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Daily Links: Technical Difficulties Edition
Wednesday, 7th May 2008 (by J.D.)This article is about Spare Change
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Some of you will wake tomorrow to find the same post at GRS you saw briefly on Tuesday morning (the bike metaphor). You’ll be confused. “Is this a re-run?” you’ll wonder. It’s not. It’s a technical glitch, for which I apologize.
This site runs on WordPress, a popular blogging platform. There are many good things about WordPress, but the software was recently upgraded, and frankly WordPress 2.5 sucks. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes suckage from a blogger’s standpoint, but what’s worse is that there are at least two problems that affect readers.
Sometimes — for no discernible reason — posts I have scheduled for days (or weeks) in the future suddenly “go live”. This happened a few Sundays ago when an entry scheduled for June went live in April. (An entry that currently only contains a single link!) And it happened on Tuesday, when the entry scheduled for tomorrow went live. There are other problems, too. For example, I cannot delete comments on some entries. Very frustrating.
Enough grousing. What you really want are articles about personal finance. I’ve collected a pile of them!
What would you do with $1,000? That’s the question U.S. News and World Report’s Alpha Consumer, Kimberly Palmer, asked three personal finance bloggers recently. She posted my reply today, and will share other responses over the next couple days. Palmer is also holding a contest. She wants to know what you would do with an unexpected $1,000 windfall. Would you save it? Spend it? Give it away? Answer this question at Alpha Consumer to have a chance to win.
Meanwhile, Kristy at Master Your Card has an awesome piece about not judging a book by its cover (where book means: “dude in a bank”). She works in the banking industry, and has learned that you cannot assume that you know someone’s worth just by looking at them. This is 100% true, and someday soon I’ll share an example from my own life.
JLP at All Financial Matters recently wrote about a topic very relevant to my life: how to squash the new car bug. “Our Buick Rendezvous will be six years old on June 1,” he says. “The idiot side of me wants a new car.” JLP wants a Buick Enclave and not a Mini Cooper, but otherwise our situations are similar. I, too, have had to learn to shake the new car itch.
Elsewhere, Money magazine has a great “money makeover” this month. They profile a wealthy couple in their mid-thirties who keep a lot of their money in money-market fund. They’re much too young to play it safe, the article says, and should be thinking long-term. I often find these sorts of pieces boring, but for some reason I liked this one.
Finally, the Los Angeles Times recently printed a piece from P.J. O’Rourke about fairness, idealism, and other atrocities. I’m not a big O’Rourke fan, but I liked this article. His advice: go out and make a bunch of money, don’t be an idealist, get politically uninvolved, and forget about fairness.
See you tomorrow morning with the “re-run that isn’t”.
23 Responses to “Daily Links: Technical Difficulties Edition”
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May 7th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I wish they’d simply maintained the 2.4.x branch like they did the 2.0.x branch, once I get my blog set up the way I want it, I don’t care to have a major interface revamp just to get security updates.
I’m still on the last 2.4 wordpress release, I’ll hold out for a while longer, hopefully these issues get shaken out.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Hi J.D., many thanks on behalf of myself and Kristy for the link to our site.
Like Red, I’m also still on the 2.4 release. This wasn’t so much a deliberate move as it was sheer laziness on my part.
I guess sometimes procrastination pays off!
May 7th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
That’s odd, I haven’t had any problems with WP2.5. Especially not as you’ve described. I did have a problem with a post disappearing — very odd — but I had the text saved. Sorry to hear about all of the troubles!
May 7th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Strange. Glad I haven’t upgraded yet. Well, I have upgraded some other sites, but not my ‘big one’. Haven’t noticed any problems with my 2.5 installs, but they don’t get much use either.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
My work blog upgraded; I am most displeased. It seems like the same buttons do different things for no discernible reason. I’m never sure what will happen when I hit “save” and I’m tired of looking through everything to find the basic functions again.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I tried to go to 2.5 and the “5-minute upgrade” they promised took me several hours, after which my blog completely crashed. I then spent several more hours reverting back to 2.4 so I could get my blog back up and running. A whole day wasted!
May 7th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I haven’t had that happen yet(crosses fingers), but I still have not gotten the image insertion to work correctly at all, kind of frustrating.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
The link to the article about the young people with a safe money market account is taking me to an article about a 55 year old couple. Am I missing something? Thanks.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
May 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I’ve had no problems that i am aware of with 2.5, hopefully they sort it out.
May 8th, 2008 at 4:28 am
Holy Cow! You have posts scheduled three months in advance? I’m lucky to have them 3 days in advance.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:38 am
My car is about to turn six too. This month I have had two mechanical problems that got me thinking about the new car bug. One was relatively easy to fix myself, replacing the battery. Cost me about $60 and an evening of my time. The other is a $350 sunroof motor fix I can’t do myself.
I keep reminding myself that I don’t have a car payment, so $410 worth of repairs is not that bad. Its only slightly more than the car payment I left behind almost a year ago.
This isn’t coming out of my emergency fund by the way. Its coming out of money I would have put into savings from what used to be my car payment. Because I didn’t inflate my lifestyle when that payment went away, I am able to handle it, whereas in the past I would be worried, and maybe even put the repairs off altogether. So I owe yet another thank You to the PF community.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Sorry to hear that you’re having problems with your install. I personally feel that about 90% of the new features/layout of 2.5 are excellent. There’s always those nagging issues with every upgrade, normally due to new versions of plugins not being available…
May 8th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Sorry, but all I took away from the P.J. O’Rourke piece was essentially this:
1. F*** poor people.
2. Getting rich is good for the environment.
3. We can never clean up politics. So why even try?
4. (see 1, above)
5. Are you poor? Well then God has forbidden your desire to better yourself. (also see 1, above)
6. I am an enormous, greedy douche.
I hope that this article was facetious, but I really can’t tell. The different points seem to contradict each other too. So even if it is a joke it doesn’t make any sense.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:17 am
I found the O’Rourke piece frustrating for a different reason: it begs the question of whether being fair and idealistic are really that counter to doing well for oneself. I don’t think that they are.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:19 am
May 8th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Yeah, at first I got the same frustration too with the PJ piece, but I think in the end he’s (or she’s?) trying to say its not necessarily evil to pursue wealth, and you can do it within a framework of principle. I’m not familiar at all with his (or her?) writing, so its hard for me to tell if that impression is accurate.
The last point is “Don’t listen to your elders”, iow, don’t take my word for it, let your own values be your guide as to what’s right in this unfair world.
I can’t say that I agree that building wealth isn’t a zero sum game though. When one person accrues wealth, someone else necessarily loses a bit of theirs. This is the nature of a system where wealth is defined by access to limited resources, be it gold, or oil or time or what have you. Even if you build your wealth by inventing a new thing, you are likely taking something from the commons to do so; even if you are giving back in some other area, someone, somewhere is probably losing something. This isn’t necessarily always the case, but I think its true most of the time. It isn’t fair or unfair, its just the nature of Capitalism.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:54 am
I’m still stuck on the new car bug. Problem is, my German car is turning 100k miles in the next couple months, and every other month or so, the transmission failure light comes on. Dealer says it will fail and require a $7500 replacement soon, mechanic says it’s fine unless it starts acting up again.
I’m biding my time but pretty sure I actually have a legitimate excuse because $400/mo + a $7500 repair is way more than trading it in and making $300/mo car payments on a newer vehicle still under warranty.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am
With $1000 windfall, I would UNFRUGALLY spend it on a new Macbook (after student discount) for my daughter’s high school graduation. We’re a little bummed out that we can’t do that for her like we’d planned.
Another great post.
Thanks for sharing!
May 8th, 2008 at 9:59 am
JD, feeling your pain. While I don’t think WP 2.5 sucks, it definitely has issues. I too have had the same problem you’ve had but not near as frequently has you’ve had it.
I’ve worked most of the issues out though, an my biggest problem is that some of the UI changes just didn’t really make the system more usable, but actually made it more difficult.
Anyway, I’m on 2.5.1 and looking forward to 2.5.2. I do love Wordpress though, so willing to live with the issues.
Are you planning to learn PHP now?
May 8th, 2008 at 10:36 am
I just don’t get new car lust. When my car was new, I worried about every shopping cart and kid with a basketball. With older vehicles, I can stop obsessing about their appearance and just appreciate their functionality. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that whoever keyed the entire right side of my car did me a favor, but you get the idea. :p
May 8th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
I sincerely hope that O’Rourke article was a joke.
May 18th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I’ve had similar problems with WP 2.5 on one of the blogs that I run (thankfully, not my personal one). Here’s hoping that 2.5.x fixes the problems…