Ray’s Musings

After a couple of years of trying to figure out just what the hell is wrong with me, I’ve finally determined that I am going through a midlife crisis. It seems this is the normal course of action for guys my age, to quite suddenly hit a stage in life where you question what you’ve done and what you want to do.

My midlife crisis is rather circumscribed. I’m not wanting to abandon my wife and kids, nor do I feel a great urge to make any expensive purchases or spend any money on improving my physical appearance, I’m quite alright with the whole idea of getting old. My midlife crisis takes the form of the guy who has NO FUCKING CLUE WHATSOEVER what he should do with his life.

I have been blessed with a great many skills and abilities. But there doesn’t seem to be any need or want of any of my particular skills or abilities. My work offers no stimulation of any sort. I have no clue what i want to do, what I need to do, or what I should do. Well, that’s not all quite true: I know for a fact that I need to be a good husband to my loving wife and good father to my kids. And I know that I must do God’s will. Aside from that, I have no clue.

God has been frustratingly silent, and even cruel lately. A couple of months ago I scored an interview for a faculty position at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. It seemed like the perfect job for me. But I went through the grind of the interview and came away not feeling like I had landed the job, and sure enough a week and a half later I get the phone call wishing me the best of luck. [Side Note: I really, really wish that if a job candidate has already been picked, or if the job is going to go to someone else no matter what, that they'd just let you know that up front. Then you could kindly say "Thanks", grab some free drinks and snacks, and leave. I know that's not possible, but still.].

What that experience taught me is 1) I’m not in control, and 2) I don’t have any idea what I want or need to do with my life. I’m glad I didn’t get the job because my gut was telling me that the fit just wasn’t there. But it left me wondering about something: I’ve always assumed that teaching would be my true profession to do God’s will for me, but now I don’t know.

So I’m a bit down about all of this, and also down about some recent health problems I’ve been having. On a grander scale I am at peace with my health problems, but this midlife crisis crap has really got me tied in a knot.

I’ve resolved to just do some reading and see if I can figure out how to make a better me from this experience. That’s about all one can do.

I just received a DuelAdapter for use with my splendid new Lenovo S10 IdeaPad.

The DuelAdapter (http://www.duel-systemsadapters.com/) is a device that is supposed to allow you to use older PCMCIA cards in the newer ExpressCard slots featured on new laptops such as the Lenovo S10. I have an AT&T cellular modem card that I use on my Lenovo T61p, and wanted to use the same card on my S10.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that the DuelAdapter is incompatible with the Lenovo S10 Ideapad. After I installed the driver software, I plugged the adapter into the S10’s ExpressCard slot and got… a Windows Code 12 error, meaning that either the Windows OS, the BIOS or some combination of both was unable to come up with the resources (memory, interrupts, I/O, etc). necessary to make the damn thing work.

After many hours of upgrading drivers, my BIOS, and googling around and trying everything I could find, I finally gave up. One thing I did learn from googling was that there were many other people who experienced similar problems, on a variety of different hardware platforms, and that the DuelSystems folks were mostly unhelpful. This leads me to believe that the DuelAdapter just isn’t ready for primetime. Unless the DuelSystem’s website explictly states that your computer and PC Card are supported by this product, I’d save myself the trouble and expense.

It looks like it is time for my wife and I to deal with aging parents. Her dad has COPD, and is slowly deteriorating to the point where he’s having trouble working and taking care of himself.

We’re going to work with my sis-in-law to start planning out what to do. He’s a very proud man and it’s going to be like pulling teeth.

On the weekend before last, I spent a wonderful three days on a spiritual retreat at the Montserrat Jesuit Retreat Center on Lake Dallas, TX.

The retreat was a men’s retreat for Advent. It was the second time I had been to Montserrat, and I have to say it was the most wonderful retreat I had ever been on.

Fr. Joe Tetlow, a world-class theologian and philosopher, was our retreat master. He led us through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, with great humor and the touch and expertise of a master.

I’ve learned to focus more on my personal relationship with Christ, and also focus on making Christ part of my daily life. Please, if you’re considering a retreat to ignite your spirituality, you can’t do better than the Jesuits at Montserrat.

OK, so I’ve changed the name of my blog, and I am going to try and be a little more personal, trying to expand my horizons and writing topics, so to speak.

I recently bought myself a lovely Thinkpad T61p laptop. As an ex-IBMer, I came to love the rock solid design of the Thinkpads they issued us, and every laptop I’ve bought myself has been a Thinkpad.

I am happy to report that the T61p, now made by Lenovo, of course, is no exception. I love this thing. My particular machine has the Core2 Duo processors, a beautiful wide screen driven by an Nvidia graphics card, 3 GB of RAM, DVD burner, and 200 GB of hard disk space. The everything about this machine is right on the mark and nearly perfect, except for the fact that my AT&T wireless network card doesn’t pop out of the PC Card slot when I punch the ejection button. Other than that very minor detail, I can highly recommend the T61p to anyone looking for a powerful but portable workstation.

The Thinkpad came preloaded with Windows Vista Ultimate. I had read all of the negative press about Vista, and had some experience dealing with it on relative’s laptops. I almost went ahead and bought XP instead, but I figured I may as well give Vista a fair shot. This is a decision I now regret somewhat.

I say “somewhat” only because I don’t use Vista in my day to day work. I purchased another hard drive for my T61p and use it for running the best Linux distro ever, Slackware. Even so, I spent quite a bit of time setting up the only two apps I need which are currently impossible (at least for me) to run in Linux: iTunes and the software for my Sony eReader.

I don’t know what was more annoying, the extreme SLOOOOOOOOWNESS of the bloated Vista OS, or the constant permission boxes that pop up every time you need to do most anything. One of the things that was wonderful about XP was the rapid boot up time, and that seems to have been forgotten by the builders of Vista. There’s a lot of pretty eye candy with the Aero interface, but that is overwhelmed by the slowness of the system in general and the overly complex security restrictions.

Vista became somewhat more useable when I went back to the “Windows Classic” look and turned off the annoying “need permission to continue” popups by turning off “User Account Control”.

Even so, that didn’t help yet another issue I had with Vista: It would not talk to my networked printer at home! No matter what I did, the drivers in Vista simply would not allow it to talk to my printer.

As I said, I don’t use Vista every day. On I second hard drive, I installed Slackware Linux and have been doing very well with it so far. I am running the latest stable kernel (2.6.24.4), and pretty much everything works well. I went ahead and used the proprietary Nvidia driver for my video card, and it works perfectly with X. I also had to download and install the Atheros wireless chip driver from madwifi.org to get the wireless card working. After spending some time custom configuring my kernel, I installed it, the madwifi driver, and the Nvidia driver, and am happy to report that everything works well. The only thing I have not had time to figure out yet is how to activate the Thinkpad volume control keys on the keyboard.

Overally, I give the Thinkpad T61p an “A+” for design, function and looks. I give Windows Vista a “D+”. I truly hope that Microsoft decides to ditch this abomination, as they did with Windows ME.

Happy New Year! I generally do not do the “new year resolutions” thing, but this year I really do need to focus on one aspect of my personality that has caused me much heartburn: being a procrastinator.

Googling for “procrastination” tells me that this is a common problem, one that the Internet doesn’t do much to help with. I can’t tell you how many hours I have idled away just playing with StumbleUpon.

Most of the procrastination resources on the Internet seem to point to the same solution to the problem: Just do it. There is really little in the way of underlying explanations for why we procrastinate. But there is a lot of advice out there simply telling the procrastinator to get over it, stick to a plan, and make things happen.

In my case, I procrastinate most when it comes to writing. I am working on a couple of writing projects, and they have been stalled for a year now, simply because I am either too tired or unmotivated to write. The plethora of advice on the Net for unmotivated, procrastinating authors all boils down to trying to find the right set of tools and techniques to just do it, to just write.

Such advice has been very unhelpful to me, probably because I don’t like being told what to do, and just want to do things my way. That in and of itself is a problem, of course, one that I need to get over.

However, somewhere in that affective state of wanting to do things my way, lies the answer to my problem. Somehow, I’ve always wanted time to sort of magically alter itself for me, so that I could write whenever I felt like it. But the reality is that I need to do my writing around my day job, and around my obligations as a husband and father of two young kids. What I really resent, then, are the impositions of Life Itself, the demands of work and family life. I resent how those impositions seemingly block my ability to write.

Time for a reality check. Reality is what we make it, and life experiences are entirely based upon how we choose to react. The reality is, if I did not spend so much time goofing off on the Internet, I could probably spend at least 30 minutes a day writing, and probably more. Thirty minutes a day adds up to 182 hours a year, or 22.75 workdays! While I could probably not finish a book in 22.75 workdays, I could at the very least get a very, very good start on it. And that is just working 30 minutes per day!

Thinking further, I guesstimate I would need about 320 work hours total to finish one of my books. That works out to just under one hour per day. If I really want to write this book, then I simply need to focus one hour per day on writing, instead of doing all of the other time-wasting things I do.

Overall, I think that most of the advice to “just do it” with regards to procrastination are correct. What is missing is that each of us needs to go through a process of understanding the reasons why we procrastinate, and understanding how much the procrastination is costing. Those reasons are probably as varied as human experience itself, hence the dearth of information on how to deal with the underlying reasons for procrastination.

Now that the Democratic Party has control of the Congress, one of the many things they’re focusing on is the predatory nature of the big credit card companies in the US. In particular, they’re looking at the ridiculous interest rates, ridiculous fees, and other complexities that credit card companies employ to suck as much money as they can from consumers. It has been said that people who are in debt to these companies have no one to blame but themselves, and that may be true to a certain extent. But the vast majority of the blame should lie squarely at the feet of companies like Citi and Capitol One, for granting credit cards to millions of people who shouldn’t be given a credit card, and then by punishing these very same people with confusing rules, criminally-high interest rates, and absurd fees. I do not think that much will change, simply because these companies are too powerful.

In the meantime, there are many out there who are in a lot of debt. My wife and I have been climbing out of debt for the past four years or so, and we will hopefully be completely out of debt in a year or so, praise God.

What’s the best way to get out of debt? That depends very much on your own individual situation. In my opinion, if your total amount of credit card debt is five percent or less of your total family gross income, then you’re OK. So, if you and your spouse earn a combined $75,000 per year, you are probably OK if your combined credit card debt is equal to or less than $3,750 at any given time.

If your credit card debt is more than five percent of your gross annual wages, then, in my opinion, you may have a problem. If your combined credit card debt is between six and twenty percent of your gross annual wages, then you really should think about engaging immediately in a debt reduction strategy. Thus, if a couple who earns a total of $75,000 gross per year has a combined credit card debt of more than $3,750 but less than $15,000, then they should start working to lower that debt as soon as possible. Why? Interest rates. The higher your debt, the “riskier” you are to your creditors. As a result, they will jack up your interest rate, even if you have a perfect payment history, only because of the fact that the more debt you accumulate, the greater the risk to them of losing that money should you decide you don’t want to repay them.

If you are one of these people whose debt load is greater than five percent of your gross annual wages but less than 20 percent, you can reduce your debt load on your own, without any outside assistance. Dave Ramsey (http://www.daveramsey.com) has an excellent debt reduction strategy that works well for many people, and you really should consider adopting it or one like it, as soon as possible.

At one time, my wife and I had a credit card load that was much more than 20 percent of our gross annual salaries. Indeed, it was more than 50 percent of our gross annual salary! For folks like us, I would very strongly recommend sticking to the Dave Ramsey approach. Another option would be going to a non-profit consumer credit counseling service, similar to the approach we ultimately took. The Dave Ramsey approach would have worked for us (it works for everyone), but it would have taken us a very long time to get out of debt at that rate. To me, the hit we took on our credit rating was worth the time we saved by taking the same approach that consumer credit counselors take. It is a personal choice of course.

We did not actually employ a consumer credit counseling service. Rather, what I did was to negotiate with each of our creditors to have them lower our interest rates so that we could pay off our balances. I would very strongly recommend anyone to NOT do this. It was about five months of sheer hell, of dealing with incompetant people working at credit card companies, and of having agreements made and broken time and time again. The credit card companies are actually set up better to deal with non-profit consumer credit counselors, rather than with debtors one-on-one.

Having said that, let’s say your debt load is equal to more than 20 percent of your gross annual income, and you want to lower it. What do you do?

The first thing I would do would be to very seriously consider if you can use the Dave Ramsey method to lower your debt. The reason for this is that if you do decide to go the non-profit credit counselor route, your credit rating will take a hit. According to Dave Ramsey’s web site, people who have gone through a non-profit debt management program are treated just like Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers when they try and get a home loan.

But if you sit down with your spouse, the bills, and a calculator, and decide it would just take way too long to pay off your bills the Dave Ramsey way, and that you can stand to take the hit on your credit rating, the next thing I would do would be to seriously consider what will happen to you while you are being managed by a non-profit consumer credit counselor. Here is a little snapshot of what happened to us when I called up all our creditors to tell them we needed to lower our interest rates:

1. All of the credit cards that are to be managed by the non-profit agency will be closed. And when you finish repaying them, they won’t be reopened. They’re basically gone forever.

2. Any cards you have that are NOT managed by the non-profit agency will either be closed, or the interest rates will go even higher. This part really got us, and it sucks. My platinum AMEX card, which I had for 10 years and had never even been late with a payment, was immediately closed, and I found out about it when I was trying to use it to pay for a parking garage on a trip, and the card was declined. AMEX is pure evil, I will never do business with them again.

4. During the time that your credit cards are being managed by the non-profit agency, you will be unable to obtain ANY new credit. This means no new car, new home, new credit cards, nothing. If you do, it constitutes a break of your agreement with the card issuers, and they will come after you for all the interest you should have paid them, in addition to jacking up your interest rate back up to it’s astronomically high level.

5. Your credit report will reflect the fact that you had to get your interest rates lowered to repay your debt. The report will say things like “NOT PAID AS AGREED” or some such crap, and this will result in a lowering of your credit score. One of the few pleasant surprises is that our credit score did not go down as badly as we thought it would. It certainly would have been a lot worse had we decided to go for debt renegotiation (where you repay them pennies on the dollar) or even bankruptcy.

So, now you know what you might face if you decide to go the non-profit agency route. And you decide to go for it, to bear it out, to go ahead and live on a cash-only basis for the entire time that your debt is being managed for you. What next?

The next thing you need to do is to gather together all of the latest credit card bills for each of the cards you want to have manged by the non-profit agency. Do NOT include student loans. It turns out that student loans cannot be managed by such agencies, but many of the more unscrupulous non-profit credit counselors will tell you to include them, only so they can increase the fee they charge you.

Get your bills together and contact a reputable consumer credit counseling agency. I have had many people recommend to me Consolidated Credit Counseling (http://www.consolidatedcredit.org). Of all the companies they seem to be above board, and competant.

If you decide to go with another credit counselor, be sure to look for the following:

1. Make sure they don’t charge you an exorbitant fee. Consolidated Credit only charges about 30 or 40 dollars a month. Any company that charges you more, or that charges you a lot based upon your balance is ripping you off.

2. Make sure they are competant. They will sound very competant at the outset, when you are dealing with the sales people. But once your account gets turned over to the folks in the back room, things can change a lot. Checks, faxes, bills all get easily lost, and I even know of one case where an employee was stealing people’s payments.

The issue of competance is sometimes hard to judge up front, but spend a little time Googling for each company you are considering, just to see if you can find instances of other people getting ripped off. It does happen.

Once you do make an agreement with a non-profit agency, three things will begin:

1. Your interest rates will be lowered, sometimes drastically. We did not have any fees or late charges on any of our accounts, but I understand that if you do, those will be removed as well.

2. Some agreed-upon amount of money will be taken out of your checking account every month by the non-profit agency. They will take this money, then distribute the payments to each of your creditors that they are managing for you.

3. Of course, you also need to be ready for your credit to take a dive, as described above, and to live on a cash-only basis. It generally happens within a month of signing your agreement with the non-profit agency.

You will continue to get your monthly statements in the mail. Look over these statements EXTREMELY carefully. Make sure that 1) your creditors are actually getting the payments from the non-profit, and 2) that your interest rates remain as agreed. I understand that if you have your account managed by a non-profit agency, the interest rates won’t change. But for us the rates go back up on random accounts at random intervals, and I have to back and call them up each time.

Track your debt carefully, and make sure that it is going down each month.

I hope this helps. There is nothing like the feeling of being out of credit card hell!

I have been actively looking for a different job for the past few months, with no luck. Right now I work at a job where I have to travel 100 percent. But with a young family at home, that has become rather difficult, so I’ve decided to start looking around for a job local to where I live (San Antonio).

I of course have come across hundreds of jobs on monster.com and careerbuilder.com that I know I could do, and do well. The problem, of course, is that I never seem to have the perfect set of qualifications for each job. One thing I’ve learned over the last few months is that if you do not have precisely the right qualifications specified in a job ad, then your application for employment will simply be ignored. I guess that the reason for that is because recruiters nowadays are innundated with applications, thanks to sites like monster.com. So they need to toss away the obvious rejects and focus on those applications who may show promise. While I don’t agree with this approach, I can understand it. Unfortunately, it leaves people like me in a bind, because I have done so many things in my career and have learned so many fundamental principles that I am quite confident that I could in fact do any number of jobs out there. But since I’ve no direct experience with certain job qualifications, I get cut.

Like I said, I know the reasons for this, but that sure doesn’t do much to give me hope as a trek away from home week after week.