Lunch Shoppe

Being a product of the web/mobile/text messaging generation, landlines are a bit of a mystery. They are phones people have at their homes, people call from them, but why are these antiquated things still around? In the land of cell phones why are those things even used. I decided to take a look and decided to put it on a diet at home, an extreme diet actually though not a diet that will lead to death. So my parents had this $60 a month plan with AT&T called All Distance (meaning as far as the borders of the US... I guess AT&T has a patriotic meaning for all, false advertising suit anyone? I'm looking at you pre-law friends of mine) which provided all the wonderful features one would expect on a modern day cell phone on a land phone. But the pricing scheme is off the fucking roof especially since it's only $20 bucks lower than the cell phone bill. Also, looking at the bills for the last 6 months (at least they got the website right... when it's up) I saw that they barely made 40 calls a month on the service. I told my parents to go basic and get the cheapest plan possible since we usually only get incoming calls not really outgoing. This automagically cut the cost of our bill by $45 bucks! So I was looking around their site and saw the "features" I could add to the phone line and was struck by how expensive it was. $15 bucks for CallerID! Are you fucking kidding me? I can get a fucking SIP provider who will not only provide a DID number with all the bells and whistles that these bastards are charging ridiculous amounts for less than they are charging for a basic plan! My research continued a bit further. So what was the state of our cell phone? We have AT&T Wireless (I love my iPhone) and realized we were not using all of our minutes (hell we have about 10,000 rollover minutes with like a 1000 expiring every month) so I told my parents to start using the cell phone more. Your probably thinking, "You told them what? Are you mad?" Yes, I know it was unusual advice. Yes, I know I could have just gone to the lower tier rate and cut a further $20, but with almost $45 saved on landline bills and with how much my mom has her cell phone with her anyways on my parents long drive to their second store it was a fair call... no pun intended. My voice usage oddly enough coincide with the evening and weekends when calls are free so I don't have many minutes used during the day (ah... college). Since we have enough minutes to last a recession using the cell phone a bit more is not a problem. So what about the landphone why even keep it then? It seems a bit useless if I told my parents to just use the cell phone a bit more. Well since we did have it and local calls are free and I started liking Skype (ykabhinav... call me) so I got the $30 a year unlimited US & Canada subscription and setup Skype to Go on the home phone. Since my parents are used to the nuances of Calling Cards anyways it is not much of a hassle for them to call Skype and bridge the call. I even set it up so that it just dials through Skype in the address book. So what did we do with the savings? Well my dad spend $5 bucks more to get faster internet at home and I spend $10 bucks more to get unlimited family text messaging, after all my sister is growing up and she needs texting as much as I do. And I figured might as well teach the parents a bit about modern day convieniences where not everything requires a call... (Sent some info to my dad about BofA which he was asking about yesterday, he replied, "Ok." My father's first text message...). Update: After using Skype for a couple more weeks my parents have gotten rid of all but the minimal service at their store thus saving them even more per year. If people were to do this at this rate it would seem that the landline business is pretty dire.

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My parents store uses a POS software called PCAmerica Cash Register Express. It has worked for them so far but it has a lot of problems. It uses a lot of memory; I am assuming there is a memory leak somewhere as it uses up almost 200 mb of ram for a products database that is less than 1mb, I am assuming it copies all the invoices ever made into memory. Also it's a nightmare to configure where hardware fails to work for no reason randomly. I get really annoyed when my parents ask me to deal with that software's issues since when one thing is fixed usually another thing is broken. The main reason that choice of software was made was due to my dad being used to the software from a previous store that he owned as well as there being no real open source alternatives. My parents usage requirements are quite simple. They need a location to enter their stock (which all systems have), a place to check out current inventory and a daily report. All this was available in Openbravo POS. For the last week or so I've been working on migrating to the new system. Initially, I was looking at getting a system up for uploading data to the Openbravo ERP so they could be able to integrate their other store, but for right now I wanted to keep it simple. I want them to use the software and get it running then add an ERP to get the other store running on this software as well. This is mostly to avoid duplicating the efforts of entering stock into both stores. I got the POS setup. This was done first by getting the CRE products database into the Openbravo POS where I had to import the data into Excel then remove all the unnecessary fields. And then import the csv files that I generated into Openbravo POS. This is the code for that. All in all it was a simple transfer, all that remains to be done are to add the specific tax categories which should be a simple SQL query and possibly import the customer table from CRE. My parents seem happy with the software and we'll start using it tomorrow since today I was training them in using it which was simple enough. The only major glitch I see in Openbravo is that when there is a text based barcode it doesn't show up on screen as  you enter it this is became my parents use some mnemonics for certain items, e.g. pot for potatoes (I know what your thinking you stoner you! ;)). Overall, this seems to be a good investment in time and hopefully it'll workout as they use it in the next few weeks.

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I am not a gambling man, mostly because I suck at the usual gambling games. However, today I am pursuing a gamble on the stock market which in retrospect is probably a stupid move on my part. I may lose money or I may gain money, but I decided to gamble on Visa's IPO. They are going for $44 bucks a share, but by the time it reaches the market it will probably be up to $65+ a pop so I have decided to wage a limit order of $75 for three. Hopefully, within the next 15 minutes I will see how I do.

Update 7:44 AM PST: I should of waited to the order as the price went down close to $55. My order was placed at $59.50. Though the price is volatile as I write this I feel the pain of overpaying for the shares.

Update 3/21/08 12:40AM PST: It seems I spoke too soon. Visa was up $7.74 today. Unfortunately, if I were to have invested when it was at $56 then I could have made a lot more. So goes life.

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I plan on investing now since I will probably have a little bit more money. I don't plan on going crazy and investing my life's savings in the next "Google." I plan on taking it slow and long term because I am in no rush to be rich. I just want whatever I'm earning to work for me.

I'm reading the Intelligent Investor and currently just going to follow the Defensive Investor route. I hope to put 25% in Treasury Bills and short term bonds as money that will be useful in case of an emergency. Then 60% will go into a mixture of S&P 500 and International Index Funds. The rest I will use for speculation (yes I still want to have a bit of fun with stocks).

My plan is to first attempt to max out my IRA then move anything else to a normal brokerage account. I will definitely keep my speculation account separate and won't keep more then 15% of my savings there.

Once I feel more well prepared to trade individual stocks I will do so in the future within the 60% account. So time to start planning...

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