Pixels, Jerry! Pixels!

Eric D. Snider contemplates how Seinfeld would spin the latest technology if it was still on the air.

In the Clutches of Clutch

I went to a concert Wednesday night. It was my friend Dave's party. He's getting married on Saturday, so this was his last vestige of freedom. He chose to go see a band called Clutch. I didn't really know what I was getting into, but I figured it out quickly at the gate, where everyone I saw had extreme tattoos, body piercings, and hair styles out of the 80s punk scene.

There were four bands that played. The genre I can only classify as "loud" (kind of like Dave's band :). I had to roll my own earplugs using toilet paper. Aside from the noise, another fun thing about the venue was that there was no place to sit. I guess people don't mind standing for 3 hours after they've had enough to drink, but for a perpetually sober person it got pretty tedious. A few times I sat on the concrete floor.

The first band was pretty talented but loud. The second band my other friend Dave labeled as "zepplinesque". The third band was Irish, with a fiddle and a banjo. Very talented, but I thought it was funny that the band members all looked really angry while they were singing, even the violin girl looked disgruntled. They were good but they went on way too long. By the time Clutch got on stage it was close to 10:30. This is a school night people! Surprisingly, Clutch didn't seem to be any more talented than the opening acts. I think the key to their popularity was that they had a really big banner, while the other acts had small banners or none at all.

A little bit after Clutch started playing I was leaning against the barricades in the back of the room and some drunk guy came back there and started puking his guts out a few feet away from me. I was wearing flip flops and I felt a few drops splash on my feet. ECHHHH!! I went in the bathroom and washed my feet off. I didn't really feel like going back in after that so I went and sat on the dirty floor in the lobby and waited for my friends, who were busy injuring themselves in the mosh pit.

I'm not really sure what scene I was a part of, but it was fun to experience a different world for one night. But I think I'll wear shoes next time.

Good luck Dave, we'll miss you!

The Best Self Directed IRA

I've been doing a lot of research recently about the best company to use for a Self Directed IRA, so I thought I'd better share my knowledge.

What is a Self Directed IRA?

A Self Directed IRA is an IRA that allows you to choose your own investments. Your current IRA provider will probably tell you that you can choose your own investments -- "Oh sure, you can choose between the Janus Fund and the Fidelity Fund." No, that's not what I'm talking about. With a real Self Directed IRA, you can invest in not only stocks and mutual funds but also real estate, businesses, notes, and just about anything you want, as long as you avoid certain prohibited transactions. Prohibited transactions are simply transactions where you use the money to benefit yourself instead of your IRA, but it's important to read and understand the details.

So if you're tired of losing money in the stock market and getting jerked around by self serving mutual fund managers, a Self Directed IRA is the way to go.

You can easily convert a non Self Directed IRA into a Self Directed IRA. You can also convert a 401K, if you have one sitting around from a former employer. If you have a 401K with a current employer, you probably don't want to convert it to an IRA, since you would no longer get matching funds.

Downsides of a Self Directed IRA

While Self Directed IRAs offer a lot of advantages, there are also some downsides to be aware of. For one thing, you can't just go out and invest the money. You have to have a custodian company (i.e. babysitter) that actually does all the investing. So, for example, let's say you want your IRA to invest in a house. Rather than writing a check to buy a house, you have to request that your custodian send a check. And instead of managing the property yourself (not that you'd want to), you have to hire a property management company and the custodian has to pay them out of the IRA. There are a few little tasks like this that the custodian has to carry out, and they all seem to cost money.

Self Directed IRAs also have issues when buying property using leverage.

But the upsides definitely outweigh the downsides.

Selecting a Custodian

I looked at all sorts of custodians. Some really nickel and dime you for every little thing, (Pensco and Sterling Trust for example). No thanks.

A lot of real estate gurus promote Equity Trust for some reason. Equity Trust doesn't nickel and dime you as much, but their annual fees get really high (up to $1850 per year) if you have a lot of money in your account. And I for one plan to have a lot of money in my account! So no thanks.

Entrust offers a pretty good deal. But the best one I found was Sunwest Trust. They charge a $50 setup and then a flat $190 per year if you go with the IRA LLC option.

IRA LLC

The best way to go when setting up your Self Directed IRAs is to set up an IRA LLC. "IRA LLC" is not a legal entity type. It just refers to an LLC that your IRA invests in. The operating agreement will have some verbage relating to the fact that the LLC is set up for your IRA. If you're only going to have your own IRA investing in the LLC, then you would set it up with the IRA as the sole member of the LLC, and you as the manager of the LLC.

Setting up an IRA LLC provides the following benefits:

1. Checkbook control. Once the LLC is funded, you no longer need the custodian to write the checks. The LLC can write its own checks, and since you're the manager, you have control.
   
2. No nickels and dimes. Since the custodian is only managing one asset, you pay a flat $190 per year, if you go with Sunwest Trust's Single Asset Account plan. Entrust has a similar plan for $250 per year.
   

Options for Setting up the LLC

Now you need to set up your IRA LLC. How should you go about it?

1. You can have your lawyer set it up. He will probably charge you $3,000 to $5,000. And he may not know much about Self Directed IRAs. Not the best way to go.
   
2. There are companies such as Guidant Financial, which provide the LLC and also administrate the IRA. Guidant is not a custodian, but they have an agreement with an unnamed custodian to only charge $130 per year for the annual fee. But setting up the LLC costs a whopping $4,000.
   
3. You can have a less expensive lawyer do it. You should be able to find someone in the $500 to $1000 range. In Arizona, Richard Keyt is a good option. He's very experienced at creating LLCs, and he gives a $50 discount for AZREIA members. His cost for an IRA LLC is $949, which includes filing the articles and publishing.
   
4. If you google "IRA LLC kits" you'll find a few inexpensive options such as this one, which costs $195. I'm not sure how worthwhile these kits are.
   
5. I bought a CD on ebay which had some good stuff, including an operating agreement for an IRA LLC. Cost: $32. Search for "IRA LLC" on ebay and you'll probably find it.
   

I am not a lawyer, but my guess is that the operating agreement content is probably not as important as the lawyers say it is. You'll probably be fine setting up your own. But the important thing is that you avoid prohibited transactions, and file the proper paperwork with the IRS. For the LLC you need to file an informational return each year, which basically just tells how much the LLC is worth. For the IRA your custodian should handle the needed forms.

A Better Solution

I decided that Sunwest Trust had the best deal, but I may not end up using them. "Why not?", you ask, (no doubt recoiling in dismay). The answer is that I found a better solution: It's called an Individual K, or Solo 401K.

I'll tell you all about it in my next post...

El Sonido de Silencio?

I discovered a Peruvian restaurant near my house, only a year after it opened, and went there for dinner, con una muchacha bonita es claro. I had a fish dish and something purple to drink called Chicha Morada.

The food was good, the people were nice, the server's name was Lali (as in Lali-pop), and they even had musical entertainment. Pan flute and guitar as you might expect. You might also expect that the first song that they played would be El Condor Pasa. But instead we got... The Sound of Silence, by Simon and Garfunkel? I'm very confused. Are all Simon and Garfunkel tunes of Peruvian origin? Was the band confused about which Simon and Garfunkel they were supposed to be playing? Had they been drinking too much Inca Cola? We may never know.

But I did learn this little tidbit from Lali: "Real Estate" in Spanish is Bienes y Raices. Yes, goods and roots, that's what I do.

Reading For Success

I've been reading some good books lately. Here's a list of 5 of my all time success related favorites. Naturally I just wish I'd read them all 10 years earlier.

	Secrets of the Millionaire Mind T. Harv Eker This is a great book about how rich people think, and how to de-program your poor person mentalities.
	The Magic of Thinking Big David Schwartz Written in the 1950s but still very relevant today. Talks about how success is an attitude and a decision. It's pretty clear that a lot of more modern authors borrowed many of their ideas from this book.
	The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen R. Covey The quintessential personal improvement and success book. (Reading all these books is a Quadrant 2 Activity!)
	The E-Myth Revisited Michael E. Gerber A very eye opening book about how to make your business work.
	Take Action Kenneth Scott If you are single, check it out.

Adding Ringtones to a Treo 600 Mobile Phone

I love my Treo 600. I've had it for over two years, and I've resisted the urge to shell out $500 for the latest and greatest. However, there are a few things that bug me about it. One is that you can't forward individual text messages (it saves all the messages from the same person as a chat thread, and you have to copy the one you want out of the thread.) Another annoyance is that the camera resolution is lousy. A third issue is that its selection of ringtones stinks and there doesn't seem to be any good way to add more.

I decided to investigate and find out if there was a way to install ringtones. I wasn't able to figure out how to install MP3s as ringtones, but I did figure out how to install MIDI files. If you know how to install MP3s, please let me know.

Below is how the process works for MIDI files (on Windows XP with Palm Desktop Software 4.1 and of course a Treo 600). There is probably an easier way to do all this if you're subscribed to the Internet data service for the phone (which I'm not). Feel free to comment if you know of any shortcuts.

Step 1: Find or create a MIDI file.

There are a number of applications out that that convert MP3s to MIDIs. I tried a few of them, and the MIDIs sounded like junk. Fortunately there are other people out there who know how to create MIDIs, and they have made a lot of them available on the net. You can try a google search, or start here: http://rock.mididb.com/

Find a song that you like and download it to your computer.

Step 2: Grab the section of the MIDI file that you want.

When you download the MIDI file, it will typically be 3 to 5 minutes in length. That's OK, but it's a waste of space -- for a ringtone, all you really want is 30 seconds or so. And you may not want the ringtone to start with the beginning of the song. To carve out the segment of the song that you want to use for the ringtone, you can use this free software: Anvil Studio. You can find instructions for using it here.

Step 3: Install the MIDI file in your Palm Desktop.

To get the ringtone to show up on the phone, you have to add it to the list of ringtones that the phone knows about. There is a file that stores the list of ringtones, and you can access it through the Palm Desktop. To do that, I used another free application called the Palm MIDI Desktop. (Java required)

You are going to use the Palm MIDI Desktop to mess with the ringtone configuration file that your phone uses to know which ringtones to display in the drop down lists, so first make a backup copy of the configuration file on your computer. In my case, the Palm user is called "Nate", so the file to back up is C:\Palm\Nate\Backup\MIDI Ring Tones.pdb

Once you have the file backed up:

• Download Palm MIDI Desktop from here.
• Unzip and extract the Palm MIDI Desktop files
• Run the Palm MIDI Desktop (you can also take a peek at the instructions in PalmMidiDesktop.html, which is part of the zip file)
• Open a command prompt: Start Menu -> Run -> type in cmd
• In the command prompt window, go to the directory where you unzipped the Palm MIDI Desktop files to. In my case I typed in cd C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Music\midi_stuff\pmidi01
• Run the Palm MIDI Desktop. Type in jview -cp:a PalmMidiDesktop.jar PalmMidiDesktop
• The Palm MIDI Desktop should pop open
• Using the Palm MIDI Desktop File->Open menu option, open MIDI Ring Tones.pdb, e.g. C:\Palm\Nate\Backup\MIDI Ring Tones.pdb
• Using the Palm MIDI Desktop File->Import menu option, import the midi file(s) that you created
• Using the Palm MIDI Desktop File->Save menu option, save the new MIDI Ring Tones.pdb
• Exit the Palm MIDI Desktop
• In Palm Desktop, click "Install" button (or View->Install)
• Add MIDI Ring Tones.pdb
• Click Done

Step 4: Sync the Treo with the Desktop.

If you don't know how to do this I don't know what you're doing with a Palm device.

Step 5: Select your new ringtone(s).

Go to Prefs->Sound->Tones: In the dropdown menus next to each option (e.g. "Known Caller Tones") your new file should show up! Select it and you're good to go! If it doesn't show up, sorry, you're hosed.

Bonus: Setting ringtones for an individual caller.

If you want a special ringtone to be associated with a specific caller, there is a way to do that. The caller has to be in your favorites (speed dial) list. (Which is a totally lame design. I'm hoping it's fixed in the later versions.)

• Go to favorites, scroll to the person you want to associate with the new ringtone.
• Go to Edit (using the dropdown menu or Menu->E)
• Select "More"
• Select the ringtone you want from the dropdown list

Enjoy!