When we follow the history of how money came to exist it was simply a way to handle trade in a fair and honest manner. I grow corn, you grow beans but I don’t need beans so instead I give you this “money” that we all agree is valued at a certain amount of beans. Everybody wins, we all have the ability to trade even if we don’t need to barter. Yay!

However money has now become the defacto standard, it used to be a way to trade, now it is the ONLY way to trade.

Perhaps this is the kind of post that one only begins when they have been fortunate financially. Research has shown that money really does not make people happy unless it drastically changes your life. 10 dollars to you or me probably does not mean much, but give it to a bum living under a bridge and you’ve just made his week, he feels rich and can now eat! Take somebody who is struggling to pay rent and give them a raise of 15k a year and they are now more secure and more happy accordingly.

Take however somebody who has 30 million dollars (which is the number that defines super-wealthy). Is there anything that this person can’t do? Is there anything they can’t buy or any experience they can’t have? Yes there is the argument about love and I will bow to that argument, but there are very few experiences that one can not purchase with cold hard cash.

Take the average joe, or even a fairly well to do person and look at their lives and goals. For the most part everybody has something or some activity they are really wanting to do, something they are saving for (a new bigger house, a new better car, a trip to Bali, or just simply security and retirement.) People have goals and things they want for, and those wants give them things to talk about, dream about, hope about and an incentive to wake up and work every day.

So take this person with a stock pile of money, real estate, staff, cars, boats, planes… and ask them what interests them. Most of them will tell you that they are pretty bored. All the money in the world bought them one particular thing that they didn’t even intend to buy… a lack of wants.

Wants give us incentives. If you are lonely you want love. If you are poor you want wealth. If you are sick you want health. Some wealthy people find that they can create a game of wealth, they have 50 mil, they want 100mil so they can prove something.

Anyways, there isn’t a huge point to this post except that the truth is that money buys material things. Those things are nice, they are fun to play with for about 30 minutes, but when you turn around and realize you want for nothing I have to imagine that is a lonely and sad place to be.

The way it works is that you enter your account information and passwords to each of your bank web site’s and their system automatically logs in and downloads all of your spending activity. The analysis is really very accurate and it automatically begins creating budgets for you. As well you enter your assets such as homes, cars and jewlery. The home’s you enter are automatically pulled up by appraised value from a web site called cyberhomes, and I found the accuracy to be good but the database to be missing a lot of homes. One of our homes for example pulled up with a $0.00 suggested value.

I’ve in the past played around with Yodlee.com and Yodlee has even made big gains in getting acceptance from the banking community to the point that several large national banks actually integrate Yodlee into their customer web portals, but the Yodlee interface is a bit clunky and poorly designed.

Mint.com on the other hand is a pleasure to use, the interface is intuitive and unlike Yodlee who’s primary model seems to be licensing their technology to banks, Mint.com makes money by saving you money. If they find that you have a credit card with a high APR they will recommend another credit card that offers you a better interest rate. Really a win/win situation… you save money on fees, they make money on the referral.

The only suggestion I have for Mint is really that they should add a similar auto-valuation for vehicles using a service such as edmunds or kbb.

I highly recommend it, http://www.mint.com

iCall was approved as a Pre developer some time ago and without a hands-on experience with the device, we really couldn’t make an educated assessment about the platform.

As an iPhone developer, we have purchased something along the lines of 25 iPhones in the past two years to always make sure that every developer and tester has one of each physical revisions of the devices.

Blackberry has been seductive with their push e-mail and their plans for a killer-app store, so we now own a handful of blackberry bold’s as well.

All told I have something like 45 phone numbers not including my various office numbers, home numbers and iCall phone numbers.

So for three weeks I devoted myself to using only one device per week. Prior to using the device I spent a day or so acquainting myself with the features and setup of each device, so each week with one device was a fair full week of use of combined business and home use.

I thought that since I’ve never written a technology review but read them constantly and had a unique experience that it would be worth sharing.

The setup:

• 1 Blackberry Bold on AT&T
• 1 iPhone 3G on AT&T
• 1 Palm Pre on Sprint

“Smart” is not a degree. It does not matter if you went to the finest ivy league school on the planet, they can not make you “smart”, they can only make you “learned”.

As I have gotten older (tomorrow is my birthday, happy birthday me) what I have discovered is that nobody knows the answers. People make their best guesses and “smart” people tend to be right.

Take for example the Bernard Madoff scandle… thousands of “learned” people lost their entire fortunes through him. Millions of people lost significant money through him because they invested in funds of funds of funds of funds that had holdings with Madoff. The “smart” people said “something is not right here” and refused to invest.

If you thought you were smart and you got bamoozled by Madoff… I’m sorry but you were not as smart as you think you are.

If you define “smart” by IQ points then you might find it fascinating to know that on average people believe their IQ is much higher than 100. Unfortunately 100 is by definition the average. Everybody wants to be smart, few people are smart, and those people who are “smart” know it.

So back to what I know.

The crooks are generally the smart ones. There is more money in stealing than in making an honest living and your chances of getting caught are surprisingly small. Rob a bank, the odds are actually good that you will not get caught. Rob a train.. the odds were largely in your favor in the old west.

The world’s economy is set up predominantly so that wealthy people have the advantage, the economic vacuum favors them, but only if you follow the rules and laws that they influence. Sure there are the Google’s of the world, but they are rare.

From the Kennedy’s to the DuPonts, those who refuse to follow the laws of the economy that they are in are the ones who build great wealth for their bloodline. I just love this quote:

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
Honore de Balzac
French realist novelist (1799 – 1850)

G’night.

It is important to note that this particular configuration switch skip-grant-tables completely disables all authentication that MySQL does so you should ONLY run this if your database is local and skip-networking is also included in the config, and this is not being implemented in a multi-user environment. If you implement this in a multi-user environment you will be allowing all users of the system to have full administrative control of MySQL, if you use it in a networked environment you will be allowing everybody who can access the MySQL port to administer the MySQL server.

The tremendous upside of this option is that when you disable grant tables, you effectively eliminate several queries that run before EVERY SINGLE connection you make, it’s not that it makes the server faster, it just stops MySQL from using it’s own internal myisam queries… I would have assumed that MySQL had been coded to keep the grant data in some sort of linked list, in fact when I tested this it was purely accidental because I was performance tuning a new box and had a little time on my hands to disable and enable every single option in our my.cnf file just to discover how each option impacted the benchmark tool I was playing with.

The only performance caveat I will add, is that this really will only improve performance in environments where you are handling many quick "connect/query/disconnect" scenarios, meaning that if you are running something like wordpress where every page load connects, does 300 queries, and then disconnects, the performance gain would be negligible.

With those warnings/thoughts, here are my performance tests… reads and writes both performed approximately the same:

WIth standard grant tables in place and only one user (root) in the grant tables:

mysqlslap –user=root –auto-generate-sql –iterations=3 -S /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock –auto-generate-sql-load-type=read -e myisam –concurrency=3000

Benchmark

        Running for engine myisam

        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 1.224 seconds

        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.168 seconds

        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.286 seconds

        Number of clients running queries: 3000

With skip-grant-tables enabled in my.cnf:

mysqlslap –user=root –auto-generate-sql –iterations=3 -S /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock –auto-generate-sql-load-type=read -e myisam –concurrency=3000

Benchmark

        Running for engine myisam

        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 0.682 seconds

        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.668 seconds

        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.703 seconds

        Number of clients running queries: 3000

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 

-Jack London

Recently I have been engaged in working with a charitable organization… this organization provides a superior education to our children at a very reasonable cost but convincing people to give money has been an arduous task.

I think that many people feel that Charity is giving a few dollars to make themselves feel good, but real charity in my opinion is giving so much that you have to either sacrifice something or you have to worry and hope that more money will come your way in the future.

I’m often skeptical of the word “karma” but sometimes, just sometimes things come back on you two-fold and make you say “whoa”.

In the past 6 months the following events surrounding charity have happened to me:

1. I donated a sizable amount of money to a charity, put in time and served on a few comittees. At the same time I was purchasing a new house. The new house was substantially more expensive and left me carrying two mortgages… two VERY BIG mortgages.Literally the day that we closed on our new home purchase, a random family out of the blue contacted us about our existing house (our existing house was not on the market). They had been looking for a home for over a year, drove by our house, fell in love with it and absolutely “had to have it”.

   We paid no brokers and walked away from what could have been a burdensome financial obligation. An amazingly random turn of events. 3 weeks later we closed on our old home at 10% over what we had paid for it only a year prior. In this market, many people would call that a f**king miracle!
    

2. I agreed to donate $200,000  to the same charity… the following morning an extremely wealthy individual whom I had never met or corresponded with contacted me and offered me $300,000 for something that had cost me only a few dollars (a domain name) several years ago.Not only is the donation tax deductible, but the profits on the name are long term capital gains on intangible property which means we get to take advantage of the 15% tax rate on those profits.

   I am not foolish and have received many offers on this particular domain, so I took it. Truly an unbelievable turn of events.

I’ve learned that money is a lousy way of keeping score. 

-Anonymous

Til later…
-Arlo

This is a 7 hour flight to Vancouver. What is the hurry to get seated? I understand if you have a huge carry-on that you need to get in the overhead, or even if you’re flying first class because you want to chug your first free drink as quickly as possible… but given that coach class is essentially as comfortable as standing in a New York subway during rushhour, why would people possibly want to spend an extra 20 minutes on the aircraft if they don’t absolutely have to?

Herd mentality at it’s best “everybody is in line, I better get in line too, I better hurry!”.

Ok… now they are making final call and me and 3 other smart passengers are walking up to the gate with no line and will spend 20 minutes of our lives doing something more fun like blogging or watching the news.

See you in Canada eh!

Time went by and games got more complicated, by the time I was 25 I felt like an old man trying to learn modern video games, 12 buttons, combinations involved lots of different combinations of buttons and joysticks and gamepads… it was overwhelming and I generally thought “if this is gonna be so much work, why don’t I do something that will actually pay off, like meeting girls?”

Then a few weeks ago, my colleague Andy showed me this video game system that you can buy at x-gaming, it’s a full sized video game (the kind you stand in front of with a friend) and it came with none other than Street Fighter II. I bought it immediately.

It arrived, the delivery guys unpacked it, and in 10 minutes I was playing. What a blast I’ve had down in the basement reliving my younger days, eating pizza and drinking beer… it feels so decadent. In any case, if you’ve been trying to find me on icq or aim but I’ve been unavailable…that’s what I’ve been doing with my free time for the past 3 days!

In January 2007, I purchased four round trip first class tickets for my family on Spirit airlines to the Grand Cayman’s for a vacation from February 9th thru February 17th. I purchased the scam trip insurance from Travel Guard (accidentally).

Due to weather we were unable to get to the airport for our departure. We tried to call, along with many other unfortunate Spirit customers. After several hours and many attempts to call and receiving the usual “we’re sorry, all customer service reps are busy with other customers”. At this point I decided that getting my family there was more important than getting them there on Spirit so I chartered a private jet.

Great vacation, good times.

The morning of our return home I go online to do online checkin with Spirit, but spirit says our tickets have been cancelled. Drats, ok well they must have cancelled them because we maissed the first leg. Lesson learned. Their web site indicates however that we have a credit with them that we can use (because we paid 6k for tickets that we didnt use). 

Their web site keeps having server errors while i’m trying to redeem these vouchers… no luck. Eventually I try calling Spirit customer service and *suprise* I get an hour of “we’re sorry, all customer service reps are too busy to help you”… so once again I get to choose between taking Spirit airlines to get home or getting home.

I bought tickets on American to get us home and we survived the trip.

I begin my weekly ritual of trying to call Spirit customer service to get a refund or at least get functioning credits with them for a future flight… and for about 3 months we continue to be unable to get in touch with a human being.

At my wits end I decide to call American Express, after all I am one of those lucky people with the card that everybody talks about (weee lucky me)… I figure that I am an important person so they will help me… and they try.

Spirit tells them they will call me… so Amex closes the dispute. Spirit never calls.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit says they will take care of the issue…. so Amex closes the dispute.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit says they tried calling me and will try again… so Amex closes the dispute.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit asks for me to send them a formal letter explaining the issue, I do… Amex closes the dispute.
Spirit claims they never got the letter.
This goes on a few more times. Frustrated but kind Amex reps continually spend hours trying to reach human beings in the customer service department at Spirit… they realize how hard it is.

During this entire time I have continued my weekly ritual of trying to reach a human at Spirit.. never once since the day I placed my order online did I reach a human being from Spirit… until today.

Spirit customer service rep Niurka Paulino (who can be reached at 954-447-7965 x 1711) she goes by the name “Nikki” (and seems ready to “rumble” from her loving demeanor) finds my account, puts me on hold to “talk to her manager” and advises me that these non-refundable tickets cant be refunded and that spirit wont issue me a voucher for use on a future Spirit flight… 

SCRREEEECCCH… wait, did you just tell me that you are going to take my $6000 and you’re not going to even let me reschedule the flights for a different time? Yep, sure did. I guess this is how they stay profitable, taking the money and not providing any services in exchange for the money.

She was however kind enough to remind me that I had been suckered into paying $20 dollars (or something like that) for “Travel Insurance” through Travel Guard and gave me their number. Travel gaurd of course advised me that there was nothing they could do because it was my fault that I had missed the flight. The fact that Spirit couldnt actually be contacted seems to be beyond everybody’s care.

Perhaps Google in all their infinite wisdom will pick up this blog entry and link to it.

But don’t worry my dear readers, I’m not done, now I’m just going to find another way to get my money back from them.. many people have won claims against spirit for this type of practice.

I pretty much plan on doing the following:
1) Filing a complaint with the BBB
2) Filing a complaint with the Connecticut consumer affairs department (they are actually really helpful).
2) Making friends and family aware that they should avoid Spirit Airlines.
3) Blogging about it (here) so that the occassional stranger will know to avoid them.
4) Keeping a really really close eye on the skies with my binoculars in the tri-state area and making sure to report any altitude violations I see to the FAA.
5) I may file a series of small claims against them which will force them to spend some time and money defending this rip-off practice, I’m not sure.
6) I may just waste 50k suing them for fraud. I have lots of good lawyers who are always happy to to get new work.

If anything happens I will update you!

As always,
-Arlo Gilbert