Well Obama has “allowed” homeowners to modify their loans. “Allowed”, but banks have to cooperate. The administration has however forgotten about investors like me. Some say it can be done, while others disagree. When 40% of all properties in the US are owned by investors, if the administration is serious about getting out of this mortgage created financial black hole, then loan mods for investors like me need to be considered.

Anyways, I decided to check out a few firms to modify my loan. Round about December 2008, I saw an ad by a traffic light and called up. There was a woman at the other end. And she said, YES we can modify for anybody. She said all I had to do was to give her 3000 USD. I thought to myself “Wow! if that is all I have to go thru, then this could be it”. So in curiosity I asked her what rate she could bring it down to….and she said “Well there are no guarantees!” What???!!! 3000 USD and no guarantees??!!! Ok smelled fraud and hung up. Well this was an ad on the side of the road; So I said to myself…no more calling up numbers seen around traffic lights:)

But as the months passed I started hearing legitimate(well thru legitimate media) advertisements via the radio…from law offices promising loan mods. I called all that I heard…3 of them. They all took messages and then all called back. All wanted to see me in their offices to give me a quote(yep take a few hours from my busy life and go see them..) In the end(of the 3 I heard over the radio) I selected something called “CPLS or CPLSPA”. They had a downtown office and was in the same building where I used to work once upon a time.

So I go to this “CPLSPA”’s office downtown. Nice office. Then the receptionist asks me to fill a form and I found all kinds of personal info asked therein, which I refused to answer(ssn, license number, dob, employer name etc). Anyways the gal at the counter overlooked that and asked me to wait. After 15 mins I was ushered in to a conference room, where I met this guy(I think he is a lawyer). The guy took data from me about my loan etc…empathized with me and said “of course we can help”. I was thrilled! So in curiosity I asked him how much it would cost me…The lawyer man told me it would be 1200 USD upfront + 250/pm for 3 months. Wow! So this was better than the 3000 deal with those guys I had from the wayside! Within 2000 USD my worries would be over . So I queried.. would my loan rate be brought down to ~4.5 -6% fixed? The lawyer man said, “there are no guarantees!” Again!!! I heard the “guarantee” word again!

In short folks, this whole thing about a third party helping to modify your loan looks a bogus deal. Without guarantees(what the end rate will be or by how much percentage your current rate would be brought down to) I think nobody should go into business with any of these law firms. The lawyers are going to milk this wealth creating opportunity to the hilt. It is too early to tell how many people will fall for this C- – - P! But this is going on. The media never seems to see all this until these snowball into another mega controversy. The fourth estate sleeps like they slept during the mortgage boom and poncy schemes :^). The fourth estate is a reactionary organization.

I tried to hire a third party because I have no time to do this on my own. I am now determined to go at it alone! And you should too, if you really want to modify your loan(no guarantees here either, but at least there would be no loss of physical money!) Third parties(as it stands today) are too good to be true. So if it is too good to be true, follow mummy’s advice!

Using Eclipse’s Dali to make a jpa(pojo) module with Maven M2 Plugin

(First install M2 Plugin if you have not..I was using Eclipse Ganymede, so Dali was already in, but M2 was not)
1) Created a mvn submodule(to a parent) using maven(m2) plugin
2) Archetype selected was archetype with group-id=com.rfc.maven.archetypes and artifact-id=jpa-maven-archetype
3) Then right-clicked on the submodule project and selected JPA Tools–> convert to JPA Project…
4) In the JPA facet selected Generic, then my db and schema and used openjpa(installed it locally and browsed to it) as the implementation library. Made sure that persistence.xml did not include class names(gives you an error “This mapped class is not specified in persistence unit..” otherwise..No clue why..but thinking it is because there were two persitence.xml files; one from the archetype in src/main/resources/META-INF and the other when using the Dali tool with a persistence.xml under “JPA Content”)
5) After converting to JPA project, right click on submodule project and select JPA Tools—>Generate Entities. This takes me to a screen that would allow me to select all my normalized perfectly designed db tables (synchronizing with persistence.xml was not checked). Once I said ok on that screen, code for entities were generated with no errors..Voila!

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Update on Feb 14th 2009: You could skip step 2 and use the Quickstart archetype instead of the jpa archetype and then do the rest of the steps too. Step 2 is a waste if you are using eclipse to convert a project to a JPA project.

download youtube-dl script (a python script)
download ffmpeg
run “python youtube-dl <url>” and get flv file to disk

(<url> is the youtube url)
then use ffmpeg to convert flv to mp3
ffmpeg -i <yourName>.flv -f mp3 -vn -acodec copy <someMp3>.mp3

Ok like everybody else, I have credit card balances.

I did a 0% transfer in Nov 2007 to Citibank credit card which expires in May 2008

I have a payment going out of my bank automatically, 6 days prior to due date(to make it doubly sure that I dont screw up my 0%:)

So things were going smooth since Nov 2007.

Today(that is the 4th of March 2008) I get a panic call at the office from my wife saying that Citibank has sent me a letter stating they dunno which acct to apply the money that was sent in to them!!!..and with a picture of my check attached. So I rush home. The letter stated that I should fax in my acct number etc. I got suspicious and thought it could be a mail “phishing” deal. Therefore I called the cust service and checked out my balance and recent payments to the debt. The voice at the other end said I was past due…WOW!

So I got into my online bank acct to see if somebody had cashed the check. On the back of the check it stated “UNABLE TO READ ACCT#”. I look at the check at bank site …I can read it all. So was the case with the pic of the check citibank sent in….What the F@#^ was going on…I thought…

I call them up…sure enough they jacked up my rate from 0 to a mega19.24% since they claimed they didnt receive the payment in time!!! So I tell the guy to get his manager…and she, the manager heard my story…Long story short she said she would set everything ok..Let’s see if they do that…Not counting on it..They all lie!

My thinking is that citibank as a whole is trying to pull a fast one on you the consumer. Once they jack up those rates at a credit card company it would be impossible for a non-entity human being like me to change it back to 0% unless God intervenes with a miracle. So in my case I think they deliberately tried to jack-up my rates stating some odd reason, even though I was paying the debt regularly on time. This is NOT a mistake Citibank made..That is sure!!..I think they are deliberately trying to harm people.

But I shall wait and see and blog what they do now…Will they bring down the jacked-up rate (caused by no fault of mine) or will they murder the common man?? Will see.

If anybody has had such things happen to them please blog in. I am bitter and angry that credit card companies go to unscrupulous lengths to harm honest people like me. In the past I can think of a similar incident when I had 0%…they changed the due date backwards and me didnt notice in time to change my bank-auto-pay-setup and long-story-short, my rate went sky-high and was unable to convince them that they pulled a fast one on me…it continued to stay at that humungous rate for a long time!!! They stole that money

Credit card companies are run by bastards, for sure! Never ethical!

Well my neighbor’s son installed linux and destroyed her windows machine

She had tonnes of pics on it…

So asked me for help

I found recoverjpeg and it recovered all her pics

Son gets credit for installing Gutsy Gibbon.  So installation of “recoverjpeg” was a breeze using Synaptic package manager

Usage was on command line like so…

sudo recoverjpeg /dev/sda1

Preferably do that in say /recoveredPics dir (your choice for name of dir)

REM’s Electrolite…there is a lot of sadness in its melody…caught me attention first on a not so good & rainy day…

There has never been IMO no other “universal” indian music director from India other than Salil Choudhury(well, forget modern day AR Rehman for a second )…Be it in Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil or Kannada …his songs help revive memories of days by gone! Here is a sweet malloo one by Salil…(and notice l’ll Sridevi

My first song on the guitar was this…again by Salil

Another sweet malloo song with heavenly music provided by Salil

sudo lsb_release -a

or

cat /etc/issue

Ok I have a healthy Feisty install.

On one of them umpteen logins noticed an upgrade button in the updates window. Well what could go wrong. Right? Extemely WRONG 

Things went good during the upgrade. I rebooted.

At that point it croaked with a greeter app crash error

Well took a month to get back to the issue.

All I did was get into maintenance mode (“Boot to hard disk” –>”recovery mode” entry from GRUB). and type these on screen at the prompt(sequentially after each finishes…each take a few mins to complete)

a) refresh apt's cache

sudo aptitude update

b) run the upgrade
sudo aptitude upgrade

c) GNOME is all screwed up…so run this too

sudo aptitude install xorg gnome

Well that did it!

Now have Gutsy. When Hardy comes out I will have the once-bitten-syndrome