So my brother had this to say in his AIM away message, Just got all my books for this semester for $102…. take that, all you suckers with “real majors” and “futures”…

To which I must impart my great wisdom at beating the college book swindle. The keys are to find out what books you really need, ahead of time, like right after you lock in your schedule, or even before that if you are sure of what professor you are getting, and what course it is. And I mean which books you REALLY need. The ones the actual test and homeworks will be out of, not some supplementary text, which are great, but when working part time to eat and live, plus all the other time constraints of a real major.

Anyway once you have this list, you can shop around and find out which ones are probably worth buying and what ones you can get cheap. Then there are some that are nice to have, but really you just want for the semester. Selling it back to the book store of course is for suckers that don’t like the beer and other fuels that money can buy them. You first bet is go to the local Jackington school where your school probably has a relationship that you can at least get in their library if not take books out. If it is close enough proximity to your school or where you are living, then you are golden. You can see what books they have that are on your list of really expensive critical books. Head over there and hide them. Be subtle yet elegant in your hiding. It is critical that you be able to find them and not tip anyone off that you are up to anything. Then any time you head back there you can grab them, do any studying, etc. (plus being in this foreign library where you are not likely to run into drinking buddies will help you focus) And get out of there. Myself attending Drexel provided me with one of the most jackington schools, UPenn, and their Engineering library was quite extensive.

Your second and probably the most popular option is Inter-Library Loan. Basically you submit a request in your library and they borrow the book from some other library and lend it to you. Usually you should be able to request renewal a couple of times and have the book for the whole semester. Or in my case the $1.25 it cost to extend the book once and then return it late for the second deadline (I couldn’t extend again) was well worth it. No need for permanent ownership of a $120 300 page text book on image processing, and compression algorithms.

And you can always find some other well meaning people trying to save money and chip in on a book. Of course the trouble here is when test time is coming up, who gets it, and then when the semester is over, who gets to keep it. You are probably better off becoming buddy/buddy with someone that always buys the books and studying/doing homework with them and maybe borrowing it on the weekends.

Also keep in mind many people get the same books for different classes, where that book is not really one of their critical books. Keep an eye out for that. It helps to have friends at other nearby schools for that one. And You can always try and borrow books from the recently graduated.

Anyway so taking fake majors isn’t the only way to save money on textbooks. And, Tom, have fun studying even more Hemingway. (more…)

Well I saw a house on Friday night. Went back Saturday afternoon to look over in detail and brought reinforcements (My Mom), and then placed a bid. Today the seller accepted the bid. (Now I wish I bid a little lower).

So pending securing financing and a reasonable outcome on the home inspections, I will be closing on September 26th and moving that weekend. (Wow… now I realize I have a lot of stuff to do!!)

The house is a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath Ranch with a full basement just begging to be finished into an office and a family room. A previous owner used it to do woodwork/carpentry so there is extra power. There are some fairly minor cosmetic issues to address, and I have to look into some kind of air conditioning for next summer. But I will have my home! No more rent getting thrown away. Now I can throw money away on other stuff. Anyway some photos are available on my gallery.

I have recently come across a new project called WikiTravel. It is intended to be a collaborative and freely available travel guide. It is just getting started so there is not much information available at this point. But I think this could be really useful. I mean I use the Wikipedia almost every day to look up some information, and it is starting to get really good. And of course Everything2 uses a somewhat similar model for collaborative information sharing. And both of those resources have quite a bit of good information there, but without the authors who contribute their work, there would be nothing. I can see a great use for the vision of this WikiTravel guide so it would be interesting if it can succeed. So the point is, go to WikiTravel and Plunge Forward, you probably have quite a bit of interesting stuff to share be it about your hometown or about the exotic place you just visited. I guess I should find some time to write about my recent trip to Disney.

But this is HDTV. It’s got better resolution than the real world. -Fry (Futurama)

The Eagles won their opening game of the “for fake” season. And I watched it at Dave’s in HDTV. It is extremely crisp and a very good picture that does make quite a difference in the viewing experience, however it certainly is not worth more than $500 to me, at least at this point in my financial history. But if given the opportunity, I will try and catch more high definition games. I imagine it is really great for watching ice hockey.

By the way, the Eagles are going to be awesome again because of the following reasons:

• The Offensive line is very, very good
• Donovan McNabb
• The defensive backs are probably the best group out there
• They have 3 really good defensive tackles, Darwin Walker, Corey Simon, and Hollis Thomas (who looked very quick.)
• The recieving core is deeper, more talented, and more confident than a year ago when they played well
• Ritchie is a bad-ass
• Many other reasons that will become evident as the season progresses

Busy signals and all other manner of errors the phone spits out at you are quite irritating.

Well I guess lesson learned, next time stand in line somewhere.

Eagles tickets are completely sold out at this point.

Luckily Tom’s friends were able to score 8 tickets to each of the Patriots and Saints games. Hopefully they are feeling generous and want to share in the love. I am just asking to purchase two tickets.

According to the following quote it is apparent to me that I didn’t give Futurama much of a chance back when I watched those couple of episodes, when they tried to put it on a cozy pre or post Simpson’s timeslot. Must be time to go home and set the ReplayTV. And while I am at it might as well record The Family Guy too.

Float like a floatbox, sting like an automatic stingin’ machine. –Bender

The best season of the year is again starting up. Football season! And the best team in the league is getting ready to play their first preseason game Monday night against the Saints.

I can’t wait to get tickets to The Linc, to see the Eagles play some football. And tickets go on sale tomorrow!

My brother and his friends have decided their best bet is to get in line a day in advance at the local Ticketmaster outlet. I am going to try my luck on the phone. Hopefully I am successful, for the sole reason that they are my wife’s birthday present.

E - A - G - L - E - S EAGLES!!!!

Have you forked over your $699 in extorted protection monies yet?

Well the googlebombing seems to have paid off and put an actual informative page near the top of Google’s “sco” results screen. So everyone with a web page out there lets make a final push, stick this somewhere:

<a href=”http://sco.iwethey.org/”>SCO</a> like this: SCO

It would be pretty sweet if someone at SCO managed to sneak that up on their home page in a hidden <div/>. Come on, you know you want to.

Also you might be interested in taking a different approach suggested on the linux-elitists mailing list: here. Basically they suggest that we may benefit from getting information directly from SCO’s mouth, by calling and asking for a sales weenie to explain to us how we can become legal Linux users. Or maybe request an annual report so we can consider investing in SCOX. The idea being that this will cost them money to support quite a few requests by freedom lovers everywhere that are not pleased with their current noisy and irritating business practices.

Of course the stock price being down 10% today doesn’t bode well for much except class action suits. I guess if you already jumped on you can always file a complaint with the SEC. This tact was suggested here and followed up here. Good point those sco exec’s stock dumping since June have been piling up (source).

Also rumor has it that the IBM counterclaims were filed last night. I would imagine you will be able to find copies shortly on both sco.iwethey.org and GrepLaw.

Update: (August 8, 2003) IBM counterclaims available here

Gonna Check out Peter Kullberg, today. To see if he can help me find a house to buy. I don’t know how anyone can pick a realtor without a personal referral, there are millions of these guys. Hopefully, this guy proves to be worthwhile.

Today is my wife’s birthday. Happy Birthday Mrs. McAllister, I love you!