We put $300,000 down on our house.  It has depreciated about $100,000.  I have lost $100,000 and the bank hasn't lost anything.  I can't write down my loan for the depreciation because the loan is still less than the house.  The people the government is looking to bail out didn't put any money down and their house depreciated $100,000.  If they go to find a new loan, the bank will have to take the $100,000 hit and nothing happens to the home "owner". 

No one knows when the housing market will stop it's downward spiral so investors and the market have no idea how much they will actually lose.  The bailout is designed so that the government will buy these bad loans from the lenders.  The lenders will sale them at a loss but they will get rid of them so they can finally put a number to their loss and it will make the street a little less jittery.  The government is going to then work with the "owners" to lower the principal on the house and lower their rates.  Remember, the government is me and you; it's our tax dollars that are just being erased by dropping the principal of the mortgage.  The owners now owe less on their house and I still owe the same.  They get a better rate and mine stays the same.  This isn't fair to any tax payer and it sends the wrong message to our kids: if you screw up, the government will bail you out. 

The market is bad and people losing their houses is not acceptable so we have to do something.  Read my idea to help after the jump. More...

Earlier today (5 minutes ago?) I blogged about Oracle Financials JE CAAT and gave away the necessary scripts to build the files.  Now I'm going to do the same for Solomon. 

As stated in the Oracle blog - these scripts work for us.  I offer no guarantees or warranties of any kind.

Don't forget to replace the year and the company id below.More...

It's that time of the year again, SOX audits.  There is nothing more I dread than audits; they suck all the fun out of work.  Our audit team is Ernest and Young.  A few years ago they started to require us to give them a listing of all journal entries and monthly trial balances for the year.  They take the beginning balance, roll it forward through the JE dump and make sure it matches the ending balance.  They also use it to look for any abnormalities in the numbers.  Obviously this is good for everyone expect for the poor IT guys that have to figure it out.

Get the Oracle scripts after the jump.More...

I'm working on a website that will be unveiled in the next few weeks.  Yearly revenue will probably bring in something between bupkis and zilch; not quite Google's numbers yet.  The site is written in C# with MS SQL 2005 on the backend.  I'm trying to conserve the limited bits and bytes in the universe and wanted to make my code as reusable as possible. 

For the sake of an example, we'll say this site allows person A to send something to person B.  Person A should be able to log in to the site and see everything they sent to A.  They should also be able to see everything someone else (person C) has sent to them.  The same query is used but the where clause is different.  I don't want to type the stored procedure twice, and I certainly don't want to maintain it twice so I went searching for a dynamic where statement within a stored procedure and I present to you my geeky friends the answer: COALESCE

Find out how to do this after the break....More...

Below is a map of our trip onboard the msy Wind Surf.   This Caribbean cruise started in sunny Barbados and took us to Nevis, St. Martin (St. Marteen), St. Bathelemy (St. Barts), Iles des Saintes and finally Pigeon Island.  It was a very luxurious cruise and I have to say that it would be very difficult for me to get back on a large ship.  The Wind Surf is one of three ships of the luxury cruise line, Windstar Cruises.  The other ships are the msy Wind Star and msy Wind Spirit.  The Wind Surf is the largest of the three.  The next one I would like to go on is their Greek Isles Cruise.

And now for the map:

I've always thought of Wikipedia as a good source of information.  I feel it becomes more accurate over time as more people contribute and ideas evolve unhindered.  I learned today that I have been wrong.

My city, Lake Forest, California, has a very informative page on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Forest,_California. Well, informative up to the point of "Notable Residents."  Two people, Dan Huard and Armando Alvarez seem to be very proud of themselves.  Dan Huard feels he is notable because he works at Digg and Armando feels he is notable because he won an award for design.  Neither of them are any more notable than me or you to the public at large.  As a small protest about the stupidity of having these "Notable Residents," I decided to edit the page and add a friend of mine that I feel is Notable.  Some of his qualifications are as follows:

• Good person
• Hard worker
• Has a great family that he supports
• Has a beautiful daughter
• He bought a house in Foothill Ranch a year ago
• College graduate
• Winner of Red Robin's Valentine Day Engagement Story Competition
• As he jokingly says, "A friend first, entertainer second and father third".

More...

Watch this map below to see pictures get updated while we are on vacation.

Cherish and I are taking a week off to go to Maui.  We're staying 5 nights at the Grand Wailea. I will post some pictures while we are there. Watch the blog for a cool map of the pictures.