Necessity, mother of education
20 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in technology Tags: Frameworks, Programming, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails
I had hoped to subcontract work on a big project this Spring, but after shopping a proposal around to several development firms, never found anyone capable who wanted to take on the work, and decided to do it myself. Since Rails seems to be what all the cool kids are using these days, it seems a good time to learn it and update my skills and knowledge along the way.
I bought the Ruby and RoR books recommended at http://programmingzen.com/rails-books/ (don’t tell my ex-boss I didn’t buy one of his! 
, and am well into the Ruby book now. Will try rewriting a few of my Perl scripts in Ruby, then when I have a feel for it, move into Rails. Hopefully, will end the year with Big Project done and a marketable skill on the resume.
How we cut our phone bill by 80%
07 Feb 2011 Leave a Comment
in finance, technology
Phone service is quickly becoming a commodity of negligible value, like email. (How much did you pay to send your last email message? You could work out your cost in network access, electricity usage, etc., but the time lost in calculating would be more than a month of messages sent.) “Making a phone call” is even becoming an anachronistic phrase as it less frequently involves something recognizable as a “phone”. If you have Internet access in your home, adding phone service runs about a nickle a day with services like MagicJack. Cellphone service isn’t nearly so cheap, but it’s getting closer all the time.
A couple of years ago, our phone service consisted of my $65/month Sprint cellphone and Glenn’s $26/month Verizon home service. We enjoy talking with all of you, but $91 is awfully high just to chat. I tallied how many minutes I’d actually been using each month, and decided to move to a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go plan, which I ended up using at a rate which came to $39/month.
A little over a year ago, I was in the market for a new pocket computer, and decided after some research that the iPod Touch was the only real contender at the time. We had our initial differences, but it eventually became an excellent tool which I use a dozen ways each day. One use revived the Skype account I’d created long before, but almost never used. I started using Skype on the iPod for all my outgoing calls at home, causing great confusion regarding callback numbers, but extending the life of my T-Mobile minutes. Over 10 months, I averaged 4 Skype hours per month at a cost of $6. The same minutes on the phone would have come to $26. I was still putting an additional $21/month on the phone, making it $27 altogether, saving $12/month over the phone by itself.
During this year, we also had our adventure in West Virginia, and were still paying our $26/month to have our calls forwarded to us (and to have service on at the house, though our housesitters never used it). When we came back and found the phones weren’t working, I questioned whether we really needed them, and thought about alternative plans. I settled on porting the house number to my cellphone so we could keep it, and canceling the service. At the same time, having bought a new iPod with camera and microphone, I decided to switch all my call making and receiving to Skype. To receive calls, I bought a SkypeIn number and added it to my Google Voice account so my iPod would ring when someone calls me. I added a Skype subscription with unlimited U.S. & Canada calling, and the two together come to $9/month.
My T-Mobile account lets me buy 1,000 minutes which last for a year for $100. I haven’t used any of them in the last couple of months, and expect them to last us the full year, bringing the cost of the cellphone service to $8.33/month.
So, we’ve ended up more or less where we started. We have home phone service in the form of Skype and the iPod (with long distance and video calling to boot!), and we have a cellphone. We paid $91. We pay $17.
It’s tempting to replace the iPod with MagicJack and bring it down to a flat $10. So far, I’m selling myself on Skype’s advantages, including the ability to use it anywhere there’s WIFI, integration of my address book, and a “phone” which rings in my pocket instead of pealing through the house and waking Glenn.
Will the same sort of plan work for you? It might if you’re like us in a few ways:
First, this assumes you’re already paying for and plan to continue paying for broadband (cable/DSL) Internet service. We’d be doing this regardless.
Second, it assumes you’ll pay the upfront costs for the hardware. That’s $35 for MagicJack, or around $200 for an iPod Touch, an Android PDA (is there one yet?), or some other pocket device which can make and receive calls through Skype or a similar VOIP service (unless you’re willing to walk around talking with your laptop in hand). I use the iPod enough to recoup the investment even without phone service, and don’t consider it part of the cost.
Most importantly, if you want to keep the cellphone side of the equation to a minimum, it means you’ll do most of your talking somewhere with WIFI. We’re home most of the time, and this is fine for us. If you work from home, you’re all set. If not, does your workplace have WIFI? I’m finding it more and more difficult to find places which don’t have an unsecured WIFI network on hand. I walked to the Post Office recently and stopped to make a note on the iPod. I noticed an open network was emanating from the house next to me, and sure enough, off went my note into the cloud. Offices, stores, and restaurants are increasingly offering WIFI connections, many of them intentionally.
At least one Big Player seems to think IP is the way of all data in the near future, either on ubiquitous WIFI or something like it. For now, the cellphone’s necessary for emergency use (power outages) and use on the road (“Hello, where is your house, exactly?”), but it may not be long before Skype is all we need. (If MIFI were cost effective, we could toss the cellphone today.)
I say grab the opportunity while there’s still a chance that you can go for a walk and that thing in your pocket will keep its mouth shut. While thinking about canceling the home phone service, I considered canceling the cellphone as well, and might have done it if Glenn were well. What would be the worst that would happen if the iPod were our only phone and the cable Internet service was down? I’d have to walk/pedal a half mile to Dunkin Donuts and make a call on their WIFI. Our great-grandparents walked that far to make a call at the general store. Their parents never heard of such gadgets. They all managed to get by, and we could, too.
Reading through the above, there are a lot of options to consider — pay-as-you-go phones, assorted VOIP services, and we haven’t even considered online voicemail-only companies. Your circumstances may not match ours, but there’s likely to be something in here which you could use. It’s worth considering in any event. Practically-free phone service may not be here yet, but if you’re looking to save a few bucks each month, you may be able to do a lot better than you think right now.
And don’t forget: Whenever you hear the phrase “a few bucks”, you should run it through the compound interest test. It may sound like a lot of bother to switch phone providers or move to Skype, but what’s the result over time?
In our case, we’re paying $74 less a month, or $888/year. Putting that away at 8% will net $5,209.54 in five years.
Worth the trouble now?
Medicare: Pick a drug plan this week
24 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in finance, partners, technology
[Executive summary: If you know anyone using a Medicare Prescription Drug Plan, point them to https://medicare.gov/find-a-plan/ this week.]
Nelson Minar recently gave an example of government agencies beginning to catch up with the private sector with regard to web services. I’ll offer another, not so fancy (though plenty of AJAX is on display), but very powerful in taking a numbingly complicated set of data and turning it into a simple presentation of options for decision making.
Our pharmacy attached a note to one of Glenn’s prescriptions recently pointing us to https://medicare.gov/find-a-plan/. People who use Medicare Prescription Drug Plans (which is most Americans over 65) are only able to change plans without paying a penalty between November 15th and December 31st of each year (though the dates are changing next year), so now’s the time to double-check the bang you’re getting for your buck. Unfortunately, a lot of people want to sell you coverage, with a great many variables.
Each plan has a different monthly premium and a different deductible. Each puts different drugs into different price tiers, doesn’t cover some drugs, and limits the quantity or places other restrictions on other drugs. Some require that you use specific pharmacies or contact them for prior authorization of certain drugs. Some will charge you less if you get a 90-day supply instead of a 30-day supply, or if you use a mail-order pharmacy. Each covers each specific drug at different levels during the initial coverage period, the coverage gap, and the catastrophic coverage period. If you take certain drugs year-round, you need to project whether (and when) their cost will push you into the coverage gap, what you’ll pay for each drug during that period, how long that will cause the gap to last, and how much you’ll pay for each for the remainder of the year if you pass into the catastrophic period.
There are 41 plans currently available to us. You can imagine what happens when you start multiplying the previous paragraph 41 times.
Medicare has done a beautiful job of crafting a site which boils the whole process down to lump sum numbers for a quick overview and clearly displays the details for thorough comparisons.
In exchange for some personal identification data, they will look up your current coverage. You can optionally enter a list of the drugs you take with dosages and frequencies (and save the list for future visits), then choose your preferred pharmacies (with Google Maps integration). A number of filters can be placed on the results (premium limits, special needs, etc.). A chart gives the highlights of the options, with the total estimated annual cost for each front and center and Medicare’s own ratings of (and, in some cases, warnings about) plans prominent. You can pass on to the full details of each plan, or choose 2-3 for side-by-side comparison.
The reports are neat and clear, with a good combination of inline explanations and popup definitions for more technical points. If you’re not grateful for what’s been done here after viewing the breakdown of all the details which go into constructing the total estimated costs, I don’t know what would impress you. You could spend days crafting spreadsheets to reach the numbers they give you in seconds, and still miss many of the finer points which could be critical to your decision.
When you find a plan you want, a single click starts the enrollment process. I haven’t made a decision yet, but from a first look, it seems we’ll be able to move to a higher-rated plan which will cost us $800 less next year.
As I said, the open enrollment period ends on 12/31, so if you or someone you know uses Medicare, take the time to take a look.
They also have a section which provides the same service for Medigap policies. This is an even more time-critical decision, as there’s only a once-in-a-lifetime open enrollment period during which insurers are legally required to sell you the Medigap plan of your choice, the six months after you’re both 65+ and covered by Medicare Part B. If you know Americans around that age, be sure to point them at Medicare’s site and their Medigap information booklet.
goodbye to an old friend
22 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in finance, simplicity, technology
when we went to west virginia last winter, i set up call forwarding with verizon so calls to the house would be redirected to my cellphone. at some point while we were away, the house phones stopped working. our housesitter reported it to me and asked whether i wanted it fixed, but i said that if it didn’t matter to him, we’d just fix it when we got back. as i suspected, though, it hasn’t mattered to us, either. (it’s actually pleasant not to hear the phone ring in the night.)
so now we’re paying $26 a month just to have calls forwarded to the phone we actually use, which doesn’t seem very smart. still, i didn’t want to completely lose the number glenn’s had for decades, which is in the address books of his friends and family. how to keep it and lose the unused service?
(i debated holding onto our home service for the 911 safety factor, but decided i felt safe enough keeping the cellphone charged. we’re in the suburbs with lots of people around, and worse come to worst and the cellphone towers toppled, i could always start banging on doors to get help.)
i looked into how much it would cost just to have call forwarding, without the home phone service. verizon gave us two options:
- just forwarding: $19/month, plus $.10 for each incoming call (whether a message is left or not), with a $30.76 one-time connection charge(?!).
- forwarding with voicemail: $26.50/month, $.10 per call, and a $40.76 one-time charge.
as far as i can tell, pots providers are trying to wring every possible cent from their remaining, aging customers before the well dries up completely.
that option patently ridiculous, i looked at some companies which do nothing but this sort of thing, including:
http://parkmyphone.com/
http://numbergarage.com/
at least the prices are a little more reasonable there, but i decided the simplest and cheapest solution is just to port the house number to my cellphone. i use google voice, and don’t actually use the cellphone number (have no idea what it is off the top of my head), so i don’t need to keep it.
i made the call to t-mobile and started the porting process. hopefully, we’ll soon have the same pair of numbers, but will only be paying for a phone which actually works, and will have an extra $26 at the end of the month.
