Curiosities of a Rambling Mind
Since this WordPress blogging software is so utterly cool, I’ve decided that I can probably import my old website data from my the old server into the blog itself. I’ll need to tweak and fine-tune a few things, I think, but this could give everything a consistent feel.
Hats off to the theme designer du jour (see the “Bob” link under “Meta”). And also to the photographer Benjamin Walls. They really spruce the place up.
In responding to a question in blog comments about rate-finding, I noticed that the calculator didn’t behave well if the Payment Amount could not pay off the loan after the Number of Regular Payments had elapsed, no matter how low the interest rate. To fix this, I added a test for the condition and have the calculator write an error message if necessary.
It’s a little surprising to still find bugs of this magnitude after all these years. 🙂 But hey, they’re still getting fixed, one by one.
I work on a college campus, and there are many great things about that. Though not a professor myself, I’m of an academic bent: I like being in a research environment. I like figuring out things. I like to have the opportunity to explore ideas to see where they lead. I like working with other people who share these similar [odd] traits.
Another “plus” of the campus experience is that new people keep flowing into one’s life. The sad part is that most of them will also flow out of one’s day-to-day experience when this particular phase of their education is completed. So it is that I will bid farewell to a few new friends this month, wishing them well in their new endeavors, knowing I will miss seeing them on a regular basis. It is a privilege to share in the lives of others, so even if it’s a little sad to say goodbye, friendship is always worth the investment. How blessed I am.
For those of you who like hard copies of your amortization schedules, I have produced a new stylesheet which should make printing the schedule a little less ugly than it may have been before. I still wish there was a way to manage page breaks better on more browsers, but I guess some of the browser builders will need more time to implement all that CSS has to offer. (I would also like for there to be a way to re-start column headings after the first page, but alas, that doesn’t seem to be a possibility with HTML or CSS, unless I missed something.)
Well, it has happened. What I have feared the most. Calamity. Pain. Suffering. Ego-shattering. In moving the calculator to its new home, it lost its long-held rank as the number one result for the search “amortization” on Google. It is now number two. I am properly admonished and duly humbled.
As for progress, the calculator page now validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. It’s a small thing, but I believe in standards.
Having been truly inspired by the work at the CSS Zen Garden, I will try my hand at making visually aesthetic improvements to the calculator web page. There’s no reason why function can’t also be beautiful. However, my skills as an artist are—shall I be generous?—limited. Someday I’d like to hire the services of a graphic designer to make it REALLY cool and pretty.
I am a believer in the Jungian notion of synchronicity, so I try to pay attention when the universe starts tossing me “coincidences”. I recently had a chat with someone about Buddhism and Zen, and later in the week, while perusing the bookstore for something on web design and cascading style sheets (CSS), I found a beautiful book called The Zen of CSS Design. Though I am a programmer and not a designer, I am a great admirer of what graphic artists have brought to our experience of the web. Next time you’re surfing, you owe it to yourself to check out the CSS Zen Garden.
I’ve added a new entry to the FAQ regarding negative amortizations. In the process, I also noticed that some of the summary information produced by the calculator and final schedule row are not completely consistent in the NegAm scenario. I will need to fix these. It is apparent that I missed some sort of symmetry in my calculations here (I probably took a shortcut to minimize computer time, which is just so much gagging at gnats these days).
This is interesting to me because I’ve recently been reading some of the Richard Feynman Lectures on Physics, and he talks a bit about mathematical symmetries. We have such an expectation of symmetry that lack of it in certain contexts may indicate a flaw in our understanding, or sometimes it may lead to the discovery of even more interesting properties. (Amortization is not so glamorous as a fundamental law of the universe, mind you; but I now recognize that had I paid closer attention to a mathematical symmetry in this case, I might have noticed my error sooner.)
I improved a test for an error condition yesterday. If one tries to find out how long it will take to pay off a loan (i.e., the Number of Payments field is blank), but the Regular Payment amount specified is below the minimum amortizable payment, the loan can never be paid off, since the payment isn’t even covering the interest that’s due. In such a case, the calculator raises an error condition.
This test existed before, but it wasn’t always reliable right at the cusp of amortizability, so I made a tweak which should have handled it. It did the job as I intended, but there was a consequence: it also disabled negative amortization scenarios if one is seeking a payoff time when a Balloon Payment has been also specified. So I have fixed yesterday’s fix, and finding the loan payoff time for a negative amortization scenario should work again.
I also added a link to this blog from the calculator page itself, for the curious.
As of July 2nd, 2008, the Amortization Calculator was officially moved from its old location in the Meteorology Department of Florida State University to this website. The primary impetus for the move is that the aging machine on which the calculator had been running since the mid-90s will soon need to be shut down for good. In fact, running the calculator was about all the old machine had been doing for the last 4 or 5 years.
Since I had to recompile the calculator program as part of the move anyway, I took the opportunity to make a few little tweaks to the design, and to make a few minor bug fixes and enhancements. The biggest visible change is the addition of a Google ad bar, which I’m sure will annoy some folks (and I can’t say I love the look myself). However, where web and network services were provided to the world “for free” by the university, *I* am now paying so that folks can continue to have access to the calculator. I think it’s only fair.
So in case anyone is interested (and if you’re not, that’s OK: this is just a personal record of my work), here are some of the changes that I’ve made to the calculator while moving it to its new home.
I probably left some things out, but I think I hit the highlights.
Hi, People of the Earth!
I am hardly new to cyberspace: I’ve had a personal website, bio, and photos on the Web since 1994. But I am just now venturing into the blogosphere, and still, this is more-or-less just a convenient way of keeping folks apprised of the updates or changes I’m making to my on-line Amortization Calculator.
So until next time, be at peace!