25 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Received the IRS Determination Letter for my non-profit. It took a while but finally got it. I had applied for it in August ‘07. The only question IRS had was for the number of directors (see my other blog entry for this). The whole process was quite smooth. Now that I look back, I am glad that I made the right decision of applying for 501(c)(3) myself rather than giving it to a lawyer to handle it for me. The book which helped me thru this whole process is also mentioned on my earlier blog entry.

Please send me an email (by entering your request in the comment box) if you have any questions regarding the setup process. Now onto the next step, getting my accounting software lined up for the non-profit. As you would have noticed the foundation website is not that appealing, i.e : I have to work on that too.

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18 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I got hooked to Thunderbird because it is an awesome email client. Nothing like it and we have a portable version too so that you can carry the client on the usb flash drive whereever you go. Needless to say the next step was to install Lightning and make it one step closer to Outlook. My goal is to have a completely portable Email, calender, contacts and tasks (which thunderbird enables me to achieve it)

The ideal situation will be to have Blackberry’s desktop manager directly talk to thunderbird ( I am not smoking anything ) but I know it is not possible yet and may be a while before we reach that level of maturity.

After searching I bumped into www.ScheduleWorld.com (for the real hardcore go getters, you can start with www.funambol.com, install that server and so on so forth). An excellant product and kudos to the guys who maintain this thing. This product is what I would consider as the holy grail of synchronization ( I did not steal this word from one other blog which also coins it the same but it was an immediate mind response the moment I browsed the site). It certainly is the holy grail of synchronization.

Installed Outlook Plugin, Thunderbird plugin and blackberry plugin as mentioned on that site.

Before going full production live (i.e : full synchronization between outlook, thunderbird and blackberry) I wanted to test whether outlook, schedule world and thunderbird can collarborate accurately. Started running in problems one after another, recurring events like an event which occurs every tuesday and thursday in outlook do not get updated properly in Scheduleworld. Just lots of problems in general that I ended up putting atleast 20 hours over a period of a week when finally I decided that even if I get this working, I will not be sure that I can rely on the sync software. Point to note, I did not add blackberry to this mix yet, blackberry being a very “closed” device I am sure will not be easy to tackle too.

There are lot of things to take care of before you can get this machinary well oiled and working for you.

- Make sure that the date and time zone settings on Schedule World are same as your outlook and thunderbird.
- Make sure that you have the correct plugin version.
- Even synch has lots of different options by which you sync your data. This can easily confuse any user.
- Sunbird is also not 1.0 i.e : it might have bugs of its own which might create issues with regards to synch.

I do not want to undermine the developer’s tremendous efforts in creating funambol, scheduleworld and all other plugins but I think this whole technology is not ready for prime time yet. Certainly not at production level when a normal computer user can embrace it and trust it to work like a champ.

Bottomline :

1. I will wait another year (see for my test results in April 2009) as it is too time consuming and cumbersome.
2. Thunderbird as an email client is powerful and production level.
3. Do not venture to research whether Thunderbird (Lighting extension), Outlook, ScheduleWorld and Blackberry will work harmoniously together yet unless you just have loads of time at hand. And if you do find out, uninstall and all reinstall plugins, create a new schedule world account and test it again. If you can get it to working properly post the steps you took on your blog so that others can leverage it.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

16 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

If you are getting the following error at the bottom of the thunderbird window then go to \App\thunderbird\chrome and delete (or rename it to something else) offline.manifest file. Once that is done, restart thunderbird and the error will be gone. Don’t ask me why. It just works
menu id=”offlineMenuItem” insertafter=”trashMenuSeperator” label=”&offlineMenu.label;” accesskey =”&offlineMenu.accesskey;”

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15 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

One of the factors for which IRS got back to me was the number of directors for my non profit organization. Although states allow a non profit organization to have 1 director, IRS prefers to have more than 1 (cannot tell you the exact number they want). During my initial filing I had named myself as the director of the organization and the agent handling my case asked me to add more directors to my organization, which was perfectly acceptable to me.

The reason I want to highlight this observation is because once IRS requests for more information, it puts your case at the very bottom of the cases. It keeps the case on hold as it is waiting for you to reply. The date they receive your reply is considered as new date of your application and it will be reviewed in the order it was received. It may take approximately 3-4 months before you hear back from them. Hence, it is in your best interest to name more than 1 director on your 501(c)(3) application.

The points (should be indicated in your bylaws) to note when naming directors are :

- Quorum Criteria
- Voting Majority Criteria
- Compensation of Directors
- Duration of their engagement with the organization.

In my case, I name 4 directors with at least 3 needed for Quorum and decision making is via majority of vote criteria. My organization does not pay any compensation to its directors and duration of engagement is 3 years.

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9 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

With email becoming a communication tool of choice and security breaches/holes a part of digital life, it is imperative that we take appropriate security measures that will protect our emails both from content integrity and privacy perspective.

By Content integrity, I mean that the email which you write is the email which is received by the recipient. Sounds like a no-brainer? It is not. Email message once composed and sent goes through a maze of servers (machines) before it finally reaches its destination. Anywhere in this chain of servers can your email be altered, thus compromising your contents. The recipient might not get exact message you sent to her. A simple example is, using a wi-fi connection in the library. The connection between your computer to library’s wi-fi access point can easily be intercepted and the contents be altered before delivering your email message to the first machine (which is the library’s access point). And this is just a starting point of the message’s journey.

By Content privacy, I mean that the email can be read by anyone who either snoops or intercepts your email en route. Thus there is no content privacy. The requirement here is that the message sent by you should *only* be readable by the recipient/s and nobody else.

Both of the above issues can be resolved by using secure email certificates. Having a personal email certificate ensures that the recipient will be notified if the message is altered and if both you and the recipient have certificates then by encrypting your email, nobody else will be able to read it. There is one requirement however, certificates only work with Smime compatible email clients like Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird etc. Most of the web mail clients are *not* s/mime email compliant, except Gmail (there is a plug in available for Firefox - gmail users which allows you to sign and encrypt your email sent from Gmail). However if you can access your yahoo mail(let’s say) from outlook then you can use this facility as outlook is smime compliant.

By attaching a certificate to the email, you are digitally signing that email so that nobody else can alter the email content. It is like when you sign your will, nobody else can alter your will because the malicious party cannot recreate your signature. With hand signatures it maybe possible to fake it but be rest assured that with digital thumb prints, there is no technology which can fake your signature.

Comodo issues certificates and I have used them without any problems at all and they are free. They are very easy to acquire and it will take less than 2 minutes for your to install it on your computer.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

4 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I understand lot of individuals are car lovers and crave to have an expensive car like BMW, Lexus, Acura etc. Personally I consider car as purely a tool to take you from point A to point B. No wonder I bought a Toyota Corolla in 1999 and still is serving me well without any maintenance problem of *any* sort.

In economics there is a term called Opportunity Cost and I think it is relevant in this case of also. By buying an expensive car an individual forgoes the opportunity to invest that extra money in something which could in future give decent financial returns.

I am basing my discussion on the fact that Toyota Camry costs ~$21000 and Cheapest BMW model costs ~$33000 . Therefore you will have ~12000 to invest somewhere else. This is assuming that you have the capacity to do down payment for both the cars, which people like me will never be able to. So in that case, you will paying interest on the car loan. Needless to say you will pay more in interest for an expensive car as compared to a cheaper car. So the effective cost of your dream car (BMW in this case) will be much higher depending on the interest rate you lock in.

Following are some of the things which could be bought instead of buying an expensive car.

- Mutual Funds / Stocks / Exchange Traded Funds : If you do not know which mutual fund to buy just pump in cash in S&P 500 index fund and forget about it till you are really in need of cash (Remember : urge to buy a new car every 5 year does not count as a need), if you are an A+ investor (unlike me) most probably you would not be reading this as you would have already figured out how to invest your hard earned cash effectively.

- Buy a home (if you are renting one) / rental property (if you already have purchased a home) : Buying a house is a perfect thing to do in *any* market. It is imperative to build home equity if you are renting currently. In addition to building equity, the government will give you a tax break for the mortgage interest which will not be the case if you buy a car. If you already own a house, buy a rental property with the money saved by opting for a cheaper car. Having a renter pay for your rental property sounds like a win win situation to me.

- Max out your 401(k), IRA etc.: Before thinking of sinking money in a BMW, please ask these questions to yourself
- Have I maxed out my 401K, IRA ?
- Do I have adequate life insurance to support my family in the event something happens to me?
- Will I have enough funds to give my kids excellent education?
- Have I taken my family to vacation outside of my home country (I strongly believe that
traveling outside your home country spawn new creative thought processes)
- Have I donated money to charity?
- Do I need to get higher education to make me more competitive in this tough market?

Fidelity’ Investor Quarterly (go to page 10) did a research study on how much it costs to replace a car every 4 years. This will give you a general idea of what you will losing by buying an expensive car instead of cheaper car.

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