In the past I’ve always hand-designed our Christmas cards. This year, free time is at a premium and Snapfish has so many great designs that we decided to use their service. I was very pleased with the end product.
CryptoLocker Virus Protection
The CryptoLocker virus has been making the rounds in the news lately, and well it should. If you get infected, the virus will encrypt everything on your harddrive and on drives that are attached via the network. You then get a message saying that you have a few days to pay them ~$500 to get the data unencrypted or they will wipe it all. It’s quite clever and now that people see how successful this type of attack is, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot more of them.
How do you protect yourself from this? Well obviously you need to be careful when you’re opening attachments in your email, but in the end, it’s pretty much impossible to guarantee that you’ll never get a virus on your computer.
So if you think about this, it’s a lot like the situation where your hard drive fails. All of a sudden, you no longer have access to all of the data on your computer. The only difference is that now the odds of that happening to you have increased (and they were already huge to begin with since all hard drives fail eventually and many of them fail after just a few years.)
The answer to both problems is the same: BACK UP YOUR DATA. If we somehow get CryptoLocker in my house, and even if it encrypts every hard drive we have, I won’t lose any of my data. It’s all backed up in the cloud and the cloud backup has versions so even if it somehow overwrites my backups with encrypted data, I can just sync back to the point before the virus and get my data back.
What would happen if you got the virus right now? The good news is that if you don’t have a plan, you can be quite safe for just $50/year. I’m not getting paid by Crashplan.com, but I love their service and highly recommend it. Set it up on your computer and then forget about it. Your data gets backed up all the time without any intervention from you. Then you can rest easy and know that your data is safe!
It’s not a matter of if your hard drive will stop working or it gets hit by a virus like CryptoLocker, it’s a matter of when. Be prepared.
Remote Control Christmas Lights
Every Christmas, we set up a tree and the Christmas village. Turning these on and off as we enter and leave the house can get a bit tedious, so this year I introduced a little technology to the picture. Enter the Belkin remote controlled power strip! Our tree and village are plugged into this power strip and then the remote is left near the door. The ease of use means that we turn it on more and get more enjoyment out of the decorations. I picked this up at Home Depot but it’s also available at Amazon via the link above.
Extended Warranties
There are a couple stores around here that push their extended warranties ridiculously hard. Sports Authority is probably one of the worst. No matter how I say “No”, I continue to get the guilt trip throughout the entire transaction. It almost makes me want to explain why I never buy it, but I question whether they’d understand the math. Here’s how it works out:
The break even price of a warranty is equal to the cost of replacing the item times the percentage chance that you’ll need to replace the item. So if the product costs $100 and there’s a 20% chance that it will break, then you should buy the warranty if it’s less than $20. The trick is that it’s usually impossible to define the odds that you’ll need a warranty. There’s still a way to prove that it’s a bad deal though.
Think about the company offering the warranty to you. If they charge everyone less than that breakeven point, they’re going to go out of business. They need to make a profit so the warranty is almost ALWAYS going to cost more than that breakeven point. Therefore it’s a bad financial deal for you to buy it.
There are, however, some cases where warranties and insurance are a good thing. Those cases are generally when you do not have enough financial reserve to cover the replacement cost if the item is destroyed. Think about your house or your car. If you have $30K lying around to buy a new car, then you could technically get buy without insurance (though they’ve made insurance a legal requirement since almost no one has this kind of reserve available.)
So when you’re standing at the register and they offer you the extended warranty, know that it’s a bad deal and if you can envision paying that much money again to replace the product, do not buy the warranty. You’ll come out ahead in the long run even if you do have to pay full replacementreplacmenet value every once in a while.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
A few weeks back, KenC mentioned Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast and I listened to one (three hour) episode. It’s incredible! He takes a small slice of history and dives really deeply into it. The story he weaves is deep and really helps you understand all of the complicated forces that combined to shape the event.
He only cranks out a handful of episodes a year and I imagine that’s because each one requires so much time and effort. There are 50 total episodes and starting with show 34, they’re available for free on his website.
If you enjoy history, I recommend that you give one episode a shot. That’s all it took to get me hooked.
Real Estate Disaster Averted
When I moved here in 2006, I looked at a bunch of condos and townhomes. One that I really liked is right down the street from where our house is right now. It was tall and skinny with three floors, very similar to the townhouse where I lived in Jersey. Since buying this new house, I’ve wondered if we would have moved after getting married if I had bought that townhouse because it’s in the right location and it had three bedrooms. But now I’m extremely thankful that I didn’t buy that townhouse.
In June of 2006, I would have paid about $310K for a unit along the backside of the complex. Today that same condo is worth about $204K. But that’s not the worst of it. The buffer of trees that were behind the complex have been completely removed for the I-405 project. The new ramp from 405N to 522E is going to end up almost directly off the back porch of those townhouses! You can see some of the piers for the ramp in this picture.
I owe my realtor a lot for suggesting that I might not want to buy this townhouse. Even with the trees the road noise was loud, and we weren’t even there during rush hour.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the property values as this project continues.
Motorcyclists Make Better Drivers
If you’ve ever driven a motorcycle, you are familiar with the heightened sense of awareness that comes with it. You develop a sixth sense that helps you avoid accidents. “I bet that guy waiting to make a left turn is going to try to squeeze through the gap in front of me.” “I bet that SUV with screaming kids in the back is going to merge into me because traffic is slowing ahead.” It’s a survival instinct. You either get it or you crash.
Most of you riders will also agree that this extra sense also translates to driving a car and makes you a better driver. Now there is some data to back that up. Insurance companies are one of the biggest aggregators of statistics since it affects their profit margin and an insurance company is now saying that a car driver who also has a motorcycle is 23% less likely to make a claim on their car. I hope this translates into some lower rates for me!
Vote Local
I’m saying this too late to have an impact this year, but the next time a voting opportunity rolls around, make sure you spend some time on the local races. They have enormous impact on your day to day life, much more so than the national races. Tired of congestion downtown? Nervous about some potential new zoning decisions? Tired of that street that needs to be repaved? Want to improve the quality and safety of the parks where your kids play? Concerned about your water quality? All of these things are done right in your hometown, not at the federal level.
Woodinville had a very hot race for city council with lots of mud-slinging and hype. The incumbent is apparently a psycho stalker making physical threats during meetings and the incumbent is accused of violating campaign finance laws. With all this hype, there were a grand total of 1380 votes cast in the race. Your vote really could swing an election. Our water district commissioner race was won by 17 votes!
You’re not going to find tons of commentary in the big media about your local election. They’re going for ratings so they’re going to cover what is common to everyone: the state and federal elections. It’s pretty challenging for me to think of any way that any of my federal votes last time around have had any effect on my life. But the local ones? Those are big. Pay attention, do your research, formulate an educated opinion, and vote!
NSA Gold Mine
So the NSA has all our data. All our web traffic, all our email, and even our encrypted traffic that they can unencrypt. That’s scary enough, but here’s something for you to chew on: what happens when this massive NSA storage facility gets hacked? You know that every hacker in the world is now trying to hit this place now that they know it exists. Sure the NSA has probably done a very good job sealing it up, but nothing is perfect. It’s only a matter of time before all that data on everyone gets leaked all over the internet. Then what!?
Merry Christmas
There are lots of phrases bandied about this time of year like “Jesus is the reason for the season” and “Don’t forget the true meaning of Christmas.” Christians know exactly what those phrases mean, but there are probably quite a few people out there for whom those phrases are nothing more than cryptic codes. So today I’ll explain why I celebrate Christmas.
The short explanation is that Christmas is the day that Jesus, the son of God, was born on earth. While the almighty God coming to earth in human form is quite the event in it’s own right, there’s so much more to it than that.
Let’s start back at the beginning. When God created the world, He created Adam and Eve as perfect human beings. They sinned, rebelling against God’s perfection and forever changed the course of history. God demands perfection. Do you want to get to heaven? Great, all you have to do is be perfect every single day of your life. If you deviate from perfection even a single time, that’s it, you’re going to hell. And I’ll give you a hint, no one has ever done that. Adam and Eve sinned and from then on, every one of us were born sinful. God’s rules are simple. Heaven is for perfection, hell and eternal death is for everything else. That’s a pretty grim judgment for us.
When God confronted Adam and Eve about their sin, he explained those consequences to them but then promised to send his son to earth. His son would live a perfect life, be killed as the payment for all of our sins, and then rise again to declare his victory over death, sin and hell. The entire Old Testament (roughly the first two thirds of the Bible) teaches us about God’s law, showing us the many ways in which we have fallen short of His perfection, and it continues the promise that God’s son would come to save us.
This is where the story of Christmas comes into play. God placed his Son, the baby Jesus, in Mary’s womb and nine months later, in a stable full of animals, the son of God was born as a human being. His name, of course, was Jesus, and in addition to being fully human, he was also God. On the night he was born, the star appeared, the shepherds saw it, and your nativity scene came to life. So that’s pretty impressive. The all-knowing, all-powerful God is now here on earth in human form. But if the story ended there, we would all still be going to hell because we’re still sinful and sin equals death.
Thankfully, Jesus went on to do what none of us could do: he lived a perfect life. He was then crucified, and with his death, he paid the price for all of our sins. Three days later, he rose from the dead and about a month later, he ascended back into heaven.
We’re all still here on earth, sinning our lives away no matter how hard we try. But because of Jesus, we have hope. Because I believe that Jesus died for my sins, I know that when I die, I’ll go to heaven because God the Father accepts Jesus’s death as payment for my sins. If God actually did ask me why he should let me into heaven, my answer would be simple: “I believe that Jesus’s death paid the price for my sins.” There’s nothing that I can do to improve on that. No amount of trying to be good or making up for things I did wrong can get me into heaven. I’ll be there solely because when God looks at me, he sees me through the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s a free gift for anyone who believes.
Knowing all that, is it any wonder why I celebrate Christmas? Yes, I enjoy the Christmas lights, Bing Crosby singing about a White Christmas, and stuffing my face with food on Christmas Day, but it all comes in a distant second place to celebrating the birth of my Savior.
P.S. I’m turning off comments on this post because I’m not looking to start a public discussion, but if you want to know more about what I believe, you can of course ask me or check out this website from our church group.