Another cool download

I love all things Excel, it's one thing Microsoft got right (even if they stole the idea from Lotus back in the day). Well there's a great website out there called Vertex 42.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Debt Reduction Calculator - Download a free Debt Reduction spreadsheet for Excel from Vertex42.com.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Vertex 42 is dedicated to all things Excel and their site is loaded with live spreadsheets you can download. The debt eliminator I'm showing here is really slick and if you're in over your head with debt, it's a great tool to get a real handle on what you're up against and how to get out from under it. I know, I have been there and super-indebtedness stinks. It's easy to fall into the trap where you tell yourself that you can't get out from under what feel like insurmountable obstacles, but that's a lie. The first step toward taking control of your life is to get an accurate picture of what you're up against. Here's a great tool to help you do just that.

Great (and useful) new website

If you're curious about your credit score, and your FICO number in particular, then check out this site. There are a lot of ways to access your own credit information, but nearly all of them charge for letting you look at your own records. To say this rubs me the wrong way is an understatement. Credit Karma shows you your FICO score and monitors it in real time for free. The site is supported by ads that are keyed to your FICO score, but if that's all I have to deal with in order to see a number that affects me daily, it's a small price to pay. Check it out.

On a Rolle

On Monday, I wrote about a great Bahamian breakfast I had at Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma and the great conversation I had with the Lounge's proprietor, Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the history of The Bahamas and he's a man who's very proud of his heritage. He has ample reason to be so, and a cursory Google search of his name shows that the Rolle clan is a pretty influential bunch in both The Bahamas and in the U.S. In addition to bringing us the likes of Esther Rolle and Estelle Evans, a number of Rolle descendants have risen to great heights in the world of professional sports. So much so that two years ago, Sports Illustrated ran a great feature on the Rolle family in the Bahamas and in the world of U.S. professional sports. SI sent a reporter to spend a day with my new pal Kermit and here's what he had to say:

WE ARE coming to the point where my father took me as a little boy," says Kermit Rolle, after the car, rolling along Queen's Highway on Exuma, has passed Jacob Rolle's Christian Academy, Rolle's Chat and Chew restaurant and nurse Lydia King Rolle's clinic and jounced through two bumpy detours around floods caused by Tropical Storm Noel. Sunlight blasts through the windshield. He motions the driver to slow. Kermit is 72 years old, but for a moment he is young again. The turquoise sea flashes through the trees. To understand anything about the Rolles, you must begin right here.

Kermit was nine or 10 that day. His father took him to this spot in Steventon to retrace the route of a slave named Pompey, one of hundreds working five settlements owned by an Englishman, Lord John Rolle. In 1829 the physically imposing Pompey led a protest against a plan to move a group of Rolle's slaves from Exuma to another island in the Bahamas . Pompey and others seized a boat and took it to Nassau to plead their case with the colonial governor. They were caught and whipped, after which Pompey escaped and famously ran five miles to Rolleville to warn other slaves that British soldiers were coming to seize them. The slaves "put hell" on the soldiers, Kermit says, laughing. "Pompey knocked them down left, right and center."

Pompey's rebellion earned him a place in history; he is credited with sparking the Bahamian antislavery movement. For the Rolles, who in the custom of the day took the name of their owner, Pompey is an icon of resistance: He didn't take servitude passively; he stood up and fought. A document from the time tells how soldiers were constantly being called out to quell the Rolle plantation workers. "They were always troublesome," says Gail Saunders, a historian and former director of the Bahamas ' national archives. "They wanted their freedom."

"Maybe that's how we get some of the strong players in the U.S. today," Kermit says. "My father always said of someone who's big and strong and healthy and runs fast: 'That could be one of Pompey's.'" Kermit, a restaurateur and businessman, is one of Rolleville's most prominent figures, a living repository of history. His great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave, told him that Lord John's overseers whipped any slave they caught trying to read and that some slaves risked their skins to secretly teach each other the alphabet.

During that walk with his dad on Pompey's route, Kermit also learned about the source of the Rolles' distinctive pride: Lord John's benevolent deed. Legend has it that, instead of selling off his land after the British fully ended slavery in the Bahamas in 1838, John Rolle willed the 5,000 acres in perpetuity to his freed slaves. Not one clod of that prime Caribbean waterfront land could be bought or sold. It could only be handed down to other Rolles.

This alone, Kermit says, makes Rolles different from other Bahamian blacks, not to mention their counterparts in the U.S. Kermit worked for 14 years in the postwar U.S. , shuttling in and out of the Bahamas on the Contract, and never understood the acceptance of second-class citizenship by many African-Americans. "John, Lord Rolle, was a perfect man," Kermit says. "That's why we ask God to bless him: His mind was so clear that after emancipation, all the lands he had he willed back to his people. That made us the most happiest people, because he treated us as human beings. He set you up in such a way that you can be proud, and there's still that proudness. The other slave owners? They just turned those people loose. [The freed slaves] didn't know where to go. They don't know where they are. But my father showed me the boundaries—and within those boundaries, the land belonged to our people."

A vast simplification? Perhaps. But Kermit is right about the psychological heft a prize such as Lord Rolle's can provide. In a recent essay, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. cited lack of property as a key reason for the growing wealth gap between poor and middle-class African-Americans. Studying 20 successful African-Americans, Gates found that 15 are descended from families that obtained property before 1920. By then, the Rolles on Exuma had been in possession of their land for more than 80 years. "People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society," Gates wrote. "They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not."

In the Rolles' case, the slave owner's gesture imbued its recipients with a sense of grace. "I heard that story about Lord John Rolle," says Florida State 's Myron Rolle, who was born and raised in the U.S. "Something like that just makes life more fulfilling. It makes you feel more connected with who you are, knowing where you came from and the people who came before you."

Amen Kermit.

Follow this link to read the rest of this article.

Calculate your roof's solar potential

View Larger Map

This is the satellite view of my block, thank you Google Maps.

With the help of a really cool website called Roof Ray, I was able to trace the shape of my roof from this image and then calculate its potential as a site for photovoltaic solar panels.
Once Roof Ray's web app figured out my roof's square feet, the degree of slope and the direction the different planes on my roof follow; it figured out how much it would cost to install photovoltaic solar panels on my roof.
It then figured out how much electricity I could expect to generate based on my location. It then figured out my current per kWh charge from the thieves at Progress Energy and how much money I'd save on electric bills on a month-by-month basis for the rest of my life. Finally, it figured out how many years it would take for my investment in solar to break even. A-Ma-Zing.
Check it out!

Composting toilets in paradise

When I was poking around the Cat Island Boathouse last weekend, I was surprised and happy to find that it uses a composting toilet in its bathroom. Ordinarily, someone in such a remote location would use a septic system and be done with it. However, The Cat Island Boathouse sits a few feet away from a pristine mangrove wetland and salt creek. No matter what anybody says, siting a septic tank anywhere near a wetland like that will have an adverse impact on both the wetland and the well that's the source for potable water at The Boathouse.

So the folks behind The Boathouse made a smart and efficient choice by installing a composting toilet. The model at The Boathouse is a Centrex 1000, made by Sun-Mar. Sun-Mar's Centrex 1000 system uses a one pint per flush flushing mechanism that's operated by a foot pedal. That it's a flush toilet makes it seem less strange to users. Compare that single pint of water with the 1.6 gallons flushed away by a supposedly efficient, standard flush toilet and do the math. Products like the Centrex 1000 are the future folks.

The Centrex 1000 is a model specifically designed to deal with the waste generated by a vacation home, but as you go through Sun-Mar's website, you'll see that they have a model for nearly any situation.

So hats off to The Cat Island Boathouse and three cheers for Sun-Mar.