Most people probably won’t care about this stuff because it’s more about my well being and peace of mind than anything else, so if you aren’t interested in that you might as well stop reading now.  However, if you are in a similar situation to me and would like to see what I’m doing to make my life what I want it to be…. read on!

Insurance

My company has just started offering an HDHP (I touched on this a little in “Socialist Healthcare? Yuck!“) which is what I have been hoping would happen for awhile.  This allows me to cancel my Flex Pay, switch Insurance plans and start an HSA.  An HSA is like a Flex Pay and insurance plan in one, but at the end of the term, your money isn’t magically wisped away into the abyss.  What I mean by this is; With Flex Pay accounts, anything you don’t use by the end of the year doesn’t roll over to the next year.  It’s gone, and you will never see it again…. so if you have it and haven’t gotten sick or gone to the doctor’s much, you’re pretty much out of luck.  With a standard insurance plan, you pay higher premiums for the benefit of being able to go to the doctor’s more often and get a better deal on co-pay.  If you are generally healthy, a great deal of the money you pay in will never be used by you.  That’s kind of a bummer, isn’t it?

With a HDHP (High Deductible Health Plan) you pay a smaller premium, but have a higher deductible. (ours is $1300… no lean feat)  However, the government allows you to have a tax-deal on a Health Savings Account.  This is an account that is used to store up funds to pay the deductible on your HDHP.  It can also be used for other health expenses such as over the counter cold medicine, and a number of other things that most standard insurance plans simply don’t cover.  The drawback is, if you go to the doctors a lot, or are generally unhealthy, your HSA savings will never be able to keep up with your deductible.  The advantage is, at the end of the year, your money is still yours.  If you lose your job or cancel your insurance, any money in your HSA is still there, and can be used for health expenses.  Granted it won’t cover what it can with a Health Plan, but it doesn’t go away.   You can contribute up to $3,000 (single, more for a family) a year to an HSA, so if you manage to go a few years without getting sick much, and only a few visits to the doctor’s, you can build up quit a pretty chunk of change, and never have to worry about whether you will meet your deductible.

So in short, I will be changing to this new health plan, cancelling my Flex Pay,  putting the difference between premiums, and all of what I’m putting into my Flex Pay into an HSA to keep myself covered into the future.

In the long term, I plan to get to $3000 in the account as quickly as possible then cut my HSA contribution down to $1000 a year. (just by redirecting my Flex Pay and Difference in premiums, I will put in more than $2,000 this year without seeing any difference at all in my net pay… chew on that for awhile.)

Taxes

Taxes are fun, especially if you play your cards right.  If you ensure that enough money is being withheld, you will be getting a pretty chunk of change back at the end of the year.  I will be estimating mine before the end of January, and filing them as soon as I have all of my year-end documentation.

Credit

To ensure my credit accuracy, I usually get annual credit reports from all three bureaus (separately).  This is something everyone who uses credit should do to protect their credit score, and ensure the accuracy of your identity.  It doesn’t cost a dime, and can save you a lot of headaches in the future, so it is foolish not to.  A few years ago, I managed to clean off an old debt I paid off that was still on there, and clear my name of some things that were on my credit report because of inaccurate reporting. (imagine that with a name like Amos Vryhof…. your name is likely to be more common)

401k

I will be getting into a 401k plan soon.  It’s a good investment, and if I play my cards right, the money I save by switching to an HSA will become 401k money and open up a whole world of planning for the future.

Bills / Expenses

I will continue to keep a month ahead on everything, adjust my budget regularly and pay extra on things when I can.  Best plan, pretty stress-free and easy to maintain as of when I started it.

So that sums up my housekeeping for 2009, and fiscal plans for 2010.  I know it’s sharing a lot of private information, but it’s information I’m comfortable sharing… especially if it will help others facing similar decisions.

I am blogging tonight about privacy;  Your privacy.

Lately, I have been keeping an eye on the media and the issues around online privacy.  These issues range from company heads telling people to “get over it”, to cloud computing, (including web-based e-mail) and even Facebook’s new privacy features.  Granted, most of the links are from a few sites, but they are issues that seriously concern me.

It comes to show that people are being just plain irresponsible with their personal information.  People are obsessive…. about everything.  If they have a place where they can post every little detail about their life, their friends lives and more… many people will.  That’s why social networking sites exist.  So your friends can see all of this stuff about you…. but what good is it to brag about something if it might cost you your future?

One by one, allow me to address these issues.

Company heads telling people to get over their breach of privacy

This is wrong on many levels.  First, no corporation should ever say anything like this.  The whole idea of a corporation is to keep the owners’ assets separate from a publically traded business. These company heads are sying that their information is more important than everyone elses.  Second, selling or allowing access of someone’s personal details is like someone selling or giving away a company’s trade secrets.  They’ll scream bloody murder, but you should get over us selling you out.  Finally, why should everyone know that I occasionally search for new products to cure pimples on my back side, or whatever strange thing I want to know about? There are plenty of perfectly legal reasons to not want people to know what you are doing. So “get over it” ?  I don’t think so, get over any company that spouts this garbage.

Cloud Computing

Are you nuts?  Store all of your documents and data on someone else’s server?  What if they have a security breach and you have your business plan in an online office suite?  Some jerk breaks in, takes your business plan and makes a fortune off it…. while also pushing you out of the market because he was able to execute it faster with the profits made by stealing people’s credit card numbers. This is a bit off the wall,  but it goes to show. You might think it’s no big deal to store your documents online, but it’s like storing your underwear in your front yard.  Sure, probably not a big deal….but it can be real easy.  If you want to get into the cloud.  Get a server of your own and put the cloud there.  Use a good Cloud server OS.  Want online office capabilities? Look at Zimbra Open Source, and eyeOS (the next release is going to be real impressive).  Take some responsibility, and keep your data safe, secure and accessible.

Those are just the most basic things.  Keep in mind that once your info is out there …. it can be a lot of work to make it go away.

Don’t sell your privacy folks.  I might not want to know about your obsession for googling for Gay Donkey Porn, but on the other hand do you want it to turn up in a Google search at some point?

Here are some tools to help out with privacy -

• Mozilla Firefox or Chromium Web Browser, they both have a safe browsing mode.  IE does too, but you can’t verify their safety due to lack of community code auditing provided by open source.
• Scroogle – Secure, anonymous Google searching.
• Tor
• Freenet
• Enigmail
• and finally….most importantly…. not a download…. Common Sense!

If you have been paying attention to my blanketing, you know that I’m working with a friend, Paul, to shoot his script. It’s sort of a police drama/suspense short about a slightly touched (maybe?) killer who thinks he is the judgmental arm of god, and kills people he considers sinners.

Being a few weeks in to casting and planning, I think we have all of the electronics and software we will need. Some consumer grade MiniDV Cameras, some editing software (kdenlive will be the package of choice), some mics, and 4-track for the sound. We are also doing pretty good at filling our cast with local talents. This was achieved with an ad on Craigslist, which got picked up by exploretalent.com, and did a great deal towards finding the right people for the roles.

Anyway, that being said, I think what Syracuse needs is some sort of organization, guild, or something for No-Budget film making. This is a class unto itself, there aren’t multi-thousand dollar cameras, people with small fortunes to spend, or much of a budget for purchasing Adobe products. Most of it would be shot with mid to high consumer grade equipment, and edited with whatever can be found free on the internet, came with your camera, or with your computer. (iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, Ulead, Premiere Elements, etc) Boom mics might be built with duct tape and broom handles, but what is lacked in costly equipment and software is made up for with skill, dedication and determination to make something worth watching.

A No-Budget group would provide leads on Talent, help scout locations, and help out with learning how to make something actually happen with the low-end software and hardware. The group would have lists of preferred vendors for certain handy materials for effects, or links to resources that teach how to do them. It would also help suggest projects to cast and crew looking for one to work on. Pretty much everything short of actually working on the project. The group could have an annual no-budget film festival and help high ranking filmmakers get entered into larger film festivals. This could be the grassroots effort to bring passionate filmmakers together when they are looking to work with other passionate filmmakers.

So…. what do you think?

I could watch a movie or something, but there’s not enough time for that. It would just be cool to have someone to talk to that would talk about something that interests me.

I guess that’s all I want…. a really close friend to be at my disposal at any time…. the rest of the relationship BS is just ritual.

This is some really cool stuff and I hope to be posting more of it when we start getting our film project underway.

I use this old Arf! video as the test video when I do video because it has a good size and doesn’t say much about anything.

Anyway, here’s the low-down. Since Prior to July 27th, I was modulating mos of my time at work between the California Fig advisory board websites, and the holsteinworld.com redesign…both of which are heavily laden with a bunch of “new to me” technologies.

For holsteinworld.com, I wrote a complete custom CRM that controls just about everything you can see on the site from graphics and colors, navigation and menus, news, calendars and feeds right down to just about every miniscule detail. Most of it probably could have been done in Drupal, but this can do a lot that Drupal can’t touch, and it’s very easy to use for our team since it was built with them in mind, and technical functions are taken care of in a predetermined way rather than requested of a user who might not know what they mean.

For the California Fig board, I built the website with a less encompassing Content Manager and a Fig Recipe database unlike anything else on the market. This is where I got my grounds with MySql since I had never actually done anything with it and pretty much got dropped into it without a life jacket. I think I did well.

Following that, I developed a Virtual Page Manger for websites that allows me to design a template, and the owner of the website to edit the content from a simple Admin panel in a very easy manner. No coding necessary, SEO is built in and the plugin system is well on it’s way to being what I could be a fresh new technology. (XML Based plugins) The cool thing about it is that I can simply build a template and drop it in place. The manager will take care of the rest. (Search, Statistics, Menus, and other page content) This truly separates design from content.

But lately, I have been working on two projects. One to offer our customers, and one to replace the defaced Moo-Tube.net.

For the customers, we now have a complete and customizable E-Commerce solution. An E-store that can be added into your website, self-managed and easily adapted to just about any design, payment and shipping system. I have a pretty complete set of shipping integrators with UPS and the U.S. Postal Service. The only payment gateway currently integrated is Paypal, but others should be pretty easy to add support for.

And for us… there is Moo-Tube 2.0. A revolutionary new video sharing platform. Moo-Tube 2.0 is easily themed from Dreamweaver, supports video uploads, rating commenting, and more. It also allows users to comment on each others’ profile, “wall to wall” style commenting, and more. That is just the basic rundown, other features are in store but will be unveiled with the site. We’ll just say it’s the next step towards integrating functionality of YouTube and Facebook into one place.

So, if anyone wonders why I usually disappear from “being online” for most of the evening, it’s because I need to recharge from grabbing amazing pieces of code out of thin air and hammering them out on the keyboard.

Have a great day everyone and if you’re interested in any of these technologies, let me know! I’m happy to help anyone who might be struggling with some of the things I have already solved.

These would be used for background music… nothing I imagine anyone would want to claim as a masterpiece.

Enter The Drifter

Things are Going Down

Shootout

I’ll probably be doing more at some point….just need to get some fresh samples.

Enjoy!

Personally, I don’t like it, I don’t want to see Government supplied health care. I don’t go to the doctor’s very often, I rarely feel ill and take care not to damage my body when possible. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I am invincible or can’t become ill, but I am making the point that I don’t use my health insurance that often.  That being said, I don’t want to be paying health insurance premiums (by way of taxes) for someone else who uses it considerably more than I do because they do not lead a healthy lifestyle or take more dangerous risks than the average person.

What I would like to see is  more people taking the responsibility for themselves. Rather than forcing everyone to pay for everyone else’s health care, I would like to see more options for the individual that understands the need for health care, but would rather not pay for something as restrictive as an insurance policy.  I for one would love to switch to a Health Savings Account (HSA) and a High Deductible Insurance Policy (HDIP) where I pay about the same, but the money to cover my high deductible goes into an account held at my bank.  This means, that whatever happens, as long as I continue doing banking with my bank, I have that HSA built up as money to cover my own health expenses.

Better yet, I would like to see more banks come up with their own form of voluntary Health Savings plan for individuals who would rather just put all of the money they would normally pay for insurance premiums into a savings account that can only be used for medical expenses.  That way, medical expenses are completely funded with one’s own money and can be taken along wherever you go.  This would be good for individuals with or without jobs, employed or self-employed because it would offer the option of not paying, but still having health coverage when times are hard.

Providing education and expecting responsibility is always better than being “mother” to everyone and doing everything for them.

Just thought I would share it with everyone so if anyone else wants to build one maybe I can help out for the experience.