Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

I’m done with my first year of grad school! One year down, one to go…

It’s 6:20 AM on Friday morning, and I’m sitting at the Quad City “International” Airport in Moline, Illinois, waiting for a flight back to school after a quick Thanksgiving trip home. There’s a girl sitting at the next table over, wearing a Stanford Cardinal track jacket. Sweet.

Update: She’s not a Stanford student — she doesn’t even have any affiliation with the school at all — she just got the jacket when she was visiting the school for work! Bummer.

There’s a park in nearby Foster City called Leo J. Ryan Memorial Park. I visited it last week and got a cool photo!

There’s a neat essay in today’s New York Times entitled Skip the coffee? What’s money for, anyway?. In the article, John Schwartz says that that he buys a latte from Starbucks every morning, even though it’s against the advice of virtually every personal finance writer, because it makes him happy. Ultimately, he asks, what’s money for if not to buy happiness?

The trick, of course, is finding the balance. Immediate gratification vs. future happiness. Wealth accumulation should be a means to an end, not an end itself. It’s not an all-or-nothing situation, but of course many finance authors don’t mention that.

Suze Orman’s philosophy is pretty smart about this, although she doesn’t usually address this point directly. Michelle Singletary, the personal finance writer from the Washington Post, is the complete opposite. She’ll make you feel guilty for spending $100 to repair a broken dishwasher. I really disagree with many of her opinions, but I guess controversy sells newspapers, because I still read her column.

Suze Orman often recommends choosing the investment option that makes you feel better. For example, when I got a raise a couple years ago, I had to choose between paying down my home equity line of credit, or setting up a savings account as an emergency fund. Technically I “should” have built up an emergency fund first. But I felt more comfortable having less debt, so I paid down the HELOC instead. And since it was a line of credit, if I needed money, the HELOC credit would be available in an emergency. At first I felt like I was making the “wrong” choice, but once I understood that my comfort level was more important than earning an extra hundred dollars, I realized that it was totally the right thing to do.

Well, I’m headed to California! Although most of my posessions are on a moving truck, I’m spending about a week driving there. Here’s a recap of the first two days on the road.
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I’m going on a four-day trip next weekend where I won’t have regular Internet access. T-Mobile has a great HotSpot (WiFi) network in the area I’m visiting. It’s a little expensive, at $9.99/day, but they offer a one-week prepaid card for $19.99. That seems like a fair deal, and I want to buy that. The only problem is, they don’t sell the 7-day prepaid service online; you have to buy a PIN at a T-Mobile retail store.

Last night, I went to the T-Mobile store near my house to buy the $19.99 card. They rang up the sale, swiped my MasterCard, but then got an error on the computer: “This store cannot sell PIN-based transactions right now.” It was closing time, but I was told I could just go to any other T-Mobile store, or come back to the same store today.

I called the 800 support number, thinking they would just sell me a PIN over the phone, but Bina told me it has to be bought in a store.

So this afternoon I just walked over to the T-Mobile store about a mile from my office — in another state. They sold me one, swiped it, and then got the same error: they can’t sell PIN-based transactions either. He said he couldn’t do anything about it except open a ticket with their help desk. He wasn’t rude, but he sure wasn’t very helpful either.

I called the 800 number again and got the same support rep, Bina. (They must never let her leave — she was there at 11PM and last night again at 1PM today.) She couldn’t tell me what the problem was, or when it would be fixed, or how I could find out if it was fixed, or even how the store could find out without swiping my credit card again. She said all I could do would be to go back to a T-Mobile store and try again. (But I tried that already!)

“As a courtesy,” she said, she offered me one free DayPass, but that’s not very useful. I need 4 days of service and even with one free DayPass, daily service at $9.99 would still be more expensive than a week for $19.99.

What is wrong with these people?!? I’m going out of my way to buy their product, and they can’t be bothered to sell it to me!! I’m a long-time T-Mobile phone customer, and I’m crazy about their customer service. But when their WiFi division is such a letdown, it really makes me want to rethink my entire relationship with the company.

Does anyone know of alternate short-term WiFi services in the San Francisco Bay area?

I’ve worked with Sam Leiber (pictured) for about 6 years, ever since we were two of the first employees at Prometheus. Sam left his job in March to tour with his band, Metal Hearts. They’ve been touring all spring, and getting a lot of attention from radio and even MTV. The tour continues all summer and culminates with a European leg in the fall!

Anyway, last month they did a live set at the radio station WOXY in Cincinnati. The radio station has made it available online for everyone to hear. The music is mellow and good, and the interview is pretty interesting, so check it out!

“Why did Ryan just blog about the Stanford academic calendar?”

Well, I’m heading off to graduate school in the fall! In fact, I’m going to be enrolling in the M.S. of Computer Science program at Stanford University in sunny Palo Alto, California!

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I just ordered some inline skates — the K2 Exo 6.0 model. My friend Erik loaned me a pair of skates a few weeks ago, and I’ve been slowly getting the hang of it. I’d like to learn to skate this spring, as it seems like a healthy and fun way to enjoy the outdoors, so I’m going to enroll in a skating course. Hopefully I’ll be able to use it as a mode of transportation by the fall.

I’ve updated the site design yet again. This time I started with a great open source template called Ezekiel, by the talented Jake Wehner, at OpenWebDesign.org. I had to make a lot of changes to get it to look just right here, but I think it’s turned out to be nice and clean and inviting.

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