Downloads:
/videos/using-gimp-to-replace-heads.mp4
/videos/using-gimp-to-replace-heads.webm
/videos/using-gimp-to-replace-heads.ogv

I cheated a bit in choosing photos where the heads were roughly in the same alignment. To account for that you could rotate one of the photos first. Other methods to paste faces would be to select the head using the lasso tool or possibly magic wand tool and then cut and paste. Another way would be to use layers and layer masks. The clone tool is probably the quick and easy way for what omni550 needs.

Credit unions have fewer, if any, local branches and don’t have as many services. However, some credit unions participate in shared branching, so I can make in-person deposits and perform some other branch-only tasks in a different credit union participating in the same shared branching program.

But I almost never need to go to a bank. The only reasons I’ve done so in the past 10 or so years is to deposit the odd paper check, but now many banks and CUs have deposit-by-scan where you photograph or scan the check and don’t have to send the paper along.

While hanging out at financial forums I consistently heard about good deals on certificates of deposit, loans and credit cards from Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed) and Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU). They didn’t always have the very best, but they were consistently competitive. I prefer to find a company that is consistently very fair as opposed to chasing the best deal every time.

Regulations require that credit unions restrict membership to a defined group. PenFed’s eligibility requirements are generally related to the U. S. Armed Forces and their families, but I was able to join after joining the National Military Family Association for one year for $20. It was well worth it. I’ve had a very good used car loan with them, a decent cash-back reward credit card and CDs with low minimums, competitive rates and reasonable early termination penalties. I use their CDs as my emergency fund since I don’t expect to break the CD, but the penalties aren’t unreasonable if I need to.

Navy Federal Credit Union is said to have generally good CD deals and mortgages. However I have been unable to join them so far since I am not military. I thought I had an “in” when they announced they were acquiring another credit union. I tried to join the other credit union, but paperwork got delayed and I don’t think I ever got an account established in time to join under the old credit union rules.

I’ve done IT work in traditional bank branches, and there are a lot of them, and they stay very busy. I have no idea what those people are doing there. I still can’t think of a reason I’ll need to step into a physical bank—as a customer—in the next decade. Anyway, for my checking, savings, CD, credit card and loan needs, credit unions have worked very well for me without the constant sales emails and snail mail.

Read the site yourself, but as I understand it there is no contract, and I’m paying actual usage at the current price. The co-op buys power in bulk and distributes leftover funds at the end of the year. My interpretation is that I should always get current fair market electric prices. Of course if prices suddenly skyrocket I may be less happy about that, but I’m ready to accept the ups and downs.

NEC Retail’s application process and online services aren’t as slick and comprehensive as Green Mountain/White Fence’s were. To apply I printed out a PDF, filled it out and faxed and/or scanned & emailed it back, and there was some brief email correspondence. I had to provide a voided check to start the bank drafting, and for security purposes they recommended fax instead of email for that. There are convenience fees for online one-time payments and phone payments, but I just have my payments drafted monthly for free.

However, everything has gone smoothly, and my electric bills have been pleasingly low so far. I moved from a newer apartment to a more-than-twice-as-big 40-year old house, and I kid you not my bills are lower. The house has storm windows most of the way around for extra insulation, and the heating/cooling unit is new, but it has skimpy attic insulation and two big energy-inefficient sliding-glass patio doors plus a big old kitchen window with no storm window on it. Also, the weather in the spring and fall has been energy-friendly, but the summer was brutally hot. I guess the point is I am really happy at both the energy consumption of my house and the low electric rates I have so far.

I want to again emphasize to readers that my electric rates are not guaranteed to stay the same for any length of time, and there is no “payment smoothing” plan, so I’m singing happy about my rates for now, but I have to have the budget and reserves ready in case, for example, next summer is as hot as this one and electric rates double or more. I expect to save money in the long term at the risk of always paying current market prices. If you have the budget flexibility and are happy with bank-drafting your electric bill, I say give NEC Retail a try.

As far as I found out, Atmos Energy was the only gas provider option, and although Atmos seems to have an electric division somewhere they weren’t a retail provider for my area. Thus, there is no gas/electric bundling that I found.

I didn’t start writing this article as a promotional tool, but while verifying links I see that I could get a $40 credit for referrals. Hey, if you read this, and it helped you decide to choose NEC Retail electric provider leave a comment and I’ll email you my referral info. (Put your email address in the email field and I can see it, but it won’t be public.)

This post is an update to Comparing Texas Power Prices Again.

My first year in this TX apartment I had a contract plan with Green Mountain, but ever since then I’ve been on the fence about moving within 12 months and as a result avoided signing a contract, and my rates have been high for a while. My current rates are 80% higher than what they advertise on Power to Choose , but the only reason I know that is because I’m a current customer. They don’t seem to volunteer their non-new-customer rates, and those are the ones I’m most concerned about.

So there are 224 options for my new place, ranging from $0.05 to $0.14 per kWH, all temporary new-customer prices. I guess I have to read 224 terms of services to make an intelligent choice?!? I just want a company that will give me a fair price without my having to watch them like a hawk or switch companies every time the contract is up. Which one is that?

(Edit: No multilevel marketing plans, and I’m in the DFW Oncor service delivery area. Also, I’ll have gas in the new place and haven’t yet figured out if anybody bundles electricity and gas plans. I counted 224 choices by exporting my choices to CSV/Excel and then looking at the highest row number. I’ll probably prefer paying actual usage rather than a smoothing/average plan, but I’m not 100% either way yet. I was willing to pay a little more for green power 4 years ago, but right now I may go with a company that burns radioactive-cigarette-smoking kittens in plastic bags with oil-soaked coal for energy if they don’t crank up my rates the moment I’m not looking.)

(Edit 2: Gas heater, gas water heater, gas connection for dryer but currently own electric dryer, electric kitchen, gas patio grill.)

This post is related to my 2007 post on Texas Power Companies. This post is a December 15, 2011 republication of my April 4, 2011 post on Early Retirement Forum.

I still have my card, so they swiped my number somehow.

I’m flying out tomorrow shortly after noon, so AMEX is having a card made for me in Dallas that I can pick up before leaving. Otherwise they couldn’t guarantee delivery to my home before 7pm, and I was wondering how I’d pick up the rental car if they shipped it to my hotel.

They caught the charges after they were approved by the merchant network but before they went on my statement. Pretty cool.

I did eat at some locally-owned restaurants, but right now I’m wondering about my gas station stop. It was a WaWa, a big chain out east (nice stores, by the way), but I had to scan my card twice. I didn’t think much of it at the time; I recall thinking it timed out while asking me other stupid questions or while I was fiddling with the fuel cap. So I’m wondering if there might have been a fake number-stealing card swiper there that I used without noticing. (I’ve heard criminals will attach a fake swiper to steal numbers, but I assume they wouldn’t actually work the pump correctly. Then again, how many pump designs are there and how hard would it be to hack into a pump controller?)

I don’t have a good memory of it because it was raining, cold, I had to pee, and I was shorter on time for catching the plane than I had planned. But I thought the pump acknowledged the first swipe and then I got slowed down between stupid pump questions and the gas cap spun around and around for a while without coming off, then it needed my card again.

Now I’ve confused myself about timing, but I think the fraud charges all started on Tues 1/18, so assuming they started using the account quickly after they obtained the number the suspect-timing transactions would be the WaWa gas stop, the US Air bag fee, the Charlote Douglass airport Bagel place, the book store at the same airport and DFW airport parking.

The phone guy asked me twice about the USAir $25 charge which was my bag fee, so I wonder if they find something suspicious about that.

Later the same day…

4.5 hours after I was aware there was a problem I had my new AMEX in hand. Awesome. I had to drive to Dallas to their AMEX Travel storefront (I thought they sold off that division), but they had it ready for me. They were going to UPS it by 7pm the following day, but I’m flying out shortly after noon.  They could have sent it to my hotel, but then I’d worry about picking up the rental car.

I quit my job again in 2006 to move back to TX to be closer to my niece and nephew(s). (Then one, now two.) Less-than-optimally I quit and moved without having a job lined up and then dragged my feet on going back to work, so I had a little debt again. Then I updated my car when it started having several more serious problems. I paid all that off again, in 2008 I think, and have maintained being debt free and building my savings.

Currently I am looking at buying a house since rates and prices are low, and I don’t see being compelled to move in the next several years. I am contributing to a 401(k) and after-tax savings. My investments are largely on autopilot, and although I’m making progress I may not be able to retire until age 55 or so. I’m 40 now.

After working so hard and long to get out of debt I found it hard to start spending again, but I want to enjoy life now as well as when I retire. It took a while to figure out my balance between saving and spending.

I also find that sometimes I fretting too much about my savings and my job security. When I was in debt it was easier to make decisions on what to do with the money: pay down the debt. Now I have more freedom and sometimes worry too much about whether I’m making the best decisions. I have to remind myself that I am much better off with no debt and a few months of emergency funds than I was when I owed $30k and had only the 401(k) to fall back on if it came to that.

This is a summary update to Personal Financial Summary Age 32. This is a December 15, 2011 republication of my January 1, 2011 post on Early Retirement Forum.

Best Buy was my last single-merchant card. It came in handy for then-big purchases for the no-interest financing. But I can’t think of anything I would buy that I can’t pay cash for now. $1k – $2k purchases for a large appliance or entertainment aren’t a problem anymore. That is so cool! (Plus, long gone are the days when Best Buy had generally good prices.)

So Best Buy and Chase Amazon closed themselves. (Although Chase is constantly cluster-bombing my mailbox with card offers. Seriously?) I just mailed the “close my account and I don’t want to talk about it” letter to Discover. That leaves my Wells Fargo MasterCard as the only inactive open account. It’s my only MasterCard, but who takes only MasterCard? Their terms aren’t impressive, but they never ticked me off. When I used them I found their ad-stuffed-envelopes annoying, but if I find myself using them again I’m sure I can go paperless. I’ll have to reread my earlier ramblings and see if I ever thought of a particular reason to close or keep the WFMC.

Wells Fargo apparently checks my credit monthly. As does AMEX, but I have 3 active cards with them. First USA (Chase Amazon) also checks me monthly.

October 6 update: I just got my email confirming my Discover card is closed! And I didn’t have to talk to them on the phone and listen to their sales pitches.

I know it’s silly, but I was so mad at them I didn’t want to talk to them for years. But all I had to do was mail them.

Discover oddly still hasn’t closed me of their own accord. In the past 9 or 10 years I’ve only activated it once and used it for a couple of gas stops because they happened to call and offer 5% off gas when I was about to move 900 miles via U-haul. I am about to overcome my resistance to calling them to close the account because I am getting really annoyed that they keep mailing me stuff. Stop it!!! They keep mailing those stupid checks, and I shred them because I’m afraid someone will intercept them and try to use them. I think it was them that once mailed me my pin out of the blue, unrequested, to try to spur me to stick it in an ATM. God I hate Discover.

As recently as a year ago I felt a need for some extra credit for emergency funds. I suppose I still should, but I have liquid assets available now, and my three now-preferred credit cards are getting enough use that none of them should be “re-evaluate”ing me. I guess it’s time to finish off the unused credit cards.

Update: I couldn’t find an online way to cancel Discover. You can cancel online access, but that doesn’t sound like an account closure to me. I searched and found that many have complained that Discover endlessly hounds you when you try to close by phone, so I snail-mailed a letter compiled from a couple of internet suggestions:

Please cancel my service and close the above account immediately. No further fees or charges will be honored hereafter. Further, you are hereby instructed that I do not wish to be contacted by you regarding this irrevocable cancellation of service.

We’ll see how that goes.

This post is an update to Replacing Credit Cards

First, I went by two Fry’s and a Wal-Mart, and ALL the Sony’s at all three locations were unavailable to try out because their demo board power supply went out recently. Not that I was married to Sony, but the reviews and price/feature (in the Sony-Kenwood-Pioneer-JVC brands) seemed to point to a Sony between $100 and $200.

I wanted a USB port, but some models didn’t have it, and I saw reviews of some radios saying they couldn’t handle more than 2GB drives. I could have tested this if the damn displays worked…. I was also mildly curious if a radio that could control an iPod would also control a Droid. I doubted it, but it was worth a try (if the demos would power on). My HTC Droid Incredible has issues with sound skipping when playing via Bluetooth stereo headphones profile to my Motorola T505 Bluetooth speakerphone, and apparently other Droid users have similar issues, but the one fix I tried didn’t help. So I sort of wanted Bluetooth built into the stereo but wasn’t sure if my Droid could successfully use it.

While looking they had a relatively cheap Sony with HD FM built in, but again I’ve heard that some people have issues with such units falling back to analog FM and going back to HD as signal strength changes, and they say the broadcasts aren’t synchronous so it’s very distracting when it does that.

So there are several features I thought I wanted, but each had possible or even probable usability issues. I finally decided all I originally wanted was the damn input jack on the front of the radio that every sound-producing device I own has, and Sony had an $80 unit with the same 4x52w amp that the more expensive units have, so I just bought the Sony “cheapie”.

I’m still on an overnight schedule, so last night I stayed up and carefully soldered the radio’s wiring harness to the Hyundai adapter harness I bought a week or two ago, covered the joint with heat shrink tubing and then neatly tie-wrapped it up. I figured it would be easier to do it inside, and not have to mess with it while my dash was apart.

Getting the old radio out wasn’t too bad except four pieces of snap-in trim clip into place with many little plastic clips that gleefully—I could hear them skipping on the way into hiding—come loose and fall back into the dash where I can’t see them, much less think about reaching them.

So I trial fit my new radio, hook up my carefully constructed harness and try it out. No volume. Well, almost no volume with the radio turned all the way up. Long story shorter my wiring harness has a black box with what I deduce to be a speaker-out-to-pre-amp-out converter. I then realize my purchased adapter harness specified it’s for the “premium sound system” which apparently has a factory amp somewhere in the trunk, and I don’t have that. I quite less carefully cut all the tie-wraps, unsoldered the black box from the speaker wires and spliced them directly, then threw some electrical tape and tie wraps at it for insulation and strain relief.

Well that worked much better, so some careful fitting, strategic repositioning of the few plastic trim clips left and other reassembling later I now have a “line in” jack in my car. What’s sad is that I think I’m going to miss being able to use the volume and mute controls on the steering wheel. I’m sure I’ll get over it, though.

I got the Sony CDX-GT240. Fry’s had it at the same price as the CDX-GT340, and as far as I can tell the only differences are that the the -340 has an extra set of pre-amp outputs and rear RCA inputs, and can accept optional (presumably too expensive) upgrades for HD or satellite radio. But they were sold out of the -340, and I am quite sure I’ll never miss the “features” the 340 has over the 240.

Update:A couple of days after I installed the radio my Droid prompted me to install an update. After it completed I noted I am now on Android 2.2 (was 2.1), and I tested the bluetooth stereo play, and it no longer skips. Figures. Doesn’t really matter as I decided to use the iPod to play in the car.