As Baruch said, we've now got our final list of accepted student projects. I'm one of the Debian mentors this year, for the "debian-cd-ng" project of Carlos Parra Camargo. Hopefully over the next few months he'll get some very good work done - he's keen and has already started! We're thinking of adding the SoC students onto Planet Debian, so that the rest of the Debian world can see what they have to say as well. No pressure, guys! :-)

The flight to Mexico last Saturday went pretty much all ok, except that the plane had to start through at MEX because of some unexpected wind and the generally low air pressure at high altitudes. While this delayed the landing for about 20 minutes, I had the opportunity for a second look at this incredibly large city. After getting through customs, we (with Herman, Tore, and Annabelle) met Neil McGovern in the airport lounge, and after Marcella and Luciano had arrived, we had a rather bumpy ride to Oaxtepec, amounting to a 20h journey for me. The site here is really beautiful, with lots of green, palms, other plants, and of the swimming pool. However, so far Debcamp has been rather unproductive, we haven't had net access until Monday evening, and even yesterday round trip times and packet loss were so high that neither ssh (IRC!) nor scp/ftp/http were really usable. Using irssi's proxy module allowed me to get rid of the lag locally for IRC, but the connection was still unstable. I wrote some patches which I have yet to submit and replied to most of my NM mail, but the next projects will all require access to the BTS and debian.org machines to be worked on. At the moment, network is down again because the antenna connecting us from the village fell down. The main activity for me so far has ben to play Mao with Jesus, Adeodato, Marga, Graham, Gerfried, and others :-) Todo: get some real work done; upload pictures; go to the pool. Ah... network just went up again, yet still slow... mail queue flushed... network down again...

Just today, in a bathroom really quite near....

I woke up this morning. I used the toilet. I flushed it. There was the satisfying sound of a toilet, well, flushing.

Then there was the very unsatisfying sound of the toilet not refilling its tank. I tried a faucet -- sure enough no water. Obviously, the ants were at it again. (Read this story from yesterday for how they disrupted our water supply once before.)

So, now I have to rush out there and fix the well before I can get to work. This time, I'm going to be prepared. I found a can of insecticide, a metal file, and head out there. Sure enough, more ants had been killed in the pressure switch. I cut the power to the switch, cleaned off the metal contacts, and sprayed insecticide everywhere I could. I restored power, and there was a satisfying faint hummmm as the water pump whirred to life.

So then all I had to do was cut power again for a moment as I did a final cleaning and reassembly of the switch and headed back inside.

All was fine until this evening. I noticed somewhat low water pressure. I tried to be optimistic -- "the pump's probably kicking on right now." But no. Once again as I flushed a toilet, the toilet tank didn't refill.

By now I am MAD. These ants are going down. I was a few minutes late to work because of them, and now I'm going to have to go out to the well in the dark to fix them. So I again grab my tools, and this time I find the stickiest thing I can -- some tape. I figure I'll wrap it around the post the pressure switch is on, sticky side out, and trap them on their way up.

So I turn on the flashlight and head out to the well house. I open it up. And hmm -- different problem this time.

The power is off entirely. The little twerps have somehow applied 20 pounds of force to the power lever and cut it out!

I'm sure there is no way that I would have forgotten to turn the power back on this morning, in my thirsty trying-not-to-be-late-for-work semi-tired daze...

All I can say is: it amazing how much water you can store up when you have two pressure tanks. Terah even ran the dishwasher today.

I made a shocking discovery today.

Terah called me in from outside to inform me that the washing machine was just sitting there. No action. Just stalled in the middle of the cycle. I poked around a bit, and sure enough. It's stuck.

I then turned on the water faucet next to the washing machine. Nothing came out. So naturally I thought: the terrorists have attacked our water supply! Run for the hills! (which in Kansas are a 3-hour drive)

(Actually, what I thought was we want to put this house on the market next week, and the last thing we need now is a lack of running water. But I'm sure if I watched the cable news channels, I'd think of terrorists first.)

Now before I can explain how SUICIDE ANTS were the cause of our water problems, we need to take a small diversion into the fascinating realm of rural plumbing. When you have a well supplying water to your house, there's a pump connected to a pressure tank, which is then connected to the house's plumbing. When you turn on a faucet, you drain water out of the tank. When the pressure reaches a certain minimum, a pressure switch turns on the pump. The pump pumps water into the tank until the pressure reaches a maximum, at which point the pressure switch turns the pump back off.

Now, inside the pressure switch are little metal plates. To turn on the pump, the plates snap together, completing the circuit. To turn off the pump, the plates snap apart.

So, back to our story.

I went out to the well house (the small outdoor structure that houses the tank and switch) with my usual well-adjusting tools: pliers, screwdriver, gloves. I open up the well house and cut the power. I take the cover off the pressure switch and stare at it for a minute.

Hmmm I think to myself. The system pressure is 0 PSI, so the pump should have been running... And indeed the pressure switch plates had snapped together....

...or had they?

No! There was -- and I am not making this up -- a cake of DEAD, PARTIALLY SINGED ANTS between the metal plates. In fact, there were ants crawling around all over the pressure switch. So I used my screwdriver to scrape the plates off as well as I could. I couldn't get them perfectly clean because of the angle, but I figured it'd be enough to make contact.

I turned the power back on. Little blue sparks appeared at the pressure switch (burning up the last of the SUICIDE ANTS), and then half a second later, the pump sprang into action.

Now this raises some alarming questions:

Why didn't our government do anything to stop the SUICIDE ANTS from attacking our water supply?

And more importantly, who is behind this sudden sinister interest in pressure switches on the part of our hill-building friends?

I can see the headlines now:

"Ants attack water supply in Kansas... Is New York far behind?"

"Gitmo Intelligence Links Suicide Ants to bin Laden"

"Price of Raid Hits $200 A Barrel Amid Fears of Ant Attacks"

"5 Troops Deployed With Cans of RAID to Terrorist Ant Training Camps in the Pakistani Mountains"

"Thirsty Latchkey Children Forced To Scrape Dangerous Terrorist Ants From High-Voltage Switches Before Using Faucet"

"Is Your Water Safe? Watch the story about the latest threat tonight at 11"

"Small-town Kansas man detained for posting instructions for attacking rural water systems using ants"

Saturday, I got Terah switched to Serendipity. Went well, though due to a heisenbug in Drupal involving hitting the Back button at certain times, her entire comment table had been wiped out. Fortunately there was a backup and restoration was easy.

And earlier last week I got an air compressor. It's amazing how much fun it is to have pressurized air on hand.

Did I say "fun"? I meant "useful", of course.

I'll have to write about that soon.

Plus, another potentially Really Big Project that I'll write about shortly.

Today I went to see the doctor for the first time in the US. I went for a few different reasons, there was a mole on my back that Sarah was worried about having changed, my wrist still hurts from that bike crash a few months ago, and I thought I'd see if I could get a 'flu shot. The first thing that's different is when you make the appointment, the receptionist asks why. I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable explaining what ails me to a receptionist from the comfort of my office cubicle shared with three other people within earshot. Besides, it's between me and my doctor. I was a bit taken aback by this level of questioning, just to make an appointment, and hid behind a "general checkup". The second thing is each doctor seems to have their own personal nurse to do the pre-consultation blood-pressure taking and examination room setup. The third thing is the prescription seems to go straight from the doctor to the dispensing pharmacy of your choice. Pretty cool. So today I had my "general checkup". Hoo boy. Let's just say an hour later, I was feeling very poked, prodded, and squeezed, and emerged with a tetanus booster, a blood test, and an order for an x-ray. I certainly felt like I got my ten dollars' worth.

Greenpeace has asked companies to minimize the usage of toxic substances (English article) in computers and other electronic devices at this year's Cebit. Hewlett Packard, LGE, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony and Sony Ericsson have assured Greenpeace to reduce toxic substances in their products in the nearer future. However, many other companies have ignored Greenpeace so far. For example: Acer, Apple, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, Lenovo, Panasonic, Siemens and Toshiba. I'm listing the names of these companies here in the hope to increase public pressure on them a bit ;-) Although I'm not a member of Greenpeace (yet?), I do support the ideas and work of Greenpeace, and especially the above E-waste article made me think. We're all using more and more computers, PDAs and other gadgets — especially the geeks among us. I think we all should (at least to a certain degree) care about how this affects the environment. I have fired up a search engine and looked for some hints about what you can do as a computer geek in order to help save the environment — guess what... there's a HOWTO for that, the Linux Ecology-HOWTO! (I'm beginning to think that there's no topic out there anymore, which hasn't been covered in a HOWTO by some Linux geek ;-) (via netzpolitik.org)

Yes, the title of this post is yet another FTWCA. The question is, do YOU still care about the Debian Project ? I refused to take part to the recent flames, aka the FTWCA threads, but given the upcoming DPL election and the recent events, I feel it’s time to write something up about the current status of the Project. I’d like my readers to ask themselves: “Do I still care about the Debian Project, about its goals, about its spirit, about what it really is ?”. You may find that the answer to this question won’t be the one you expected, either way. Before reading further, you may want to quickly google for “Teletubbies” if you don’t know what this thing is. It may help you better understand the rest of this post. This post is a long one, thanks in advance to all of you who will read it until the end. I may refer to some people in this post. This is by no mean a personal attack, so please don’t take it as such. Recent events I mentionned “recent events” earlier, here are the events I am referring to: the FTWCA threads, DDs willing to expel Andrew Suffield because of his post to d-d-a, listmaster deciding to block Andrew from posting to d-d-a again, Rapha l Hertzog promoting his “social pressure” thing again, and some other bits that happened here and there. The problem: a bunch of Teletubbies
The Debian Project is a technical community, which some DDs are now trying to turn into a social community. Obviously, this can’t work. Why ? For a start, because the NM process has not been designed to select people based on social abilities (there’s a minimum, though, but other than that, that’s absolutely not the point of the NM process). New developers are selected on purely technical criterions, which is what you would expect from a technical community like ours. Adding social tests and whatnot isn’t going to help; the NM process is enough of a pain in the ass already for the applicants. We are a thousand Free Software hackers collaborating to the Project, dedicated to producing the best operating systems ever, and we want these operating systems to be Free Software, as defined by our guidelines on that matter, that is, to say, the DFSG. We all agree with the Foundation Documents of the Debian Project, we agree with the DMUP, and that’s pretty much all we all agree with. We never agreed to be nice to each other, we never agreed to group hugs at developer’s meetings or anything else. Our beloved Teletubbies are complaining about the “frequent” flamewars that happen on the Debian lists, and to be honest, one must acknowledge the fact that those flamewars have been a bit too frequent recently. What I find quite amusing, really, is that most of these flamewars have been started by one of the Teletubbies and mention Ubuntu. Now the same people want to come up with a mailing-lists code of conduct, similar to the one Ubuntu has. Ironic, isn’t it ? The same people are willing to expel Andrew for his post on d-d-a. Is it coherent ? The whole “social pressure” thing is nothing less than intimidation, and this is not acceptable. Similarly, the reactions to Andrew’s post on d-d-a aren’t acceptable either. Why ? Because this Project used to be open-minded. It looks like a bunch of people lost this, and I really feel sorry for them. Your reactions to Andrew’s post are really over-exagerated. You need to take a break and a reality check. If you aren’t open-minded enough to grok Andrew’s post, you’re not open-minded enough for this Project, or even for Free Software. Some of you also need to come back down to Earth. We are a volunteers organization producing Free OSes. We are doing it all for fun, so stop being so fucking serious and pull that tree out of your ass. You’ll feel better afterwards. It’s also quite amusing when the same people are announcing, on side channels (IRC, …), that J. Doe made it to their kill-file. I don’t use kill-files myself, because I believe that everybody has something interesting to say, because this is an open-minded Free Software Project, because the people I would kill-file might be maintaining something someday related to the packages I maintain and I’d need to work with them. No matter what I think of my fellow DDs, I never refused to work with anyone. People please, learn to put the Project’s interests before yours. Why ? Why now ? Why ? Because I joined a technical community of Free Software hackers, not a social community of Free Software integrists to spend my holidays with. Why now ? Because the vote on GR 2006_01 is currently running. Because the DPL election is on its way too, it’s that time of the year again. Because out of 7 candidates, 5 are, to diverse degrees, Teletubbies and 1 is the worst DPL candidate EVER (if you don’t know why and are a DD, log on to master and grep for his email address in the -private archives. Not his name, because his firstname at the time was Jonathan — something you must think about when you’ll vote). That leaves one sane candidate only; Bill, I hope your platform will be good. Solutions ? Realize that the Debian Project is the Debian Project and has nothing to do with Ubuntu, remember its goals, its spirit, remember why you joined (if you joined to get the @debian.org address, GO AWAY). This means:

• Debian is not Ubuntu, stop trying to copy everything Ubuntu does;
• Stop the social madness, we’re a technical community;
• People need to learn to put Debian’s interests before their owns.

Remember that there is only a limited number of people making a lot of noise. So if you belong to what I believe is a silent majority, please raise your voice. Help tell those people to FOAD and let’s get back to work. When you’ll vote for the DPL election, please, think twice. Be extra-careful, most of the candidates are really good politicians.

I woke up to a breakfast of pancakes, cooked by the wonderful riseorbleed. I don't know about you but waking up to a hot breakfast is heavenly. After some morning ablutions, we hailed a cab and along the way we chatted with the cabbie as I looked out the window. Luxor cabbies are really nice, every time I travelled with them, they had some interesting story to tell and big, broad smiles. Smiling is the way to fatter tips! The weather in San Francisco is supposed to be rather variable. You know how that is, rain one minute and then sun the next. Well, the entire time I was there, it was bright and sunny and gorgeous. San Francisco really put on her best to charm me and she really succeeded. I didn't think that postcard-perfect pictures were possible, but I saw them everywhere. I was happy to walk around without needing a winter coat. And everyone else smirked at how happy I was. Daniel seemed to have recovered from the previous night's revelry. His talk on delta was excellent because he's a very good public speaker. Which is good, because he gave two presentations at CodeCon. When I talked to him on Thursday night, he seemed a little embarassed at how successful delta had become since it such a simple piece of software. But people like GCC use it to fare down their bug reports to the lines of code that reproduce its bugs. Rob and Tristan sidled up to my bar and asked me if I could get them some juice. For their laptops. They were working on their presentation all the way until the last minute, which involved a drunken Tristan stumbling around on stage. Except that Tristan doesn't drink, so his imitation was quite poor. They were presenting Djinni, which is their implementation of a fast simulated-annealing algorithm that takes also pressure into account. Sadly, they didn't explain their algorithm but their talk was entertaining nevertheless. At lunch, Spider snuck me out of the building and she showed me around San Francisco. She pointed out the Eagle Tavern with a glimmer in her eye. I think she's trying to corrupt me. Or she's trying to pimp me out. Then we went to Stompers where she tried on some boots. We were stymied, however, by the fact that a very annoying woman and her husband were trying on every single pair of boots in the entire store. iGlance is a real-world video-conferencing and screen-sharing application that has some fairly good usability built into it. It also has a fairly sensible privacy model and does some NAT punching to boot. Although it's only got a Win32 port for now, it's free software so someone will fix it up. Sometime in the afternoon, the beautiful and fair wealhtheow came behind the bar and surprised me with a hug and a sandwich! I was happy with the random hug from a new friend, but the sandwich was wonderful. I had not eaten lunch on Friday so I was very grateful. She put a huge smile on my face. I munched on the sandwich while listening to the OASIS talk. This technology is a locality-aware server-selection resolver, which is pretty good for distributing servers around the world and finding the fastest one. They implement this as a DNS redirector so that lookups are transparent to normal Internet software. This made me feel a little bad for holdenk, whose SelfDirectedProject happens to be on a very similar topic. It does, however, validate his approach. maradydd's presentation about Query by Example was up next. She did a very good introduction to data-mining, which segued into her hack on PostgreSQL where you can specify examples of things you want to search for. That is not how SQL normally works, where you specify constraints. With QBE, you just specify things similiar to what you want, and things similar to what you don't want. I was chatting with Rob Pascual when I noticed Len lining up in the Q&A; queue. Suddenly, my ears perked up as I sensed something important was going to happen. So I pulled out my camera, stepped on some toes, and got into position. When it was his turn at the microphone, he started saying random stuff that wasn't question at all! Something cheesy like how Meredith had changed his life and how he wanted to be with her. Then he got up on stage and asked The Question. It was beautiful. The audience broke out into cheers and applause, except for the heartless bastards beside me. But who cares about them? This was such an awesome occurance that an interview was taped. After teardown, some people were going to head to a franchise Mexican restaurant. Spider insisted that I get real food, so we walked down to the Mission. We made a detour to Good Vibrations which is a San Francisco landmark if ever there was one. I swear that she's trying to corrupt me. Anyway, as we were walking out, I must have mentioned that I was from Canada. Because Cohen, a Torontonian, came out of nowhere and introduced himself to us. Well, what was I to do but to invite my fellow countryman to dinner? So we set off to find a Taqueria that served nopales. This failed since Californians don't seem to like eating cactus. Instead, we went to Pancho Villa where I ate enchiladas and salsa verde and guacamole and churros and I was so very happy! We bid farewell to Cohen after exchanging contact information and tried to find everyone else. Unfortunately, we couldn't reach anyone by cellphone, so we sat around dejected for a while. Then we realised that we could go to Annie's Social Club where an event was happening. This turned out to be a good and a bad idea. It was a good idea because we found everyone at CodeCon. It was a bad idea because Annie's Social Club double-booked us with bad karaoke! And then were quite rude when we complained. And then kicked out John Gilmore. So I just want to say that Annie's Social Club hates geeks and freedom. So Len hailed a black stretch limousine, we all climbed into it, invited some reporters along and moved the entire party to the XYZ bar. The XYZ staff were very awesome, accommodating an extra hundred patrons and getting an extra bartender. And they were very nice about it. Unfortunately, the bar was full, so I had to lead a bunch of introverts in the fine art of taking over an establishment. We walked in, started talking, I encouraged people to sit down in empty spots on the couches. They did a very admirable job of taking over the back. I got the stunningly adorable akashayi a seat and a drink, before I taked to the people sitting with us. They were a couple who had moved from Florida to San Francisco, and a man from New York who was quite the boor. The man in the couple knew the New Yorker and seemed quite embarassed about him. After twenty minutes of conversation, they excused themselves and bid us good night. This gave us plenty of seating space to talk about geeky things until the manager kindly kicked us out. I made sure Akasha got safely to her hostel and then took a taxi back to the guest room. It was quite the challenge to direct the cab driver, since I had lost the directions back, but I managed!

Sometimes I worry about the mental state of Mallum. Under continued pressure, I'm caving in to his demands. Although I refuse to include the <marquee> tag. I'm sorry.

Throughout the last couple of years, I've had some bad decisions. I decided to start using my credit to work for me, and to buy things which I couldn't afford. Partly this was because I had a horrible ex, who I thought I should do things for, and partly because of just living outside of my means for a certain period of time. The long and short of it is, I've gotten myself into a bit of credit card debt. I'm not in any big trouble, just needing to pay it down so that I can get on with using that money for other things. There is a couple of web applications that I have in the works which will help me remind myself, but that's neither here nor there at this point. So, I have all of this credit at high interest rates, surely there is someone out there that will look at my credit and finance it at a lower rate, make some money off of me, right? I'm thinking that what I need is a consolidation loan - something to lump together my credit card debt and give me one monthly payment. What I call this, is debt consolidation. Thinking we are in the age of the internet, I type "debt consolidation" into google and give it a try. This is my first mistake. Apparently "debt consolidation" doesn't mean that you are consolidating your debt, it instead means that you are going into what I would call debt negotiation. This means you decide of your own volition that you are going to stop paying your bills, and try to negotiate with the credit card companies to pay off your debt at a fraction of your actual debt. But I don't know this, so I nievely fill out a couple of forms at "debt consolidation" sites. This gets pretty long, so I put in a break. Read on, MacDuff. The Scam The first people who got in contact with me were some people from Credit Solutions. Let me be clear on this: I'm not making broad generalizations about the company here - I can only speak of my own experiences. The person who I got on the phone went through a whole spiel, "explaining" how it works. He was very high-pressure and very fast talking, just from the start I didn't want to buy anything from him because he seemed like a used car salesman who decided that it was better to make money from nothing than from goods. Here's the explanation he gave me: You've probably been paying your cards down already, so you've paid 70-100% of the cost of your original loan. You stopped paying your cards, wait 3 months, and then they start negotiating with their "powerhouse lawyers". Then they negotiate you to pay your debt at 40-60% of the current balance, and the credit card companies get to take the remaining 40% as a tax loss. Now is when the math gets strange. The man on the phone attempted to say that this meant that the credit card company got 140% of the current balance. This doesn't make sense to me, especially because I'm a smart credit card consumer, and most of my debt is on 0% APR promotional rate cards. This means that they have made at most 3% of the balance from me, based on balance transfer fees. The man on the phone tried to dance around the issue, saying that they actually will get the 40% tax loss and that means they'll still get 140%. 140%? This doesn't make sense - 60% plus 40% is 100%, not 140%. Lets add to this that a tax loss is not the same as profit: a tax loss only gets you like, 30% of your loss. At this point, I've decided that I'm being taken for a ride already, but I ask how it works anyway. Here's how this particular company is setup: I pay into a savings account (of my own), automatically deposit around $200 a month, and they take money out. For the first three months, they take the WHOLE amount. After that, they take half the amount, and leave the other half. They then start negotiating with your creditors, and when they make a deal, they tell you "pay them now". In the end, they take 15% of the settled cost of your debt. On $6k settled debt, this is another $900. I really didn't want to do it now, mostly because of the high cost. The man kept coming back to my objections with "you can't borrow your way out of debt". Of course you can't borrow your way out of debt. That's stupid. I wasn't planning on borrowing money and then ending up with less debt. I was planning on borrowing money so that I'm not paying so much in order to have the debt. Apparently he thought I was an idiot, because he kept repeating it to me. He sent me a little packet of stuff, which laid out the whole plan. After that, he gave me a call back. This is when I got really defensive. I asked him point blank: "What is the worst thing that can happen to me if I go with this plan?" His answer: "You stop paying your bills." On the surface, this is true. The worst thing that can happen is that I stop paying my credit card bills. He neglected to mention the fact that ceasing payment on my credit cards would ruin my credit, cause insane fees for lateness, and possibly send me to forced arbitration with the creditors. Every creditor that I have ever had since 2002 has had an arbitration agreement, which basically would end up in garnishment of wages. The Scum About a week after my first bad experience with a debt "consolidation" company, I got a second call from a completely separate company. They introduced themselves on the phone as "Christian Financial Services" or some such. Basically the same deal, but this was a low-pressure sell instead of a high-pressure sell. He was much more reasonable, and talked me through the whole thing at my own pace, taking his time to lay everything out that I could understand it. It was basically the same deal, 15% and they negotiate for you, but they set up an escrow account instead of you doing it yourself. When I asked the same "worst situation" question, he gave me a realistic outlook, and this company is in a much better standing. If the creditors don't like their negotiation and take you to arbitration, you actually get representation from their company to help you out. I was almost willing to do it. Then I went and looked at their actual company online, and discovered that they are a chamelon of some sorts. They were originally called something similar to "USA Debt Consolidation" or something otherwise patriotic. Apparently they decided that God could be on their side, at least it's good advertising. What good company has to change their name to get religion on their side? A good company would not need to change it's name. The Sweet Some people have gone with these companies, and they have actually negotiated with the creditors in order to pay off your debt at a fraction of the price. If it happens, that's the sweet part of this. Just given an example of $10,000 credit card debt, it is possible to pay around $6,000 and have all of your debt paid off. It's basically saying that you can spend money that you won't have to pay back, ever. There is some hit to your credit rating in the short term, but in the long term, it starts going the other direction. The hard part is finding a company who will do this and who you like. I had an even harder hurdle to surmount - I don't really believe that it is ethical to do this. I spent the money, I should pay it back - that's the deal I made with the company when I signed up for the card. To me, I need to go through with paying them back. Luckily, I came into this with a decent credit rating, and will probably go out with a similarly decent one. Right now, I am a prime target for anyone who wants to give me a large loan at a decent rate - if I can pay less for the money I spent, I'm savvy enough to do it. The Alternative There is one other option which I looked into, and will represent the only company that I will link through this diatribe: Consumer Credit Counseling Services or Money Management International are truly non-profit and have good word-of-mouth from anyone I have talked to. They will not negotiate to settle your debt, but they will work with the creditors to get lower percentage, and help you through your budget. The couple of talks on the phone that I had with these people were very productive, and I got some stuff in the mail to help me out. You pay down the entirety of your debt. The downside is that you get a good size hit on your credit rating. My Choice In my position, I decided that I was on a good track myself already - I'm paying off my cards smartly, taking the highest APR out as quickly as possible. On my current plan, I will be completely debt-free in 3 years, less if I get some windfall of any sort. One of the bonuses of having a good credit rating is that people are willing to loan me money at promotional rates for some amounts of time. When my promos run out, I play financial musical chairs and get the lowest rate on all of my money. That's just for me though, to each his own. The most important part in all of this is that I got control of my budget, and started living within my means. My punishment for living outside of my means for so much time is that now I have to live well within my means. I have to live within the means set upon by having to pay a large chunk of each paycheck to the creditors. Once I'm outside this, it will be much easier for me to have lots of happiness and savings.

Jacobo, nice try, but you can make much better: at least three more atmospheres are needed. I am all flattered, though, but no, thanks, no .

<Yoe> Hmm. is someone pressurizing Amaya to go for DPL? ;-)
<helix> I love it when non-native speakers say unintentionally funny things
<Yoe> helix: hmm? Am I saying funny things, or are you referring to someone else?
<helix> you
<jamessan> pressurizing
<jamessan> that s like putting someone in a hyperbaric chamber
<helix> yeah
<Yoe> ahh. hmm :-)
<helix> you mean pressuring... I hope :)
<Yoe> likely :)
<jamessan> either that or there s a top secret DPL chamber candidates have to be put through
<nickr> amaya must be at three atmospheres before she can run for DPL
<Yoe> three... atmospheres?
<helix> haha
<nickr> its a measure of pressure
<jamessan> ~31k Pa
<Yoe> ah, three bar.

I d like to pressurize Vorlon instead, but Patty would kill me. And I really would love to have a Finnish DPL also.

Now she can’t kill me as, technically, she’s not appearing in the image :-)