Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

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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 »

Happy Birthday

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005

Happy Birthday, Michelle!

I love you.

See, isn’t this better than a real gift?

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

rain

Friday, April 22nd, 2005

looking at the rain, I’d rather be walking outside :-(

Posted in Notebooks, Personal | Comments Off

Marriott saves me from a trip to Guantanamo bay

Sunday, April 10th, 2005

So unless you have been living under a rock somewhere you know it is frowned upon to bring a knife onto an airplane. You also probably know that they have a little lottery to decide if a passenger gets an extra special screening by the TSA.

Well I sometimes carry a Swiss Army Knife that was a Christmas Gift from my Aunt Judy, Uncle Dom and Niko. I carry it in my backpack that I use to carry my laptop and what at times is a huge collection of electronics gear (usb drive, ipod, travel alarm clock, headphones, airline headphones, usb mouse, cell phone, wireless pcmcia card, laser pointer pen.) Well I flew out of PHL today and the gear bag was at full capacity. And I won the TSA lottery for extra inspection.

Of course I don’t know the knife is in there. And it turns out they don’t either, even though I noticed the TSA worker looking quizically at my USB drive, and checking out my ipod. It wasn’t until I was talking to Michelle a few minutes ago that I noticed the knife while I was looking for my cell phone charger.

Dammit. I have at least 3 more airplanes to get on. And to pass TSA security at least twice more. A knife has to light up like a christmas tree on the XRay machine, otherwise why the hell is the xray machine there. I could check my bag. What a PITA, especially since my original 2 flights and 1 of my subsequent flights were cancelled today. Where would my laptop end up?

So I decide to try the “At your service” line at the Marriot I am staying in. Well they hook it up, a fedex envelope is filled out and set to be shipped back toward my home, for hopefully not too much money. Now I can avoid becoming a mainstay on the terrorist watch list, or avoid further disgust and embarssment as my tax dollars at work to protect the airways continue to miss finding a knife in my bag.

Posted in Personal, Politics | 3 Comments »

Podcasting, Fools and Canadian?

Friday, April 1st, 2005

Why does google think I am in Canadian. When I am at work and go to google.com it automatically sends me to Google Canada. I know Jersey is a little strange, but I didn’t know we (the US) were shipping them off to be some other countries problem.

Apparently it’s All Fool’s day as evidenced by all the half assed Slashdot stories and the whole assed Google Gulp product announcement.

I guess with it being a Friday I will have to read the the joke RFC too. Side note: If you try really really hard to tell a joke and it really is only mildly amusing, does it still count as a joke?

Also I downloaded ipodder last night and grabbed a few podcasts to listen to on the travel to and from work. Mildly interesting, I guess at least as good as some of the commercial radio around here. The only problem is the people tend to not have a very strict agenda and digress into really boring topics or inside jokes, it’s like college radio where all they talk about is how cool it is to be able to communicate over this wonderous medium that is radio. “And here we are voices coming to you through the air, isn’t radio great! I wish everone would do this.”

Although I think an hour long podcast of just the little 5 – 10 second self-promotional rock and roll intros with ominous voiceovers that each caster inevitably makes for themselves would be fun to hear. It would be like just hearing that little segment of the Rob Zombie song Howard uses to launch his show every day, over and over. (Yeah I know, I am the only one driving around at 6 that hears this. But it sounds cool.) Seriously I think most of the people doing podcasting probably wanted to do it, just because they always liked this really cool part of some song wanted to have it as their intro music, much like the WWE wrestlers have, or that episode of the family guy when Peter wished for theme music to follow him around all the time.

“Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus ….”

Posted in Hacker, Personal | Comments Off

Audio books & Moles

Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

The ipod experiment is a success so far. I just finished The Gunslinger by Stephe King. It was pretty good, I guess this is probably the best way for me to read the dark tower series. The only problem I have is now I have to wait until the 17th until I can get another book on my audible.com subscription. I guess I will need to hit up the library to find some books on CD.

I also ordered some Moleskine pocket notebooks today. From Moleskineus. One I am going to use as a general purpose notebook. The other I am going to use to start a journal to Allison, something she can read someday and see things I thought about while she was growing up. (Thanks for causing me to snap into action on this Ryan.) Now I just have to make an effort to write in it.

I wonder if it matters what kind of pen/ink I use, I want to make sure it doesn’t fade too much over the years.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments »

ordered an iPod

Thursday, March 17th, 2005

Well I am joining the ranks of people who have a way too expensive toy. I had a good experience listening to an audio book during my commute, so I took some birthday money, money saved from cancelling my Investors Business Daily subscription and the offer from audible.com to get $100 toward an audio player for signing up for a 1 year subscription, and got the best deal I could find.

I grabbed the iPod photo 40 GB which is discontinued, but is currently available through amazon for $360.00 which is of course only $11 more than the 30 GB iPod photo. And the 40 actually comes with a few more accessories (AV cables most notably). Sure it’s slightly bigger (0.12 inches thicker and 0.5 ounces heavier) but I think I can deal with that. You can make the purchase even more inexpensive for me, by buying one yoruself using my referral code: iPod photo 40. Now I won’t have to try and carry wallet photos around either. I also got the Monster Cable iCarPlay iPod Wireless FM Transmitter so I can listen in my car, which is the whole point.

Hopefully it will be arriving in time for me to spend a long weekend playing with it. Excitement abounds.

Posted in General, Personal | 1 Comment »

Prodigy

Wednesday, March 9th, 2005

Allison Rolling

My daughter rules! Yesterday as a belated birthday present she rolled over last night after dinner. Apparently she was practicing this trick all day while I was at work, and waited until I got home to finally pull it off. I was and continue to be not only amazed, but also proud and outwardly aloof like I expected it all the time. Of course my little girl can do things better and faster than everyone else ;-)

Anyway, It was not a one time fluke either, reports out of Montgomery County are just in saying the feat was repeated this morning, with authority. There are a bunch of short but very large AVIs of her trying to roll over, on the increasingly growing gallery, the snapshot here is from one of her initial attempts.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments »

Happy Birthday to Me

Monday, March 7th, 2005

“The say it’s your birthday ….” Thanks for all the food gifts and well wishes I have gotten.

Posted in Personal | 5 Comments »

No More Homing Pigeons

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

Well I can now retire the homing pigeons, I have this new fangled technology that allows me to talk to people miles away without shouting. Sure it takes 2 copper wires instead of the preferred 1 string and two tin cans, but boy is it keen.

Anyway this is just the follow up to my entry on the absolute bungling of my phone service by CavTel, the Verizon guy came here today and was here for about 10 minutes. I now have phone service. I wondered shouldn’t I be without service for 6 days after he claimed I was turned on? Apparently thats not how they do things.

The only downside is that I have a new phone number, because I didn’t want to be without service forever while the phone companies sorted out the paper work to get me my old number back from limbo. So if you need to call me, get my new phone number; somehow.

Maybe I should send CavTel my cell phone bill and associated brain tumor also.

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