Beach Baby

image Connor loves the Carolina coast. Last weekend he got a tan; mommy and daddy got burned. He makes heading on to the water a whole new experience. We can forget about laying around anymore. Someone’s got to constantly keep him out of the ocean or go in with him. We take shifts because he has no fear and will go in by himself. Now that he’s putting words together he said “bye-bye beach” the whole way home Sunday.

image When I got home last night he ran to my truck screaming “beach! beach!”. I don’t think he cares that it takes 2 1/2 hours to get there.

I’m not used to wearing sunscreen but I’m not going to argue with Amy about putting an SPF 45 all over the little man. It works. He has a tan and I’m peeling a little.

Sirius Radio

image I’m now an official satellite radio subscriber. This is one of those things I wasn’t sure I wanted to buy and now I don’t know how I lived without it. I went with Sirius over XM radio because one is for adults and the other is for kids with Honda Civics and go-cart mufflers. XM radio sports selection consists of Major League Baseball. The only thing more boring than watching baseball on TV would be listening to it on the radio.

Sirius on the other hand has NHL, NFL, NBA and many ESPN channels. During my research I found that the music and news selections are better too. I guess “XM” just sounds cooler than “Sirius” so parents this is what your teenager will want (and why XM has more subscribers). Despite this Sirius is in better financial shape than XM. This could be because of a more mature user base that can actually pay the bill. Personally I like the fact that there is better news and jazz on Sirius. I guess that makes me an ol’ geezer but that’s what life deals.

WRAL.com – News – House Committee Approves Two-Year Death Penalty Moratorium

WRAL.com – News – House Committee Approves Two-Year Death Penalty Moratorium

So at least the NC House of Reps has a little common sense. WRAL has a poll going that is evenly split between people that think the moratorium is a good idea and those who think it’s a step towards outlawing the death penalty.

So here’s my poll: If you do not support a moratorium of the death penalty while it’s studied for problems explain your position by selecting one of the following (and you MUST chose one or you do not have a justifiable claim to your position):

A) I do not care if innocent people die as long as executions continue.

B) Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary I think the death penalty is a deterrent to would be murderers.

C) I believe our judicial system is efficient, just and without bias.

D) I do not think that prosecutors are politically motivated in their pursuit of criminal convictions.

E) I can cite a criminal case in NC where a prosecutor has obtained evidence that would exonerate a defendant and voluntarily presented it in court for an immediate dismissal.

F) I am a redneck, neo-Christian-conservative who believes an eye-for-an-eye is ordained by God. Innocent people are just casualties of our “War on (insert latest sin here)”.

WRAL.com – News – House Committee To Consider Two-Year Moratorium On Death Penalty

WRAL.com – News – House Committee To Consider Two-Year Moratorium On Death Penalty

I love it when hard-core Christian conservatives ban together in support of killing innocent people. Who cares if a couple of people who didn’t commit any crime get the hot needle? A few innocent lives is a small price to pay to make sure the real bad guys burn right? Ah,where would we be without good ‘ol NC redneck, lynch mob ideology?

This story quotes one really intelligent death penalty supporter, Representative Nelson Dollar, as saying that releasing two innocent men who spent over five years on death row shows the system works. Yep folks, this genius was elected. What does he care – no reparations are required. And never mind the controversy that surrounded the investigation of the crooked lawyers who withheld evidence that could have exonerated one of the men during their original trial.

Here’s a solution, I’ve posed it before but it doesn’t seem to popular among criminal prosecutors: If any defendant is aggressively prosecuted, with blatant disregard for researching facts that could lead to an acquittal, and that defendant is proven to have been wrongfully convicted, then the prosecutor must serve a minimum of half the sentence imposed on the innocent defendant.

Somehow I think the prosecutors are going to want to hold on to their current infallibility.

8-way system shootout? anyone…..anyone…..

Right now I’m doing research in uncharted territory at work. We have an SQL application performance problem we’ve decided to attack with hardware following months of performance analysis. I have reached a point where benchmarks are unavailable. This is because the server options we have on the table vary in platform architecture, therfore few performance comparisons. In the ring are:

The IBM xSeries 445 8-processor, Intel, single core server with dual fiber channel host bus adapters for redundant connections to SAN controllers and…
Servers from Sun and HP (v40z and HP585 respectively) that are 4-processor dual core solutions with dual FC HBA’s

So the question is: Can the new AMD Opteron dual core systems out perform the 8-processor dual bus system from IBM?

I’ve heard “yes” and “no” but no one has put these 8-way solutions up against each other in any performance comparisons that I can find. I’d really like to see it done by TPC.org since my solution needs to be transaction based. Therefore I’m tempted to go with the dual core solution because that is the trend of the industry with Intel currently having 15 dual core projects in the works. I will be spending the rest of this week and the first part of next week on the phone with IBM, HP and Sun engineers looking into specifics surrounding the architectures.

At present I have deduced that the AMD dual core Opterons do out perform the Intel Smithfield based dual core solution. This is because the Intel platform cannot distinguish ownership of cache data between the two cores. The AMD Opteron can actually pass memory data between the cores. But because the AMD chipset can only recognize DDR memory (not DDR2) AMD is having to go back to the drawing board for the base architecture in order to stay ahead of Intel in the future. For now, AMD has once again smoked Intel just like they did with the Athlon 64 vs. the Itanium.

During my research I contacted a relatively unknown server manufacturer who will be bringing an 8-processor AMD 875 solution to market within the next few weeks. Verari uses iWill motherboards and is trying to stablize the cooling issues now before the product launch. They don’t have the brand name but they may soon offer the best of both worlds with 16 total cores in 8 sockets.

Changed Title

imageMy little babies gone and my big guy is 30+ pounds and 34″ tall at 19 months old. According to Dr. Chip who he saw last week that’s in the 98th(W) and 100th(H) percentile for his age. And he’s in a size 8 childrens shoe. The Doc’s stick by their prediction of 6’2″ to 6’4″ before he’s done growing.

image According to my sister, sorry – I mean Aunt Mary Kay, he’s at his cutest age. He’s darn cute but he’s getting a head start on terrible 2. We changed his name to No-No but he does it anyway. Throw some food, kill the plant, bang toys against the TV, run across the living room screaming and fall down. Then do it again… five more times. Mommy is ready to go back to work part time. She’s begging me to get her resume done tomorrow.

One thing we do have going for us: at 8:30 or 9:00 when he’s ready for bed he’ll say “nigh-nigh” and walks straight to his crib and wait for mommy. If he’s too tired for Amy to read him a book he’ll shut the book, shake his head “no” and say “nigh-nigh”. Nothing comes between sleep and food. That’s my boy.

PS – notice I also listed this under the catagory of “Money”. That’s for the grocery bill.

MyFICO rant about FICO scores and Medical Collections

Like many consumers these days I’ve been doing some personal research on the calculation of FICO, Fair Isaac Corporation, credit score calculation. If you don’t know what a FICO score is, or more specifically what yours is, the best advice I can give you is find out now at www.myfico.com. This number directly affects your life in many ways.

Through on-line analysis and many phone calls to the three major credit reporting agencies Experian, Transunion, and Equifax I’ve come to determine that FICO scoring is a horribly unfair analysis for most consumers producing varying results among these three primary credit reporting entities, often as much as 100 points difference on a scale ranging from 350 to 850. The agencies using FICO scores do not even share a common definition of a “perfect score”.

My personal FICO scores (they should always be addressed in plural) are not bad now and they’re rising. But like anyone who embarks upon the journey of deciphering FICO, I could not determine how this numerical calculation could possibly be indicative of a persons true credit worthiness and therefore how it can be legal under the terms of the 1996 Fair Credit Reporting Act, or FCRA. Almost anyone who investigates the way a score is calculated is certain to be left with more questions than answers.

My personal investigation began after an auto dealership’s financial manager informed me that medical collections were adversely affecting my score by. These collections derived from unpaid bills from an emergency room visit in 2001 during a time when I did not have medical insurance. Without sending me a single bill the hospital immediately turned over three bills for collection. I quickly learned this is common practice by hospitals, clinics and private medical professionals. Obviously it’s their assumption that if someone can’t afford medical insurance they won’t be able to afford to pay the bill. So why bother mailing one?

I wondered how much these collections affected my score? Well, that completely depends on which credit reporting agency you inquire with. My first inclination was to obtain a “3-in-1” credit report from TrueCredit Corp, a division of Transunion Corp. (which is ironically a place my wife used to work in Mississippi doing of all things; updating credit reports). This report is suppose to contain a credit score from all three major reporting agencies, including Transunion. Turns out the only FICO score that held any merit on this 3-in-1 report was the one for Transunion. Here’s why:

On the same day I obtained the TrueCredit 3-in-1 report for $30 I also obtained my scores directly from Equifax and Experian at a cost of $10 each. Yes, I spent $50 in an attempt to make an accurate determination of my FICO scores. The Equifax and Experian scores I acquired directly varied by as much as 70 points from the scores contained in the 3-in-1 report. – Time to make a phone call to Transunion.

Once I got connected to a Transunion rep, obviously located in a call center in India, I explained my acquisition of the scores and asked for an explanation of the variance in the TrueCredit scores and the directly acquired scores from the other two reporting agencies. The answer almost made me fall out of my chair. In not-so-confident broken English I was told that the TrueCredit website has a disclaimer (i.e. small print) that the scores they provide are only “representations” of consumer credit scores based on information contained in the credit reports from each agency and are therefore not guaranteed to be accurate. To punch me in the gut she added “and they are not necessarily representative of what lenders see when they pull your credit score”.

What in the hell is she talking about?

It’s true. The FICO scores you obtain on-line may not be the same as the score a lender sees when obtaining your score. It’s only a calculated “representation” of what they may see. So here comes my list of questions I’ve derived regarding lenders, collection agencies, insurance companies and last but not least credit reporting agencies (CRA’s):

1. Shouldn’t there be a law stating that consumers have access to the EXACT credit score that will be seen by lenders relative to the three major reporting agencies? This seems like common sense consumer law to me.

2. Shouldn’t a credit score be derived from only those items in a consumers credit report for which the consumer has directly and intentionally obligated his/herself? Signing that you agree to pay all fees associated with medical care when your shoulder is dislocated or your leg is broken should be looked at as signing under duress and therefore deemed ineligible for reporting.

3. Furthermore wouldn’t it make sense that any debt a consumer is not able to negotiate of his/her free will be deemed ineligible for reporting? When was the last time you went to a hospital and the fees were explained to you up front and the option to defer treatment was provided?

4. To continue in the area of medical collections shouldn’t be unlawful for a medical practice to turn over a bill for collection without providing proof that the recipient of the treatment was directly billed at least 90 days in advance of the account being turned over for collection?

5. Now to stray from medical collections: why in the world is a FICO score used to determine someone’s auto insurance rate? This practice needs to be outlawed immediately. Note: It has in Washington state and possibly several others by now.

6. Why isn’t the Fair Credit Reporting Act enforced in cases of reporting inaccuracies by the three major credit reporting agencies? These entities have it made. They keep data and they have no responsibility for insuring it’s accuracy. That burden falls upon the consumer to make sure information is reported by his/her creditors accurately. To make the deal even sweeter the consumer has to pay the CRA’s for a copies of their reports to begin checking for inaccuracies (okay so now you get one free copy per agency – whoopee) and then we have to pay again for another report to find out if the disputed inaccuracies have been rectified. Meanwhile the CRA does absolutely nothing but take the consumers money and perform data entry.

If the burden of making sure all credit reports are accurate fell on the credit reporting agencies they would lose almost every dime they ever made while attempting to correct all of the inaccuracies. Given that the information they provide affects almost every consumer in America, I for one have little sympathy – I say make ‘em work.

My First Cousin Once Removed

imageI had to Google this one. My first cousin Richie just had the second boy in the latest Singleton generation. That makes Ian Singleton my first cousin once removed. Now the Singleton clan will not just live on but may flourish. I hear Ian looks just like his grandfather on his mothers side. Rich and his wife Karen are both Doctors. Right now he’s doing his surgical intern in PA. Even with Amy staying at home Connor keeps us busy. I can’t imagine how they’re going to find the time but I’m sure they will. Unlike us they’re pretty organized and resourceful. We rely on controlled chaos.

Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon?

Ron Howard and his casting crew got it wrong leaving it open for debate as to who should’ve been cast in this role. Tom Hanks might be a box office draw but the only thing he can possible do in this role is draw this movie down. Robert Langdon, suave, sophisticated professor of symbology he ain’t. I didn’t buy him as a hard nose Captain in Private Ryan either. To me Tom Hanks has always peformed best in sweet, goofy roles like his characters in Big and You’ve Got Mail.

It’s still pre-production Ron – save the film while you can. Obviously I don’t want to see Tom Hanks in The Davinci Code. I want to believe I am watching Langdon on-screen. We need someone more unkown that we can tie to our image of the character. Otherwise you might sell a couple more tickets, but in the end the whole film will just be a sell out.

A few suggestions of more believable choices for this role would have been:

Aidan Quinn

Matthew McConaughey

Mike suggested Jeff Goldblum