Saturday, August 28, 2010 - Restoring Honor Rally

Category: Photo Gallery

Restoring Honor Rally with Glenn Beck. Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC. August 28, 2010.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - Free, Simple Finance Calculations

Category: Economics

I've been using my own custom budgeting spreadsheet for a long time. Most of the budgeting software I've come across is just really overkill for my needs. I don't need to track every penny in and out, I just need to make sure in a general sense, my money coming in is more than my money going out. Most of my expenditures are extremely predictable, bills like rent, phone, cable, etc. don't change much from month to month. If I look at my expenses over a year this is even more true. Issues that aren't the same every month like car repairs and travel expenses are more consistent when looking at the picture for a whole year.

Therefore, I developed a simple budget spreadsheet, which is now available to you. It is based on a very simple concept, it follows the same trail that your money does over the course of a year. We start with income, typically in the form of wages. Then remove the pre-tax deductions that never see your bank account. From there we can reasonably calculate how much you are taxed and subtract that out along with any other post-tax deductions from your paycheck. That leaves your take home pay, where you itemize your expenses and watch your balance drop to zero.

In addition, I developed a simple retirement spreadsheet. This was because I was unable to find an online calculator that convinced me that it took the appropriate considerations for inflation, social security (or lack thereof), and pay raises. Or worse, it was unclear about inflation adjusted dollars vs. present day dollars, as you will see this can make a BIG difference when you are looking at decades. If you want to look at the details you can, I have full spreadsheets for each year, inflation adjusted or not. But if you want to keep it simple, just fill in the purple boxes and you will get a chart that shows your retirement saving/spending.

Please note, I am not a Certified Public Accountant. You should consult one for tax and retirement planning issues. These spreadsheets are only a generic guide to give you a long term outlook for retirement. There are probably some mistakes or things I haven't accounted for, or issues simply too complex to include. I appreciate any feedback on these issues and I will try to address them. I have run numbers against various other calculators and believe what my spreadsheets come up with are at least in the right ballpark.

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Saturday, June 12, 2010 - Health Reform Website Collects Personal Info for No Reason

Category: Public Policy, Law, Privacy

The President's website to promote health care reform, www.healthreform.gov, collects Personally Identifiable Information (PII) without explaining why or what it will be used for, in violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA).

In two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the government states that it has no records of anyone even discussing Information Collection Requests for any part of www.healthreform.gov as required by the Paperwork Reduction Act. Both the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (PDF), who manages the website, as well as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (PDF), who administers the PRA, have no records for anything involving www.healthreform.gov.

Under the PRA, collection of "general comments" is allowed without approval, as well as information "necessary for self-identification" such as name and email or mailing address. Anything other than that requires an Information Collection Request which is published in the Federal Register, then OMB will issue a control number for the form, which indicates it was properly generated and approved. The forms at www.healthreform.gov have no OMB control numbers.

Normally FOIA requests that result in no records provide a very simple response that says just that. But the response from HHS goes a step further. HHS claims, "as only general comments were to be received, no Paperwork Reduction Act documentation was created because clearance was not required." This is partially true, but it does not address the "support" form at all which ONLY collects PII such as name, address, email, and even phone number. Thats all, no field for "general comments" or anything else, unless your comment is "I support health reform this year."

Since this request was filed, the "support" form was removed from the website, the original page can still be found as part of my FOIA package (PDF). As to why this page was removed, I'll leave that to speculation.

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Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - Appupdater 1.4.1 Released

This is a bugfix release for version 1.4.

Version 1.4.1
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- Bugfix for Windows service from the command line
- Added command line option to output debug information
- Added system Configuration Information dialog to GUI tools menu
- Fixed bug for when SOCKS proxy is defined
- Vulnerability fix from Metalink Checker library
- Service now skips packages when no silent install commands are defined

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Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - Appupdater 1.4

This is largely a bugfix and stability improvement release.

Changelog:

- Now runs as administrator by default from Start Menu, current user option available
- New option to ignore certain directories when scanning for installed versions
- Windows service fixes
- Improved crash reporting
- Added GUI notification for when newest version is not available as a silent install
- Experimental PortableApps.com format release
- Installer now properly sets permissions on shared download directory
- Installer now acts properly and prompts for repositories when offline
- Installer now has a portable install option
- UPX compression for smaller installed size
- Improved output for Window service
- Removed redundant code
- Upgraded Metalink Checker download library (added support for new Metalink format defined in RFC 5854)
- Numerous other minor fixes

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