Brian @ Wongside

Where’s Noah, the great ship builder when you need him?  The central valley is just getting dumped on.  Drive safely, everyone.

If you know Edmund and his family, please keep them in prayer. His dad died last week, and Charlene and I went to the funeral yesterday. It’s likely going to be rough for them for a while.

Edumund, we’re praying for you, dude. Keep the faith, and let us know how we can help.

Charlene and I are going out on a date today…all day.  It’ll be fun, and the best part is that she has no idea what we’re doing.  But we’re doing stuff that we both enjoy, so we should have a great time. Yay! Fun times.

So I spent a lot of time yesterday looking at ME-50s to purchase. I looked all over Ebay, Guitar Center, Amazon, Musician’s Friend, and even Craigslist.

For a while I even considered the Boss ME-20 because it’s about $100 cheaper. But when I found out that the ME-50 has tap tempo and the ME-20 doesn’t, I nixed that idea. Per the advice of my friend Ryan, I decided that if I ever got a delay pedal, the one feature it would have to have is a tap tempo.

Fortunately, for me I found a guy who is selling his here in the Bay Area. It was listed on his Craigslist post as used for $200 but negotiable.

He’s all the way up in Pleasant Hill, which is kinda far. So I asked him if it would be possible to reduce the price because of the exorbitant cost of gas ($4.33 at my local Shell, and $4.47 at the Chevron). I offered $150, and he bit, so now I’m off to Pleasant Hill to pick up an ME-50 effects pedal.

See ya when I get back.

I’ve been thinking about getting one of these nifty effects pedals for the last couple of weeks. I’m on the worship team for the ALCF Young Adult Retreat this weekend, and we don’t have any effects to use on the electric guitar. Normally, we’d use the effects available at church, but they’re going to need them in the High School group on Sunday, so we really can’t borrow them.

The biggest hurdle is that they’re pretty expensive. Musician’s Friend has them for about $300. Amazon has it for about $230, but that’s from a random user I don’t know at all.

So we’ll see. That’s a lot of money to be spending right now.

I don’t know about you, but in times of uncertain financial environments, capital preservation becomes one of my top priorities. Interest rates on checking and savings are pretty much in the toilet. I’m earning nothing on my Bank of America Checking, and something like a measly 0.5% on my savings. So I was ecstatic to find that E*Trade Financial has a Max-Rate Checking account with a whopping 3.25% interest rate. That’s even more than their Max-Rate Savings, which is still earning a pretty amazing 3.15%.

Other than the fabulous interest rate, there are some other pretty nifty features:

• Online bill pay that is free and unlimited
• Free Debit card
• Unlimited ATM fee refunds. In other words, I can go withdraw from other ATMs, and E*Trade will refund any associated fees.
• Free Quick Transfer to and from any of my other accounts, including my B of A account.

I will say that the one downside to the Quick Transfer feature is that it’s not exactly Quick. I’m not sure who got to define it, but “quick” in this case means about 4 business days. I’d say that’s rather slow, but at least it’s free.

If you’re looking for a great interest rate on a checking account, this is the highest one I’ve found to-date.

Looks like Visa is planning to go public. I have no idea when, though. I must say, it would be really nice for Visa to start in the 40s like MasterCard did, and then take a nice 2 year zoom to $200. I doubt that will happen, though. It seems that Visa is likely to be oversubscribed due to MasterCard’s success, meaning opening prices are likely to be ridiculously high. I guess we’ll see.

Just a shout out to some new, awesome friends! Charlene and I had dinner with Joe and Kim tonight. Suffice it to say we had a number of good laughs and can probably discuss just about anything with them now. It would be fair to say the conversation wasn’t exactly Rated G the entire time, but according to Andy, that’s the way it is when Joe’s around. Turtle, dude.