Archive for August, 2005

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Free Bubble Wrap?

Tuesday, August 30th, 2005

Anyone want to give me some free bubble wrap? I guess I can watch freecycle. But if any of my throngs of blog-reading admirers want to lay some free bubble wrap on me, I won’t be opposed. I noticed that the good people at half.com and amazon give you a fairly limited allowance for shipping expedited, especially if you want to hit the extra 45 cents for a tracking number.

So they assume you are going to throw stuff in the flat rate priority mail envelope, which of course has no padding, and since I have no seller whuffie to speak of, I have to be the low cost seller or I get ignored, so no room to pad the shipping allowance there, and I don’t want to get lousy feedback because my books are getting dinged up in transit.

Oh and now the Mexico fund is off and running. I just hit a $21 sale, I have my $20 cash back from Discover that started it, and I got another $5.99 sale yesterday. It reminds me I have to race to get more of my text book like books up on half or amazon, so I can cash in on the back to school crowd.

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I woulda picked it up

Tuesday, August 30th, 2005

If only they would have told me that the seller’s facility was in Horsham, I would have been glad to go pick it up.

Date Time Location Service Area Checkpoint Details
Aug 29, 2005 09:57:27 PM HORSHAM PA US Arrival Scan
Aug 29, 2005 09:01:37 PM HORSHAM PA US Arrival Scan
Aug 29, 2005 09:00:37 PM HORSHAM PA US Shipment picked up from seller’s facility
Aug 29, 2005 06:45:00 PM US Carrier notified to pick up package

So was my valuable merchandise really just around the corner? Or does this mean that the UPS tracking system is FUBAR? Either way I ordered on Saturday, the 27th, and it wasn’t until shortly after my complaint email, about them not shipping yet, was responded to by Amazon that I got shipment notification. The good news is I got $5 for my annoyance. So it goes to prove “If things don’t go your way, just keep complaining until your dreams come true.” -President Clinton

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Geeky Bookworm Frugality

Monday, August 29th, 2005

If you can’t resist the urge to buy shiny new O’Reilly books every time you are within 1 mile of a Barnes & Noble or a Borders, and you are often restraining yourself from purchasing a bunch of new books on amazon (then click on the amazon link and buy lots of stuff so I can get referral fees and feed my own demons!) Okay, that’s not really the point although I wouldn’t mind a few extra bucks toward my Mexico fund. The point is, I have the same problem, I always want to get new books, often the technologies will help me with my work. And the biggest part of the problem is these books are always between 30 and 60 dollars each.

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Posted in Finance, Hacker | Comments Off

Mind Games

Saturday, August 27th, 2005

I have thought of it so many times, and dismissed it for various reasons. Too hard, too much cutthroat competition, not enough time, not a viable way to make money, way too many wanna-bes I don’t want to get classified with them. But damnit, there is no other thing I would rather waste some spare time on than writing video games.

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Posted in Hacker, Personal | 5 Comments »

Eye Relief

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

If you are like me you’re 6 foot 2 and your name is Kevin.

Also you spend most of your day staring at a monitor of some type. I have some advice, I don’t know how well they will work for you, and I don’t know if there is anything to back up my reasoning behind these actions, but they seem to work for me.

  1. If you can afford it get some kind of non-CRT monitor, like the ones on laptops or those nice LCD (or whatever technology it is) displays. They are more crisp. My work provides one for me.
  2. Turn down the brightness. Turn it down all the way until it reaches a point just below where it is comfortable, then turn it back up 1 or 2 clicks. You still want it to be comfortable, but why stare into a 1000 watt light bulb if you can stare into a 30 watt bulb instead.
  3. Turn down the contrast too. This one I remember hearing that it is easier on the eyes if the contrast is not very high.
  4. Go outside a few times a day and look at stuff far away, and under natural light. Especially if you are locked in a room with fluorescent bulbs.
  5. Blink. If you notice that when you are staring at a screen you don’t blink, you probably should figure out a way to make yourself do that.

I have found that my eyes are less strained feeling the more I pay attention to this kind of stuff. Maybe you will too.

Posted in Hacker, Health and Fitness | 2 Comments »

Image theifery

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

I noticed a whole bunch of referalls to my site from the Jet’s message board, I thought maybe someone had linked to the whole Ed Hochuli debacle, but I hunted it down and found out that no, someone was stealing my bandwidth to show a picture I have on my site of Chuck Bednarik. Well I don’t approve of that, so I used a friends instructions on how to let the people know what I think of them using mod_rewrite. Thanks Darxus.

Now instead of concrete charlie that persons signature on the message board contains this.

plus the Jets suck. Seriously a first round pick for Doug Jolley, watching your preseason it doesn’t even look like he is starting.

Posted in General, Hacker | 1 Comment »

making the money work

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

Tom found $20 and is thinking of investing it.

That reminds me of the $5000 challenge. Some dude is trying to turn an initial investment of $20 into $5000 in 6 months. I think he is a bit behind, but he has made about $500 in around 2 months now (I think he only has 300 liquid but the rest is working for him in inventory) Here’s his blog: $5000 challenge

Anyway I am trying to do something similar but my goals are a lot less aggressive, $2500 by May 1, 2006, from nothing I will miss, so I can go to Mexico for my brother-in-law’s wedding.

I haven’t been able to get much yet, I listed a bunch of stuff on half.com and amazon.com, but haven’t gotten any hits yet, and I have some plans to sell some stuff on ebay to get the process going. I am going to take an initial $20 which is my cash back bonus from my Discover card and apply that to the fund.

This also reminds me of some story from 1st grade about some eels that were given a pearl by their teacher for a summer project. Some of the more industrious eel’s invested theirs and created underwater lemonade stands or casino’s or some other glamorous cartoony venture. One eel buried his in the sand somewhere, and then dug it up for the next year, and not only was he the only jerk who didn’t make a ton of dough, he probably failed the project too. I think it was based on some biblical parable, but I can’t remember what one.

Here’s hoping some hidden marketable talent emerges from no-where so I don’ t have to be the dumb eel.

Update: I found the parable. Mathew 25:14-30

Posted in Finance, Personal | 1 Comment »

it’s gotta be the shoes?

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

I have been on a real walking kick since I have been working from home. In the past 10 days or so I have walked at least 2 to 3 miles daily and some days I have walked over 5 to 6 miles. And over the past 2 months there haven’t been more than maybe 7 total days that I didn’t walk at all.

The last 7 days have been particularly intense with longer trips and more hills. I have noticed some muscle soreness, which is good and is something I am used to, however I have also noticed some pain that I don’t think should be there. My right foot hurts around the arch, and yesterday I noticed another pain in my right calf that was unusual, my initial thought was I must be compensating from the pain in my foot and altering my gait, therefore causing a different pain to happen.

Anyway what it comes down to is I think my shoes may have had it, (New Balance 475) that I got for Christmas last year. But they aren’t terribly worn so I hate to throw them away and get new ones. So here are my questions:

  1. anyone have experience, recomendations of the various sole inserts, particularly for walking quite a bit?
  2. anyone have a favorite brand of comfortable shoes that stand up to quite a bit of walking?
  3. Any other suggestions for foot/shoe care?

Posted in Health and Fitness | 3 Comments »

Good Deed

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005

I did my good deed for the year. I primarily saved some big faceless credit card company some money, but I did save some poor schlub some hassle, and I have learned from a wise man, the quest to be hassle-free is divine.

Well I was out on my habitual morning walk. After having fended of a psudo-attack from a stupid dog, I spotted a Discover card on the ground. I scooped it up, and when I got home called Discover and told them I found someone else’s card. The Discover employee was not quite flabergasted, but he was surprised. So I destroyed the card and Discover will be contacting their cardholder.

You’re welcome Mr. Slacum.

Posted in Notebooks | 3 Comments »

Zenity, Gmail & GTD

Tuesday, August 16th, 2005

I am trying to Get stuff done and in doing so I have decided to use my gmail account to capture everything. If you search hard enough there is a PDF somewhere that gives you some ideas on implementing a gmail based GTD system. I found that I have been languishing in putting stuff into my system, and decided because it was too hard. I had to open thunderbird and then click compose and type the address and then the thing I want to do. I am sure I could speed this up a bit, but it was painful. So I wrote a quick script using zenity:

#!/bin/bash

TO="xxx@gmail.com"
SUBJECT=`zenity --entry --text="What do you want to get done?" \ 
    --title="GTD\ Entry"`
if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]
then
    echo | mail -s "${SUBJECT}" ${TO}
fi

and mapped it up to F12 using a technique from my previous post. And now any time I think of something I want to do I just hit F12, type a quick “next action” and hit enter. Later I can process my gmail inbox. I may also have to find a way to batch this process for when I am going through my physical inbox. But so far so good.

By the way, Buy the book, (or get it in a library or whatever) it’s great, it at least makes you feel like you can do lots of stuff without worrying about it all the time.

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