I am pretty proud about the way I have saved money on texts in college, and I bug people with the stories often.  Recently I saw a chance to share this with the world because the folks at lifehacker asked about it, so I sent them the email, got my invite to comment and commented.  But decided I would throw the same tips and stuff up here, because, well as I said I am proud of them.  So if you are looking for ways to stick it to the man when it comes to college textbooks, read on.

(more…)

I won the Spam lottery! Some jerk on an Israeli ISP decided to use my email address as the sender on a bunch of junk he sent out last night.

So today I got to learn all about how well the Barracuda SPAM firewall works, how many bad addresses this dude had on his list, and finally how many people are on vacation, or neglected to turn off their on vacation auto-reply.

I think the solution to this is to train the Bayesian filter that is built into spam assassin a couple extra times today. Of course the only downside to that is I may never see a legitimately bounced email again.

“Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.”

Today I learned that sometimes if you wait long enough your problem goes away. Actually I always knew that, but this was in a positive way. I kept assuming something wasn’t working when in reality it was just taking longer to get an IP address than it should have. But what’s 7 minutes among friends.

I also learned that budgeting and paying your bills is a good thing. I wasn’t behind on anything, but boy did I owe a lot of money. Expensive wifely birthday presents, children being born, Fantasy leagues being financed and car inspections all conspired to beat me senseless financially.

Now I am going to take a shot at following the simple budgeting advice at Getting Finances Done.

Apparently it is broken computer season, I have had several family members dutifully report their computer problems to me over the past two weeks. Let’s hope we have reached the limit, I can’t take the excitement of many more of these.

Also maybe it’s a coincidence but 2 of them were my Mom and my brother and both of their issues are already fixed, the other two are Michelle’s Aunt and her Mom. And those issues are still broken. Actually her aunt had the misfortune of calling me on Fantasy draft weekend, and I just heard about my Mother-in-Law’s today.

Hopefully I can work on getting out of much more of this type of repair. Maybe if these folks got a look at my sad slow and non-booting computers at home they would be reluctant to call me at all.

I often find myself overwhelmed with paper. I have a pretty good system to manage the stuff I know what to do with, but when I get a thing that I am not sure if I should keep, plus maybe things that have sentimental value, I feel strange tossing them, but I don’t know where to put them.

Any of the 3 people out there that read this know of a good value scanner that works well with Linux? I have a Visioneer 5300 USB that I have had for years. It does not work with Linux in the least, and I think getting it to work with WinXP is a chore so I am looking to upgrade, hopefully for free or possibly cheaper.