Enough with the corny jokes… In a lot of ways, I am glad to see 2011 become history. There were a lot of hard times in 2011, and I’m not just talking in generalities. Several of our church members have had a really, really rough year. I know that new year’s day is just like any other day in the grand scheme of things, but we humans like to think of it as a fresh start. A time to reflect on the past for a bit, then to make it into a new start.

I do pray, for all of you, as Moses did:

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:

The Lord make His face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:

The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

Once I was finally able to eat, things were all better.

On Wednesday, I was finally able to go to church (We had been in revival meetings beginning on Monday). It was rainy. I stepped on our makeshift sidewalk in my already slick, but now partially mud-covered boots. My leg went one way, the rest of me went the other way.

Instinctually, I tried catching myself with my left arm extended. I extended it too far. In fact, I hyper-extended my elbow. I considered linking to a video to demonstrate what I mean, but I’ll spare you. If you really want to watch one, just search for it on youtube. It stayed very stiff and very sore for a couple of days, but it’s good now. I still feel a little sore, but the stiffness is gone, and I can generally do whatever I want now.

As a part of the doctor visit on Tuesday, I was given a prescription medication. I wanted to try to use it in the mornings, so I tried it for a couple of days – Friday & Saturday. It has warnings about possible dizziness and drowsiness… I only slightly felt those symptoms, but it was enough to stop taking it in the mornings. All I felt like doing was napping (which my wife says I feel like doing too much of anyway).

So now that I’m past all of that, I’m actually feeling pretty good today. Even though it’s Monday. I’m looking forward to a short work week and a great Thanksgiving!

A few days ago, it reached 100,000 miles. The best I can tell, it still runs like it was brand new. It runs at least as good as it did when we bought it, at which point it had just under 60,000 miles on it.

Anyway, I made a corny video documenting the milestone. Sorry it’s shaky – we were driving obviously. And no, I wasn’t videoing while driving. Becky ran the camera while I drove.

Dad helped get it up into my yard – he pulled it with the tractor. He was able to pull the whole thing into the yard, but once it got on the softer ground it needed to be cut in 3 pieces before he could get it to where I needed it so I could cut it up, split and stack it.

Becky and I worked on that for a little while last night after I got home. I haven’t done much manual labor over the Winter – I’m not used to it at all! Maybe after I work on firewood for a few weeks I’ll get into a little bit better shape.

I’m about to make an admission now about something stupid I’ve done, and have learned a lesson the hard (and expensive!) way. Last year, I neglected to check/change the oil in my riding mower. Some of you already see where this is going. Yep, it finally caught up with me and the motor seized on me. I added some oil back in and had to force the motor by hand to turn some so I could work the oil back in and get it started again.

I mowed the yard a couple of times without incident after that. But that 3rd time it really caught up with me. I’m not a motor-head, so I don’t know technically what happened, but I can say all the insides started making a racket and something let go. There’s a hole in the side of the motor about the size of a golf ball.

We only needed to mow one more time after that, so we borrowed Mom & Dad’s riding mower. Wouldn’t you know, one of the belts broke. So we gave up on mowing the rest of the yard and decided to make another go of it this Spring.

When I ruined the motor in my mower, I looked online to see how much it was going to hurt my wallet to replace it. All of the prices I found were pushing $1,000 by the time I paid shipping & taxes. Once I noticed the weather was warming up, I remembered I needed to do something about our yard. I looked online again and found a motor for roughly $630 shipped. It’s on its way to my house now. Hopefully I can get it changed this weekend and actually get my yard mowed.

So yes, I’ve learned a lesson. I’m learning overall to be more disciplined about different things, whether it be finances, maintenance or whatever. I’m finding it to be less stressful and less expensive.

The Network

As most of you know, AT&T doesn’t have the best coverage in the country. Years ago, it was better in my area than Verizon was, but they seem to have gotten complacent with their current infrastructure.

Now, before you jump all over me about it, I know the iPhone is coming to Verizon. My next point will begin to clarify why I went with a Droid X rather than the iPhone as far as the device itself in relation to the carrier.

I tried hard to love my iPhone on AT&T. I had convinced myself that it was of huge importance that I be able to browse the web and talk at the same time on one device. However, that specific scenario rarely ever came up, if at all. Not to mention, you had to be in AT&T’s 3G coverage for that to work. Their older Edge coverage would only do voice or data – not both. And guess where I live? Yep, right smack-dab in the middle of their Edge network.

Alas, AT&T offers this handy little device called a MicroCell that will solve everyone’s coverage problems. It’s actually a neat concept – you plug the device into your existing Internet router, enter your AT&T numbers, along with those of friends and family (up to 10 numbers total) and you have an instant 5-bar full 3G coverage in your house. Reception quality was great, but there was this nasty 2-3 second delay between what one party said and the other party hearing it.

While that was somewhat bearable, it only worked if I was inside my house. If I walked down the road to a neighbor’s house, my coverage went back to nil. Where I live isn’t the only issue. The place I work has poor coverage as well. We even put in one of those repeaters, and my signal at my desk was rarely more than 1 bar.

So, in the two places I spend the most time, I had poor coverage with AT&T.

The Cost

New iPhones in the US with a new contract cost $199 and $299 for a 16 GB and 32 GB model respectively. Granted, if I go to Verizon’s website, a Droid X will cost me $199 on a new contract, but only after a $100 mail-in rebate. I hate those…

In a nice tip I received, I found out about amazonwireless.com. This isn’t a plug for them, but I had to point them out. I bought two phones from them – the Droid X for myself, and the HTC Incredible for my wife. On a new contract, the combined price for those two phones was $30. Apple won’t make their iPhones available to resellers at a discount that big. This played a huge part in me making the switch early and canceling my existing AT&T contracts. My wife’s contract had 5 months left, and mine had 15 months to go.

Including the discount I get via my employer, the Verizon monthly bill will come out to be a little more expensive than AT&T’s bill. The coverage I get, however, more than makes up for the cost difference.

The Platform

I’m an Apple fan. The people who know me know this. My wife and I both own MacBooks. We have Apple TVs on both our TVs, and we also own an iPad. We even have the Apple sticker on the back of our car. Apple hardware and software is hard to beat. It all works seamlessly together.

However, the openness of Android made the final case for me to switch. Long before I was an Apple fan, I was a Linux fan. Linux is by nature open, and Google built on that. The idea is that using Linux, you can do pretty much anything you want, and usually for free. (Before I get too far, I realize that the ‘free’ in Linux usually refers to ‘speech’, but the reality is you can still do most anything you want in Linux for free, as in my wallet loves it.)

So for Android, Google kept the platform open. There are a few cases where ‘rooting’ an Android phone will give you extra functionality you couldn’t otherwise get, but the actual need for that is pretty much non-existent when compared to the need to jailbreak an iPhone to get the same functionality as a non-rooted Android phone.

On iPhone, you can change the background/wallpaper, and you can change the order of your icons on your screen. You can pick from a handful of alerts for incoming texts, and you can customize your ringtone, but everything else, you’re stuck with. That’s pretty much the extent of customization on iPhone.

On Android, you can customize everything. You get useful, functional widgets that you can place on any of several home screens, along with folders, icons, shortcuts, and just about anything else you want to put there. You can customize alerts for everything, using any sound you want. Notifications are also much more flexible. Rather than seeing only the latest notification, as on iPhone, you get a list of notifications so you don’t miss anything.

The Android platform is different, and requires some getting used to. But it’s not so convoluted that it’s hard to use. It’s intuitive enough that it makes sense and won’t cause any issues for those wanting to switch.

Conclusion

To some, these may not be very good reasons to make a switch in carriers and device platform, but it all made complete sense to me and I haven’t been sorry, and doubt I will be.

Thanks for reading!

Yesterday, I ran across an article over at Cents to Share explaining how you can set up a budget in Excel (or any other spreadsheet application). I’m a Mac user, and although Microsoft Excel is available for Mac, I prefer Numbers, part of Apple’s iWork suite.

To follow along with the article, you’ll need a basic understanding of spreadsheets, cells, and how to reference cells in formulas. Just understanding the concept is fine – the article explains the formulas in great detail, although the formulas themselves are not complex in the least. That said, I’d like to stress again that although the article is written about and references Excel, the formulas will be identical in any spreadsheet application I’m aware of – it only uses simple =SUM(CELL:CELL) formulas.

I ran across the article, and it looked like a simple task. The hardest part was categorizing everything I have expenses for – the rest was simply following the instructions and logic of how the spreadsheet was structured. Once you have that, it’s a breeze.

I encourage everyone to go take a look at the article. I plan for this to be a simple, but effective financial tool for my wife and me to use to better manage our finances. I even added a chart to give me a picture of how our income looks, compared to our accounts and expenses.

When you’re finished, you’ll have a result that looks something like the following (taken from the linked article – the numbers are not real..oh, and click for full size):