DeeLoaf

I Kicked CitiFinancial's ass. They gave me a loan (before I went bankrupt) and they secured it with a bunch of random household crap. A Citizen 27" TV, a VCR, a Sanyo 3disc 2spkr Stereo and a Pentium III Computer w/printer. That is the exact level of detail, definitely no serial numbers and I was totally guessing on the specs of the TV and the Stereo. It turns out that I actually have a 21" Electrohome TV and a 5disc Panasonic stereo. Oopsee, but that's ok as you'll find out. So after going bankrupt these guys start talking to me (after finally getting the bankruptcy memo) about how we can settle the security on the loan. They wanted the $900 estimated replacement value of the stuff (I'm not really sure where the values came from, I think it was both me and my loan officer guy pulling numbers out of our asses), after giving me the spiel on how they don't hardly ever settle for less than half the loan amount, and why did I just go bankrupt instead of trying to continue to pay them, and how I've wrecked my credit rating. And I don't care one whit of course about my credit rating, or what they usually do, and I'm certainly not going to talk about $900 hahaha. I made my first counter offer over the telephone. I started at $40. Hahahaha. But it was more funny because then they said $500. They wanted me to come in to meet with them and talk about settling, so I went in, and I spoke with the branch manager C and she and I discussed the matter. I let her know in the end that I was only prepared to settle for a maximum of $110, and if that was insufficient then they could have the stuff. She said they'd have to get back to me and that she didn't think they'd accept the offer of $110. They started calling me a few days later to get on with it, the woman who called apparently not knowing about my offer of $110. The first time she called I think she said $500, but I told her $110 (or take the stuff). The second time she called and that time she said $250, and I again told her $110 (or take the stuff). She said that she thought they would want to take the stuff, and that she would go to get the details of the stuff and asked me to please hold. After a few minutes she came back and said they'd be accept my offer of $110. Bwuwhuaahahah. It was a possibly that it might have cost me up to $150 to assemble all the junk I would have needed to satisfy them. But the junk was so poorly described that just about anything could have passed. I was gonna get the old p3 computer from work (gutted) with a second hand cartidgeless $5 bubblejet printer. Old vcrs are supercheap too. The TV and the Stereo are funnier. Not sure if they'd care much about the difference in the stereo or if I could have gone out and found some junk that more closely matched the description. For the TV, what the hell does 27" mean? There are ways of measuring things which can yield whatever number you are looking for ;) . I could also have said that the stuff all went to Jessica when we split up, but I didn't think of that, and I didn't want to play games. This was a few days ago, and now that I've actually paid them the $110 and got a receipt stating that it is done with, I feel better. I'll stand by my $110, even though it means the combined total that I gave them of $938 (3x 276 monthly payment plus the $110) is about 7% of the roughly $13200 they would have gotten out of their $7550 loan to me (3 years at %30.99).

Seems I'm not the only one trying to wrest control of my own destiny away from the bankmasters. Theres a mutual credit network IN OPERATION with 1200+ members in Cape Town, South Africa! This is totally awesome. I'm going to get in touch with the guy whos working on the software, Tim Jenkin and hopefully have some conversation. I'm totally going to incorporate some of his ideas into my own I think. I was leaving the offers/wants lists till later, or for out-of band ... but it adds a lot to have a facility for that built in. Gotta get multi-party profiles working though. And oh boy it would be awesome if there would be a way to let our systems talk to each other!

So theres this phenomenon of "Andre the Giant has a Posse" graffitti usually made with a stencil. I'm no artist, so I traced a digitized portait of Mr. Malthus to make this.

Somebody should do a better one.

What does Thomas Malthus have to do with anything you might ask? Oh, only that he took an interest in pointing out the limits to the infinte growth of population (arising from ever increasing food supply, arising from an ever increasing need to produce more stuff, arising from an ever increasing debt to the bankmasters of the world - though I dont know if he studied it from those angles). So anyway he was saying basically that one day our population would outgrow our food supply. Thinking about peak oil and how that energy source effectively allowed us to continue increasing our food output, and how soon that increase may turn into a decline, and the resulting population overshoot which could be observed, I got thinking about old Malthus. And so I decided to pay some respect.

Thomas Malthus has a Posse.

I'm getting really tired of the nature of work I'm having to do to earn money. Almost exclusively lately it has consisted of applying afterthought hacks to software we've rolled out for our various clients. Hardly anything new or exciting just a lot of bread and butter crap that has to be done to maintain cashflow. Relying on cashflow is lame, this is supposed to be fucking capitalism. We need some investment in our company so that we can spend time innovating instead of making cheese. I'm tired of making cheese and churning butter, and would love to develop some standard librariesand tools for rapid ajax-enabled web-application development (raewad). The formgen code I wrote has allowed us to take on a lot of little moneymaking projects that we couldnt have done if I approached that Seminars application as a oneoff hackfest. Instead I painstakingly attempted to develop a reusable framework focussed around abstraction of form specifications and sql generation. And its worked well, save for some hubris causing it to be a little overused in situations where it might have just made more sense to write a one line sql select statement, and the fact remains that I spent a significant amount of my own free time developing it. And yet it's S. who makes the money.

I should leave this company and just do my own thing. But the reality is that I dont _WANT_ to work for money, so I'm deathly afraid that quitting would be the path to homelessness and starvation. And yet deep down I have hope that God might have something in store for me if/when I quit.

Whats a guy to do?

Bla so I drive a stupid car. Got to. I live in a suburb called Burlington. In case you arent familiar with the concept of suburbs basically they are really spread out and designed around the easy motoring automobile bullshit lifestyle.

I took my car off the road after being graciously let off by a police officer who had stopped me for my expired tag. I dont have insurance either. Thats what made him so gracious, he saved me $5000 and a car impoundment. I'd been driving for a couple years now without insurance without incident. But I know I'd been pushing my luck and this was a sign of it.

So I did what was prudent, and started the process of getting the car legitimo. That meant fairly major body work rust hole repairs, some very basic mechanical (a sticky parking brake and new wipers and headlamp lenses), a certification, insurance and a new tag. In that order. So far I've got the major body work done courtesy of a guy I just met who calls himself D Car Doctor. Lets just say he is a ninja of car body repair. Time will tell on the quality of the repairs but everything looked super nice. I hate dealing with shifty people and businesses, this guy was anything but. I found him by asking the bodyshop place around the corner to recommend someone who does the kind of work I needed. Damn, proves again that the best resource is people. So far I've had much better luck by asking people to recommend other poeple, or help me with my problem, than by just looking in the yellow pages or trying to find information in books.

People power is good, and my car is on the way to getting into compliance with the provincial regulatory regime (of bullshit). Also praise the might and power of liability insurance. Money money money money money money money dont you just LOVE FUCKING MONEY.