latest version. If you’re using PHP then you need to update to the latest version of PHP. With .Net and languages like C# you are probably using the 3.51 ODBC driver to connect to MySQL. You’ll need to update to version 5.1 of the driver.

I’ve found that there’s not a lot of information on the net concerning this issue with C#. This is probably because .Net developers are writing web-apps which will silently ignore the error or they are running apps which exit and close the window so they never see the message. The only time you can see the error when coding in .Net is if you run a console app from the command line and the program otherwise cleanly exits. If you break out of the program you won’t see it.

Who uses C# to write console apps?

Fortunatly the error is not really an error. It’s a counting bug. MySQL sees your app’s thread and includes it in the thread count. MySQL exits first when your app closes and it sees that 1 thread is still open that it can’t account for so it throws an error.

The threads that alledgedly didn’t exit belong to your app and your app did in fact close so there are no threads that didn’t actually exit.

It looks scary but the error doesn’t mean there is an error in your app. It means that the MySQL lib can’t count.


rotate_logs.bat:

bin\httpd -k start


Instead of copying or moving large log files it’s much faster to shut down the Apache log server, rename the log folder based on the date, create a new log folder and then start up the server again. Once that process is done you’re free to copy or move the log files where ever you want without affecting the web server.

You can put this code into a bat file and use Windows Scheduler to automatically rotate your logs every week or day or whatever.

I’ve had a lot of problems with having Apache automatically name files based on the year and month to rotate logs and this seems to be a far more elegant solution. Apache does the minimum amount of work logging activity and the bat file does the minimum amount of work rotating the logs. The result is only a second or two of downtime depending on how quickly Apache stops and starts.

On Lamp has an article titles “Writing Apache’s Logs to MySQL” which explains how to log directly to a MySQL database. This seems like a good idea on the surface. There’s nothing better than a database to store large amounts of information for processing. However, it’s not necessary or even advisable to try to store a bunch of log information from Apache directly into MySQL.

If you want your Apache server to run efficiently you need to have it do as little work as possible. For small sites the novelty of putting logs directly into MySQL may seem like a good thing. But as your site gets more and more popular the time it takes to insert rows is suddenly going to be noticable.

The better approach is to stick to file based logging and do post processing on log files. It’s rather trivial to write a PHP or Perl script to parse logs files and populate a database with the information. I currently use a free PHP script (the “Apache Log Parser” script) which happily chugs away reading the Apache “combined” log format. The class is instantiated into a simple script which takes the lines read by the parser script and stuffs them into a database table based on the year and month the request was made. This keeps MySQL happy by not storing millions of rows spanning 8 or 9 years of access logs into a single table.

Log reports are generally done on a monthly basis anyway. If your server is really popular then creating tables based on the year month and day is easy enough to do.

In order to improve efficiency even more, my server stores all the log files on a dedicated hard drive. I have yet to find a good log rotater for Apache. Every time I try to rotate logs I end up with runaway processes and server errors. So to rotate logs manually simply stop the server, rename the current log folder, create a new log folder, restart the server. A few seconds of downtime and you’re free to process the log files without interrupting the server any further.

You could probably write a bat file to do that process and set up a cron to do it automatically every week or so.

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