Aren Cambre’s Blog

This weekend I attended the first session of Wood Badge, a training program for adult Boy Scout leaders that is known as the Ph.D. of Scouting. The training was held at Camp Wisdom, just right outside of Dallas, TX.

Camp Wisdom used to be Circle 10 Council’s main camp. Now that Circle 10 has Camp Constantin, Camp James Ray, and Camp Cherokee, Wisdom is used mainly for weekend trips and training.

Interestingly, Camp Wisdom sits on several parcels. All are owned by Circle Ten Council except for two: one owned by the Circle Ten Council Boy Scout Foundation and one owned by the Boy Scouts of America national office in Irving, TX.

Camp Wisdom’s southern and western edges are bounded by Interstate 20 and Spur 408, respectively. I-20 is a 9 lane freeway, and Spur 408 is a limited access 6 lane connector road. Unfortunately both of these roads create a constant drone in the whole camp. If you’re outside, it’s difficult to hear anyone talking who is more than 30 feet away. This is a relatively recent development in Camp Wisdom’s history. Dallas-area planning maps show that I-20 was under construction in 1971.

Anyway, back to Wood Badge. This weekend I learned about effective team leading techniques, with an emphasis on how to create self-running, self-managing teams. That is in fact the crux of Boy Scouting: a properly-run troop should be mostly boy-led and boy-run with adults providing minimal supervision and handling things that the boys can’t or shouldn’t do (mostly financial or legal matters and certain supervision).

The Wood Badge is organized like an actual troop. The participants are in patrols, and the course leaders operate in traditional troop-level youth and adult positions: Senior Patrol Leader, Assistant SPL, Scoutmaster, Assistant SM, Troop Guides, etc.

On a future weekend I will attend the second Wood Badge session. That weekend will be a hiking camping trip. Each patrol has to backpack in almost all supplies for the trip. It will be interesting. The last time I have done a backpack trip was when I did a 6 day Mountain Man hike at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico, one of America’s foremost speed traps.

After I complete both Wood Badge weekends, I will still have to complete a “ticket.” This is five major items I have to do within 18 months. They include items of personal growth and service to others. Once I complete these 5 items I will be officially presented with my Wood Badge beads.

The biggest surprise about Wood Badge is how similar it is to the Sam Houston Area Council’s Junior Leader Training Conference (JLTC), which I did in July 1990. That conference literally had almost all the same components as Wood Badge except that it was directed towards troop youth leaders, and it did not involve a ticket.

I reran the numbers on Buying a new car is a poor financial decision assuming 250,000 usable miles. The numbers more dramatically favor used cars:

Today I thought more about my views of car buying. I came up with the following as a response to someone who suggested that if you’re going to hold on to a car for 10 years, it’s smartest to buy new. In fact, it’s probably smartest to buy used regardless of your time horizon.

According to http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/auto/20011226a.asp, a typical new car loses 15%-20% of its value each year in the first three years.

Let’s take the case of a Honda Accord LX V6. Based on friends’ experiences and Consumer Reports reliability ratings going back to 1996, I think it’s reasonable to say that this car will go at least 180,000 miles before requiring costly repairs or becoming unacceptably unreliable.

This chart is based on if you purchased the following cars right now:

It should be noted that Accords both are in demand, limiting your ability to negotiate, and don’t depreciate as badly as many other cars.

Notice how much higher you pay per useful mile for the new car than for the 4-year-old car.

Look at this differently: suppose I had $23,800 sitting around. What is the smartest investment: $23,800 all sunk into a car, or $12,650 sunk into a car and investing the remaining $11,000 in something useful and wise such as a child’s college fund, your own retirement, a worthwhile charity? Or if I didn’t have the cash laying around, why double my debt for the sole point of the new car smell? What does it say about one’s values when he maximizes his deprecation losses (and debt?) at the expense of better choices?

See http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Saveonacar/P37267.asp another perspective.

Cars are depreciating assets, or a net liability. It makes sense for careful buyers to reduce exposure to losses by not buying new.

Today I played dodgeball for the first time in 15 years. (The last time was at Groves Middle School.)

I played in a tournament at my church. Six teams entered: four teams were mostly teenage boys, one was the church’s media department, and one was my Sunday school class (mostly in their 30s).

The tournament started with double elimination: each team played twice, and teams that didn’t lose both games got into the finals brackets.

My team was the only non-youthful team to make it to the finals!

In the finals, we quickly spanked a first youthful team in the first round. We waited through two more rounds, then we played the very last round for the trophy.

A brief note: up until this point I just played defense. All I did was stay away from balls and hand balls to teammates who were better throws than me.

The last round progressed normally. Both teams slowly picked each other off. We got down to 3 on our side and 2 on the other side.

All of a sudden balls flew and it was a 1 on 1 game, and I was one of them! Suddenly I was on offense! The opponent chunked three balls in succession, and I barely missed each of them. Then I managed to get two balls. I threw one high (unintentionally), distracting the opponent, and shortly nailed him on the legs.

Holy cow, I threw the winning ball! Today was my the best dodgeball performance ever!

For the past two days I have been banging my head against the wall with an ASP.Net problem.

I created a custom WebControl composite class, meaning that it contains other WebControls.

I overrode its render method and used the provided HtmlTextWriter to spit out the code specific to my WebControl and the HTML code of the child WebControls which, by the way, were dynamically created in my WebControl’s Init event handler.

Anyway, what counfounded the heck out of me is that if I would push a button on the ASPX page, thereby triggering a PostBack event, the ASPX page forgot all of its dynamically created controls. In other words, a richly populated page became a blank page just by me hitting the submit button!

After a lot of research on this problem, I stumbled across an article at http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/2129.aspx that didn’t directly provide the answer but proverbially slapped me across the forehead and jumbled the facts into place. I needed to add these child controls to my parent control’s Controls collection! Stupid, stupid, stupid!

I removed my custom render method and added the controls to the Controls collection, and it works like a charm. View state is preserved!

Meet Amelia:

Amelia is an 8½ year old Himalayan cat.

Amelia is a very bad kitty.

About three months ago, Amelia no longer wanted to use her litter box. So she has taken to pooping and sometimes peeing everywhere but the litter box: Alec’s bedroom, the mat in front of the box, the rug in front of the garage door, and other random places. (I’m sure I’ve missed some places because Sugar the Bad Dog thinks cat poop is a treat.)

I’ve tried several of the tricks in the book to get her to back into her litter box. I’ve ensured that the litter is usually no more than a week old. I’ve used the fine, scoopable litter. I’ve removed the litter box cover. I’ve watched her diet.

I have only had limited success. She still poops outside the box more than she poops inside the box, but at least she poops within eye shot of the box.

I now don’t know what to do with her. I have never seriously considered getting rid of a pet, but the thought crossed my mind today as my stockinged foot mushed into a pile of gooey poop on the back door mat. (She pooped on that mat so much that I just tossed it. It was just a cut up section of carpet.)

Stupid, idiot cat! I wish you could train or restrain them like dogs.

My understanding of the Wright and Shelby amendments, which regulate air travel out of Dallas’s Love Field airport, was incorrect. Even the Dallas Morning News has it incorrect!

According to a 1998 US DOT news release, it appears that the 1979 Wright Amendment permits passenger air travel from Love Field, partially upending a then-11 year old agreement between Dallas and Ft. Worth. Under this agreement, Dallas and Ft. Worth will not use their respective airports to compete against DFW Airport. The 1997 Shelby Amendment enhances the Wright Amendment’s permissiveness by allowing flights to go to 3 more states and also allowing no destination restrictions on flights using planes with fewer than 56 seats. (It is humorous to note that Senator Richard Shelby, the amendment’s namesake, is from Alabama, one of these 3 additional states.)

So without the federal Wright or Shelby Amendments, there may be no passenger air travel out of Dallas Love Field.

Edit: See the comment left in the comments section below. (Click on the Comments link.) Simply repealing the Wright Amendment is not enough; that would invite another round of local lawsuits from Fort Worth, American Airlines, and DFW. Congress needs to clearly say that there shall be no restrictions on flights on Love Field.

A few years ago I read The Millionaire Next Door (see chapter 1). I was fascinated by this book. It showed that, in general, the people who act rich are not rich, and the rich usually don’t “act rich.”

A good measure of wealth is how long could you survive without changing your lifestyle or taking out additional debt if your income was cut off today. By that measure, an amazingly high percentage of those people living in your area’s silk stockings district are fakes. They are consuming so much of their income that their net worth is a fraction of what it should be had they been responsible.

I also read part of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That book was such hooey crap that I didn’t even finish it. A good analysis of the book and its author is at http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html. I think this guy is practically a fraud.

The communally reinforced mantra is that collision pays little for old cars. My experience is contrary. I had generic collision and comprehensive coverage on my Nova. They were for “market value,” or what someone would pay for the car on the open market. Market value itself already factors age, so it is not like there are additional deductions because of age.

I got a check for about 5800% of what I paid for semiannual collision and comprehensive premiums. I only had to substantiate the car’s value with receipts and comparable sales ads. A 58:1 ratio is a good payout. (By the way, the insurer assessed my car at double the value of a 2001 appraisal; some appraisers are apparently idiots.)

With my experience I have to question the value of “agreed value” insurance. Unless there is something extremely unusual about the car (e.g., it’s a Tucker or a real Yenko Nova with 5,000 miles), it is easy to determine actual market value for the vast majority of old cars.

Also: “stated value” insurance is just a crippled market value policy. It only means that in the event of a total loss the insurer’s maximum payout is the stated value. It does not guarantee that you get the stated value. (See http://www.lelandwest.com/Stated_Amount_Explained.cfm.) If you have the choice, I think a plain vanilla collision policy is far better than a “stated value” policy.

If you have a street driven car, and your car’s actual cash value (minus deductible) is significantly higher than the premium (I would shoot for at least a 20:1 ratio), then I think vanilla collision and comprehensive coverage is financially worthwhile and a very smart choice.

This morning I stopped by a Starbucks in a Tom Thumb grocery store on the way to work. I used a coupon for a free “grande” coffee. (Right now you get one if you spend more than $50 at Tom Thumb.)

I was embarrassed to bring this drink into work. I think that Starbucks coffee is a great example of conspicuous consumption, a wasteful, hedonic habit.

Fortunately I don’t think anyone saw me with that coffee.