manipulat0r
I realized something …
last month, the bank sort of screwed me. I moved money out of my credit card balance into the checking balance on the 29th or so to pay for rent. Then the bank compounded interest on the credit card, which brought it to about $0.60 over the limit. Then they slapped down a $20 over-limit fee on the credit balance, but rather than stacking it over the limit, they charged it to the checking account balance.
Boy, that woulda really screwed me over if I hadn’t checked on it before I sent a rent check. I ended up just moving the money back into credit and having my roommate spot me rent.
So, this month I learned the lesson well. I am covering both our rents to pay the roomie back, and I’ve got money set aside for that. But I’m totally waiting until the second to do anything … write the check, transfer the funds from the credit balance, anything at all.
So, I pay interest on $500 less. Which is good right there, ’cause that’s like 8 bucks or something. And I don’t get smacked with over-limit fees. And everything goes generally well, or so goes the theory. Call me manipulat0r of the system… I’m totally taking advantage of what I can.
Yup, in case you were wondering, I plan to spend the next 2 days largely at work too. I figure, if there’s one thing I can stand to do, it’s study for this final. Even though I’m relatively certain that failure is probably inevitable at this point, I want to at least make sure if there IS a slight chance, that I can capitalize on it.
I’m quite enjoying this ubuntu install at work. While the software isn’t quite as bleeding-edge as gentoo lets me be, and while part of it may be that I haven’t significantly used gnome since my freebsd forays a few years ago, and while a damned lot of the improved experience is almost certainly the direct result of the fact that the hardware is night-and-day compared to my usual linux workstation (p4 2.8/800fsb/ht + 1gb ddr400, quadrofx-500 on this machine versus p4-2.0/400fsb/512mb rdram, ati rage128 video in the normal workstation), I am definitely happy with what I see.
Right now my biggest wishes at work are for another (or a higher res, or possibly both — I wonder if I can convince them that I need a 2405fpw) monitor, more new hardware (so everyone can enjoy the new hawtness that I’m enjoying, and so I can set up a test domain and try to get winbind+samba+openldap working the way I’ve been itching for it to work for a while). Meanwhile, to give myself more projects, I’ve started playing with Eclipse 3, and giving myself java projects to fill in the gaps I see in my java skillz. Just spending 3 hours with it today really demonstrated to me just how much nicer it’d be working with eclipse than not, and I plan to take that realization to heart in future CS classes. I’m already pretty comfortable with how it works, and the “collapse method” feature is freaking AWESOME.
After I got tired of playing with java, I finished up the last 30 or so pages of Fahrenheit 451. Another classic literary work down, only about infinity and a half to go. I think I’ll tackle “A Brave New World” next, since it’s been sitting on my shelf for a while. Then probably move on to Catcher in the Rye, because I haven’t read it. Still up in the list of books on my shelves that I haven’t read: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, a few more Discworld novels, Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, a few things by Gatto, a few things by Schneier … then I’ll have read every non-shakespeare book I own (stupid shakespeare, why did I ever think I’d enjoy reading you? — oh yeah, because I got you for $0.25/play in a huge going-out-of-business liquidation sale! Fine, you can stay).