Well after 10 years I can now celebrate.  No more $330 per month payments for my student loan ever again!

So for morbid curiosity I was wondering... How much did my education cost me?

Sallie Mae did not make the gathering of this information easy btw.  I had to copy/paste from the history, 6 months at a crack for 10 years of data, into Excel.  I guess they didn't want me to know how much blood money was extracted from me for my education.

That doesn't count all the expenses. Although those loans did help me pay for tuition, books and housing; I do believe those loans did not cover all the expense (although my memory is getting a little foggy in that area since it was 10 years ago).  Also there was 1.5 years (of a 4 year degree - it took 4 years real time) of local community college classes paid for out of pocket that's is not in those numbers.

So was it worth $30k?  Would I do it again? Yea I think so. I don't think it is fair or right but having that silly piece of paper opens doors that are unjustifiably closed sometimes if you don't have it.  And salary wise, I've probably more than made up the loss.

It does seem like a lot of money though...

Later

Often at work I need to reboot a remote server.  I remember this being something that I worked on at Harley-Davidson as well.  Recently, I've been logging into the machine using terminal services and then selecting Start --> Restart and entering in a reason and clicking OK.  Takes about 2-3 minutes depending on fast the machine decides to respond.

There's got to be a better way to do this... and there is.

On WinXP and Windows Server 2003 there's the command line tool shutdown.exe.

From the command line (Start-->Run-->type 'cmd' and hit enter) type:

shutdown -r -m \\YourBuddiesPcName

To automate it, stick it into a command file (cmd), create shortcuts on your desktop, use SlickRun, or create a PowerShell alias.

Later

Sometimes I get shit at work because I attempt to automate things.  I do it to save time and mental anguish and most importantly - to free myself up to do other things.  Maybe that's reading or learning about a new technology or getting more stuff done in an 8 hour day then the guy sitting next to me because he's doing all his stuff manually and mistake prone.

My old boss, John Barry, was from South Africa.  He told this joke [and I'm going to butcher it...] about a guy who would run past this woman's house everyday pushing his bike.  One day the woman asks, "Why don't you get on the bike and ride it instead of pushing it?".  The guy replies, "Because I don't have time to learn." 

Do you go through your day, pushing buttons like a monkey because you don't have time to learn a better way of doing it?  You know if you just take the extra time to do something better, faster, in a more automated way - imagine how much time you will save, and imagine how that time will accumulate for each little thing you do.  Just like investing your money and compound interest.

I'm sure you do some of this already in your daily life... you use a dish washer, a garage door opener, the microwave, a washer, a dryer... all these things you use so that you can free time up to do things you want to.

There was a good post the other day by Jeffrey Snover, the Powershell Architect on this:

the next [time] you find yourself thinking about how to do something that you've done before, you should take it as an opportunity to invest a little bit and automation the activity so that you don't have to think about it again.

And that's the point.  He also references this guy called Alfred Whitehead:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

When I moved to Oregon, I changed how I did my finances drastically.  Instead of downloading stuff into MS Money, entering in receipts, tracking everything, etc... I automated it.  I ditched Money.  Only use the banks' website.  Bills are auto-deducted and paid.  Money is auto-transferred into savings accounts, spending accounts, etc.  I spend little or no thought on this anymore.  Maybe 10 minutes per month...  freeing up time to do other things.

Now I still enjoy boiling the water on the stove to make tea.  Sure it's faster in the microwave.  And it doesn't mean I want to do laundry the old fashioned way - some things, boiling water for tea, cooking at home instead of going to McDonald's, are more comforting...

Later.

I've been wanting to check out Microsoft's XNA Game Studio for awhile now so I spent a couple of hours tonight checking it out.  Basically it's a hobbyist release of Visual Studio (C# Express) with a 'Framework' that sits on top of the .NET 2.0 libraries.  This XNA Framework wraps the DirectX libraries with managed code and you get a bunch of classes like Game, GameTime, GameWindow, BoundingBox, blah blah blah.

It shows alot of promise.  I was able to follow along the tutorial and basically make an image bounce around on the screen like a ping-pong ball.  As a business app developer it's cool seeing the C# code, how little it takes, to get this to work using objects I normally don't see like Vector, Sprite, and Texture.  I wonder if someday we'll get to inject some of this kind of code into business apps as the younger generation (where gaming is more... accepted as a norm) gets older and doesn't mind some of the fancier graphics in the app - where it may even enhance it.

Bottom line here is that although they have a great 'arcade' game framework - it's not yet ready for prime time. 

It doesn't have any UI classes...

There's a few posts on the XNA Framework message boards from MS employees stating that they aren't releasing any in V1.  Seeing how cool the WPF stuff is using XAML, it would be cool if they could incorporate the XAML/WPF stuff with this...

Anyway I'll have to keep looking/researching... My Dad and I have been talking about a creating a game for years and I even did some work a couple years back on a web based version.  My biggest hurdle is how to represent a game board that can contain lots and lots of hexes (200 x 200, etc); once I figure that out...

Later.

So yesterday morning on my ride to work, Mt. Hood was looking beautiful with gorgeous sunrise coming up behind her.  It took a few pictures on top of the I-5 bridge heading north over the Columbia River (into Vancouver, Washington).

These pics don't do it any justice.  It looks so much larger in person.  It's hard to see because of the light, but you can make out the snow on the mountain already.