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Although the price of gas has dropped a little bit over the past few weeks, it is still really expensive to fill up. Here in Seattle, premium gas is over $4.30/gallon. For me, this means that I am paying $.24 per mile to drive my car. While there are a lot of trips where driving a car simply makes more sense, I am starting to find that there are quite a few trips that can be just as easily traveled by bicycle.

In order to assist me, I have a speedometer on my bike to assist me in calculating my distance. To be specific, the bicycle computer that I use is the Sigma 906. It currently retails for $22.98 at Pricepoint.com. It is a pretty simply bicycle computer. It is nothing too fancy, but it takes care of the essential functions like trip and total distance, current speed, max speed and average speed. My only gripe is that I haven’t been able to find an easy way to reset all of the values of a trip. If I erase the trip distance, the trip time will remain active. Because of this I have to go through and manually reset every statistic.

Anyway, I am using this bicycle computer to help me to track how much I have saved on riding my bike. So far I have ridden 16.82 miles, which has saved me $4.04. This isn’t much, but it can add up over a course of a year depending on how much I actually ride. For the most part I am able to keep up with traffic and Seattle does a good job of providing bike lanes and other places to ride. I would be a bit quicker if I had a road bike instead of a mountain bike, and slick tires instead of knobby treaded ones. So far I have ridden to the book store, the drug store, and my girlfriends place and back.

The best part is even if I am not saving money, I am still getting some exercise in the process.

I haven’t posted about a company that I really like in a while, so I thought that tonight would be a good time to post a small blurb about a company that I think has enormous upwards potential. The company that I am talking about is Metavante. It is fairly likely that you have never heard of this company because you have never dealt with them directly. It is probably the case that you have.

Metavante is one of the largest bill pay providers in the United States. What is Bill Pay? These days, many banks offer free online banking. Free online bill pay is one of the main attractions of online banking. When you as the consumer initiate an online bill payment, the funds are sent to the bill payment provider who then turns those funds into a paper check made out to whomever was specified. The check is then mailed to the recipient. Metavante is one of the premier bill pay providers in the US. The reason that I know this is because our credit union receives about 30+ checks per day from them. Considering our total net deposits is only $500 million, that is a lot of checks. Of the bill pays that come through to our main branch, I would say about 90% of them are from Metavante.

The company does not do just online bill pay though. They offer a wide range of other products and services for their customers. Some of their products and services include:

• Banking and trust solutions
• Business transformation services
• EFT solutions
• ePayment solutions
• Image solutions
• Payment network solutions

I think that online banking has yet to reach a full audience. There should still be a lot more room to grow within this industry. As people become more and more reliant on using online banking, they will be more likely to send an ePayment rather than writing and mailing out a check. The more people that use these online services, the more money Metavante could bring in. Because of this, I see excellent growth potential in this company over the coming years.

I make these recommendations all without looking at the company’s financials. I hope to dig deeper into those sometime in the near future. The company just went public back in November 2nd, 2007. The stock currently trades at $22.94 with a market cap of $2.742 B. They currently have a P/E ratio of about 69, and about 64% of the company is owned by institutions. If the company performs well in the near term, this should allow plenty of room for the institutions to purchase up more shares and drive up the price. Their revenues are about $1.598 billion for the year, which is a 6.25% increase from 2006 levels. For the year 2007, Metavante had profits of 49.451 million, which was a major drop from 2006. This was due largely to the $142.242 million outflow due to special items.

This post is going to look at some of the highest dividend paying stocks at this point in time. There are a few reasons that I have decided to look into this. First of all, my dad always suggests stocks to me because of the dividends that they pay. “You should get WXYY. They have a 4% dividend, which is much higher than you can get in a CD.” Of course just because a stock pays a dividend doesn’t mean that it is going to rise. Second, father was on the WAMU bandwagon, especially when they were paying 10%+. Look at that company now.

There is a big reason that I am skeptical of companies with high dividends. Back in 2006 I bought a little bit of stock in a company called Fieldstone Investment Corporation. They were one of those REIT companies that ended up collapsing. Anyway I initially got into the company in 2006 thinking that it might make a good play, especially with such a high dividend. At the time I think it was paying at least 15%.

As you can see from the image above, my experience with them did not go entirely according to plans. All in all I spend $1177.40 on the stock, and ended up selling for $610.03 over a course of less than a year. This was coming from a company with a 15% dividend. Who would have thought? All in all I made $98.70 in dividends from them. That makes my sell price look a bit better, but definitely a far cry from perfect.

When choosing companies to look at, I am not going to look at the companies that pay the most out per share, but I am actually going to look for the companies that have the highest dividend yield. By clicking on the thumbnail, you can see the companies with the highest dividend rates that traded for at least $10.

I did another chart where I looked at companies that were trading for at least $25 and were paying at least 10%. Here are the top 15. Click the thumbnail to see who made the cut.

So the goal for this experiment is to see whether or not these stocks beat the market, and maintain their dividend yield. My prediction is that either the dividends will be cut, or the price of each stock will drop. I think the reason that these rates are so high is that the stock has dropped quite a bit since the last dividend was paid. Since we have no idea what the next dividend will be, we have to go by what the most recent one said. I think that this produced abnormal yields.

I graduated from college almost exactly a year ago. On the day of my graduation I thought that I would never go back to school again. Based on the current job market and job descriptions that I have seen, it seems to make more and more sense to go back to school and take more classes. While I don’t think I am ready to go for an MBA, I do think there would be some value for me to get some professional certificates.

There are many Universities out there that offer certificates for the working person that can be completed fully online. This is what I plan to do. It makes more sense for me to do it this way because of my work hours. They tend to vary widely based upon how the day goes at work. Because of this I would probably have trouble making it to a 6:30 class on a consistent basis. Therefore, I think online correspondence classes would work out best for me. The two schools that I have looked at the closest are the University of Virginia and UC-Davis. These schools seemed to have the best online setup for the courses that I was interested. The other thing that I liked was that they were a traditional University rather than a University of Phoenix that seems to be more of a business than a University. I also looked at the University of Villanova’s online course offerings, and theirs seemed to look more like a business than a traditional University even though that is what they are. UMass also has a lot of online choices, but none seemed to fit with what I wanted to do.

So my next step is going to be to look into when I can start. It appears that I can start just about any quarter and take as many classes as I feel like per quarter. I will probably just go with one class per quarter so that I don’t get too overwhelmed with everything else. After that I need to look into whether or not my employer will reimburse me for this. The certificate will cost about $5,500 plus books and other fees to complete. My employer will reimburse up to $2,000 per year. That would be a very nice help if that would work out. So I think my goal for this week is to see if my employer will compensate for it and then go from there.

I have finally given up trying to reinstall windows on the previous hard drive. Everytime it would get to the Windows installation it would always stall once it hit the spot were there was approximately 13 minutes remaining. This was the portion where it said it was registering components. I left my computer on all day while at work to see if it was just being a bit sluggish, but when I came back it was at the same point. The was the third time in a row after a complete erasure of the drive that it would stall at this point in the reinstallation.

After talking with a few people who know more about computers than I do, we decided that it was some sort of hard drive malfunction. Great. I went to a store called Computer Stop in north Seattle and picked up an 80 GB Seagate hard drive for $50. I came home and took out the defective hard drive and installed the new one. Now I am in the process of once again attempting to install windows. Hopefully it will be a success this time.

Final Note: My computer is finally back up and running again! I didn’t feel like putting on yet another post about my computer woes. Unfortunately though I am without my Microsoft Office software, but I will have to take care of that at a later date.

I am getting a lot closer to having everything all installed on my computer. Monday night I was up until about 1:30 a.m. reformatting my hard drive. The process was taking so long for it to reformat that I decided to just go to bed and pick it back up another day. Tonight I should be able to complete the reinstall process and hopefully get most of my drivers and programs back in as well.

Once I get all that settled in I should be able to get back up to date with Microsoft Money so that I can report my weekly expenditures. Last week I went just a tad over budget mainly thanks to buying a new version of XP and having to buy a father’s day present as well.

Yesterday I began the progression to moving over to the desk side of my job rather than being on the teller line. I think I will definitely excel in this position. I haven’t quite gotten into loans yet, but I can open new accounts and other products and services.

This is a test post. For some reason it won’t let me post.

I have spent the majority of my day today attempting to reinstall windows XP on my PC. The main dilemma that I had was that I could not even start windows, which was the reason that I had to reinstall in the first place. Because I could not start windows, I was unable to back up my files. In order to back up these files, I ended up spending the majority of my time trying to find out how to go about doing this.

What ended up happening was that I had to use a program called Knoppix. From what I gathered, Knoppix is the CD version of the Linux operating system. This means that you don’t have to install Linux/Knoppix on your hard drive for it to work. All the files that your computer needs are on the CD.

To get Knoppix onto a CD, you first need a working computer which I luckily had. Then, you must go to the main Knoppix website to download the latest edition. After you download, you can then burn the .iso file to a CD. Next, you will need to set up your boot menu on the broken computer so that it boots from CD first and then Hard drive. This way it will automatically boot into the Knoppix program.

Once I got this all set up, I had some initial struggles getting the program to work. It seemed like everything was working alright,  but then the screen would go blank and say “out of range.” I think this happened because the screen that I was using was an LCD 19″ screen. After doing a bit of research I found out that if you hit F3 at the first screen, you can enter special setup commands. The command that got my screen was “knoppix vga=0″. After that everything worked perfectly more or less.

From time to time the Knoppix system kept crashing on my while I was trying to transfer files. I wasn’t expecting perfection, but this was getting annoying. I tried to find some other Linux programs to run. The ones I came across were “Damn Small Linux” and “Slax.” I found Damn Small Linux to be about worthless, but I don’t think I knew what I was doing. For some reason it wouldn’t let me access my files on my hard drive. Slax kept crashing, so I was even more worthless to me.

I decided to go back to Knoppix because that was the only one that had worked for the most part so far. When I went into the F3 screen I noticed that there were some other available commands. One I believe was called “toram.” This command temporarily installed Knoppix on the RAM in your computer. This allows the program to run entirely off of the RAM rather than constantly trying to read the CD. Once I applied this fix my crashes were but a distant memory. Also, everything ran a whole lot faster as well.

There was one annoying quirk about Knoppix. The reason I was using it in the first place was so that I could transfer files from my main hard drive to my external hard drive to be backed up. The problem I ran into was if my external was on and plugged in when I started Knoppix, then the main hard drive would not show up. If I started up Knoppix with the external off, then it would detect the main hard drive. It was only at this point where I could start up the external. Once that was detected everything worked fine.

In conclusion, I must say that Knoppix has saved my files from being deleted on the reinstall. If I were a bit more computer savvy, I could see myself switching over to Linux. It seems like they have their act together a bit more than Microsoft when it comes to certain things.

If you have noticed a gap between this post and my most recent one, there is a good reason for it. Apparantly my computer has been infected with some sort of virus and it has been inoperable for the past week or so.

Here is what happened:

I turned my computer on just like I do every morning, but that particular morning it decided that it wanted to check my disks. After it checked my disks it rebooted. After that initial windows screen with the scrolling squares underneath, the screen went black for about five seconds. Then an error message came up stating that file “ole32.dll” was missing so that it could not start winlogon.exe. Then it gave me the same error message for file lsass.exe. I clicked ok on each of them and the screen just went blank. If you waited long enough it would go to the desktop but nothing would come up. Lame. I tried to restart in safe mode, but no luck. I also tried to restart with the last known good configuration, but that did not work either. It was at this point that I decided that I needed to reinstall Windows XP.

Today was the day that I was to embark on my mission to reinstall Windows XP. The first store that I visited today was the local Best Buy. They were all out there, and the sales associate wasn’t even sure if they were going to keep selling it. Then, I went to the Target next door, and they were all out as well. The sales associate there told me that they would probably be out for a few more days, but the Target about ten miles north of us had two copies in stock.

I left the shopping center on a journey to find the next Target. On my way there I noticed  an Office Depot off the freeway. I thought about it for about two seconds and then darted onto the off-ramp. When I got to the Office Depot, I was immediately greeted by a friendly staff member. I told him that I needed a copy of XP. He brought me over to where they sold their operating systems. I initially went for the $99.99 version, but it turns out that this is the version that you use when you are upgrading from Windows 98 or Windows 2000.  Since this wasn’t the case I went with the standard $184.99 + state and local taxes version. This was the real deal full installation I was told. At this point I was too frusturated to buy the “upgrade” version, take it home and find out it was the wrong version, and then take it back only to find out I couldn’t return it because I had already opened it. I decided to just bite the bullet and get the “Full Meal Deal.” Yes, supersize it.

Now we are current and I am in the process of repairing Windows. It attempted to do the repair about a half an hour ago, but it restarted after 3% completion for some random reason. I did not see why because I was doing laundry in the meantime. I told the setup disk to repair once again, and now we are sitting nicely at 16% in the “h” section of the files. At this rate it should only take another hour. I spoke too soon, it decided to restart again…lovely.
So if I already had XP on my computer, why did I go out and buy a new install disk you might ask. Well…I built this computer myself a year or so ago. This would make me the tech support for when things go wrong. At the time I thought that I could just install windows from the reinstall cd that came with my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. It turns out that it doesn’t quite work like that. Luckily my roommate at the time had a copy of Windows that I could use, and I have used that copy since. Now that I need to reinstall, I don’t have that copy and I was forced to purchace a legitimate version.

Now nothing seems to be working. Hopefully I can figure out this mess and keep all of my old files as well.

For those who feel like the gas tax holiday will be a great thing to have, please take this into consideration. Just because the 18 cent per gallon tax is eliminated doesn’t mean that retailers will necessarily drop prices by a similar amount. In fact, they may turn the gas tax holiday into a gas profit holiday.

Most gas stations make 10 cents per gallon or less in profits. Some just break even on gas. The reason for this is that they use the gas to get you there, and then profit off of the soda, beer and snacks that are in their convenience store. If a retailer could make a few extra dollars on the sale of gasoline they would.

Imagine that a retailer currently earns 5 cents per gallon. When the holiday in enacted, prices should theoretically drop 18 cents per gallon. Imagine that instead prices drop by only 13 cents per gallon. If this happened, there would be an additional 5 cents per gallon in savings that would not be passed on to the consumer. Guess where those five cents go? That’s right, into the pockets of the gas station owners. The gas station just increased their summer gas profits by 100%. Not too shabby. Even if the station dropped it 17 cents, that left over cent would give the station owners an additional 20% in profit for the summer. Once again, not too shabby.

Click on the following link to see what respondents to a CBS poll thought about the proposed gas tax holiday. The results clearly show that many see it as a political stunt to gain favor.