Sat, 30 August, 2008
Posted in Life
at 11 am
Getting Smart Slowly: I’ve been following Get Rich Slowly by a guy who lives in the local Portland area, so I can relate to some of the places he goes and people he names. I’ve been enjoying reading his articles, and it’s made me more conscientious about the way I deal with money, plus I’ve been watching for ways to keep the money we have.
As part of that effort, we paid off one of our credit cards last year (Card A) and have kept it at or near a zero balance for a while now. So the Card A people sent us, on a monthly basis, these blank checks to use “for whatever you want” with minimal interest rates. Wow, how nice of them.
The Offers: The checks come in two flavors: 1) 0% interest for 12 months (after which it reverts to an unacceptable percentage rate over 20%) or 2) 3.99% for the duration of the balance. One of the fine print items was a 3% transaction fee that capped off at $200 I had to keep in mind.
I mostly ignored them for about a year, but they were certainly tempting. We had a nice credit limit and the idea of jetting us off on some spur of the moment getaway certainly crossed my mind… but I knew it was just putting off (and increasing!) the cost. I’ve looked at the offers each month. I just needed to find the right time to use them: a time when they would save us money rather than cost us.
The Summer Situation: This year had me flying solo to Montana for a death in the family ($700) and over the Fourth of July Amy and I went on a follow-up road trip to the same town with a side trip for a day in Salt Lake City. (Amy went to a small private liberal arts college there.) The vacation travel costs themselves were fine (lodging $300, gas $250) but we also made some major car repairs in preparation (exhaust system, tires $2,180) so the total came to about $3,400, which we had put on Card B.
In terms of using credit wisely, I think we did okay in this instance. We had very little warning about my flight so there was no time to save for it. We needed to get the car repairs done, but we had been holding off. The family reunion trip forced the issue since we had to get there on the Fourth of July with the rest of the family. We tapped into our embryonic emergency fund to pay for some of the car repairs and cover some of the travel costs, but the $3400 remained on Card B. We traded money for time.
Cunning Calculations: Now with things settled down a bit on the home front, I have had time to re-assess our accounts and look at how we could take advantage of those checks from Card A. I looked at a few of our debts: credit union car loan, credit union personal loan that we used for some debt consolidation last year, and Card B.
The first thing I did was use a generic loan calculator to figure out that with our normal monthly payment, the debt on Card B would have cost about $2,000 in interest and taken over 4.4 years to pay off.
Next I calculated the same monthly payment against the 3.99% rate plus the 3% transaction fee. The transferred debt would cost about $1,000 and take 3.3 years to pay off.
(Paying off the personal loan with the 3.99% checks + 3% transaction fee would have saved us $20. Paying off the consolidation loan would have saved a whopping $2. Neither of these seemed worth the effort.)
Amy and I are both distrustful of large banks and corporations, so I tried to be as cautious as possible. In the end we decided to go for it. All told, we’ll save $1,000 by using these checks.
Warning: Avalanche Zone: Obviously, if we could pay more on a monthly basis, we could knock down both the cost and the length for repayment. We’ve been using a combination of techniques to work down our debts and by next March both the car and consolidation loans will be retired at which point we’ll be able to pile on a bunch of money to wipe out the debt. I think we’ll be done with it by next summer. The Debt Snowball plus automatic withdrawals from paychecks have been a big help in making sure we get these all taken care of. (See the Debt Snowball article at GRS or read the wikipedia article. Amy actually thought up and started practicing the debt snowball style before she or I ever read about it. She’s the smart one in this house.)
...With a Cherry on Top: For those of paying close attention, you may be asking: But what about those 0% checks? Wouldn’t they be an even better deal? You’re right but that’s also a gamble. If for any reason we don’t get that debt paid off in 12 months, the interest rate sky rockets. This is flat out gambling that we won’t have any major financial hits in the next year. I’m not a total pessimist however.
We used the 0% checks to pay off $500 of the debt and paid the balance with the 3.99% offer. I’m willing to gamble that we will pay off $500 in the next 12 months, even if something major comes up. It saves us about $100 in interest, which is a nice bonus.
Other families have much larger amounts of debt to deal with. These 4 figure debts are peanuts compared to what others are facing. But Amy and I are getting our money house in order. These exercises with smaller amounts make me more confident about the larger amounts that we might see in the future. (House? new car?) If I’m not getting rich slowly, I hope I’m at least getting smarter.
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Sun, 24 August, 2008
Posted in Media, Tech
at 12 pm
A brief rambling of thoughts regarding television and video transmission as they will evolve in the coming decades:
1) The end goal? The Star Trek Holodeck: a 3-D representation of a scene that can be viewed from any angle. Putting aside the hokiness, this is what TV is heading towards: a reproduction of an environment in all physical dimensions.
2) In order for this to be feasible, flat 2-D capturing is useless. Video today is taking a series of bitmap images. The next gen of video will be just be stereo 2-D: 2 images of the same scene at the same time. Great, so we’ve replicated the depth of a scene, but we’re still stuck with the single perspective of the original pair of cameras.
3) If stereo images for ‘faux-3D’ isn’t enough, then what we need are more cameras, right? Well, then where does that end? Do you build a giant sphere of cameras, all pointed towards the center of the action? This might work okay for a movie like Cube but for, let’s say filming a climb of Mount Everest, this isn’t the way to go.
4) There are two basic ways of representing images in digital formats: Bitmaps or Vectors. Bitmaps are grids of pixels: perfect for paintings, documents and flat video. Bitmaps are great for when you have an image that you might want to make smaller, but they are useless for making bigger. If you take a 100 pixel by 100 pixel image and make it 1 mile by 1 mile, you’re going to get individual pixels that are 50 feet by 50 feet. However the same image made up of vectors could be made of very small 1 nanometer pixels and still be an accurate representation of the image.
5) If we want the ability to view a scene in all of it’s physical dimensions, we will need to capture the points in space (x,y,z coordinates/vectors) of as many elements as we need in order to re-create the scene. Take track events portrayed in a movie like Chariots of Fire. In order to truly capture the event, we’ll need to track the spacial locations of every significant element. I would guess these to be the track, the starting line, the finish line and the runners.
6) This should be subdivided down further however. Not just the runners, but the various body parts of the runners: legs, arms, heads. Maybe fingers? How about the starter’s gun? the trigger on the starter gun? the finish line tape?
7) We need to decide what’s truly important to capture: The runners, yes. The starting line and the finish line, yes. The crowd? Mmmm, maybe. Certainly films for decades have been using ‘standard crowd noise’ in place of recording actual crowds on the set of the film. Movies have been adding crowds to stadiums using mannequins, inflatables, or digital post-production. Maybe the specifics of the crowd are unnecessary for the scene.
8) We need to capture as much as possible, but we could extrapolate from a small set of points a number of the other points. Perhaps we know where the starter gun is, but instead of keeping track of the official that is pulling the trigger, we simple estimate the height of a person that would be holding a gun at a certain angle and height and make an approximation of the official. We know how the ribbon at the finish line would move and float given the motions of the players and the wind and the tautness of the tape. Do we need to know the exact location of a runner’s knee if we already know where their hips and toes are at? Maybe, but we probably don’t have to know where the ankle is at if we know where the heel and the knee are at.
9) Once we have those points in space, we can recreate the locations, but short of capturing the location of every thread of the clothing being worn or each lace of each shoe, we’re probably going to want to capture a ‘skin’ or a ‘texture map’ that would be used to wrap around the skeletons (vectors) of the runners. The skin could be captured ahead of time, or could be extrapolated from a video feed. We’ve already seen projects that take varied photographs and collects them into a multi-faceted view of a single object. In much the same way, a set of stills taken over time could create a texture map.
10) That same capture of the texture maps could be used to extrapolate the x/y/z of the original skeletons. Today’s motion capture techniques have relied on ping-pong balls taped to actors in green body suits and similar set ups. Those configurations are simply work-arounds that allow us to capture the models easily with today’s technology and are ultimately, unnecessary. Once we have the visual processing tools that are necessary, we can forgo the artificial set ups and special configurations and rely on the original video captures.
11) This sort of capturing and transmission becomes possible once we move from thinking of capturing a flat plane of pixels to capturing the coordinates and texture maps of a scene. The information that is captured can be still captured by a single video camera, given enough processing power. But when we add a second camera, we can collect better textures and more accurate coordinates. Add a third and the quality of the capture increases again. Add a dozen and you’re capturing every detail needed to analyze an event in everyday scenarios.
12) What does this all offer? Imagine watching Chariots of Fire from the actual point of view of one of the runners. Or from the officials. Or the finish line tape, or a shoe of the runners. Or directly overhead. The amount and number of perspectives is immense. Imagine changing the scene by adding a 100 mph wind to it. Or altering the track so it goes in a loop-de-loop.
13) And talk about scalability: If you want to transmit this scene to someone, you have the option of A) sending a fully-rendered image like you would to a current television, B) a pair of images to a stereoscopic video display (Yes, that’s by my employer), C) or a small set of the captured data to a cell phone/Personal media device for display of a low-res, animation style rendering, D) or a full feed of all the details to a computer-enabled display that could use a mouse or 3-d mouse that could be used to navigate around a scene.
14) Today we are capturing the equivalent of a single, low quality texture map. Soon we will be capturing higher quality single texture maps, but this is just a baby step forward. We need to build tools that will take those bitmaps and break them down into component parts: Vectors of skeletons, plus texture maps. We blend in approximations of the missing texture, enhance the scene with up-close photos, and extrapolate to fill in the additional x,y,z coordinate points we’re missing. None of these techniques are outside of our reach.
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