Last month I spent a couple weeks working on my finances.  Specifically I was working to consolidate some debts into some cheaper loans.  Every few months and sometimes even every few years I find it necessary to fine tune my finances, my debt, my credits, my investments in many other aspects of my life.  I am actively involved in managing my finances on a day-to-day basis, but sometimes I find it necessary to take a step back and look at the big picture and make some choices about the directions I will need to take to maximize my results.

So last month after letting things run for several months on their own without too many corrections and cores, I decided to make some moves to make some dramatic changes and improvements in the course of my finances.  These types of changes are never entirely easy however technology is making it easier these days.

In my situation, I consolidated several different types of loans with a larger loan at a lower interest rate and the longer-term.  This served to reduce the number of pills I have to pay every month, it saves me money and interest and it also reduces the amount of cash flows I “have to pay” every month.  Right now I’m in the middle of starting up a new business and I need and desire the flexibility of having lower monthly payments and fewer bills to pay.  Saving money was just a bonus but a very important bonus.

After consolidating loans, the new loan was supposed to send funds via a electronic wire three to the accounts that were being paid off.  Unfortunately the technology failed in this didn’t work.  So I had to take the funds and establish an online banking account to make payments from the larger accounts each of the smaller accounts paying them off.  This worked fine on two accounts but the wires got crossed on the third account and it took probably another two weeks to straighten out the ensuing mass from the technology going wrong when I was trying to fix the technology that previously gone wrong.

Murphy’s Law plays a very active role in both finances and in technology people looking to improve their finances shouldn’t be put off by the fact they could probably will run into complications along the way.  It’s still important to make those corrections and improvements in your finances regardless of how hard it is to fix things.  Take the strong medicine, it may not taste great but you be better for it.

I do a considerable amount of research on a daily weekly and monthly basis on finance.  I also happen to have a double major in finance and accounting and a Masters in tax law, but I always find new and useful information to either enlighten me or give me a new perspective on ways I can do things better.  What I’m trying to say is the matter how much you know or how much you done you can always make improvements and find good advice.

There are many resources online that can help you to find good advice.  You can easily find good advice on debt consolidation tips and you might even take a look at several of the specific articles including the article on understanding credit card statements. I am a trained accountant and I still run in the credit card statements sometimes it gives me pause and make me reread them two and sometimes three or four times to ensure that I truly understand what it is the credit card companies are trying to tell me and what they’re trying to hide from me.

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It almost sent a substitute teacher to prison for forty years, when it triggered an endless number of pop ups that were displayed in front of a classroom of seventh graders.

Prosecutors initially relied on faulty evidence from an investigator to convice Julie Amero a 40 year old substitute teacher on four counts of risk of injury to a minor.

It was only after her conviction in January after a 4 year legal battle that security experts and bloggers came to her rescue forcing the disclosure of evidence that her computer was infected with spyware that caused pop-ups.

She was granted a new trial and the prosecutors have indicated that they will not move forward with that new trial. 

The problem is that she has lost four years of her life fighting this problem, four years of legal bills. four years of slander against her reputation.  All of this due to Pop Up Porn from spyware.

Something like this could easily happen to almost anyone that works with minors, but it could also create serious problems for anyone whether they are at work in an office or even in the privacy of their own home, where their own children happen to witness a bombardment of pop up porn hell bombs.

Please do scan and clean your computer, but remember at the end of the day, anyone is still susceptible.  To me this means that prosecutors and the public at large has to become a little more tolerant of the fact that we are all victims of this software.

Link to Teacher’s porn conviction overturned - Security - MSNBC.com

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Last year the US Congress passed a number of laws that cracked down on online gaming sites.  This has not slowed down the industry and probably shows the impotence of US law to impact an internet industry all by itself.  US authorities were obviously influenced in part by established brick and mortar gambling institutions when they crafted the laws that were not friendly to the online community.  This coddling of brick and mortar institutions that have long histories of problems makes the moral stance that the US took online seem hollow.

More and more sites that were once dedicated solely to carefree online games are moving into the virtual big time offering people the opportunity to gamble online.  Playing games is a social aspect of life that goes back many millenia.  The internet is almost a perfect tool for enabling people to socialize from all around the world and when you bring the two together you get an online gaming industry that really can not be stopped or slowed down. 

The internet has long had the potential to flow like water around physical jurisdictions and that is exactly what is happening with gaming online.

Case in point is BackgammonMasters.com, they have historically provided people with the ability to play backgammon online at BackgammonMaster.com and at a sister site for backgammon, called gammonish.com.  They have now opened up poker rooms on their site where people can gamble for real money.  They even have setup an incentive where the house will not take a commission on the games played by members against other members.

The bottom line is that online gambling is legal throughout most of the world.  The United States has established a law that is only partially enforceable against businesses in the US and against persons in the US playing games.  The concern of the US government is that these sites and the people that gamble on them could use the site to launder money, collude or a number of other activities.

Online gambling sites do have this potential, but the nasty truth is that any business that operates online has the same capability.  If someone really wants to launder money, they do not need to attract attention by establishing an online gambling site, all they have to do is establish an online business.  In fact, the law has probably done more to hide money laundering activity than to prevent it.  It has probably also served to clear money launderers out of a large segment of the online gambling industry.  Why would money launderers choose to perform their illegal activities where they know the authorities will be watching when the world wide web is infinitely large and offers many other rocks to hide under.

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Below is a quick video tutorial that I created to demonstrate how to use Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 to dictate text in a dictation box and push it into a single cell within Excel without spreading the text into multiple Excel Cells (bit of a tongue twister with all those cells).

The topic used in the example is decidedly non-tech, but hopefully it conveys the message well enough!

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The more work I do with audio and video these days the more tedious I find it to work with individual files, one at a time.

Often I need to convert video or audio files in batch processes or let them run in batch when I’m not on my machine.  TotalAudioConverter from Softplicity provides this capability.   TotalAudioConverter (TAC) can perform batch conversions on multiple audio file types.  Running Batch Audio conversions can definitely speed up production time and make the overall process much less tedious.

This batch conversion software works fairly easily.  Just select your file(s) and right click to launch the conversion.  It supports the following file types:

1. WAV,
2. MP3,
3. OGG,
4. WMA,
5. APE,
6. FLAC,
7. MP4,
8. AAC,
9. MPC

If you have a file in one of those file types, you can convert it one file at a time or in a batch process.

The Price is right!

You can download the software for free for use during the first 30 days.  That is pleanty of time to determine whether or not the software will work well for you.  If it does, you only have to pay about $20 to keep it permanently after that.

Twenty dollars for a audio file converter that supports batch processing with just a couple clicks is pretty cheap!  TotalAudioConverter is definitely worth a try if you work audio files regularly.

Dragon Naturally Speaking Dictation Potential

I plan on testing it out soon with the Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation tools.  I’m curious how well DNS9 will work when I convert an MP3 file or some other file into a .wav file and run it through the transcription tool.

The price of this software utility is free for the first 30 days.  After that it only costs about $20.  Thirty days is pleanty of time to determine if you will use it or not.  If so, then $20 is not too much to pay for the time you can save by picking up TotalAudioConverter, especially for batch jobs.

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