The Philosopher's Stone

Don't Put 1000 Pounds of Concrete In Your Car

Yeah, what the title says. So I loaded up 12 80lb bags of Quikrete into the back of my car back in May so that I could pour some footings for my new deck. Now I have a totally screwed rear suspension. :(

Never fear - when something breaks, it's a good excuse to upgrade! OK, so I'd still rather not spend the money right now. I have, however, turned this into a pretty good opportunity. I shopped around a little on some of the Subaru forums, and found some used STi struts, springs, and top hats (everything I should need to repair my car) for $420 total, including shipping. Not bad, considering that Firestone wanted over $700 just to change the springs. And for this price, plus a lot of work (that's the fun part, right?) not only do I get my car fixed, but I basically get an STi suspension out of it, which is a pretty decent upgrade.

I could have gone with a better upgrade if I had been willing to spend more money - and I probably would have been willing to spend a little more. However, my big limiter wasn't money. The big limiter was that all spring/strut "upgrades" pretty much end up doing the following two things:

* Lowering the ride height of the car
* Stiffening up the ride

This is what helps give you better traction in turns. However, I and my soon-to-be-wife have to ride in this car and enjoy it, and it can already be a pretty bumpy ride. That, however, mostly because it's in dire need of some new tires right now, which are going to come very shortly after the suspension gets fixed. It's not worth buying new tires right now just to have them wear weird because of a messed up suspension.

Anyway, the point is that I don't want to turn this into an overly harsh ride. The stock STi suspension seems like a pretty good balance point between upgrading and keeping it comfortable. I've ridden STis before, in some pretty harsh (autocrossing) conditions, and it wasn't substantially worse than my WRX. With new tires, it should be a pretty good improvement over what it was just before the suspension got damaged, in terms of both comfort and handling.

If I can find a couple hundred dollars this fall or spring for some new sway bars, I should have a pretty darn good suspension setup here. :)

Divinity Destroyed has a new web page

After promising it for about the last seven months, Divinity Destroyed has finally launched their new web site. It's kinda spiffy. Let's hope they keep this one up to date.

Supreme Court Ends Ban on Price Floors

It seems to me that this ruling is very, very bad. Anybody care to try and convince me otherwise?

The Old House is Gone

Monday afternoon I closed on my old house. Now almost all of my debt is paid off! The only stuff I didn't pay off is stuff that has zero percent interest - it didn't make any sense to pay that off while I can earn interest on the cash in a bank account. This is the first time in about five years (since I bought my car) I haven't been paying interest on anything. It's kind of nice. :) Unfortunately, it will only last until we close on the new house. :( Still, this is the best financial position I've been in for a long time.

Disney to Stop Making "Direct to Video" Sequels

Good move if you ask me.

Quest for a New Dojo: Part 2

Last night Morgon and I were driving around Athens trying to find an Office Depot or Office Max. Yeah, we could have just checked Google Maps to find out that we'd actually driven right past one earlier that night, but we were out and about and didn't have internet handy. One of the shopping centers we drove into, however, happened to be the home of The American Black Belt Academy, and we happened to be pulling in right as the owner was leaving. We stopped for a few minutes and got a flyer and chatted with him.

He seemed like a genuinely nice guy. One thing I really liked, as well, was that he showed due respect for my own not-insignificant belt rank. That was refreshing, as many martial artists have little to no respect for belt ranks outside their own organization and/or style.

However, there are several reasons I don't think this is the school for me. First and foremost, we couldn't get an actual price out of him. Granted we didn't press very hard, but all he mentioned when I asked for prices was the "$29.99 introductory plan". That's also all that's listed on his flyer, and he himself suggested that the intro lessons included in that plan would be a waste for me (and for Morgon, too, although he didn't say that because we didn't bring up her belt rank). Furthermore, I got a hazy answer when I asked him about contracts. I don't like contracts, and don't want to sign one. I will if the school is good, but even then I'll do it grudgingly.

Third and last is one that might sound a little arrogant or picky. I truly don't mean this as a negative against his school in anyway except in my own personal circumstance. I have a second degree black belt, and before my injury was very close to a third degree black belt. My most recent instruction was under 6th-10th degree black belts, who had well earned their ranks. Given all that, but particularly my own rank and skill (or at least, skill I'll have once I get back on my game), I don't feel particularly enthused about paying lots of money for instruction from a fourth degree black belt. That's barely higher than my own current rank, and even though the style is different I'm not convinced I'll get enough more from it to make it worth lots of money.

I want to emphasize, for anybody who stumbles across this site looking for a review of his school, that this last point should in no way be meant as an overall negative for his school. My previous instructor was a fourth degree when I started with him (although he did make fifth a mere one year later), and he was one of the best teachers of any kind that I've ever had. Possibly the best. For a brand new student, a fourth degree (or even second or third) can provide plenty of damn good instruction. But that's not the level that I'm at, and it's not the level that I need.

There's a silver lining in tonight's episode, however, that may prove to be the answer to it all. We came home and looked up his web page. After finding these things that we didn't like, we started looking around some more, and stumbled across the web site for Classic Goju Karate. After looking around their web site, we're very excited about this school, and we plan to check it out on Tuesday.

Some particular key selling quotes from their site:

While some martial art styles may be better suited for certain temperaments and body types, there is no one style that is intrinsically better than another.  Each has its strengths and weaknesses.  The greatest weakness of any system of fighting, however, is to fail to take other systems into account.

I liked the respect here - I can't count how many schools Morgon and I found that purport to be the "only real style" or "the best style in town". Bleh - what a turn off. This kind of intellectual honesty was refreshing.

Could you beat Bruce Lee?  (No Really! Asked exclusively by kids.)

     No, he's dead.  (That one's easy.  I'm 20 yrs. older than he was when he died.)

I just liked the sense of humor here. And that he wasn't arrogant enough to say, "yes, of course!" as so many other martial artists would.

 

Also, a big plus, they don't do contracts. Their time frame to black belt seems about right (although they don't do colored under-belts, which I kind of like but might bother many people). I've got a good feeling about this place, and I can't wait to check it out.

Quest for a New Dojo: Part 1

Now that we're settling in a little bit in our temporary home, we're running into a few related problems. 1) We don't know anybody and we're kind of bored. 2) We're not getting any exercise. My preferred solution: find a new dojo and get enrolled in some martial arts classes again.

This is not as easy as it may sound. Simply put, many martial arts schools suck. Maybe even most of them. It's particularly bad for us, because we've had experience at one of the best. What can I say? We're a little spoiled now.

Our current fallback plan is Itto Martial Arts, run by Sensei Tommy Lunsford. As it happens, I've met Sensei Lunsford and learned under him at several seminars in the past, and I know for a fact that he's a good instructor. However, his school has two strikes against it, both of which are specific to our current circumstances and have nothing whatsoever to do with him. First, his school is about 30 minutes away from where our new house will be. Tolerable, but that's further than we want to drive twice a week. Second, the styles his dojo offers don't match up with our first choices.

Sensei Lunsford himself primarily teaches Aikido, from what I remember in the seminars. His school also offers Judo and Jujitsu. Frankly, Morgon and I aren't all that interested in the bodily punishment that can be offered up by these arts. He also offers Shin Nagare Karate. I have a second degree black belt in Shin Nagare Karate. Right now, I'm very out of shape. It wouldn't hurt me at all to get back to something like that. But my first choice would be to find something different that I haven't already spent over a third of my life studying.

My first choice would be some form of kung fu. Failing that, I'd prefer to find somewhere convenient.

Last night we tried for convenient and met our first strike. We stopped by a place in a little shopping center in Winder that happens to be about 5-10 minutes from our new house. Didn't look like much, but at that level of convenience it was definitely worth checking out.

Total bust. First, nobody was there at prime workout hours. Granted it was a Wednesday night (probably church night), but this is a bad sign when the wall advertises classes Monday-Friday evenings. Second, the sign visible from the street said "Karate", while the sign on the wall informed us that they actually taught Tae Kwon Do and Hop Ki Do. This might sound nit picky, but it very much turns me off from this school. It means the owner either doesn't know the difference between the two or that he's preying on the ignorance of the general public for advertising purposes.

If he doesn't know the difference than frankly his school isn't worth squat. This is pretty basic stuff. And if he's preying off the ignorance of the general public in this way, then how else is he doing it? Finally, his school is named You's Martial Arts, which looks (by the spelling) suspiciously like somebody not Korean trying to appear Korean. This becomes particularly suspicious if you know that due to hundreds of years of back and forth rapage and pillaging, no self respecting Korean (Tae Kwon Do and Hop Ki Do are both Korean arts) would ever dream of putting Japanese words like Karate on his building. And if you click through to the web page you'll see what a joke it is.

So strike one off the list. Our next target is the The Shao Lin Center over in Norcross. It looks and sounds like it could be exactly what I'm looking for and one of the coolest places ever - or it could be a bunch of money-grubbers. We shall see.

Ratatouille

So one thing that's nice about our new location is that, unlike Huntsville, Atlanta actually gets some pretty cool stuff. Case in point - I got an e-mail from Disney Rewards (I have a Disney Rewards Visa card) yesterday afternoon informing me that there were sneak preview showings of the new Pixar movie, Ratatouille, tonight. Naturally, being the huge Pixar fan that I am, I snatched up tickets. Morgon and I went out with my brother and his wife.

No surprise to anybody, we loved it, and so did the entire audience we were with. Morgon thinks it's now her favorite Pixar film, and while I won't quite go that far (it'll be a long time before anything tops The Incredibles - also directed by Ratatouille director Brad Bird - in my book), I thought it was definitely another home run on their score sheet. As long as these guys keep making movies like this, I'll keep going to see them.

Ratatouille Pre-Screening

Sweet! I just scored tickets to a pre-screening of Ratatouille tomorrow night!

Stock Trading SNAFU

So I made a small error in some stock trading in the last few weeks. Actually, it's nothing horrible, but it did leave me in a bit of a weird position, and I think the story is somewhat interesting.

On May 31, I bought 50 shares of Disney stock from the leftover cash in my SEP retirement account. Given some of the stocks history, I think I overpaid a little bit (it's still currently down from my purchase price) - but that's OK, and not really what the story's about. It's a long term buy for me, mostly because Disney has a strong dividend history and a good DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment Plan). This is one of the "stable" investments in my diversified portfolio - and I think that the company also has some good room for growth, given that they just kicked out the old management that was running it into the ground and replaced them all with Pixar guys. Good call.

The interesting part is that I didn't do my research very thoroughly. See, many years ago, Disney bought ABC. This I knew, although I didn't think about it very much. What I didn't know was that Disney was planning to spin off ABC Radio (just one piece of ABC) into a separate company, which they then would merge with Citadel Broadcasting Corporation. So I login to E*Trade to check my stocks yesterday morning, and lo and behold I have three - count them 3 shares of Citadel in my portfolio, having no idea how they got there. A little bit of digging informed me that the deal was that each Disney shareholder received 0.0768 shares of Citadel for each share as a dividend (meaning they still keep the Disney shares) of Disney that they owned.

In my case, that turned out to be 3.84 shares of Citadel. However, they rounded that down to the nearest whole number, collected all the fractional shares, and sold them in the open market as a block. The proceeds were then distributed as a cash dividend to Disney shareholders based upon their fractional share. So I also got a $5.03 cash dividend deposited directly into my E*Trade account.

$5 cash = great.

3 shares of Citadel? Not bad, but they're only worth $6.05 a share (last value as of 5 seconds ago). And if I sell them, I have to pay a $12.99 commission.   $6.05 * 3 = $18.15. Not bad. But $18.15 - $12.99 = $5.16. That means that I'd pay a 71% commission. Thank you, but no.

Hence the snafu here, because my only real choice is to hold on to these very long term and hope that they grow to a value that makes them actually worth selling. On the plus side, however, Citadel also has a history (albeit less lengthy) of a strong dividend, and I've enrolled these shares in Citadel's DRIP. So somewhere around, oh, 2012 I might actually have four shares to sell. :)

If this involved more than about $20 I might be annoyed, but as it is I find the whole thing incredibly amusing - and a valuable object lesson about doing my homework. Besides, it gives me an opportunity for a very nifty experiment. I'm incredibly tempted to hold on to these shares until the day I die to see just how much $18.15 can grow to with, say, 50+ years of compounding dividends and growth, possible stock splits, etc. I never would have paid the commission to actually buy three shares of a company to run this experiment, so maybe this is just a blessing for my intellectual curiosity.