I spent nine of the last twenty-four hours playing Cashflow 101. If you're unfamiliar with it, this is the educational game based on Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of financial books.

The game definitely helps put certain things in perspective, but makes some of the investment options too easy. It's not difficult to get the 'gist' of the game, yet I can see how some people might try to take some of the game interactions as literal ways to behave in the real financial world. That seems a little dangerous to me.

At any rate, I began as the janitor last night. This profession has an incredible lack of expenses and it made winning fairly easy. The biggest trouble I had was landing on investment opportunities once I was out of the Rat Race. Indeed, it feels like the game is really 'won' by getting out of the Rat Race-- the ease of life afterwards is almost laughable. I'm sure this isn't accidental, since they want to convey that as the most important step.

For today's game, we decided to put our personal financial information onto the sheets to see how well things worked. My friend Scott won quickly, mostly because he has very low living expenses and it only took a handful of wise investments to get him to financial freedom. I was able to get out of the Rat Race soon after because my income was so much higher than my expenses and debt. As such, I was able to invest in large deals from the get-go and leapt into the Fast Track with far more money than we had seen previously (nearly half a million).

All in all, it's a neat game. It definitely has me thinking very much about my own finances and how I can make the most of my investable income. We'll see if I can carry that momentum forward.

Categories: Geekery

Ever since I first started playing with WMI, I've been meaning to delve into it more. It seems like a very handy interface for manipulating and querying Windows machines.

I just ran across the WMI Code Creator tool from Microsoft. This fellow will generate example code in C#/VB.NET/VBScript for all sorts of WMI tasks. It really demonstrates how easy it is to do powerful things with WMI. For instance, it takes only a click or two to create a VBScript that gets notified whenever a process is invoked. Here's code of a VBScript it generated for me:

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\CIMV2")
Set objEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _
("SELECT * FROM Win32_ProcessStartTrace WHERE ProcessName = 'notepad.exe'")
 
Wscript.Echo "Waiting for events ..."
Do While(True)
   Set objReceivedEvent = objEvents.NextEvent
 
   'report an event
   Wscript.Echo "Win32_ProcessStartTrace event has occurred."
 
Loop


This snippet will display "Win32_ProcessStartTrace event has occurred." whenever notepad.exe is invoked. This is only a small example of the easy demos you can put together with their code creator tool.

Categories: Software Development, Power Users

Earlier today I was thinking of writing a utility that monitors what applications you use regularly and lists them for others to see. Part of that would involve providing short descriptions and frequency of use into a socially-linked database.

Well, part of that is already here. Take a look at MyProgs.Net. It acts as a del.icio.us for cool and clever software utilities.

Categories: Power Users

A fellow put up a search engine for 100+ million lines of open source C/C++ code. I'm not certain how practical or useful such a site is, but it's certainly interesting to me.

Categories: Software Development

Tired of commenting your code? Well, this customizable utility could do it for you.

Categories: Software Development, Humor