Saving money through credit cards

When I finally got fed up with hearing, “I’m sorry, sir, we don’t accept Discover”, and went looking for a new credit card, I started off at Fatwallet, looking for a good deal.  I looked through their list of rewards cards for something with a 2% return on something that I would actually use.  The one that jumped out at me was a Chase/Countrywide card (Even though I hate Chase).  If you, like me, have a mortgage through Countrywide (Which I do, on our rental condo in Falls Church), this card will pay $50 towards that mortgage for every $2500 you spend on the card.

They just applied the first payment to my mortgage, and I was wondering what my long term savings were.  I have 27 years, 8 months left on the loan.  The wife and I intend to continue to rent out the condo as long as we can afford it (And that should get easier from year to year, as rents inevitably go up while the mortgage stays basically the same).  Now, it’s likely that we’ll refinance at some point, although the rate is 5.375%, so it probably won’t be until we can get a 10 or 15 year fixed mortgage instead of the 30 year.

Anyway, I found a mortgage calculator that would tell me my savings based on a one-time extra payment.  I don’t know how accurate it is, but it tells me that my one-time payment of $50 in the 27th month of the loan will save me $177 over the full remainder of the loan.  So my 2% reward turns into a 9% reward (I know, adjust for inflation, present day value vs future value, blah blah blah I dropped my econ major, remember?  It’s not a perfect calculation.).

So that’s pretty awesome.  And it shows how much a small early prepayment can help in a long-term loan.  So, while Chase’s customer service is, in my experience, unbelievably bad, this credit card is a great deal if you have a Countrywide mortgage.  I have no idea whether Bank of America will mess with this or not, but I hope not.

Columbia Heights lost a theater

DCist: Rorschach Gets A New Home (For Now)

The scrappy theater troupe has been hunting for months for a temporary home to finish out its 2008 season, after being bumped from its former spot at the Sanctuary Theater in Columbia Heights, a converted church space.

That sucks.  I hadn’t been paying a ton of attention to what’s going on at our local theater because the last few times I looked at their website, they had no announced dates for new shows.  And now I find out they’re no longer our local theater.  We went to one show a while back and really enjoyed it, and just hadn’t gotten around to going again.

I hope this works out for them, but it sucks for Columbia Heights.

Someone stole my cherries!

I had some frozen cherries in the freezer at work to eat with my oatmeal in the morning, and someone stole them.  I was looking forward to oatmeal with cherries today.  But they’re gone.  Now I have to eat plain oatmeal.

A coworker tells me they sent out a notice a long time ago that they were going to clean the fridge, but I never saw it.  So I suspect that those jerks threw out a half a package of organic frozen cherries just because there might have been a little bit of cherry juice on the bottom of the freezer.   I hope they’re happy with themselves.

Wow, that was easy

I did a test import of Complaint Hub into Drupal on my laptop.  It worked nearly flawlessly.  It’s going to be a little tough to keep up the permalinks so that any links to the current site redirect to the new site.  I want to move everything back to complainthub.com (You’ll notice the URL here is blog.complainthub.com), which makes it harder.  And then there are still the posts from my old From Harvard Street blog that are all forwarding from harvardstreet.complainthub.com to blog.complainthub.com.  I suppose I could probably just fix that to go directly to complainthub.com.

The import module for Drupal also does not import multiple WordPress categories for a single post.  It only imports multiple tags.  Unfortunately for me, I use categories almost exclusively.  There is a way to convert categories to tags, but there’s a big disclaimer about backing up your database first.  I guess I could just do that.

Otherwise, it was pretty awesome.  I still need a nice new theme, but otherwise you may be seeing the changes sooner rather than later.

The future of Complaint Hub

I’m thinking about migrating the site from WordPress to Drupal. For many of you, that sentence may make absolutely no sense. If you don’t keep reading, I won’t blame you. If you do stop reading, you should make it up to me by going and buying John Scalzi’s special edition book that he’s auctioning off for charity. Get him to inscribe it to me, with some really inscrutable saying. Bid quickly, as it’s already over $2000.

Anyway, if you’re still reading, I got a little infatuated with Drupal while doing some work for a project that never panned out. It doesn’t do blogging as well as WordPress (At least not right out of the box), but it does a lot of other stuff much better. And I think it would be perfect for a project I’ve been thinking about.

Some of you may know that I’m MUCH better at thinking about projects than actually doing them, and I have a bunch of stuff still in the thinking stage. I have a money-making venture with a friend. I have an online economics course to take with another friend. I have the science fiction novel I’ve been plotting out. I have an 8K in March and a 10K in April. I have my real job. I also have a wife, and a family, and some friends, all of whom require and deserve some of my time.

In any event, the project could be really cool, and a nice side effect is that I’d probably bring back the complaint submission page that people have been missing. And I’ll update the theme of the site – at least one friend insists that his eyes bleed when he reads it.

So that’s in the future.  I don’t know how long it will take to happen, but be prepared.  If you subscribe via RSS, the feed might change, although hopefully FeedBurner will take care of that transparently (To you, at least).  But I’ll keep you posted.

Back from California

The wife and I got back yesterday from a super-quick trip to California.  The main purpose of the trip was a baby shower (My first, and I have to say it wasn’t bad – males were forced to go upstairs and drink beer and watch tv while the women played all those ridiculous shower games) in Pasadena.  After driving from LAX to their house, I don’t think I could live out there.  LA is just so enormous and car-centric.  And the Pontiac G6 we rented is a prime example of why Michigan and the American car industry is having such a hard time – it was uncomfortable and unmaneuverable (I’d expect a turning radius like that from an 18-wheeler, not a mid-size sedan).  Although the wife liked having the trip counter and stuff in the middle of the dash, so she could reset it at each turn as we followed Google Maps directions.

Before the baby shower, however, we landed in San Jose and spent the night with a brother-in-law before taking the train up to San Fransisco to stay with another brother-in-law and his girlfriend.  Pictures will be up on Flickr later, but this trip especially has reminded me that I need to take another photography class – I’m less happy with each successive batch of travel photos I take, I think.

We also went to see a show at the SF Museum of Modern Art.  Wow.  It was certainly interesting.  The show was Weimar New York, and it was not quite what I was expecting.  The show is mostly drag, not surprising for the area.  But as the night went on, it was increasingly risque.  After three hours, when we decided to call it quits (It was 1AM at this point, and the wife and I were still more or less on East Coast time), they had arrived at full male and female nudity.  It was an interesting show, although I’m not sure I’d recommend it.  We were talking afterwards, and a brother-in-law remarked that he was unaccustomed to being in the top 5% of the conservative end of the room.  I felt the same way – I think I’m pretty liberal socially, but the crowd in there made me feel like Mike Huckabee.  It was liberal even for San Fransisco.

Anyway, it was a good trip, although much too short.

Say no to artificial sweetener

‘Diet’ foods weight gain puzzle

Scientists from Purdue University in the US now believe that a sweet taste followed by no calories may make the body crave extra food.

So, instead of being better for you, artificial sweeteners give you cancer, metabolic syndrome, and make you fatter.   Artificial sweeteners are not actually food.  They are chemicals that trick you into tasting “sweet”.  Every study I’ve ever seen says they’re bad for you.

So, stop eating them.  Just eat less sweets.  You don’t need that diet soda.  You don’t need the little blue and pink packets of powdered crap in your coffee.

I’ve found, as I’ve cut down on drinking soda, that I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to.  I used to LOVE Coke.  Given a choice, I would almost always drink that.  Then I found beer, and that took away the top spot, but Coke was always my top non-alcoholic drink.

I still drink it sometimes – I don’t believe in cutting things that I enjoy out of my life completely just because they aren’t good for me.  If I generally eat healthfully, then one bacon cheeseburger with fries and a large Coke every once in a while isn’t going to kill me.

In any event, you should stop consuming artificial sweeteners.

Voted!

Took five minutes this time. They had run out of Democrat paper ballots and the little blue cards that count how many people have voted for each party or whatever they do. But I voted.

It always seems a little anti-climactic after I vote – such a large event that actually takes just a few presses of a touch-screen. Whatever. I look forward to the results coming in at 8 or so.

The guy who took my little card told me that they had broken the record for most votes in this area already, and the polls are still open for more than three hours.