Jay Paroline

I often work nights at Grooveshark, which means I also drive home very late or very early, depending on your perspective.

A few times on my way home, I’ve noticed somebody driving in a fashion that can only be summed up as ‘crazy.’ From a distance it looks like they start to pull up into somebody’s driveway, then turn onto the sidewalk, then back onto the road, and then back up onto the sidewalk again, until I or some other car gets near, then they zoom off down some side street.

Tonight I saw that again and I was on my scooter, so I decided to follow the car down the side street. It didn’t take them long to realize they were being followed, so they started driving even more crazily, speeding and running stop signs, turning off on even more side streets, but still sometimes pulling up onto the sidewalk and then veering off. I started to get freaked out at how freaked out this person was, and how crazy they were driving, afraid that they would decide to try to run me over or something, so I gave up. I turned around and took off, but not before looking back. And at that moment the car I had been following was pulled onto the sidewalk again, and I finally saw the detail I had been missing before. What I saw was a newspaper flying out the window of the car. My crazy driver was just a person delivering papers.

Although I know I shouldn’t, I love Stouffer’s french bread pizza.
What I don’t love is the 30 minute cooking time in the oven, or how it comes out all soggy and gross after the recommended 5 minutes in the microwave.

The solution? 1 minute in the microwave, 10 in the toaster oven. The result? Crunchy pizza perfection, in just about 1/3rd of he time.

This is either creepy, awesome, or a weird combination of the two, but it would appear that I have hundreds of smallish wolf spiders living in my yard.

I occasionally go out at night with a flashlight hunting for mushrooms in my yard (most recent discovery: destroying angel or a close relative). On one such occasion I noticed a strange glimmer reflecting from where I shone my light, almost like a dew drop but different…more colorful. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a small wolf spider. I saw a couple more of those glimmers that evening and every time it was another wolf spider.

Last night I went out, and virtually the entire yard is glimmering in the same way. I looked at quite a few and found wolf spiders every time, so I can only assume that I have hundreds of wolf spiders in my yard right now.

I might be slightly more creeped out by this fact if I didn’t live in Florida, but since I do I know they must be feasting on all the palmetto bugs that have made a happy home of this entire state, so I certainly can’t complain. :)

I’m taking a minor diversion from the normal theme of my posts, and my implicit policy of leaving controversial topics for my personal blog, because what I’m about to talk about should not be controversial, but I’m sure it will be.

One of the sillier arguments I have heard against allowing gay marriage is that it is a slippery slope, ultimately leading us to be forced to accept, among other things, marriage to animals.

Well, recently in eastern India, a boy was married to a dog in order to “ward off tigers.” Does the hypothetical slippery slope work both ways? Will the members of his tribe soon be accepting gay marriages?

Get Rich Slowly has a blog post entitled why I drive a 13-year-old car, which I recommend reading.

I followed a similar strategy until recently. I bought a 1989 Pontiac 6000 LE station wagon a few years ago, paid cash, somewhere between $600-800 for it, and vowed to drive it until it would not go anymore. It was hideously ugly, did not have heat or air conditioning, the electric windows sometimes stuck, and the electric locks would sometimes fail to unlock, but it was super cheap, and insurance was even cheaper. I was able to set aside $250/month as a “car payment” to myself.

When I got rid of that car, it wasn’t even because it needed repairs, it was just as junky as ever, no better, no worse. The problem was that I needed to be able to drive to Orlando frequently, and although the car was great for my in town driving, I didn’t feel entirely safe taking it on the highway that frequently, not to mention the relatively lousy gas mileage of an older heavy car. By then I had saved up enough to buy a “newish” car, but my need wasn’t urgent so I waited until I spotted a great deal. I found a solar yellow 2005 Scion xB that the owner had been having difficulty selling due to the nature of how ugly solar yellow is, but that type of ugly was still a few steps up from my old car, and I was able to talk them down to $2,000 below blue book.

I’m happy with my decision, it’s an extremely utilitarian car which gets very good gas mileage, and it’s a tolerable sort of ugly. I still put aside “car payments” even though I don’t have any, so I’ll be set if anything happens. I think the main thing to take away from the article is that you can save a lot of money by simply owning your car, so that’s my goal: to never have a car loan again. If you start out with a car you can pay cash for and make the same payments as you would otherwise, at the end you have the cash to pay for a new car (plus interest). If you do it the traditional way and buy a car with a loan, at the end you have an old car that may not be worth much anymore. If the circumstances allow it, I highly recommend buying no more car than you can afford with cash.

Then, when you have cash and wheels, you’ll have the ability to save even more money because you have more negotiating power with cash, and the ability walk away from any deal that’s not an awesome one.

It’s almost as if Tuesday never happened…

This evening, while sitting down with Chris Suter trying to work out the finer details of an algorithm over a pint, I was approached by a woman who asked: “This is probably an offensive question, but is that a wig?” in reference to my hair.

For the record, my hair is real, as unlikely as that may seem at first glance.