New to the US 101

After almost 2 years I think I'm qualified to put together a list that could be help to anybody else who just have arrived to the United States and is about to start a new life here. The first 6-12 months will need some adjustments and you will face some limitations for sure.

I hope this helps all of you!

Basics

1. SSN - Social Security Number: This you need for everything: getting paid, opening a bank account, get credit cards, cable TV, internet, mobile phone. Fill out and bring this form with you to your local Social Security Office. You cannot get an appointment for this. Go in the middle of the day. Everybody else will go early in the morning.
2. Open a bank account. You can try one of the credit unions, too. You most likely will be allowed to open an account, but you'll have to update them with your SSN once you have it.
3. Once this you have your SSN get a secured credit card from an issuer. I suggest to deposit $2000 and never have a balance bigger than $600. Pay it off every month. After 6 months you should be eligible to get a real credit card. This will start building your credit history. You need to have a good one! Google what that is, it's too complicated to sum it up in this post. But you have to have credit to get credit. Strange system. To monitor your credit you can either pay $10-$15 every month, or you can sign up with Credit Karma. Less service but it's free and gives you a basic idea where you are at.
4. You need a car. Without car you won't be able to get around unless you live in a big city with good public transportation system. If you have at least $10000, you could aim for a new car. Used cars are not cheap. Only the ones that are very used... If you don't have that kind of cash, you'll have to settle for a 12 years old Toyota Camry. If you put down 40-50% of the price of your new car, you'll get credit. No credit is better than bad credit! Your APR will not be the best though. You probably won't get financed for a used car, even if it is certified pre-owned. Never accept sticker price on a car, and you can negotiate on the maintenance plan for your new vehicle, too. Instead of the standar $2500 you can get it for something between $1000-1500 depending how good you are negotiating.
5. Car insurance: with the 12 year old Camry go for liability only, it will be something around $50-$70 a month. For a new car you need the full coverage. A 6 months premium can vary between $700-$1200. Try AAA, Allstate and StateFarm. Others charge way too much as I saw. Once you have 18 months of US driver history (i.e. 18 months after your driver's license is issued) rates will go down on your premium.
6. Driver's license: get it as soon as you can. In California, you need to take a test. Easy as pie compared to the European ones :) You can get the handbook from DMV, read it and go take the test. Once you pass you'll be scheduled for a behind the wheel test. Watch this video and follow the guidelines and you'll pass. Once you get your DL you're no more required to carry your passport with you all the time.
7. Mobile phone: No credit history? You'll probably have to give a $400 deposit or so per line. You'll have to live with pre-paid for 5-6 months, sorry, if you don't want to leave the deposit. Difference between the providers:

• AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM providers. If you have your SIM free phone, all you need is a SIM card
• Sprint and Verizon are CDMA based, so you'll need a phone as well.
• Verizon and AT&T does not give unlimited data
• T-Mobile slows your data down after you reach a limit
• Sprint claims to have real unlimited data
• Verizon has the largest network, you'll get signal probably everywhere
• Unlimited nationwide calling means: you can call as much you want, but you'll have to pay the per minute fees once you reached your included minutes. The possibility is unlimited, not the service :)

8. Cable TV and internet. Again, needs SSN, and probably you'll have to give a deposit, but I didn't have to... It varies.

Company perks

1. Health insurance: most important thing. If your employer provides only HDLP you are screwed and they're cheap. Health will be expensive for you. If they don't offer FSA open an Health Savings Account to save at last the tax on your health expenses. For foreigners your only option is Chase HSA as I found. If you don't travel much, you're good with an HMO plan, otherwise go with the PPO. The difference is: HMO - you have a health care provider, you can only go to their facilities and pharmacies, you'll have a primary physician that you need to visit anytime you have a problem, he'll transfer you to a specialist; PPO - you can go to anybody in the network and you're free to visit a specialist right away. PPO is more expensive, might require higher co-pay from your side. I'm with Kaiser and I'm satisfied so far. Kaiser is an HMO.
2. 401k: that'll be your retirement money. Try to contribute to the max, and use whatever contribution your employer offers. Besides this you'll only get social security once you are retired. I don't believe the government will be able to give me any money in 40 years... Your call :)
3. Vision and dental: this covers your eye-care and dental care. Eye checkups, contact lenses, frames and glasses, fillings, crowns, root canals, professional teeth cleanings. Usually you get $1500-2000 coverage per year. Co-pay varies per service.

A place to live

Now that's expensive in California. If you are OK with it, live with room mates, otherwise you'll pay around $1200-2000 for rent per month, plus $200-250 for utilities (water, garbage, heating, electricity). When you rent, they'll check your credit. If you don't have children, choose freely your place. Avoid very cheap areas: you'll get rubbed, mugged, and you'll wake up for gunshot noise. If you have children you need to choose an area with a good school district. More expensive. Locate these areas using Trulia or Realtor, and than look for listings on Craigslist. That'll be your cheapest source! You can save some money if your children are about at the same age. So you can settle for a good middle school and when they go to high school you'll move to another place.

Mobile home is an over-sized RV, cheap but it's like camping all the time! If you choose to live in an apartment, aim for the highest floor, otherwise you'll be bothered by people walking.

Until you find a place to live, you can find extended stay rentals. Either an apartment or you try Extended Stay America or Marriott Residence Inn. Bit cheaper than a hotel, bit more expensive as an apartment, but you get WiFi, cable, furnished apartment with kitchen. A place of your own.


Let me know if I missed something! :) Good luck!

Olympic coverage from the USA

The Olympic coverage from the USA is ridiculous. NBC does the worst job ever. Almost nothing's live on TV, the evening coverages are only about Americans. After almost 2 years I know now why Americans don't know anything about the rest of the world, and the media is the one to blame: 8 runners, one is on Team USA, they don't even show the faces, names of the other 7... And that applies to all the sports.

At least they have their website where they broadcasting live on YouTube all the video streams by the Olympic Broadcast Services. American races and games with American commentator, of course... So I can watch all the water polo games and other Hungarian events live, and that's a good thing!

Now the Internet stream is filled with ads. Like every minute. Sometimes the actual happenings are not even taken into account, and they broadcast a 10 second ad block in the middle of a game. I figured, that at my workplace there's no ads. They applied recently a filtering system that blocks certain sites (like memebase for which I'm furious) and all the ads. All of them, everywhere!

So it is possible to block YouTube video stream ads! First I was trying it using the URL filter of my router. I was recording the HTTP requests with Tamper Data, and found the domains where these streaming ads came from. But that didn't seem to be sophisticated enough: there were no ads, but the live stream was not served as well. So I went with the crowd and installed AdBlock Plus in my Firefox.

By default it doesn't work on YouTube streams but there's a guy who seems to know what he's doing, and he explained in a forum entry what to do! So I've added the custom filters to my settings:

In case you don't want to type those rules in, here they are for copy-paste:

• ||http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/ad-
• ||c.youtube.com$~object_subrequest
• doubleclick$domain=youtube.com
• google$third-party,domain=youtube.com

Well I just started a stream in my Firefox while we were watching the Pommel Horse Finals (congrats to Krisztián, winning our 3rd gold medal!) on IE. I had to watch it on IE, because the ads crash Flash Player on Firefox and chrome full screen YouTube exits if I move the focus to another window...So in that stream for 5-10 mins I didn't see ads.

We'll see how it performs later on the men's Hammer Throw Finals!

UPDATE: It works! Hammer throw finals, not a single millisecond of ads!

Evil fat

So my weight loss program stuck around 220-225lbs. I refuse to starve. I don't think I eat too much, and I'm going to the gym every workday morning and I come home every time completely exhausted and smelly. I ride the elliptic for 30 mins and I do my weight lifting routine. All together 60-90 minutes in the gym, and that's all hard workout! I do feel my training is legit and not just a waste of time!

So the solution I came up with was to start a creatine monohydrate cycle. It is supposed to help increasing the size of your muscles and your strength. The bigger my muscles are the bigger is my body surface, and if the amount of fat doesn't grow it will spread on a larger body resulting in a leaner look. :) Let's see how it goes.

I'm at the end of my 4th week, and I started 5 days of loading. I can increase the amount of weights in all my exercises week by week, so my strength does increase and my biceps grew about 2 centimeters (almost an inch), so it seems to work :D Let's see how it goes.

In the past I drank whey protein and other stuff, but they all seemed to be just wasted money. A container that should be enough for a standard 3 months cycle was only $20 at Vitaminshoppe so it will not max out my credit card for sure, and so far it seems to work.

I bet somebody else doing the same thing would look like Arnold in his glory days!

Yeehaaa

Ever since we moved to the US i wanted to see a rodeo. It's the all American thing I thought, and I was right. Luckily a couple of weeks ago there was a rodeo nearby. California doesn't seem to be the homeland of rodeos. I bet Texas is different :-)

I had the luck to go to Bill Picket Rodeo. It's an all-black invitational rodeo. I bet I could count on my two hands the number of non-black members of the audience! At first it was a bit intimidating, but I had a great time. the MC was great, was talking during the whole show. There was no boredom either. Something always was going on. I like how they involved the people watching as well: kids from 6 to 11 could chase calves and the ones getting the ribbon off their tail win a price.

If you have the chance, don't miss a nearby rodeo, that's my advice.

Some pictures to illustrate:

B*tch, I'll kill you dead!

If you have [adult swim] on your TV you need to give a try to this show: Black Dynamite. It's on air every Sunday night, and I'm sure the channel is full with repeats, in case you missed the first couple of episodes. it has its own kind of humor, and I think it's brilliant. One word: whorephanage ;-)

NTFS vs. RAID1

Ever since hard drives are not that expensive and even cheaper motherboards come with on board RAID support I mirror all my hard drives. It saved 'my life' twice already, so even right now I have a bad experience I'll keep on doing this.

The first time it saved my life was in my previous desktop system. It served me for 7-8 years long. In the last 2 years it got a new pair of hard drives, as the ones I had (mirrored) became smaller and smaller in size. And of course as they were that old they started to be slower, too. With HDD prices going down I thought it's a good investment to keep my machine running. When I migrated my data over I realized that the drives were in a bit worse condition than I thought and it was really time to replace them. If it wasn't for RAID1 I would have lost all my pictures, music etc. long ago!

The second time it saved me was in my Seagate NAS. The new desktop I spent €1000-1200 onis in a nice looking case from Thermaltake. Micro-ATX... Meaning there's no room for anything in that case. It was a stupid idea I know now... So I needed disk space and I wanted a network attached storage and I happen to choose Seagate BlackArmor. Bad choice, but what can I do now. After 5 months one of the drives died completely. I have it replaced under warranty, and again RAID1 saved me, as the second drive also had all my data!

Over the weekend I realized that RAID1 helps you with hardware failure, but it's a curse for logical failures. I happen to run out of the 2TB on my NAS so being disappointed in its performance, this time I got and eSATA unit from Western Digital (MyBook Studio II). First thing I did I set up RAID1 on it. I've been trying to update its firmware ever since I got it, but the update program never seemed to find the unit (even though I followed the instructions), so I gave up. I think that just stroke back yesterday. The NTFS file system's MFT (Master File Table) got screwed up. Both the primary and backup. And as it's RAID1 it got synced over to the second disk. Damn!

I've tried all the tricks I've found on the internet without any luck. So there's nothing left here to do: restore the files. I was searching for tools online and purchased to cheapest solution: Restore Ultimate for $29.99 So far it seems to do the trick. In about 6-7 hours it scanned the drive and found the files. Even the ones I deleted long long time ago. Luckily the 2TB drive had only about 500GB data. At the moment I'm copying the found files to another drive. It's running for about 10-12 hours now, but it looks promising. All the digital photos I took over the years would have been gone otherwise, so I'm really grateful for BitMart Inc!!!

I don't think it's a hardware failure. Must have been a bad correlation of many the things (eSata, older firmware etc.) Probably an algorithm logic hiccup that is not handled well caused all this. I couldn't really find articles online what would make both the MFTs to blow up, but one would think there's some safeguards built in... Even RAID controllers could identify something like this and would report and error and would not corrupt the second drive. Somebody didn't test the algorithm well enough...

So I'm annoyed but not devastated thanks to my $30 investment that seems to work. And one more thing I've decided: if I'm in the need for getting more disk space, I'll build a cheap Linux machine and put it in a big case with lots of hard drives and that will be my file server. I don't trust these small external drives any more. I would probably need a UPS too for that machine, to safeguard the disks on them. Linux doesn't seem to tolerate hard reset very well... I've already made some calculations. From $1000 I could create a 4TB RAID1 array in that machine and expanding it would be easy too.

Routing the sh*t out of it

Here's a story why I will never have Linux on my machines at home. Maybe there'll be one exception: when my external hard drives are full I'm going to build a file server. These external boxes are slow and expensive and worthless.

So I have a web application that needs two IP addresses. Certain things are only available on one NIC (Network Interface Controller) why other stuff is only available on the other NIC. Don't argue with this. Smart people thought this is the way to go, so be it.

Now my machine (virtual) happens to be on DHCP on a server under my desk. These under-desk servers are on a separate switch as the development desktops. I realized that I can't access this VM (virtual machine) on its second IP but only the first one. From my server and from other's server I had no problem pinging this second IP thgouh. Strange... Google-ing and talking to people with more advanced sysadmin background I learned something new: since subnet is blahblahblah, and the correlation of the stars and the universe is expanding Linux for questions on NIC#2 answers on NIC#1. It's like someone gives you a call on your mobile and you answer the call with your land-line phone... Probably there's a logic to it, which I'm not worthy to understand.

So after all this misery I've found a website that explains what to do. Quite complicated, but I started doing this. Then when I was about to create a second routing table and tried to figure out what to type in there based on the example on that website it came to my mind that there has to be a better way. It's the 21st century for god's sake! GUI is the magic word even on Linux!

So I typed 'init 5' opened the GUI console, and some fate has been restored:

1. Click on the little network icon
2. Edit connections
3. Click on eth0 then click on Edit
4. Click on IPv4 Settings
5. Click the Routes button
6. Thick 'Use this connection only for resources on its network'
7. OK, Apply
8. Same for eth1

Magic has been done.