Homeless Guy in San Francsisco: “Got any change?”
Me: “No…sorry”
Homeless Guy in San Francsisco: “Quit lying”
Me: “um, no change” *shakes pockets…no jingle*
Homeless Guy in San Francsisco: “I bet you voted for McCain too”
Me: *grits teeth, makes fist, walks away*

Some guy in SF seriously said that to me, and I seriously wanted to punch him in the face, if it weren’t for his numerous homeless friends and the worry that I might get syphilis from his teeth puncturing my hand, I might have. After that, I started thinking, where do they come from, and why in such abundance?

It is my belief, which may be narrow but I think holds true, that every single one of them made a series of bad decisions to get to where they are. Maybe they had ill educated parents? Unless the parents were homeless too, then they also have the ability to find a place to go. Perhaps they’re into drugs? Poor excuse, check into a clinic or at least commit a felony and go to jail so I don’t have to deal with you anymore. Maybe ‘The Man’ forced him down, took away his apartment for not paying rent, and then denied him access to a shower so he smells? I doubt it, they call them slums for a reason, it’s an entire section of housing that’s low income, and in most places it’s mandated by law!

So what’s the deal then? I can understand not being able to get a job once you’ve become homeless, it’s hard to look presentable for an interview like that, and you can’t list an address for your check to be mailed. But I’m not dealing with how to dig yourself out, what I want to know is how did you get there in the first place? At some point along the way, it must’ve been painfully obvious that you were headed down the wrong path. Ignorance let you keep the downward spiral, or maybe just a gripload of apathy.

Either way, something needs to be done, I felt a little intimidated in downtown SF at a decent time of night, with lots of other people around, they were very aggressive and all over the fucking place, and frankly it gave me a really poor opinion of almost the whole city. I went to see D-Rock in Haight Ashbury, far away from downtown, same situation although the age of the indigent was much younger. This further boggled my mind, how the fuck did you end up here as a 20 year old? The only logical conclusion I had was that these kids (which D-Rock lovingly calls “gutter punk”) were probably ejected from their homes by their parents for being total fuckups. So that’s it? You were such an idiot that your own flesh and blood would rather disown you than tolerate you any further. If that is the case, then the young fuckup in question is at a crossroads: On the one hand you may realize that you are in fact a total fucktard and that now is the time to go back to your parents and turn your life around -OR- on the other hand, you accept your fate and without any foresight of personal worth just continue smelling of urine and guilting the hard working people around you into supporting whatever it is you’lll be eating/drinking/stealing that day.

Get a fucking job…

I read a book. It was a good book. ET now refers to this book as my Bible. This book is entitled The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.

It outlines a semi-radical plan to get yourself on the path to being debt-free and having the money to do what you want. When the plan is broken down to the basics, it’s obvious, spend less while saving more. To get there you MUST be on a strict budget and adhere to a self-designed plan, but you have to stick to it. After the budget you immediately save $1,000 for an “emergency fund” and you never touch it. After that, you aggressively pay off your debt as fast as you can. You then have an emergency fund equivalent to 6 months of expenses, for ET and I this will be $10,000. After that, sky is the limit, invest!

Thus far I have successfully established my $1,000 emergency fund and payed down the 2 small credit cards I have. Erika also has her emergency fund setup, and we recently sold her 4Runner which relieved us of a monthly expense of almost $600! I debated selling my car almost 3 months ago, and decided against it. But for the moment, sharing our single car works just fine. I take ET to work and pick her up, she takes me to the airport and picks me up, if she’s unable to take me to work, I take a cab and expense it. Totally worth it for $600 a month, or almost $8,000 per year! We’re currently paying down ET’s larger credit card, between the 2 of us we hope to have all $7,000 worth of debt taken care of by January.

The budget ET and I are currently on uses a flat amount taken from every check which I withdraw in cash and then break up into a series of labeled envelopes (groceries $65, dry cleaning $20, gas…etc), then when we need something, you don’t take a credit card and therefore you can only spend what you have on hand. I also have a plan in place at the moment to pay off the engagement ring I have on layaway in 8 months, all the while contributing $800 per month towards the current debt being payed down or the current savings project.

Exciting times my friends! This plan sort of came about when ET and I realized that before tax the 2 of us are pulling in an excess of $100,000 per year and yet we were still living paycheck-to-paycheck. If we can keep up this pace, we should be in good shape to pay for the wedding and honeymoon straight cash!

Sound Personal Finance for Brando = Way Fucking Overdue

Sorry for the delay my friends, I’ve been really lazy, I was on the road for 3 weeks straight, and at the moment I’m enjoying being lazy, but I’ll have SEVERAL posts up soon.

B

I’ve been reading a lot about HDR photography, and was inspired by these 2 collections of HDR photos: 20 great HDR photos part 1 and part 2. I decided to give it a shot, having never done it before, and only using my Canon powershot SD 750.

HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range“, it is a photography term. I’ll distill it down for you as I understand it, you take several pictures of the exact same thing, usually from a tripod, but each time your exposure values are changed. If you took old school photos with a 35mm, that’s increasing/decreasing the shutter speed to generate under/overexposed photos. If you’re on a point-and-shoot digital it’s changed the EV value from -2 up to +2 over a series of shots. HDR is typically in high contrast situations, for instance, shooting into the sun: if you expose the sun properly everything in the foreground is dark, if you expose the foreground properly the background will be washed out (backlit). But, when taken of everyday things that you wouldn’t ‘need’ HDR for, you can get stunning results:

Now mine isn’t necessarily stunning, but it is pretty cool looking, and quite dramatic when you consider the originals:

After you take the originals you combine them is Photoshop, it has an HDR feature, and then to really bring out the surrealism you apply a filter made by HDRSoft called Photomatix.

It was definitely a good first try, I think this will come in pretty handy since I like to take pictures of skylines when I travel all the time, we’ll see what I come up with.

I’ve found a wonderful comic about a month ago called Malfunction Junction. It is incredibly witty, and hilarious. The author went back to college and hasn’t posted anything new since April, so I’ve been combing through 3 years of archives, and I came across quite a jewel today about Creation Science:

Matt Milby is fucking hilarious! I’m really sad he doesn’t write them anymore.