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I’ve decided that I want to take a deeper look into my finances. I’ve been using Mint.com to track all of my accounts and spending habits but now I want to do that using the financial software I use, GnuCash. Before today, I treated my credit card bills as one transaction on the same day I paid it, so I don’t have a sense of exactly where my money is going, without looking at Mint.com. Starting today, I will begin to enter every transaction I make using my credit card. I wish I had been doing this earlier, but like they say “better late than never”. This isn’t the first time I had been doing something for a while, decided to change something and wished I had been doing it all along.

Total was my last day at DeVry University. After almost five years of going to school part-time (not counting the two years I spent at Penn State), I finally have my Bachelor’s Degree. I received my Associate’s Degree in October of 2008, so everything I’ve been taken since then has been general education classes required for my Bachelor’s. I’m glad to be done but not looking forward to the loan payments I’ll have to start making in a few months. Today also would’ve been my mother’s 65th birthday. I wish she could’ve been alive to see me finally graduate.

Technorati Tags: bachelor's degree, DeVry, graduation

It’s been a number of years since I’ve actually made a New Year’s resolution. I decided this year I would make a few. My New Year’s resolutions for 2010:

1. Graduate DeVry with my Bachelor’s Degree
2. Get the race car up and running
3. Save up enough money so I can get my own apartment
4. Play golf at least once a month this summer
5. Lose at least 10 lbs

Technorati Tags: New Year's, resolutions

I finally got to go to my first Devils game at the new Prudential Center in Newark. It’s a very nice arena and I really like how convenient it is for me to get to a game, since it’s only a 2 block walk from Penn Station Newark. I don’t have to worry about fighting traffic to or from the arena, like I did when they played at Continental Airlines Arena (now called Izod Center). The next game I would like to go to would be against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden.

Technorati Tags: hockey, New Jersey Devils, Newark, Prudential Center

I had off this week from work to use up some of my vacation time, so I thought I would take some day trips.
I started my vacation week of day trips with a visit to the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum on Sunday. I haven’t been there since I was in the Cub Scouts (probably 6-8 years old), but some of it seemed familiar. I didn’t get a chance to see the Concorde while I was there but hope to maybe see it soon.
On Tuesday, I drove up to Cooperstown to visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This was another place I haven’t been to in a long time so some of it did seem familiar but some of it seemed new to me. While there, I also stopped in to see the Wax Museum which is down the street from the HOF.
On Wednesday, I went down to Philly to check out Eastern State Penitentiary. I went there last year for their Terror Behind the Walls haunted house and decided I wanted to go back and tour it during the day. I also walked around the outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and saw the infamous Rocky statue.
On Thursday, I got to tour the new Yankee Stadium. I got to visit Monument Park (the one in the old Stadium was better), the Yankee Museum, and the Yankee dugout. If they Yankees were on a road trip, I would’ve also been able to visit the locker room. I’ll definitely go back next year when they’re out of town so I can check that out. I just wish I had toured the old Yankee Stadium while I still had the chance.
I ended my vacation week of day trips with a visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The last time I was at the Statue of Liberty, I was probably in middle school. I do remember that we were allowed to go up into the crown then and the stairs were very narrow. We were in a constant line, slowing going up the stairs to the crown.

Technorati Tags: Cooperstown, Eastern State Penitentiary, Ellis Island, Intrepid, museum, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium

I hardly post to this blog anymore since I’ve been using Twitter. A lot of other people I know (not personally), have also severely cut down on quantity of blog posts and are using social networking site like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook to say what they need to say instantly. Over in the sidebar, I have my last five tweets and the last three photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. I really don’t have much to write about anymore that I can’t do in under 140 characters.

Technorati Tags: facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter

11 months after purchasing my iPhone 3G, I purchased the new iPhone 3GS today at the Apple Store at Fifth Avenue. I reserved the phone through Apple’s website about 2 weeks ago when it was announced. I got a little concerned yesterday when I got an email from Apple reminding me about the reservation and I read the fine print – “Reservation does not guarantee iPhone availability at an Apple Retail Store. iPhone is sold on a first-come, first-served basis.” This made me think there was a possibility that I would have to wait even longer to get the new iPhone. I could either drive into the city with my Cobalt (not really something I wanted to do since the car is only 2 years old) or take the earliest train I could (4:45AM arriving in NYC at 6:15) and pray that the line wasn’t so long that I wouldn’t get a phone. I got to the store at 6:30AM and they had two separate lines, one for people who reserved a phone and one for people who decided to camp out. I walked into the store about 7:10 and by 7:30, I was walking out with my brand new 32GB black iPhone 3GS. I had to pay $499 instead of the $299 other people got to pay because I wasn’t completely eligible for an upgrade. To offset the extra $200, I sold my old iPhone 3G to a coworker.
I’ve played with it a bit today. It’s not much different than the iPhone I had, except for video recording, compass, and voice controls. I also wanted more storage so I don’t have to carry an iPod anymore.

Technorati Tags: 3GS, Apple, iPhone

My recent lack of updates to this blog are mostly because I have been micro-blogging on Twitter. You can read my Twitter updates in the sidebar or click on the link to follow me. I wanted to make this post to make sure I had at least one post for May 2009.

After reading about the money management site Rudder in an article on Lifehacker, I thought I would check it out and see if I liked it more than Mint. I’ve been using Mint to track all of my finances for quite some time now. I tried Quicken Online when it became free but, at the time, it didn’t have all of my financial institutions listed. I recently logged in and they have added the places where I have accounts which had been missing when I first joined. Like Quicken Online, Rudder doesn’t have all of my financial institutions listed. It, however, is only missing one, whereas Quicken Online was missing two. Rudder also can’t track loans. It can only keep track of checking, savings, and credit card accounts right now. When I gave it the info for my American Express login, it only returned two of my three Amex cards. An unreleased feature, which I would like to see on Mint, is Goals. They don’t give much information about it but, if I had to guess, I would say you would provide how much money you want to save towards a goal (first home, car, emergency fund, etc.) and when you would like to reach that goal, and it would tell you how much money you have to save each month to reach that goal. Nowadays, with automatic scheduled transfers, anyone can do that if their bank offers it.

Technorati Tags: Mint, Mint.com, Quicken, Rudder

A few weeks ago I bought a Canon PowerShot A590IS digital camera from Newegg.com to replace my aging HP Photosmart 720. The HP was only 3MP, which was fine since I didn’t print many of the pictures I took. The Canon is an 8MP camera so I have the flexibility to print any photo I take. I wish the camera had GPS built-in so when I upload pics to Flickr, it would already be geotagged. I was thinking about getting the Eye-Fi Explore but I’m not too sure how accurate it would be only using WAPs. I wonder how long it will be before all cameras come with GPS built-in. If my iPhone can have GPS built-in, I don’t understand why camera manufacturers can’t find the room to put it into their models.