As a possible solution, Dubner describes something called Prize-Linked Savings (PLS) accounts. Basically, it is a special savings account where you get slightly less interest than normal. Periodically, maybe once a month or once a quarter, one winner is chosen from those that contributed (likely proportional to their contributions) for a big prize that is composed of the reduced interest on all of the contributions. That way, it is revenue-neutral for the banks offering the product and it plays on the needs of people to gamble on the “big win” to get them to save. Even better, if you don’t win, you still get to keep the money in the savings account, plus the interest that it accrued. Nobody loses.

Well, that isn’t quite true. You see, even though no one is actually risking any money, the States still consider it gambling and in competition with their own, State-run lotteries. The States argue that they would lose revenue for things like education if people were not participating in their lotteries. So, it is actually illegal to have the PLS accounts in most States. Personally, I think that the PLS accounts are a great idea. If the States see revenue fall from a lack of people playing the lottery, then the programs that revenue stream supports should be re-evaluated for necessity. If the programs are necessary, taxes should be raised according so everyone shares the burden of the necessary programs. That would reveal more about the true costs to each citizen of government and open the door to programs like the PLS accounts that might actually get people to save money for emergencies.

In the book, Ende covers the nature of the Nothing, what happens to the Fantasticans (I actually like the name Fantasians much better) when they are taken by the Nothing, and how the Nothing affects the real world. The scene with Gmork, where all of this is explained, could not be more different than it was in the movie since the brief spurt of action found in the movie is not present. Once Ende gets beyond the end of the movie, he starts to explore the idea of what happens when you allow yourself to get too wrapped up in fantasy and who you wish you can be and begin to forget who you really are.

if you loved The Neverending Story as a child, I highly recommend reading this book as an adult. Be prepared for your conception of Fantasia to be forever altered, though.

A few weeks ago, we went to Bridge Street to walk around on a Friday night, when the bands are out playing. Since Emily loves to dance, she just had to show off her moves.

Then, over Thanksgiving, Emily got together with her cousin Colin and had a good time playing at the park. I took some video and stitched together a couple of clips and still shots into this little movie.

I also have a goal to get Emily off of her Disney movie obsession. We have watched about half of My Fair Lady and she likes that so far, so I am going to let her watch the original movie version starring Rex Harrison. After we finish reading Heidi, I am going to show her the Shirley Temple version of the movie. This won’t break her of the Mouse, but it will expose her to other classic films that will not drive me nuts to watch.

Since before Emily was born, Ashley and I have paid the extra money every month for digital cable because we wanted to get high-definition channels. However, the past few months, I have realized at we, as a family, really watch very little TV. Further, the TV that we do watch is mainly found either on the local channels or on Netflix Instant. So, after talking it over with Ashley, we are going to drop cable entirely in favor of receiving our local HD channels over e air. The one show that we really enjoy and are current on that is not on local networks can easily be downloaded to the Apple TV for a small charge per episode. All in all, I expect this to be a fairly easy transition that should save us somewhere around $70-80 every month.

The second challenge for September is more of a personal challenge for me. Since I do most of the cooking around here, when I get home and don’t feel like making anything, it has become entirely to easy for me to declare that we are going out to eat. Lately, we have been eating out at least one weeknight and just about every meal except for breakfast on the weekends. Also, this does not count the 3–4 days a week that I have been eating lunch out instead of taking a lunch or coming home to eat. Now, that is really ridiculous since I work five minutes from home and it almost certainly takes me longer to grab something for lunch that to come home and heat up leftovers or make a sandwich. So, for the month of September, I am challenging myself to not eat out unless it is meaningful to me. I am making an exception for Ashley and my date night this Saturday and I am debating whether or not I will make an exception for the weekly lunch group I meet with. Hopefully, by the end of this month, I will have broken the eating out habit. It is a bit on the embarrassing side, but we spent almost $500 on eating out this last month so by breaking this habit for me, we will probably save at least 80% of that for September.

These personal spending cuts are inspired by financial reading, but the reason is not really austerity related. While the amounts that we spend, both of cable and dining out, are high, neither one is really breaking the bank for us. Granted, I can find better things to do with the money, but this challenge is more about just making myself do it.

Ok, Netflix, I realize you want to emphasize your streaming service. I want you to emphasize it to. In fact, I would happily use it exclusively if I could get anything I want to watch over it instead of having to rely on discs for some things. I can even accept that you changed your API so that application developers (including yourself) can only manage streaming content using the API, requiring management of discs to be relegated to the website. I don’t like that as much because your website is a bit of a hassle on my iPhone and most of the time I hear about new movies that I want to watch, I am remote.

However, this final irritation takes things one step to far. I have the Netflix-provided app for my iPad. I can accept using the website for managing discs on the iPad, because the screen is big enough and the experience doesn’t completely suck. But, do you really have to tell me every time I access the site that an app exists for the iPad? I know that already. The reason I am not using that app is because you, in your infinite wisdom, restricted what it could do. Now, you have raised the price of having streaming content plus content delivered on discs. I do not begrudge you the extra money; I known that the content providers are squeezing you to charge more for streaming media. But, do you really have to make it even more difficult for me to access this content that I am now paying more for? Do you really want me to drop the discs completely? For some reason, I think that the answer is yes.

Now, the learning more math thing is something he has been harping on for years. Back in 2006, he wrote an article called Math for Programmers where he goes into the kinds of math that programmers need to learn (obviously) as well as his reasoning behind it. Watching the Video and then re-reading the article has made me want to bolster my own math education. (Geof had nothing to do with this). So, I am spending 30–60 minutes a day hitting the books with Concrete Mathematics and Information Theory. I do not really have any goals for my studies other than it is fun and will maybe make me a better software engineer and researcher in the long run.

How many of NPR’s top 100 science fiction and fantasy books have you read? Well, the top 100 is really not accurate because several of the top 100 are series of books (like the 14 current books in the Wheel of Time series), but the others are not counted. Like Amy, I am marking books/series in bold and things I did not finish with ***.

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury ***
28. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman ***
30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons ***
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold ***
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore ***
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey ***
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldon
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson ***
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony ***
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

Looks like I have read 44 of the 100 with several that I did not finish for multiple reasons (either I have not gotten around to it yet or the series/book pissed me off and I will never finish it). I will note that there are several on the list that I have plans to read, but there are so many books and so little time.

Today you moved up into the ‘big kid’ class at daycare.  You put on your new school uniform and off we went.

We put your new ‘big kid’ backpack…your first reaction: “Mommy, what’s that smell?  It stinks!”  Then I explained to you about that ‘new backpack smell’.  I don’t think you believed me.

When we arrived at the daycare, it was packed.  Many parents were lingering as they dropped off their new Pre-K’ers.  We arrived just in time for a group photo.  As I looked at the group of kids, some of which you’d been with since you were an infant, I couldn’t believe how you all had grown.

Some kids were sitting around looking shell-shocked, others had tears running down their cheeks, and then there you were my bright, shining star, my Emily; sitting there with a big grin on your face, bouncing on your knees with excitement.

I hope you have a great first day of Pre-K.