iMurphy

    I get crazy ideas when I’m trying to go to sleep. I often think about going back in time and doing a better job in my life, knowing then what I know now. But lately ‘ve had a series of ideas that I think it’s worth blogging about. I wasn’t inspired by the song “I had a Million Dollars”, but that’s the idea. But it’s not just a million dollars, it’s a million dollars a day. I imagine the source is busted drug, or the patent on shoelaces, or whatever; it’s not important. The important thing is to think of what you would do and the problems you would face still face if you had all the money you could want.

    This very quickly becomes a serious problem that reveals one’s character. Retirement happens nearly instantly. If you wanted to give complete financial independence to anyone (perhaps your new child), $30,000 a year times 80 years is 2.4 million, plus 2.6 more for a one time lump pay-out, or as backup, equals five million dollars. That’s just five days. You could do that for every person in America in less than three and three quarter years. (This makes me wonder what is happening to our taxes where billions of dollars are tossed around like this all the time.)

    Next up on my agenda would be tithing. I think our little church in Lynden, WA would be completely beside themselves with $500,000. Even Faith Presbyterian, where we’ve been going in Tacoma, WA would be overwhelmed with just a few million. I think I would end up giving a lot to a lot of Reformed denominations, but that would still only eat up a few days.

    I guess I have revealed something about myself already: I would feel obligated, wherever the money came from, to do something good with it. I have a lot of thoughts on this matter, but perhaps I should ponder them more fully. Obviously, I think about starting a hospital under my supervision. I will make this an entire category of blog entries and revisit it later. More to follow …

I admit it up front: this is a selfish plug for something I want but can’t afford: a Panasonic SV-SD50. Maybe you could buy it for me for Christmas? Go in with someone else? Anyway, it uses SD Memory, something we already have some of, for our digital camera. It can play real audio, MP3’s, AAC’s and WMA’s. One AAA battery will last 30 hours and with our current memory card, it could hold 5 hours of music. It’s no iPod, but for under $100, its cool.Alright, I know I don’t need this, but we have 30 GB’s of music (some obtained over gnutella via Aquisition, but lots from the iTune’s Music Store and from our mountains of CD’s).  We buy boxes of CD-R’s for cheap from Costco, but we burn some many it would be a lot less wasteful to just have an MP3 player. I am trying to not be greedy, but people seem to never know what to get me (partly because G5’s cost $3000), so I thought I’d tell you about something and give it a lot of links. Cheers!

I’m not sure why, but I went looking for a smartphone the other day (I thought these were the combination between a PDA and cellphone). I went to Best Buy to see if they had a good guide, and instead I see on the front splash page a new invention: digital camcorders that burn DVD’s! There are models by Sony and Panasonic, among others. Who knew? The Sony one’s use DVD minus R’s and RW’s. DVD RAM is the standard favorite by The Great Satan, so I must oppose it. What I didn’t see is FireWire ports on any of them. Does this mean they won’t work with iMovie?

As I was looking for smartphones, I used Apple’s list as a starting point. What I wanted to find was BlueTooth enabled, multimedia phone that takes SD Memory. No guide listed items according to this criteria, and it was like pulling teeth to find on the company websites which phone took SD cards and which multimedia phone could play 3GPP movies. I was inspired to look for this when I saw a young woman sitting in lecture with me at University watching The Matrix on her little, instant-messaging device (like the kind rappers love). After an hour, she pulled out one SD card and put in another, and proceeded to watch the second half of the movie! We already have a few SD cards for our camera, so I thought I would love to do that. I used to be able to find things at dealtime.com (now shopping.com) by the categories I liked, but the cellphones, at least, are grouped by who you can get a deal through, so it’s like clicking on ads, not info. Oh well!

When I think about some possible careers to sustain my family over the next dozen years in America, I consider being an RN first and foremost, but some twisted little corner of my mind thinks I could be a DJ. I know, it’s nuts, but I think about some times. I would need a Denon DN-S5000 or two and an X800. There’s a site dedicate just to the mixer. It’s for scratching CD’s and MP3’s, ’cause I’m not about to start at zero and go looking for vinyl. So, the minimum to get started would be around $2300.

Well?! Nursing school’s bound to cost that much, it not more! I could write music on Propellerhead’s Reason, maybe use a Music Machine or two, and crank out some really ill tunes. It’s fun to dream about.