Considering the purchase of a new car while the housing and equities markets plummet requires detailed knowledge of one’s financial position. In my case, I was considering the purchase of a 2008 BMW 335i sedan amidst a rise in foreclosures and a significant downward movement in the stock market. With two existing car loans still in repayment, which necessitates both cars to be fully insured, the addition of a third financed car along with the added insurance costs would bring my budget closer to being balanced. I generally prefer to have a surplus for my personal budget.
BMW rarely, if ever, offers a low interest rate like 0.9% on their vehicles. Assuming that the normal interest rate for my desired car is 4.9%, I calculate that I would save about 5000USD if I took up the 0.9% limited time interest rate offer. The competitive pricing offers, some under invoice, from several BMW dealers were also compelling. I heavily considered the purchase. I thought about the end of repayment in February 2009 for my 2004 Honda Civic and July 2009 for my 2004 Honda Accord. I wanted to believe that by cutting tiny financial excesses in my daily routine, I can create a sizable margin between my cash inflow and outflow while I make payments on three cars simultaneously.
By reviewing just the expenses that are charged on my credit cards, it seemed that the payments on a new car as well as the added insurance cost could easily fit within my budget. Unfortunately, I lose a lot of detail in my budget with all my cash transactions. I give myself a cash allowance, and I repeatedly exceed it, because I sometimes make unexpected yet necessary cash purchases. Not knowing how the cash is applied with the lack of financial controls over my cash spending made it difficult for me to evaluate my financial position and move forward with the car purchase.
I moved on from using Microsoft Excel to GnuCash to manage my accounting. To address the issues that I have with monitoring my cash transactions, I now make use of the “Cash in Wallet” account. I now collect my receipts, post the transactions to my ledger, and reconcile the amount of cash in my wallet with the corresponding account in my accounting software. I do this daily as to not allow the amount of work in maintaining my account from becoming insurmountable.
I now have a better view of my financial position. For example, I am able to see precisely how much I spend at Starbucks by looking up a particular expense account in my ledger. I can see how much of my monthly income is used on lunches and how much I spend on car maintenance over the year. Businesses use accounting practices to measure the health of a business. It seems natural that the same practice be applied to Me, Inc.
Microsoft TechNet elaborates on the description of the program, stating that gpupdate “refreshes local and Active Directory-based Group Policy settings, including security settings.” This command line utility is useful when updating group policies in an Active Directory environment and immediately checking that modification’s effects.
Looking forward to a three day weekend, I thought about what I could do to pretty much relax from work. I have always been curious about the bootstrap process on a PC, but I never had the time or skill to understand the assembly language and process involved in writing one. After having exposure to proprietary assembly languages at work, I decided to revisit the x86 assembly language, which is the first low-level language that I’ve encountered and should know as a software developer who started computing on an “IBM-compatible” machine, and study example bootstrap code.
My first “Hello, World” program toward a functional bootstrap code is VnutZ’s minimalist bootstrap code:
[BITS 16]
ORG 0
int 0x18
TIMES 510-($-$$) DB 0
DW 0xAA55
The above code is input to the assembler, and the resulting binary file is written out to the first sector of a disk. The BITS directive sets the target processor mode. According to VnutZ, the processor is in 16-bit real mode when processing is handed off to the bootloader. The ORG directive specifies “the origin address which NASM will assume the program begins at when it is loaded into memory.” The x86 assembly instruction, int 0x18, is a BIOS interrupt call to have the BIOS interpret BASIC code in the ROM. The TIMES directive is used to write zeros after the sole assembly instruction up to and including the 510th byte. The value, 0x55, is written for the 511th byte, and 0xAA is written for the 512th byte. This marker value indicates to the BIOS that a valid bootloader application resides in the sector when the BIOS inspects it.
The Nokia 3588i, activated on January 24, 2004, was my first mobile phone. At the time, I was working at THQ, Inc. as a game tester with the hope of working for one of their subsidiary game development houses and making it big at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Unfortunately, being a game tester who once worked 76 hours in a single week did not allow time for me to maintain the development skills that I learned in school. I was hammered during an interview at Heavy Iron Studios, because of my neglected software development skills, and was pretty much signaled not to pursue a professional career in video game development. Nowadays, E3’s attendance is 3,000 to 5,000 people as opposed to 50,000 in 2005.
I have worked for five different companies while having the Nokia 3588i in my pocket. I have gained a lot of experience through the diverse work environments with different business models, products, and services. There have been many memories collected while I had this phone, and many of those memories resurfaced as I manually transferred phone book entries to my new Blackberry Curve 8330, which was activated August 12, 2008. Maybe, I should give some of these guys a call, text message, or email.
According to this Amazon.com S3 Team write up on the loss of their S3 service’s availability, “very few requests were completing successfully” during an availability event. The service’s problems seem to have started at 08:40, and the service’s error rates did not fall back to normal, acceptable levels in the United States until 16:02pm. The level of precision offered by the write up, which provides times with minute precision, suggests that the duration of the event was 7 hours and 22 minutes. Allowing a year to be 8760 hours (365 days* 24 hours), the maximum uptime that they can achieve assuming that no other events will occur within the year is 98.318%.
Certainly this event is significant for services that depend on S3 and are contractually obligated to have even just “three nines” or 99.9% availability. I have seen software implementations as well as whole companies that rely on the performance of an uncontrollable third-party. This S3 event is merely another example of what can occur even at a gigantic corporate entity such as Amazon, and it should dissuade people from building their critical systems around uncontrollable third-party services like S3.