JDPFu.com 2025

SunRocket was my VoIP provider. They’ve run a number of specials – most recently $199 for 2 years of unlimited service
Let me know if you want to sign up. A referral would be much appreciated.

August 2007 Update — They’ve gone out of business. I kept my Gizmo and moved to a new, monthly only, provider. That provider has some problems. If I figure them all out, I’ll post an entry here.

Investing for retirement made simple. I’m not an investment advisor nor do I have any certifications related to investing.
If you don’t enjoy working with numbers, tracking down "cheap" companies selling at a good value and monitoring them daily, weekly, monthly, then here’s a simple set of ideas for doing reasonable well investing for retirement.

• Pay yourself first – whatever the monthly amount is that you are going to invest, consider it a bill just like your rent or mortgage.
• Save at least 10% of your GROSS income for retirement – this applies to both husband AND wife in a marriage. If you are single, you need to save more.
• Start saving early – it is amazing the difference that starting at 25 years old makes when compared to starting at 35 years of age. At age 55, the total amount is staggering.
• Asset allocation (putting a little money here and a little money there) is very important to ride the ups and downs for each part of the market.
• Unless you are 5-10 years away from retirement, avoid bonds. Some people will disagree with me on this.
• Ok, the target asset allocation for someone under 50 years old (in my opinion) is:
  • 50% Large CAP stocks (an S&P500 fund or ETF) These are the core of your investments, steady, predictable growth well above inflation is needed. If you want to be a little riskier, find a "value" Large CAP fund or ETF. Morning Star LrgCAP Funds
  • 30% Overseas (EFT or worldwide fund) You might ask why? Growth rates overseas are likely to be higher than in the USA over the next 30 years, IMHO. Morning Star Worldwide Funds
  • 20% Small/Mid CAP stocks (ETF) Smaller companies tend to grow faster than large companies, but they also tend to fail more. Morning Star Small CAP Value funds
• Be certain to take enough risks – Certificates of Deposit are not risky enough for your retirement, unless you are retiring within 5 years. Then you should ladder your CDs every year so that for any 5 year period, your income from your investments is completely guaranteed.
• Don’t put any money into any stock, mutual fund or ETF that you might need in the next 5-10 years. Sufficient time is important for risk management.
• Avoid market timing, something called Dollar Cost Averaging really does work – basically, this means send the same amount in every month. When the price is high, you buy fewer shares. When the price is low, you buy more shares. Simple. Be certain to buy those stocks that are cheap with your monthly inputs. AND don’t forget diversification! Never forget that.
• If you aren’t willing to do the time monitoring and researching, stay away from HOT TIPS from the gym and water cooler.
• Save for your retirement before saving for your child’s college education – college loans are easy. There’s no such thing as a retirement loan.
• A good enough guess for how much money you should have before retiring is 12x your annual salary. $50K calculates to $600K needed at retirement. There are many, many assumptions and your needs will be hirer or lower based on too many factors to assume. More conservative estimates go with 25x your annual salary – that’s $1.25M. Which do you think can better weather a 10 yr bear market or critical health issue?
• Here’s a retirement calculator that might be helpful to estimate how much you need to save to reach your goal – both IE and MS-Excel is required for it to work (sorry, it was too easy for me using these tools).
• Try to keep fees to a minimum by using a discount broker with lots of No Transaction Fee Mutual Funds and low fees to purchase stocks (Under $13 per trade). Avoid churn.
• Never buy a fund that requires a front-end or back-end load or 12b fees.
• Avoid high fee ETFs and Mutual Funds with fees over 1%.
• Look for top ranked mutual funds followed by Morning Star – try to purchase the mutual funds in the top 25% of short term and long term performance for the type of asset class you are trying to get. Mix Value and Growth AND Large, Mid, and Small CAP companies. Asset Allocation is critical.
• Be certain that you have 6-12 months of living expenses saved and available outside your retirement investments.
• You should be in good overall financial shape before you begin investing – no credit card debt, no long term car loans (over 3 years total), you get the idea. If you aren’t certain, you have a problem to be solved.
• Never have more than 20% of you total investments in a single investment – once you have $50K total. This includes the company stock that you work at. I count my annual salary towards this 10% rule and don’t have any company stock where I work – my salary is enough of an investment.
• Your house is only an investment if you can sell it. You will still need someplace to live.
• DO review your investments every quarter and verify you are in investments in the top, say 30% of the class for performance.and DO rebalance your portfolio annually to get back to the 50/30/20 allocations (approximately).
• If you do these simple things, anyone can retire with over $1M saved by saving $250/month. It just takes consistency over the 30+ years of saving. Average returns in your investments will get you there.
• Keep the market ups/downs in perspective with this graph

Some helpful links:

• Dollar Cost Averaging
• Asset Allocation | Asset Allocation is more important than the actual investments selected!=
• Yahoo Finance
• Mutual Fund
• EFT
• If you are looking for more Links … I currently use NAIC stock selection methods and Manifest Investing and have used The Chartist advisory service for multiple years. If you’re looking for an easy way to learn NAIC investing methods, check out.

• http://jdpfu.com/pda/
• http://www.google.com/palm
• http://mobile.wunderground.com/
• http://news.google.com/news?output=xhtml&hl=en
• http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/raw?dp=quote&ySiD=HdTxRBSirLiWxV1UdgjG
• http://www.schwab.com/wireless
• http://myganav.com/www/pda/

Cisco has a handy table
that compares quality (subjective) with bandwidth based on most of the popular codecs used by SIP VoIP ATAs today.

BR = Bit rate
NEB = Nominal Ethernet Bandwidth (one direction)

Are you saving enough for retirement? Probably not according to PBS/Frontline.
Over a 30 year working life, experts say you need to save between 15%-18% of your salary.

PBS-Frontline for more.

Another simple way to guess what you need is 12x your salary is your target for retirement.
The 401(k) plan probably isn’t the best solution for your retirement unless you learn how to invest – unfortunately, it is probably the best option that you have. You really don’t have any choice — learn some basics about investing and get started.

Schwab says you should expect to need about 25x your last year expenses before your first year of retirement. Check it here

Don’t put this off. You need to understand this sooner than later. GET HELP if you need it.

Or you will probably end up working when you should be retired.

Ok, we all need energy. We need it for our homes, computers, refrigeration, radios … normal household items. We need it for our cars, our businesses, to pump water, to mow our yards and just to have fun. Basically we either need energy at a static place OR a type of energy we can take with us, portable energy. Energy is either kinetic or potential; moving or something that can be moved.
Fossil fuels are good because they are portable and we have 100+ years of experience handling them, but there are negatives. Agreed?

For simplicity, let’s ponder just on home and car energy needs. If we can create a plan that solves those two energy types, most of the other energy problems can probably be solved.

For your house, we use solar, geothermal and wind power to create electricity. On sunny or really windy days when excess power is created, that excess power is used to convert hydrogen monoxide, water, H~2~~O into hydrogen and excess oxygen. The hydrogen is stored in containers in your garage for "other uses." If your solar panels leave room for water heating panels, use them to heat your water for bathing, washing, AND heating your home during cold periods. Today, solar and wind probably can’t fully support your total energy needs, but even 20-50% would make a huge difference if most of us did it. Higher efficiency solar panels are on the way, but you still need a way to have power at night and on cloudy days that last weeks, so plug into the power grid anyway. Geothermal power isn’t an option for most folks, unless they happen to live near geysers. This energy is all about having a thermal gradient that can be leveraged to heat and cool some type of liquid. In most states, the power company has to pay you for excess power.

For your car, we need a portable power solution and works at night, for over 300 miles of travel, and can be replenished along the way in 5 minutes or less. Your house will create hydrogen for this portable power need. The fuel cell in your car can work, just like the Space Shuttle uses. A car with 300-500 miles per tank is needed with performance similar to cars in use today. If you like, an electric car can also work, but battery power cars generally can’t have air conditioners too and need 4+ hours to recharge. Electric cars today have a 30 mile range except a few models with 60 mile ranges.

Sound too simple? It is. there are lots of problems. Solar cells are only about 20% efficient and are very expensive. Recently there have been headlines for new solar cell technology with 40% efficiency. Great, when can I buy them? I propose a requirement that wealthy homeowners building new homes worth, say, over $700K (inflation adjusted), be required to install solar panels on the roof. This will cause many benefits beyond local power generation. As there is more demand for solar cells, greater efficiency in production and in the cells themselves will occur bringing the price down for everyone. Also, these larger houses require more energy just to exist, so think of this as a way for the wealthy to pay back on their overuse in a small way. Over the long term, their homes will actually cost less to run thanks to this surcharge. Al Gore, are you listening ?

Hydrogen created from anything other than solar or geothermal or wind power or some other non-carbon creating renewal energy source isn’t very smart. That’s a mouthful. Hydrogen, H~2~~, appears in nature, but only rarely and never in the quantities we’d require to drive cars.

The US Government should sponsor an X-Prize -like contest for the first solar cell with 85% efficiency and a 50 year lifespan installed in over (500) 2000 sq ft homes, say the prize is $30M US. That provides a highly efficient, reproducible, manufacture-ready solution for everyone and it creates a buzz in the industry.

Cars and hydrogen power? Why? Purely electric cars don’t have the distance needed for most households and can’t be recharged in less than 5 minutes. Hydrogen cars can. The key to hydrogen cars is local generation using electrolysis, storing the hydrogen and having water available. Storing hydrogen is fairly difficult – it is the smallest atom and slowly escapes from all containers. This means some kind of chemical storage device is needed – something like a sponge for hydrogen that will easily release it. Perhaps another Auto X-Prize is needed? The other key is to have these hydrogen generation at every house and business. Basically, if there is electricity, there ought to be a hydrogen power plant. Decentralization, that’s the key.

So you have some items to think about. Can it be done? Certainly. Popular Mechanics

Lastly, ethanol from corn is just crazy! It takes almost as much energy to create (need 1 acre of corn to power the tractor used to farm the 1.24 acres corn) than you get back from the ethanol. Stupid, stupid, stupid . Why bother? This is anti-GREEN. Just because you aren’t causing the CO~2~~ to be released, doesn’t mean someone else in the chain is. The only way using ethanol makes sense is if it can be created using either solar or wind, 100% renewable energy sources.

Article on Well to Wheel efficiencies. The total cost of getting the fuel from the ground and making a wheel turn are calculated. This article confirmed what I knew intuitively – we must use solar or wind energy to create hydrogen, converting other fuels into hydrogen is too lossy to consider.

Ok, so let’s agree all this can be done. Who might want to stop this? Well, who has the most to lose or would need to change the most for local power generation and non-petroleum power? We all need to watch those industries carefully to ensure they don’t stop the changes. We need to convince these companies to change – and risk the change – into creating we need for local power generation and support the early adopters. Governments should also take bold steps to encourage risk takers in these areas. Just look at what Germany has done for electrical power already.

These are the main links I send friends:

• Slickdeals
• BensBargains
• Woot
• /.
• Freshmeat
• Lifehacker
• Linux.com
• http://www.voipgo.com/
• http://www.hotwire.com/
• Weather-Marietta
• http://bigal.jdpfu.com/
• Security Now!
• SwansonRules
• http://manifestinvesting.com/ – [[NAIC-based|http://www.betterinvesting.org/]] Investing Site; [[M* Dashboard:TinCup|http://www.manifestinvesting.com/dashboard/20]]; [[M* Dashboard: Solomon’s Select|http://www.manifestinvesting.com/dashboard/334]] [[M* Dashboard: NAIC Growth|http://www.manifestinvesting.com/dashboard/1222]] [[NAIC Discussions|http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?webtag=ws-naic]] on CompuServ
• http://www.stockcentral.com/
• http://earnings.com/ – quarterly company conference calls.
• http://portableapps.com/
• http://portablefreeware.com/
• PDALinks
• http://pda.jdpfu.com/
• http://www.jdpfu.com/dr/ – Disaster Recovery Lists for Home Evacuation
• http://www.zkoss.org/zkdemo/userguide/ – ZK – Simple AJAX/Scripting WOW!
• http://give.org
• http://charitynavigator.org
• http://RetailMeNot.com
• http://BugMeNot.com

No news on the site maintainer. Sorry.
If you feel that you must email me, take a guess at my email address – good luck with that.
If you want a response, tell me who said, "you got the wrong guy. I’m the Dude, man."

My email this will open a new tab or window.

Sorry about the email hoops. Spam is getting really bad here.

Textile formatting tips (advanced)

Need an external SATAII Enclosure? Check these guys out Very interesting.

Here’s another player. The DS-500 is an eSATA 5 drive RAID system.

You’ll want a hardware RAID 5 controller card too. Adaptec, LSI Logic, eWare, Highpoint and Raidcore are listed on Tom’s Hardware. Highpoint has linux support for current releases. Promise’s linux support is very dated. I never got Promise to work in HW RAID on Linux.