Author Archives: Alan V

Money

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I find it slightly strange that, the more I go from having no money to making enough to live comfortably, the more reluctant I am to spend it.

As a kid, the money I made was basically my (admittedly large for the time) allowance and birthday checks… yet I loved to spend it and had next to nothing in savings.

In middle school what meager savings I had was eaten up by the Pokemon TCG craze, and I spent way too much money. Still no income.

In high school, I started working a part-time job. Spent a little less, but still had rather large purchases relatively often (such as dropping $300 in one trip to Best Buy to get lots of games) and would splurge on random things like CDs and cafe items at Barnes and Noble.

In college, I worked more regularly and gradually spent less and less each year as I made more and more money from internship experiences. I self-imposed a $50/month spending limit (excluding essentials like food and toiletries, and excluding larger purchases like my DSLR and laptop) and stuck to it (at times dropping it to $30 when I wasn’t actively making money from jobs).

Post-graduation, I have an awesome job that pays well, but I am extremely reluctant to spend it. I still stick to the $50/month spending limit and, if anything, include more items under that now than I did in college (generally resulting in me buying even less now).
I’ve wanted a new computer since I started work over a year and a half ago. My laptop, at this point, is relatively unusable due to its lack of internet and ability to randomly turn off or reboot. Yet I can’t justify the $700 purchase to myself because, after all, the laptop *does* still work, and I can accomplish things on it like making cards and tagging photos.
My DSLR is rather broken, as I can no longer shoot with it at shutter speeds over 1/50 (or zoomed in at all) unless I turn it upside down. Yet I can’t justify the $1000 purchase for a new camera. Instead, I purchased a small, crappy, point-and-shoot camera for $80. It doesn’t really do what I need it to (although the portability is excellent), but I was much more willing to deal with the sub-$100 price tag. At this point, it’s kind of my replacement for the SLR.
Food-wise, I used to eat out a lot in college, and even when I first moved here. Now just about every meal is cooked at home (or provided as leftovers free from work courtesy other peoples’ lunch meetings) and I am extremely reluctant to order at restaurants (even when I go with friends).
As far as the groceries go, I no longer go to the store and pick up whatever looks good. I now scour the weekly ads and make a list and effectively buy only sale items (or items that I have coupons for). I buy chicken on sale and freeze it. I buy 10 jars of pasta sauce when it’s cheap. I have saved at least 50% on each of my grocery bills in the past 6 months, with only one or two exceptions (mostly when I’m feeding other people like my parents). On the plus side, this results in me eating healthier as I tend to buy more vegetables and staple foods rather than snacks. But it’s still a huge change from college.
(As far as my large trading card purchases go, the cost gets spread out across subsequent months, so I effectively borrow ahead a couple months’ $50 budgets, then don’t buy anything else in those months. I did the same for my point and shoot… it will be paid off at the end of this month.)

I’m not entirely sure what this says about me.
On the one hand, it’s nice building up a nice savings account in the event that something goes wrong. It’s a good feeling to know that there isn’t much that can hurt you financially at this point, and that you have enough saved up to maintain your standard of living for well over a year should anything happen.
On the other hand, it seems silly that I’m not really using the money I make from my job to buy and do things that make me happy (besides saving it, which I suppose makes me happy), especially because I already have a nice savings account built up. It’s not even about luxuries like a TV (don’t need) or eating out all the time (don’t want)… but little things like a new computer or a printer that I’ve been wanting for over a year and can’t justify to myself.

So yeah. I guess I’m just really strange or something.

Am I the only person who does this (spends less and less as time goes on)?

(Also, seeing as it is almost 3 AM, I should probably try that sleep thing again.)

VM Fail, Take Two

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So the last time I messed with my VM, I needed IT to come and build a new VM for me to use.
You think I would have learned better than to mess around with vmware when everything was working mostly fine.

This morning, I came in to work to a perfectly working VM and everything was fine. However, ever since IT had gotten me to install VMWare Player to create my new VM, I hadn’t been able to use VMWare Server. I figured I would remedy this.

First step was straightforward enough… uninstall VMWare Player. Unfortunately, it seems that doing so also uninstalled VMWare Server. Fine, whatever.

Second step then became to reinstall VMWare Server. This didn’t quite work… apparently I’m missing a couple kernel source files. As a result, it was unable to build the VSOCK module. This meant that my VMs, when run through VMWare Server, had no network access. This is a problem when the entire point of your VM is to run tests remotely.

After trying without success to sync the required source files, I figured I’d cut my losses and go back to the player. Uninstalled VMWare Server and reinstalled VMWare Player.

This install didn’t quite work right. It didn’t create the shortcut in my Applications menu, which I tried to do. Then, on launching, it was unable to read some required files to start up unless I ran it with sudo. In the end, I decided to just tell the shortcut to sudo it, because I didn’t want to start chowning the actual VM files.

So yeah. That took most of the morning and resulted in a less-usable Player (have to run with sudo now). Blah.

I am not touching my VM again for a while. :P

Hmm

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It’s been an interesting couple days.
Last night, for some reason, I couldn’t sleep. I started browsed Schthack’s forums instead, and went through various image files from PSO in an attempt to find the photon blast and tech images from the game for use with RPG Get!. Succeeded, and continued messing around online, and not feeling tired. I eventually went to bed around 7 and woke up at 8 for work. That was interesting. Surprisingly, I wasn’t too terribly tired at work. I’m also surprisingly not tired now.

Work had free pizza during a presentation at lunch. Then there were leftover sandwiches from a different meeting. Then we had our Friday dev meeting and there was cake. Tasty.

Spent most of the day finishing up creation of a new object type in our code. Unfortunately, around 4:30, we found out that we were actually missing some fields that were necessary (that we hadn’t thought about before). As a result, we’re going to have to remake portions of it. Meh. This means we’ve gotten one story done this sprint, and that was a carryover story from last sprint. We really should add things we’ve been doing in as stories, because from a report standpoint, our team has been seriously slacking these past two weeks. :P

After work, I went to Safeway to buy foodstuffs, where they overcharged me $0.90 on my yellow squash (in addition to charging $4.50 for 3 avocadoes that I hadn’t bought). Safeway customer service people processing the refund can’t do math… because apparently 1.3 pounds of yellow squash at $0.99/lb comes out to $2 in their mind. Oh well.

Posted some photos from the picnic last week. Tasty food.

Also got revisions of RPG Get! posted. If you’re at all interested in the game, you should go check them out.

Found and installed this amazing interface reskin for PSO. My action buttons look amazing now. :D


Meow
Yeah, that’s really it.

Past Few Days

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Recently, there have been board games, a tasty BBQ at work, a bit of work on the RPG Get! CCG, and lots of PSO.

I’ve ordered a copy of Grandia 2 for PC with the intention of capturing screenshots for further RPG Get! sets (so the game doesn’t turn into PSO TCG version 3).

Yesterday, I also attempted to get a couple Dreamcast emulators working so that I can run (and screencap) Skies of Arcadia. The first one was disasterous, as it required installing Daemon Tools to mount the CD image. My computer bluescreened during the install, then rebooted, then proceeded to bluescreen and reboot in a continuous loop. I had to boot into safe mode and do a system restore. Boo Daemon Tools. The second one doesn’t work because my laptop doesn’t have a graphics card, which is apparently required. Boo stupid laptop.

PSO-wise, I got my Fomar to level 152 (finally) so he can use his Aura Field. Meph played today and helped me get another level (yay for Phantasmal World #4), and we got a HotFencer too, which is awesome. Meph also helped level up my Fonewm, who is now 43 and can survive the beginnings of vhard mode. I also purchased a L&K for my Fomar, which actually seems rather useless as his ATA maxes too low for such a weapon to hit with any acceptable accuracy. On the plus side, with his Zero Divide or Asteron Belt, he can actually do decent damage (200-600) in Ultimate Ruins (with a full set of buffs and debuffs). Melee forces are fun. I should play my Ramar some more.

But yeah. This post was originally going to include some photos (or screenshots, or something), but I find myself uninterested in going through photos right now.

I guess I’ve just been feeling rather off lately. I suppose part of it is the growing uncertainty in the lives of those closest to me, and that has a disorienting effect on me as well. At least there’s one certainty in my life right now… but circumstances make even that rather unfortunate (or, at the very least, a ways off).