Nick Bonadies

Senior Systems Administrator :: Boston office

Nick is the IT Bearded Gentlemen who handles infrastructure, network, servers and technical operations for the Boston office. He is so ridiculously nice it’s not even funny. Like amazingly so. He even fixes servers at 3 AM when people are randomly working on something and they go down. He doesn’t even act grumpy, and really he usually isn’t. Unless you interrupt a serious round of Call of Duty 4 or Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Then he might get a little miffed, but only for a minute. He enjoys fixing problems, especially if he doesn’t have the slightest clue how to fix it. He also likes the woods and taking pictures. And yes, those are his mom’s dogs.

Getting Out of Debt

Man I am scary close to being completely “serious” debt free.  Meaning that the debt I have accrued that has interest rates over 5%* is nearly, completely, gone.  I could go on some LifeHacker-esque thing about it.  But really all it came down to was giving up my credit card to someone that couldn’t use it, and pouring every extra cent I had into my debt, instead of savings.  The thinking being that the interest rates on my savings accounts (1.3%) are no where near the interest I’m being charged (12-18%) on my debt.  So in reality by locking money up in my savings I was actually losing it faster than I was saving.

So there you have it.  A year of debt pounding and I’m almost free.

Budgeting, Money, Et Cetera.

Katie and I are getting married next year.  This poses some interesting life  questions.  Mostly planning related.  To date my life has been lived by the seat of my pants, pay check to pay check.  And now I need to get away from that.  A daunting, terrible reality I have been struggling to realize for probably the last 3 years.  

The problem has always been that I haven’t had enough money to simultaneously pay my bills, buy groceries, and maintain my lifestyle.  Out of those three things my lifestyle is the easiest thing to change.  Things like not buying lunch at work, not buying the new sweet video game, not getting that iPhone game, not going to bars, generally decreasing my social activity. 

Man that sucks!  What about all the fun stuff?  Hard to say, but when you have your eyes on a house and a wedding, its easier and easier to give that stuff up.  I suppose that has always been the problem, no real clear goal. Now that I’ve made a real and life-long  commitment to Katie its easier to set those things as real deal serious goals.  To stop living paycheck to paycheck and really act like a grown up.

Shit maybe I’ll get an IRA while I’m at it.  Oh and my stuff is done compiling, guess I’ll get back to work.

chat roulette

i was on for like, all of 30 seconds earlier, and its pretty fun to just make horrified faces at everyone.

Golden Gate Park

Golden Gate Park

I hated this.

….but i wanted a place to post random thoughts that didn’t necessarily fit into the barbarian group blog.  anyway — we’ll see.

iCal and CalDAV calendars

Are you troubled by strange noises in the middle of the night?
Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or attic?
Have you or your family ever seen a spook, spectre, ghost, or blue screen?
Has your CalDAV calendar in iCal ever acted a fool?
If the answer is “yes,” then don’t wait another minute. Pick up the phone and call the professionals…
Barbarian Group Help Computer!
Our courteous and efficient staff is on call 24 hours a day to serve all your supernatural-computational elimination needs.
We’re ready to believe you.
If you’re like us you’ve probably had a bunch of problems with Apple’s implantation of CalDAV in iCal (at least in Leopard). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it get locked up or all kinds of messy, and usually the only way to fix it is to delete a bunch of cache files, reset the sync history, etc. Normally this is tedious process. Well no longer cause there’s an app for that! CalDAV Fixer to save the day!
All this does is run a shell script that clears out your sync history, then moves all the potentially corrupted CalDAV data from your calendar library folder to the trash. If something disastrous happens you can roll back by dragging all the .caldav folders from the trash back into ~/Library/Calendar. After you run it you’ll have to re-setup your CalDAV accounts.
Leopard only!
I offer this up without any warranty, implied or otherwise. Also with no promise of support whatsoever. If it breaks your stuff, sorry but I warned you. TBG is not responsible for any data loss or any sort of loss whatsoever. Be it financial or otherwise. Always back up your data before running!

Formal Friday Intern Beer

Two of our interns Alex Kaminsky and Frank LeClair were kind enough to get some beers for the office, imagine that! It also happens that I kinda did a formal friday thing today. Thanks guys!!!

Impossible Ebay

eBay is busted, and its not because some code went bad or because a server somewhere failed. Its because eBay is overrun with people trying to scam other people.
Even the unstoppable Bruce Schneier isn’t immune. He almost got scammed twice while trying to sell his laptop on eBay.
Consumerist has a nice write up about the problem:
The cool thing about eBay’s support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn’t a Nigerian scammer. Timothy has learned the awful truth behind today’s eBay—something many readers here already know—which is that it’s become virtually impossible to sell any sort of medium-to-high end electronics there anymore.
Pretty lame. But I never really trusted spending a lot of money on anything via eBay. Its just too bad that everything on the internet sort of turns into this. Too bad or crazy awesome. I can’t decide.