Writing Takes Longer Than I Thought

Well, I’m still working on my new blogs based on personal finance and
technology. So far, I have about 20 posts planned out for the personal finance one, but I haven’t touched the technology one yet. I’ve been toying with writing my own blog engine for the technology one – not because there aren’t good blog engines out there, but more as a learning exercise (and it would use some of the newer .Net features that the other blog engines haven’t used yet). I’m not sure if I’m going to do that now or not…

I have maybe 3 personal finance posts written, but still need to proofread them before I make them public. My original plan was to not post anything on the personal finance site until I have about 14 posts ready to go so I can queue them up and start writing the next week or two worth of posts. That’s still my plan as of right now, but this is going to be harder than I imagined as far as keeping fresh content coming out. My target is to have one new article a day during the week. I just have to figure out a rhythm and then hopefully it’ll get easier, but I guess we’ll see.

I may go ahead and start the tech site as well with a series of posts about building a new blog engine. I’m not sure that I want to do that or not, but it may be useful and having feedback on the design as I go along would be helpful. Just have to find the time to do that too.

I’ve also been trying to get back into the habit of taking more photos and getting a little photoblog up and running, but I think that one is on the back burner for now. Just not enough time to do everything.

Countdown to Debt Free

At the end of last month, I paid off my student loans – it was quite hard to write a $14,000 check, but once it was written, I didn’t regret it at all. It feels great knowing they are out of the way. The only debt I have left at this point (other than my primary mortgage) is a second mortgage I got when I bought my house (my down payment didn’t go as far as I had hoped due to closing costs, new house expenses, etc). This one is higher than my student loans ($18,000), but it’s possible that I can knock it out by the end of the year assuming no major financial issues arise between now and then. I may end up having to sell some stuff to make this happen, but we’ll see how that goes…I’m willing to do what is needed to take care of business.

This morning I sent in my monthly payment with a nice little $500 additional principle attached and I’m already starting to feel better. 🙂 Debt free, here I come!

Sci Fi Rewind Is Great

I love Sci Fi Rewind – I haven’t had cable TV for two years now and the one show I wanted to watch, but couldn’t find legally online was Battlestar Galactica. Now Sci Fi finally has it online for free on Rewind. BSG may have been on there earlier, but I never found it until this season. The thing I really like about Rewind is the fact that the commercials are short and the video automatically resumes once the commercials are over. I like ABC.com’s quality (particularly the HD feeds – really nice video), but I really dislike having to click the done button once the ad is over…I’m just fine with the ads, but please, show them and then get out of the way. I’m glad to see Sci Fi understands this.