Shay’s Blog

I have read about a peer to peer lending site called prosper.com before. I never put too much thought about it. Then I read a few other reviews about it. I read about it again on mymoneyblog. They are offering a $25 referral so I went ahead. I am waiting for my bid to fund a loan so I do not have anything to report.  I will report more on it as it goes along.  If you are interested in joining, please use my referral link so we bought get $25. Here is the link.

I got a personal email certificate from thawte this weekend.  I am not sure what made want this, but it is free.  For those that are not familiar with what a certificate does for you, it allows you to sign and encrypt your email.  Encryption is a nice feature that definitive has a purpose, but do people pay attention to a signed email?  A signed email assures the recipient of the email that the sender is who they purport to be.  Does anyone pay attention to this?  I am curious.  It really does not create a lot of work other than getting the certificate.I went a couple of extra steps after getting the certificate.  First a standard thawte certificate does not list your name in the common name attribute on the certificate.  To get your name in the certificate, you have to get your identity confirmed by some of thawte’s network of notaries.  It works off a point system.  I was able to get enough points from two notaries this weekend.  Then I went the extra step of actually generating my own private key with openssl which comes preinstalled on the mac.The reason for generating my own private and then generating a public key off of it is if thawte had s security breach, then someone could read my encrypted mail and send out encrypted mail posing as me.  I thought it was kind of cool to generate my own private key.  I followed the directions here. 

As I mentioned in my earlier post about the blog software updates, it has been a long time since I have posted.  Anyway I wanted to give my blog readers an update on the biggest event since I have posted.  I proposed to my girlfriend Alicia and she accepted.  This is course means we are now getting married and are officially engaged!  We have set July 26 as the day which is coincidentally both our sisters’ birthdays.  I am very excited.  We had been dating for about 15 months when I popped the question. We have selected a location in the Dallas area called Grand Traditions.  They are Corinth which is kind of a drive for us, but we like their setup the best.  We wanted an all-inclusive place that could host both the ceremony and the reception.  There are only a few of them that were indoors in the Dallas area.  Grand Traditions had separate rooms for the ceremony and the reception, and we will be the only event going on.  Plus they allow us to bring our own alcohol which is both a money saver and let’s bring what we want. 

Wow, I have not posted in a long time.  I have to not had the blog posting bug of late.  I spent a little while updating the wordpress installation to 2.3 which adds some performance enhancements and tagging which are both nice features.

It has taken a few weeks, but I have finally overcome the stock markets woes of August.  My net worth is finally above it was in July.  It was a pretty ugly few weeks, but it definitely underscores the importance of staying in the market.  If you get of it you are more than likely going to loose out on the recovery and subsequent gains. Here are my financial updates:Assets +$62, 224.91 over last yearLiabilities -$14,015.95 than last yearNet Worth + $76, 240.86 than last year I am pretty happy with the performance.  I would like to increase my net worth $100,000 year over year, but it will remain if I can accomplish this goal. 

Michael Vick has formally entered his guilty plea under a prearranged plea bargain.  The NFL has suspended him indefinitely.  I wish the federal prosecutors had not entered into a plea with him and let him face a jury under racketeering charges too, but I guess bird a hand holds true especially with celebrity defendants.  He will not be sentenced for some months, but it is excepted to be a year to a year and a half jail time.

Anthony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the driving force behind the Manchester scene died on August 10, 2007 from complications of kidney cancer.  He was the main focus of the movie “24 Hour Party People“. He began as a local news reporter who became the driving force behind the bands like Happy Mondays and New Order.  He also founded Factory Records and opened the legendary Hacienda club.  

A couple of a days ago, I started to get an influx of spam that was coming from the contact form from here.  Thanks to Douglas Karr who modified the original version of the wordpress plugin.  He added a challenge question which should cut down on the blog spam.

We are lucky in Dallas to have several published technical authors in the area.  One of the better authors, Craig Walls is very generous with his time by speaking at the Dallas Java Users Group and the Spring Users Group.  Last night was the release of the second edition of his book, Spring In Action.  His talk was very good covering some of the basic uses of The Spring Framework which is a very large framework.Craig did point something that I had not thought about before.  Spring has a lot of subprojects to it which do a lot of things (Boilerplate code for JDBC and JMS, remoting, MVC framework, etc), but its core functionality is dependency injection and aspects (AOP).  Then everything else is an extension of these two core functionality.  That was a very eye opening statement.  I very much enjoyed his talk last night as I did with his two session at the Dallas No Fluff Just Stuff symposium.  I was lucky enough to win a free ecopy of his book.  I look forward to reading it.

My year 0% financing promo is coming to end the middle of next month (September).  My plan is to transfer the money that I borrowed from Citibank and Discover from my money market fund at Fidelity a few days before the due date.  I can then pay off Citibank and Discover before the promotional rate expires.  I am pretty happy with the results of this.  My original goal for this was to two-fold.  The first was to stop paying interest on a HELOC which was at a little over $5,000 and the other was to generate extra interest income.  After a the year, the HELOC will remain at 0 since I have saved enough to cover the borrowed money.  I have also generated around $300 in free interest income on the residual of what I borrowed from on the 0% cards and the $5,000 from the HELOC.  This is not a lot, but it sure beats the interest I would have been paying on the HELOC.  I definitely think I met both goals. My next step after I pay off the two balances is to wait around six weeks and get a copy of my credit report.  I want to make sure that the balances have cleared from it.  I am then going to embark on a second round of an app o’rama.  This time I am going to apply for hopefully around fifteen or so cards.  I want to borrow a lot more at zero percent and then generate a lot more in interest income this time.