Took me way too long to actually figure this out, but it’s almost exactly the same thing.

Southwest’s Visa CC charges $69 yearly, but gives you 3000 of their made up points, which equates to $50. JetBlue’s AmEx CC chares you $40, but there are no bonuses.

With Southwest, you’re getting at least 6 points per mile, and can get more if you pay more for your flight. JetBlue? The same deal. 2 extra points are rewarded on both CC’s per dollar used. (This is the part that took most of my time.)

In terms of redemption, Southwest is a bit more direct, in that if you use the Wanna Get Away rates (the cheapest), it equates to about 60 points per dollar. With JetBlue, redemption starts at 10,000 points for round trip… which I really don’t know what to make of it until I spend any more time with this.

Anyone else want to carry this to completion? Someone could find out how many flights would be required to make the CC a good deal. Blah.

EDIT: Oh right. Expirations. Looks like JetBlue’s points expire within a year without card usage, but SouthWest’s points are okay for two years. This is… not worth my time.

I’m just glad I own fake stocks in ATVI. Hooray for theupdown.

Zecco, when will you ever give me an account…

Remind me to buy some Consumer Cyclical tomorrow morning.

The past two days have been up up up. Zecco, freaking make me an investing account already!

EDIT

Okay, Google, fix this fast. Today, Financial seems to be down a bit.

I haven’t really thought about Yahoo as much as I’ve had in the past couple of days.

Google and Yahoo… to normal people, they might just seem like #1 and #2 in the world of online search (there’s a #3? who’s that? ahem). But really, I see that comparing the two companies as a whole is almost like comparing apples to oranges. The commonality that people misunderstand is “search”. But man, there’s so much more!

Both companies are trying to grow. Aggressively. Mind you, Google will be going after Microsoft Office’s market (PowerPoint, anyone?), no matter what Mr. Schmidt is saying at the Web 2.0 Expo (seriously, I only typed “2.0″ cuz it’s name of the conference).

“I don’t think we compete with them. We’re not as fully functional as MS Office — we’re more in line with how people use the web than how they use the desktop.”

I’m not sure how I’ll be using this presentation feature, seeing how I don’t normally create PowerPoints on a day to day basis… but I use Google all the time. The default search engine I use in Firefox is still Google (see how I didn’t say “I google all the time”? Dodged a bullet on that one). I use Gmail for all my email needs. I use Google Reader for my feeds. I also use Google docs, for budgeting and reporting hours for work. I even use Google chat from time to time.

But really, this is only because I haven’t had a reason to try something new. The funny thing is… Yahoo has already been a part of my world… for quite a while, now. While I haven’t really ever used Yahoo search (except to settle a little spat between two friends, Alex and Raj… pertaining to who is really “L Dopa Da Dopsta”..), Yahoo has Del.icio.us and Flickr… two companies very dear to my entrepreneurial heart.

Sadly… Yahoo took a beating on the markets today. Thank goodness I haven’t bought any of their stock. Yet…

What was the point of that? I don’t know. I just needed to relieve some Google/Yahoo steam.

I think this post borders on brain dump… Meh.

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is.

Yes, Mr. Jobs. We want to give you money! We knew June. Of course, a nice rebate would be good.

[Sidenote: By the way, I'm most likely not going to get one. Why? Two reasons: Programmability and Power.]

However,

I don’t likes the looks of thissss.

iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.

“We screwed up. But you still love us, right?”

Of course, Mr. Jobs. We love you. Here, have some more money. When’s Leopard coming out so I know to save up my $150?

While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October.

October? Wasn’t the original date Spring 2007? What, is Apple pulling a Vista?

We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

But of course, had I known this announcement would be made the day after I started my IRA Roth… if I knew about Leopard missing the already pushed back deadline… if I knew the market would look like this for the week to follow:

Blah.

This post made by an ex-Apple employee definitely sums up the possible reason as to why… things are becoming shaky, just a tiny bit.

Already, 1/6 of 2007 has gone by, guys. It’s insane how fast the time goes by when you’re having fun. Actually, the funny thing is it wasn’t all just fun… it seems like time is just out of control at all times, regardless of if you’re ready or not.

While I’m writing this, I have my January’s Month in Review open, so I’ll be able to see where I’ve met my goals or fell short on them.

I want to keep this post as short and to the point as possible. Let’s do this.

On the Blog

I’ve begun to use images quite liberally, thanks to the Markdown plugin and the TextMate Blogging Bundle. Gallery hasn’t even been touched, and I don’t think it will be for a while: Pictures aren’t what I’m going for with this .com, anyway. Same goes with videos and such.

I’ve been giving splitting up the blog into two some thought… and while I’ve been back and forth on this issue, I think it’s best to keep it going in this manner. We’ll see in a month…

Goal to double traffic wasn’t met, but I get to blame the hosting company for that (they were down twice, and once for more than five hours on a saturday night/morning)… kinda. For next month, I just want to beat my last month’s traffic. That’s all.

In terms of a design change, it was supposed to come this past month, but we’ll see how things go this month. That… and I still have to post my old entries up. I also need to restructure the categories… retag… ugh. So much work to do, just for the blog…

On Finances

Looks like the normal for groceries for me is around $150/month. I guess I should still shoot for $100/month, but I really do believe… food isn’t something you should skimp on. Eating out, however… that’s something I can still cut down on.

Discretionary spending should have been $100/month, but this past month, I went out to eat quite a few times. seems to also hover around $150/month. This month, though, I started to “live it up”… like buying furniture (exercise ball/chair) and electronic goodies (earbuds)… this is probably why I exceeded my budget. Darn.

In terms of total spending, it comes out to about $300. Anything left over has been sent into savings… By the end of this month, I hope to start up my Roth IRA… I’ll post when that happens. I still have to finish my federal and state taxes. This, too, will be done by the end of this month.

Investments… will start… soon… dang it. Lots more to learn in this field before I start.

On Spiritual

Initially, for Lent, I had given up things like YouTube, TV shows, and movies. Then I started to play Quake… ONE. Oh man, how much fun. I think I must have sunk a good chunk of time into it. Well… I’m going to say this here: All forms of electronic entertainment is forbidden until Easter.

This includes: ANYTHING Flash, ANY passive media… It’s quite hard, seeing how almost EVERYWHERE I go, there’s a TV on or a browser open to YouTube. Time to strategize how to avoid those situations…

Bible reading is going well. Kinda getting behind (I think… I’m not sure…), because I’m really trying to learn Philippians before Easter… but that’s only an excuse. By the end of this month, I want to be fully caught up. I need to do some math in terms of how many chapters I, then, have to read to catch up. We’ll see, at the end of the month.

On Code

Ruby is definitely coming along. But lots to accomplish before I launch a service with it being the main language of choice.

Work is great. The work that I do for the College of Education is so perfect for me. It’s got a lot of flexibility in terms of hours and when I can work, as well as how applicable some of the things I’m doing for them are. For example, I’m administering Subversion for Network Applications Group. I’m going to be using that skill to start subversion-ing my entire /jk/Sites directory, or even possibly my entire home directory. It’s like getting paid to learn and learn and learn (just like you, consultants).

While I lack the “benefits”, like health and 401(k), I like to think my benefits for leading this kind of freelancer/personal consultant lifestyle are flexibility and freedom.

On Business

So hopefully, by the end of the month… I’ll have a company started. Not sure how to even go about doing this 100%, but I guess something like this… is just meant to be learned as one goes about doing it.

On Foreign Languages

I’m almost done with Pimsleur’s Conversational Japanese I started… last… summer. I only really got into trying to go through the system at the beginning of this year. I should be done by the end of the month, easily.

I’ve also finally finished downloading this 10GB torrent of a Japanese Language Learning Pack. I ended up throwing away about half of it, but man… there are some good stuff here. They even have TV lessons! Whoo hoo!

Hanja, I’ve kinda given up on. I guess that 5 characters a day rule went out the window. Let’s hope I can get some kind of system in that lets me continue in this area.

On School

For the MBA, I’ve decided to not go for this upcoming year. Period. Maybe the year after, but not this year.

On Health

It’s becoming very hard to run for my usual 30 minutes, even though I only run every other day. I think my exercise routines are becoming more and more “weight”-heavy now… but I need to start cardio again.

My back is killing me. I think it might be because my back is so weak… more deadlifts for me!

In the past month, I think I missed WIMPE a couple of days: A few due to the snowstorm and a few due to laziness. I hope to go six times a week, minus one rest day somewhere in between.

In terms of diet… Mike Cho told me something about the Boxer’s Diet: Chicken and Broccoli. Period. This scares me a little bit, but I get the point: Very little carb intake, with a humogenous protein intake. Of course, I’m not going to do it like he did for 3 straight days… but I’ll be trying this out, replacing maybe one meal a day for this craziness.

I’m going to give up carbonated drinks again… for like the 30th time. I’m not sure when this started back up again, but it’s been creeping back into my life. It’s time to go cold turkey like before, and stick to water, orange juice, and milk. It doesn’t matter if I have to do an all-nighter… I think I’m going to go caffeine-less, too, like before.

Ugh. I feel so vain talking about physical goals… it’s strange though, I don’t feel so vain talking about intellectual goals…

My my, how judgmental I am, of even my own self.

Closing

This post was supposed to be done on the 28th of last month. Ugh. I feel like writing on my blog is quickly becoming a chore. Also, I feel like I don’t even know who I’m writing to. That issue of splitting up the blog into two plagues my mind every time I start to write an entry…

“Who do I write this to?” This is what’s stopping me from writing endless entries about either myself or about other things. I mean, I want to write about how I pulled two all-nighters at Wardall lounge with the freshmen, but that doesn’t appeal to everyone. I want to write about how things are going in my life, but who wants to read that garbage. I want to write about how RSS feeds aren’t being adopted by the mass public and how to mass-adoption a reality, but no one wants to read that either.

AHHH!

Well, here’s to another month of living! So exciting, so filled with unknowns!

Your Real Tax Rate: 40%

40%, eh? Too bad this article didn’t include anything about singles in their 20′s…

After I got back from Cincinnati, I was so tired… I went to take a nap. Instead, it turned out to be a 5 hour one. I guess I’ll be off cycle for tomorrow. This is why I’m writing at 2 AM, CST.

I don’t know if you guys noticed, but I stopped making the daily list a while back. I had intended to make those lists monthly; a kind of “self-performance review”. I guess this is the first of many to come.

I’ve decided to break it down into subject areas… and so, here we go. In no particular order.

On the Blog

I promise to use more images. As soon as I figure out how to fix this image linking problem in TextMate. The image gets uploaded, but for some reason (maybe this is a feature), I have to create the image HTML element myself, which seems silly.

While on the subject of images: I guess I won’t be using Gallery for my blog image solution after all. It looks like WordPress/TextMate is an awesome combo. I might consider using Gallery for hosting pictures straight from iPhoto, but I’m sure there’s some Web 2.0 startup that’s looking to make it easy and painless… I’m looking at you: Sharpcast.com.

I also think that joshkim.org will become first and foremost, a blog. I think I’m going to formally announce the dropping of “/blog/” today, and implement the change with the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. While that happens, I also need to implement a swankier interface… which I will painfully chronicle as I do so, so you guys don’t have to deal with plug-ins and whatnot if you are also creating a wordpress blog.

I haven’t even touched my “combine all previous posts into one” project since last year. I need to get started and finish it this month, so that Mr. Google can index it and I can finally have one place to go for all the Josh Kim fun.

Oh, and I want to double my site visits this month.

On Finances

In terms of expenses, I have only a few things. Apart from student loans and other bills… basically, it comes out to groceries, gas, and discretionary spending that changes from month to month. I’ve been trying to find the average spending on each category by tracing my spending for about two months. It’s become a habit to keep my receipts and check with my online statements (I hate checks and checkbooks… and paper).

Looks like I dropped my spending on food by about half, compared to December. This was achieved through this one rule: to eat out only ONE meal a week. Eating out has been categorized with “discretionary spending”, along with any fun things I had to pay for or gifts I’ve purchased. This month was kinda lopsided because of the iPod shuffle purchase for my sister (which, by the way, I’m lusting crazily after… it’s so cool looking), but still, I managed to keep it under $150. $100 is the goal for this month.

Groceries, though… The first time I went shopping after I got back, I bought almost $100 worth of groceries. I still have some of the stuff I bought from then, but man… I hope to never spend that much on food at one time ever again. Data for groceries was lacking, because while I did live in apartments for a year last year, groceries were split up between 5 people… and so I didn’t really have a clear number. This month, I ended up with about $200 for this category, which might be a little bit more than I should be spending. I’m going to be aiming for $100 for this coming month… we’ll see how it goes.

Gas was interesting. Without taking to account the trip to Cincinnati and back ($20), I ended up spending less than $50 on gas for the month. I will once again shoot for $50.

So that’s $250, on top of bills and student loans. All extra cash… well… that’s another post, dealing with retirement planning (yes… I’m doing it…) and investments and savings.

Right, taxes. I’ve already ran through the Federal, but I want to make sure I get all the deductions I deserve. Hope to finish by the end of this month.

On Spiritual Life

Seems like I’m a little behind on my Bible reading, but I’m actually not. The initial goal was to read 3 chapters, from start to end. The thing is, I got tired of Genesis real quick. I’ve done this book to death, since I’ve tried reading all of the Bible many times before. I think I even read it through in Korean, back in the day… So, I started to read Proverbs. But that wasn’t enough, so I jumped into Paul’s letters in the NT. Currently, I’m reading more than three chapters a day.

I just need to continue with this. In the morning, prayer and NT reading. In the afternoon, or other free times, OT readings.

Ah, let’s enter into prayer. I’m still having a hard time praying for the world at large. I feel like there are enough issues with me and me and me and me and other people. I feel like I put God in a box sometimes… I gotta pray through this one, as well.

On Code

Programming is fun and irritating all at the same time. But it gets that much more fun when you sit through the irritating times and figure it out.

Just yesterday… an IE bug annoyed me to no end. I had to make a design choice because of this bug, and ended making the wrapper background white because something wasn’t stretching properly (no, I’ve tried every hack in the book, and no, I don’t like hacks).

What I’m learning is to be flexible… in a lot of ways. I might even have to learn .NET this month, seeing how this multi-authentication system is going… or I might just get stuck with the PHP side to it, I don’t know. Even re-learning coldfusion is continuing to help me see how important flexibility really is…

It’s not the language, it’s the concept.

And while, yes… I’m finding certain areas of programming to be increasingly annoying… but someone (i.e. ME) should fix it so that it isn’t as annoying or annoying at all to other programmers going through the same thing. That’s the beauty of open source. Huzzah.

But closed source is fun too. Hooray.

Ruby. Need to keep going with ruby. I see great things in the horizon.

Also, some projects need to be written down on paper. Not a full blown business plan, but just some stuff. Post it online for the world to critique.

On Foreign Languages

Korean. I’ve completely stopped Hanja all together. I need to restart that goal of learning one page per day… but let’s tweak that to half a page a day for this month. I’ve also started a vocab list of Korean words I come across that I don’t know the meaning to. That list is going to get large real quick. I should also continue writing email to my mom in Korean.

Japanese. Going to continue with Pimselur for listening and speaking. I want to review one lesson and move to the next lesson each day. Hooray for WIMPE and mindless running… In terms of writing, I still have no clue with katakana. I still want to focus on hiragana, first, though, and so I want to go through one lesson in the Korean Japanese book each week.

Chinese. I’m not even going there. Someday… someday…

On School

MBA Info Session in two weeks. GMATs in four, if I ever register for it. Admission Essay and Application due in six. Awesome. I’m still not 100% sure if I want to go back to school… hmm…

In Closing

Wow, it’s day break. You’ve got to be kidding me. Okay, back to work.