Brad Ishida's Stuff
Stuff I write down in a vain attempt to remember

When my daughter was 9 years old, she earned her first chunk of money by pet sitting for vacationing neighbors. In 2011, she earned $500 and filed her first tax return. In 2012, she earned $320 and filed another tax return. By filing a simple 1040EZ, all that money became eligible to contribute to her own Roth IRA. That means she is looking at a minimum of 50 years of tax-free compounded gains. Her effective tax rate happened to be ZERO, but this is now officially post-tax money and she will keep every penny of gains that will compound for the next 50+ years. As a very young person, time is one her side–to the extreme. $500 compounded for 50 years at 9% (very attainable by automatically reinvesting dividends in high-yielding stocks like utilities) will transform into $37K tax-free dollars. Once she is old enough to earn a little more money and make the maximum Roth contribution every year, it will be easy to project many millions of dollars ($5K contributed per year for 50 years at 9% results in $4.8M).


Here is your checklist to get going:


1) Kid earns some money working for friends and neighbors.
2) Parent helps kid open a Minor Roth IRA. The Minor Roth IRA is for people under 18. The parent will be the custodian of the account until the kid is 18. Not every brokerage is aware of these accounts, but OptionsXpress (Charles Schwab) is a great choice because they know about them and don’t have any fees to open or maintain the account.
3) Kid files a federal tax return. If your kid doesn’t have any income other than helping friends and neighbors, then she can file a 1040EZ and it will only take a few minutes to fill out. In the section where you would normally show your W-2 from your employer, you just write “HSH 320″ which means $320 of household income. See my 2012 example 1040EZ here.
4) In Ohio (check with your state), you do not need to file any state return if you make less than $11,700.
5) Deposit your kid’s entire 2012 income to her Roth IRA account and help her purchase a high-yielding stock with low risk (think utilities, consumer goods, etc.)
6) Make sure your Roth IRA brokerage account is configured to automatically reinvest dividends.


Here are some more ideas to help get your kid excited about saving and investing:


* Show her the difference between a 10-year-old and a 40-year-old both saving $500 per year until age 60. This will demonstrate the power of time and the value of being a young kid. (40-year-old saves $30,684 while the kid saves $481,399 at the same rate of 9%)


* Show her stocks that have been huge gainers that she could have identified early on (Apple, Chipotle, Panera, Five Below)


* Show her the difference between keeping all your money and paying out a large percentage to taxes.


* Show her how to learn from other peoples’ successes and mistakes (you probably have some people in your family who are good at saving and some who are bad at it!)

openssl rsa -in yourKeyfile.key -text -noout | grep Private-Key

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to find a used Parabody Rotary Smith Machine for sale for just a few hundred bucks. The model is 864101. I love it and prefer it to any newer machine I’ve ever seen. These used to be made in the USA and it’s built to last forever. The natural arc movement of the machine puts stress on your muscles and not so much the joints. It’s just a beautiful design. I was never able to find any original documents when I was trying to locate one, so maybe this will help someone in a similar situation.

Parabody 864101 Owner’s Manual
Parabody 864101 Component Diagram
Parabody Rotary Smith Machine Workout Manual

Here is an example of the command line zip command to package an EPUB file.

zip -Xr ebook.epub mimetype META-INF *.opf *.jpeg *.jpg *.html *.css *.ncx

Note the first file in the archive should always be “mimetype”.

Here is a quick way to save the content of a MySQL query to a file from a Unix command line:

mysql databasename -u username -p -e “select * from Table” > ./file.txt

If you have a text field or textarea that is case-sensitive or needs to avoid spelling autocorrect in mobile Safari, you can use these attributes on your field:

autocorrect=”off” autocapitalize=”off”

Note the use of the keyword “off”. It seems to ignore you if you try to use “false” instead.

If you want to replace your Mac OS X main hard drive with a larger one, I find this process to work well for me.

1) Connect the new drive to your Mac using an external USB dock.

2) Insert your OS X DVD (Snow Leopard) and use “startup disk” to have your system reboot from the DVD. Or, you can just reboot and hold down the ‘C’ key on your keyboard to make it boot from the DVD.

3) From the installer program, go to utilities and launch disk utility.

4) Erase the new drive and create a partition (Mac OS Extended Journaled). I’ve had problems using the entire disk in the past. I recommend you size the partition to be slightly smaller than the entire disk. A few hundred MB is probably enough. You can drag-and-resize the partition right in disk utility.

5) Using the restore function, drag the original hard drive to the source box and drag your new disk partition to the destination box. I unchecked the option to erase the drive again and let it just copy over all the files from the original drive. Once you start, it will probably take a few hours.

6) Quit disk utility, shut down and physically swap out the hard drives and boot up from the new one.

Slight variations from this process in the past have resulted in problems such as startup disk not being able to bless the new disk and make it bootable which is very frustrating of course.

Recently while upgrading the hardware on a very old Windows XP Pro box, I immediately got a blue screen of death when booting up for the first time. The system would boot fine in safe mode. The message provided was “An attempt was made to execute to non-executable memory.”. The error code was 0X000000FC. The fix for this was to edit the boot.ini file and make the following change. Start->settings->control panel->system->advanced->startup and recovery settings->edit. Change the “/NoExecute=OptIn” to “/NoExecute=alwaysoff”

I recently brought a 10 year old XP Pro machine back from the dead with a new motherboard/cpu/memory. Everything was working except in both Firefox and Internet Explorer the act of scrolling caused massive screen redraw problems and black horizontal lines to appear in the browser window. Also, the scroll bars would be out of position and sometimes 2 scroll bars would draw although only 1 would work. I thought this was a video driver problem, but it wasn’t!
This problem was fixed by disabling the dual core cpu so it would only use a single core. In the system bios this was turned off by choosing Advanced->cpu configuration->unleashing mode->disabled. This system uses an Asus M4A77TD with an AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz and DDR3 1066 PC3 8500 RAM.

I recently had to reactivate a Windows 7 box due to hardware changes. I was prompted to use the automated phone system and provide my installation ID. However, the system asks for 9 groups of numbers and only 8 were displayed. All the content on the right side of the activation window is cut off. Words are cut off and the 9th group of numbers was completely hidden.

Here is a quick tip to get your installation ID if you can’t view it in the activation window. Run cmd.exe as administrator and type ‘slmgr -dti‘. This will display your entire installation ID in a popup window. When the system gives you numbers to type in to reactivate, the same problem may occur where the input boxes are cut off and out of view. Type the numbers even if you can’t see them and as long as you don’t make a typo, it will accept them and activate.