This is probably not interesting to anyone other than me and Andy Kragick.

There are two MIL-STD-1553 specifications. MIL-STD-1553A was published in 1975 and MIL-STD-1553B was published in 1978. I have been trying to figure out an exhaustive list of the differences and I think I finally have it.

There is a very useful document at http://www.utmc.com/ProductFiles/AppNotes/MILhbk1553a.pdf which is the military's handbook for 1553.

There are some electrical tolerance differences, but from the software perspective the differences are:

In 1553A mode codes must use subaddress 0, but in 1553B mode codes can use either subaddress 0 or 31.

1553B uses RT address 31 as the broadcast address, 1553A does not permit broadcast, so address 31 is a normal RT.

In 1553A only mode code 0 was defined, the others were implementation defined. But in 1553B, all mode codes 0-31 were specifically defined, or prohibited as reserved. Mode codes 0-15 do not have an associated data word, but codes 16-31 do have a single associated data word. The T/R bit determines whether the BC or the RT sends the single data word.

In 1553A only the message error and terminal flag bits are defined in the status word, all other status bits are implementation defined. In 1553B all 11 status bits are either defined or reserved.

I have linked to an article from the CATO institute which questions the common statistic that 10% of Americans are going hungry.

The author suggests that perhaps 1% would be more fair. Even that seems high to me, these are just survey results after all. There might be a margin of error greater than 1%. And I just read over the survey. There weren't any questions that asked about household income, and there weren't any options for anything like: "I qualify for food stamps but just haven't bothered to sign up" or even "My children don't get enough to eat because I spent all my money on cigarettes"

It really burns me that some liars even claim that 20% of all children are going to bed hungry every night. I wish I could find a recording of their shameful radio commercial that pushed that particular lie.

I recently visited my own website, and saw this Google Ad:

Mortgage pay off

Invest or Pay Off Your Mortgage? Do Both on your current budget!

So I clicked through and found myself looking at the website for the “Sydney Financial Group”. I watched their little video, and decided to test their claims.

Here is their plan:
Instead of writing checks as normal, they give you a home equity line of credit, from which you pay your bills. The idea is that the money sitting around in your checking account can be used to bring down the daily interest on your mortgage.

Here are their claims:
A person has a $4000 monthly income with a mortgage payment of $1350 and monthly expenses of $1700. The other assumption is that the person will put 100% of their expenses on their credit card, and not pay until the last day of the grace period. After 65 days, that person will have $8000 in equity, will be “gaining equity fast”, paying less interest. Then they mention that normally it would take 3.5 years to get that much equity and you would have paid $48,000 in interest.

Here is a summary of the figures with their plan:

Hey what do you know, there is almost $8000 in equity! Wow, of course there is almost $2000 of credit card debt that wasn’t there before. And what would happen if we had just paid the mortgage the normal way?

Ooo, only $210 in equity. How bad. But wait what is all that cash in the checking account?

That is right, go back and look at the stats. $4000 income – $1350 house payment – $1700 credit card bill = $950 left over. Well let’s just go back and put an extra $950 on the mortgage every month.

This is a little weird, since the 65th day is a payday (in their example), and the mortgage won’t be paid until day 75. So let’s say that instead of waiting until the due date, let’s pay the mortgage on payday, and make some money by paying sooner.

Ok, so that is as good as we could do without their program. So how much money did their plan save us?

Let’s see: $192,142.41 (house debt) + $1983.33 (CC debt) = 194,125,74 vs. $195,568.63 (house debt) – $3400 (checking) + $1983.33 = $194,151,96. Wow they saved us $26.22 over a period of 2 months.

The question is then, is saving $13 per month worth what they charge? I have no idea how much their program costs, but I bet it is more than $13/month.

For me, I am not playing their game. I like this game better.

I cannot answer this for myself, but here are the experts on this subject:

Dave Ramsey answered this question on his show recently, listen here.
Summary: Risk and taxes will eat up any gains you may get through this mortgage arbitrage.

CNN Money column: Betting your home against Wall Street
Summary: Might work, given a LONG time and near-perfect market conditions. Too risky for the CNN expert.

Now, let's look at what I think people REALLY mean when they say not to pay off your house early:

Here is a quote from an article by Kimberly Lankford

Paying off your house early can help your financial situation, especially if you're nearing retirement age. But make sure the rest of your finances are in order before you devote any extra money to increase your mortgage payments, especially if you have a low interest rate. First pay off high-interest credit-card debts, save three to six months of living expenses in a liquid emergency fund, and max out your 401(k), especially if you have an employer match.

If you still have credit card debt, PAY IT OFF!
If you have no emergency fund, START SAVING!
If you are not saving for retirement at something like 15%, DO IT!
If you have children and are not saving for their college, SOCK MONEY AWAY!
Then go pay early on your house. Since the average person on the street has no savings at all, telling them not to pay extra on their house is probably good advice, as long as you don't forget to tell them to get out of debt and save for emergencies.

Cato announced the Anti-Universal Coverage Club to promote the idea that perhaps not everyone thinks that universal heath insurance coverage (notice that I did not say health care) is such a wonderful idea.

Personally I think that most of our health care problems are caused by a combination of heath insurance and government regulation. If everyone was still paying their doctor in chickens and cash, prices would be lower.

I have been looking for a program to sort the mp3 files on my Apacer mp3 player, and I found someone else who is too.

Back in February, I promised a bi-weekly version of my Excel budget form. Now it is available in two juicy flavors:

• Monthly
• Bi-Weekly

It is very much like the paper budget forms provided by Dave Ramsey. Column B is the category, and columns C-E are how much you have budgeted for that pay period. Place a 1 in the first cell of each column to activate that pay period, or put in a 0 if the pay period is still in the future. That will affect the amounts in the green column. Column F in the auto-calculated total budgeted for the month. Column H is how much you have spent so far this month, so at the beginning of the month these will be all zero. Now column H is all formulas, since I didn't want to do math every time I wrote a check. So if you look at the second sheet "Actuals" you see a similar chart showing the same first columns. Starting in column D, you can just enter one check per cell. So for example if you have spent $5, $20, and $15 on food, go to the food line and put 5 in column D, 20 in E and 15 in F etc. The total will automatically show up on the "Budget" sheet in column H.

Column I is simply a formula letting you know how much is left in that "envelope" for that category: i.e. Budgeted(F) - Actual(H).

The balances at the bottom are just for checking your math: Balance F should always be zero if your budget is balanced. Balance H should be exactly the same as the balance in your checkbook. Balance I should be the same as Balance H but reversed. If it is not, then there is a broken formula in the spreadsheet somewhere.

The tables on the right side:
The allocated savings register for you to record all of your savings goals, there is a formula for percent there but that is all.

The next table is the debt snowball table. The first column is the name of the debt, then the original amount, which is not really needed except that when you call in to scream "I'm debt free", Dave will ask you how much debt you paid off, and if you didn't write it down you won't know. The next column is how much the current principle balance on that debt is, and then you have a nice little percent.

The Upcoming table is a list of infrequent bills that I always forget about. I don't think that Dave has a form for this, but I needed it so that I remember to save up for big annual bills like car registration or quarterly insurance payments.

The next section in the black box, is what I call the motivating statement. It is what encourages me to keep going, when I can look at the budget taped to the side of the fridge and see in huge letters: "We saved $3,963 and paid off $16,883 in debt" it keeps me focused on the goal.

Is a debt paid when you send the payment, or when the finance company makes the entry and sends a statement? Oh who cares......

WE ARE DEBT FREE!!^*

Yes, on December 31, 2005 we made our first budget for the month of January 2006, and since that time we have:

• Sold a house, we moved in April 2005, and had two houses for about 10 months. Uck
• Completed Financial Peace University
• Paid off $38,637.29 in consumer debt consisting of 2 credit cards and 2 cars.
• Saved $7700 for emergencies, irregular bills, and HSA.
• Got a new job, having more fun, and making more money.
• Sold some stock of my previous employer.

For a grand total of:

$148,620.18 former debt in just 17 months!

Ok, perhaps including the bridge loan on the old house is overkill, but it's still good news.

* = Except for the house.

Here is a wonderful Kiplinger article about index fund investing.  It is nice to find something that isn't the usual "Todays 10 hot stocks" for a change in the financial press.

This is exactly what I am going to do when I open my Vanguard account here in a few weeks.

I have seen many financial blogs charting their net worth, and it looked fun so here goes:

Our total money makeover began 1/1/06. At the beginning of 2006 we had balances on 2 credit cards, 2 car loans, 2 houses, and 2 mortgages. During 2006 we sold the old house, which just paid off the bridge loan, we paid off and closed both credit cards, and made progress on the first of the car loans. Investments were good, which brought us to a total improvement of 4%, not a lot for a whole year, but good.

In January we saw a huge gain, thanks to a tax return, and I boosted the emergency fund to $2000 since I was planning to change jobs.

February moved cash to loans, as I PAID OFF THE FIRST CAR LOAN! And I started a new job, and am not yet eligible for the IRA plan. Since I don’t have to pay for my own health insurance anymore, and am not contributing to retirement, we have a lot more money to pay off debt these days.

In March I brought the emergency fund back down once we figured how to budget biweekly, and put every spare dime into the debt snowball.

April was a very good month. The loan on the van is under $10,000, and every April 28th, I increase the value of my house by 4.5% to celebrate the date we moved in.

So, in just 16 short months, we have gotten nearly out of debt, and are 38% richer! I figure by October we will have the van paid off, and then we will be debt free other than the house.

The Get Rich Slowly blog wrote a summary of square-foot gardening information.  We may do something like this at our house, so I thought I'd save this link.

Please read this article by CATO policy analyst Neal McCluskey, about why so many of the political conflicts would just disappear if we weren't locked in to a monopoly government school system.

Dave Ramsey recommends that you get "guaranteed replacement cost" coverage on your home in case construction costs jump up right at the time that your house burns down, and I found this text at the MOAA website:

Most insurance experts recommend “actual replacement cost,” “guaranteed replacement cost,” or “full replacement cost” language within the policy. This can be particularly important for owners of older or historic homes, for which the true replacement cost could be considerably higher than the current market value of the home. If the policy is for “actual cash value,” then the cost to fully replace the home might not be covered. Certain carriers require a separate full replacement cost rider for historic homes. Failure to cover your home at full replacement value can be a nasty shock in the case of a major loss.

However, I can't find ANY company willing to sell me such a policy!! Do they even exist any more?

UPDATE: I found one! Yup, it is my current insurance company AAA. It's not even an option there, they just do it that way. Unlike every other company, that acted like I was a crazy person for asking such a silly question, AAA just said "Of course, after all there might be a hurricane and construction costs might jump up and you wouldn't have enough insurance."

UPDATE: I was wrong. My AAA policy is just for 25% over the coverage amount, just like everyone else. Stinker. The odd part is that even though they only insure to the coverage amount, they won't let me choose the coverage amount.

UPDATE: In the end, I went with AllState. This will save me about $250/year on home owners insurance, and $100/year on car insurance, and $80 in auto club membership. They will cover the cost of rebuilding the house in the event of a total loss, up to 120% of the stated value. So I'll just have to watch that value very closely from year to year and make sure that it is high enough. At least they will let me change the value up or down if I think that their calculated amount is off.

Several of the insurance quotes I got were just for the tax assessment, which is $20k less than I paid for the house, and definitely not what I would want the insurance to be for. Shameful really, but it made for some really cheap quotes!

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to compare mutual funds? It appears that the whole system is set up to prevent you from finding the information you need.

Just little things, like showing the expenses separate from the returns. And if you want to see the dividends, too bad.

Look at this graph for an example. It shows a fund that I have my kid's college fund invested in. Notice that huge drop on Dec 20, 2006. The fund fell from 49.68 to 43.84, sound scary right. Well it would be except that the fund paid a $6.071 dividend that same day. According to Quicken, in the 3 years that I have had money invested in that fund I have seen it fall 14.16% for a total return on investment of +13.53% WHAT???

Yes, that is correct. The fund has dropped in value 14% while paying dividends of 27.5% for a net gain of 13.5%. (That is total gain not 13% per year, don't run out and buy this fund quite yet.)

How would I have ever known this if I was just comparing charts or statistics?

There has got to be a better way.

Perhaps it is a sign that I need to find a hobby, or perhaps it is just jitters from starting a new job in a new programming language; but I woke up in the middle of the night dreaming about safe ways to write copy constructors when some of the member variables are using std::auto_ptr<>.

Slate has a great piece on wind chills, and I agree.  Since wind chill is a measure of how quickly heat will leave bare skin, it is almost completely meaningless.  If you are clothed or indoors the wind chill factor doesn't affect you at all, but the temperature matters very much.

Why don't they report wind chills in the summer, when we are outside with exposed skin?  Would that be nice, "Tomorrow will be in the high 90's but with the wind chill factor it will feel like 85."

Well, it's been a long run, but I am finally moving on from HKS. For the last 13 years I have been working as an Objective-C programmer.  However on Monday I will become a C++/Qt programmer for AIM-USA.

I know this is silly, but the thing that I actually am most concerned about is learning to budget biweekly instead of monthly.  You can expect a new biweekly version of my blank budget template in the next month or so.

My new company has a great insurance plan which means I can't contribute to my HSA account any more, but it should save me about $5000 a year in health insurance costs.  While I believe in high deductible insurance as a good thing for the country, I am going to do whatever will save me the most money.

I installed the performancing addon for firefox, and it is cool.  It appears to be working with b2evolution 1.8 except that I can't fill in a link for the post.

Oh well, I don't do that very often.

And it reports an error for every post, but it does post the article fine.

I was looking for how to change a SQL Server 2005 Express database from windows mode authentication to mixed mode, and found this article.

The summary is that you have to change the registry key \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQLServer\LoginMode to 0x2

The totally unscientific Tiobe index of programming languages ranks Objective-C programming as #50, and I don't think that is fair.

So join me and googlewhack the Tiobe index.

Put the text "Objective-C programming" on every website you can find.