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Since buying our house our savings account has really taken a beating. It’s down to about half of what it was before we bought the house. I was expecting that to happen because we wanted a bunch of stuff for our new house.

Now we are pretty much settled in. There shouldn’t any more major purchases for a while. The other day we sat down and looked at all our expenses and tried to find things that we no longer use and could do away with. It’s amazing how much little things add up. From Netflix, Audible, my web host, DirecTV, phone, cell phones, and internet sure add up. We unsubscribed from HBO since neither of use could remember the last time we watched it, but we didn’t really want to get rid of any thing else. We were tempted to get rid of our land line. When we moved we had to change phone plans and out phone bill went up $15. We rarely use our land line. It is mostly used for incoming calls that we don’t want on our cell phone and it is also nice to have when we have family visiting. So last week I signed up for Vonage. I got it all set up today. I am a little nervous about the quality, I haven’t used it enough to tell how good it is, but for only $15 a month for 500 minutes of out going calls local or long distant and unlimited incoming calls is a pretty good deal. For $10 more I could have got unlimited minutes, but I don’t see us ever using more than 500 anyways.

So I guess we have saved $50 a month so far. Not much, but every little bit helps. I don’t mind paying for things we use, but I think we have a lot of waste. Next year our goal is to get our saving back up again to what it was before we bought the house. We feel much more comfortable knowing that if something major happens, we have enough in savings to cover most things.

Like everybody else that has the DirecTV HD DVR I hate it. My DirecTivo is so much nicer. The DirecTV HD DVR menu system makes no sense, and it’s hard to find things you are looking for. The worst thing though it that is just misses things all the time, and you have to reboot it at least once a week or it will lock up and wont record anything either. As soon as DirecTV comes out with something better I am getting it. They made up with Tivo and they just recently bought Replay TV, so I am hoping they use one of them to improve their crappy DVR.

Over the weekend I downloaded an episode of Numb3rs that the crappy DVR missed. We watched it streaming to the XBox. The new upgrade to the XBox 360 is super cool. It played the the file no problem and looked really good. So then I installed Ted. Ted stands for torrent episode downloader. You can subscribe to shows and it will go out and look for new episodes and automatically downloads them. With Ted and the XBox 360, I might have a good work around for my crappy DVR. We will see how it works.

One thing I learned from having my brother-in-law living with us is that I have a lot of pet peeves and am pretty anal about some things. It bugs me when people don’t put things away. We have drawers in out entertainment center for our XBox games and DVDs. He is always leaving games and DVDs all over the place. How hard is it to put them away when you are done? He also leaves dishes in the family room. You have to walk past our kitchen to go to bed. Can’t you bring your dishes to the kitchen? He also leaves his shoes right in front of the front door. I am always tripping over them. We have a closet right there for shoes and coats. Use it. He also always cranks up the baseboard heat in the bathroom. How much time do you spend in the bathroom? Does it really need to be 90º in there? Isn’t it hot enough when you get out of your 30 minute shower? Yeah, he takes 30 Minutes showers too. It will be interesting to see what our water bill is like after he moves out. I think our last one was $65. One more week and all these annoyances will be gone. I can’t wait.

If you have been following my on Twitter you would know that I got my new phone. I got a LG Voyager. It has a lot of similarities to the iPhone. I now know I would have probably spent the money on an iPhone if they were available in my state. My Voyager may not be quite as sexy as an iPhone, but it’s pretty close and has features that the iPhone doesn’t, like a replaceable battery and the ability to record video. I also couldn’t imagine using the slow EDGE network on the iPhone. I find the speedy EVDO slow enough.

The wife didn’t really think I needed such an expensive phone, so she wanted to upgrade he iPod. She had an old pink Mini. I couldn’t really say no since I just spent $300 on a phone. So I also bought my fifth iPod yesterday. She got an eight gig Nano. It’s crazy how small they are. It looked small in the store, but once we brought it home, it looked even smaller.

I think our Christmas presents to each other are bought now.

YES!!!!1! LOSER BROTHER-IN-LAW IS MOVING OUT IN 11 DAYS!!!!!

Ok, yeah, I am a bit excited. I am sure he is moving out because we are going to charge him rent. Oh well. He will learn that it’s no picnic living with his parents when he is not going to school either. I wish the kid luck. He just has some growing up to do. Someday after he grows up we will laugh at the time he spent here and drove us nuts. For now I am just glad to get our house back.

One of my newest favorite bands is The Action Design. Emily from The Action Design was Agent M in Tsunami Bomb. Tsunami Bomb was one of my favorite bands also. In fact I am wearing my Tsunami Bomb t-shirt right now.

I saw Tsunami Bomb play in the basement of our VFW. It was by far the smallest crowed for I concert that I have been too. There were maybe 100 people there. It was awesome. Emily was even watching the opening bands from the back of the crowed. I drove by the VFW a few hours before the show, and saw Emily unloading their fan. I was so tempted to stop and help her. She also hung out with some of the fans after the show. I was too much of a chicken shit to go up and talk to her though.

I was a little sad when Tsunami Bomb broke up, but I think I like The Action Design even better. I ordered their first EP that was hand made and individual numbered. I got number 46 of 1000. They have since re-released their EP with a couple more songs. I of course bought that too. It’s on Amazon in plastic and downloadable form. Here is an interview with Emily that I ran across. She is so cute. How can you not love her band.

For the most part I use MarsEdit for all my blog posting. It has a simple clean interface and I highly recommend it for any bloggers using Macs. From time to time I am away from my MacBook that has MarsEdit on it and I have to use the usual WordPress dashboard. One thing that has always bugged me is how small the edit window is in the WordPress dashboard. I have looked all over and couldn’t find how to make it bigger, so I looked into the code myself.

The file you will be editing is /wp-admin/post-new.php. It’s just a matter of changing one number. Look for this line in the code.

Changing the edit window size is just a matter of changing the numbers after ros and cols. I changed mine to 40 rows and 40 columns.

So loser Brother-in-Law has finally come clean about not going to class. He is now paying rent as of January 1st. That’s nice and all, but I wish he would just move back in with his parents. He also has to now pay his car insurance that his parents were paying. It’s been over a week since he last worked, so I am hoping he can’t afford rent so we can kick him out.

This seems to be the hot video of the day. I am seeing it all over the place. It’s pretty funny.

What a crappy weekend. My loser Brother-in-Law that is living with us had some friends over. They got here Thursday night and didn’t leave until Sunday night. They slept downstairs and hogged my TV and XBox all weekend. The wife and I are getting pretty fed up with her Brother. Our deal was he could live here rent free as long as he was going to school. I wanted to charge him rent. Not because we needed it, but because it would teach some responsibility. I got overruled on that and he is living here rent free. I don’t think he will be here much longer though. I couldn’t tell you the last time he went to class. He stays up all night and sleeps all day. He quit is job where he was actually getting hours, and got a new job where he works about ten hours a week. Then he complains he has no money. I am hoping my wife kicks him out soon since it is obvious that he is no longer going to class. He has even admitted to not registering for classes for next semester yet which starts in January. I so can’t wait until he is out of here.

Oh yeah, we also got 7-9 inches of snow here, but that isn’t really enough to talk about.