CK Blog

I have previously touched upon my attempts at decluttering and have run into the number one fear of those against getting rid of stuff, “what if I need something that I got rid of?” In a bit of irony, it is in the midst of trying to thin the large pile of books that has caused the issue to arise. A long time ago, there was a little barcode scanner called the Cue Cat, which was going to revolutionize the marketing industry but it never took off yet the Cue Cat could be modified to work as a regular scanner. I brought one on eBay, used it a few times but did not have too much of a use for it.

The Cue Cat spent the majority of its time in the box with a variety of other miscellaneous technology items gathering dust and mostly forgotten about. Now that I am going through my books, it would be nice to use the scanner to get the UPC codes from the back of the books so I can convert them to ISBN and make a database of my books. It would allow me to have a better idea of what I have and make it easier to list items on Amazon or Half.com. I have searched all around looking for where I could have put the Cue Cat but have had no luck finding it. But the more I think about it, I seem to recall going through some boxes before I last moved and I think I probably found the Cue Cat and thought I have not really used this much and not sure I would even need it again and promptly threw it away. Now I would like to use it and at this point, it is nowhere to be found.

I could always buy another Cue Cat or other barcode scanner from eBay, or even just tough it out and manually type this ISBNs into a database. So far, I have not been excited about either idea. I have entered two boxes of books into a database so far by hand and might just keep that up doing a few of them every so often, but still it would have been nice to have that scanner. Oh well!

Okay seriously! I have an account with some job boards even though I know the statistics of actually finding a job on one of them. It never hurts to look at least right? I did take my info off one of the better-known sites after a well-publicized case of fraud awhile back, but kept the rest around.

Most of the time, I just get the occasional email from places like Careerbuilder with a list of new job listings, but every so often I’ll get an email from some company who “found” my resume on the site and is offering me the best job ever! I would love for just one time to get one of those emails that is not a outright scam or just a bad deal like some the “financial services” jobs. Those jobs should really be called “harass your friends and family to buy bad insurance and mutual fund products, but you won’t make a living expect if you can sucker other people into it” jobs. Guess that title would not fit on the business card though. I know some people do fine with those jobs, but have seen many people taken in with promises of large incomes and freedom, spent a bunch of money and times on classes and licensing tests and then nothing.

Right now in my email from Careerbuilder is a “great opportunity” from a company that says they sell site layouts, but poor them, they are in Russia and cannot get a merchants account here in the US. Do not worry though, if I help them out, they will pay me 10% of their earnings that they estimate will be $2,000. Wow! I just need to send them my full name, age, contact phone number and for the purpose of authentication, I should attach a copy of a passport or a driving license. How could I ever turn that down? Darn guess I accidentally deleted the message, my loss. Maybe some Nigerian prince will be able to help them out instead.

Sometimes with technology, things can get wrapped in the details and jargon of pixels, resolutions, device drivers, etc. It can be easy to forget the “why” part of technology, why is it important that we are building something, who are we building it for?

Take Youtube for instance, you can talk all day about streaming vs. downloading, resolution size and quality impact, copyright issues until you turn blue in the face. But when I sat down and showed my Dad how to use it the other day and then he spent the rest of the afternoon finding old performances of singers long set aside by today’s audience. The whole getting to relive memories of yesterday and getting to see his reactions meant more than worrying if 320×240 is good enough or whatever technical issue that could be debated.

I have been using Firefox off and on for awhile now and updated to version 3 when it was released. The installation went off without a hitch, although a few of my addons were not compatible with the new revision and thus were disabled. None of them were deal breakers so I did not worry too much about that. That said, a few annoyances have popped up since I’ve been trying the new version. First it changed my default browser without asking even though I used the custom install. Secondly, Firefox 2 would normally start right up and show my home page (the default Mozilla Google homepage), but with Firefox 3, it sits and thinks about it for a while. Meanwhile, it is stuck until it finally decides to load the page, the software is locked up until then. If you try to say click on the bookmarks before it is “ready”, you get a not-responded message from XP.

Then every so often, when it is trying to load a new page or tab, it will start eating up CPU or just plain locking up the computer until it is ready to go again. I have plenty of RAM (although I could always use more) nor am I trying to open up bunch of windows or have a ton of programs open at the same time as Firefox. It is by far the heaviest usage of memory alot of the time with over 100 megs used with just two tabs open. I have disabled all my addons except for one (DownloadHelper) because I remember Mozilla blaming addons for performance issues in the past. Overall, the lockups just plain get irritating after awhile in any event.

I’ll have to keep messing with it and see if I can do something to improve the performance a bit.

I have played the Sims and Sims 2 a few times before and registered my copy of them so I get the occasional email from EA Games offering some little deal or annoucing a new game.

This morning though, I got the grand-daddy of them all announcements. I can get my very own Sims credit card!

Not only that, they will also throw in a Sims cinch bag with my first qualifying purchase.

I guess that makes the credit score hit all worthwhile.

I have been going through a few things and listing them on eBay or Amazon.com, mostly to get rid of them, but if I get a few bucks out of it, that is even better. I listed a book on eBay, started it off at $0.99 and whatever it brought was fine with me. It ended up selling for $12, which was slightly better than I thought it might go for.

The buyer paid via Paypal pretty quick, requesting Priority Mail which was fine except I apparently messed up when I made my listing. I looked around at some similar listings when I was deciding on how much to charge for shipping and $3.50 seemed pretty fair. The problem was I didn’t check my eBay defaults though, which was Priority instead of Media Mail. $3.50 would have been fair for Media Mail, not so much for the Priority Mail. The Priority Mail ended up costing about $6, but my mistake and thus my loss.

Next time, I’ll double check my shipping rates more carefully.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a website where people or companies can post little work assignments (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITS) for people that are tasks that computers cannot do well, but humans can. For instance, deciding which photo best represents an address or transcripe a speech are tasks that are better done by humans. Therefore a person can post a HIT and assign a reward amount to it, and then someone comes along does the work, requestor approves it and the worker gets paid. Pretty simple huh?

Most of the times, it is a resonable trade of work vs. reward amount, but sometimes it can just be silly. Right now, there is a HIT with a $20.00 reward for writing a 50,000 – 55,000 word romance novel. 50,000 words is about 175 pages worth of writing according to the Washington Post. I remember how long it took me to write 30 page papers back in college, let along 175 pages. If you have enough time to spend writing that much and then just trading it to someone for a mere $20 bucks with no rules set about copywrite or other explaination of what they were going to do with your work, I really would wonder about you and your priorities. You could spend the same amount of time that you spent on that novel, work at McDonalds and come out ahead dollar wise.

I am not saying that it is wrong to spend your time writing a romance novel if that is your thing, but to expect someone to trade it away for $20 is just a little boggling.

In most cases, I am all for saving money and paying less for things if possible, but occasionally I think it is just not worth it. Yesterday gas prices jumped from around $3.56 to $3.75 a gallon at most stations around my area. I noticed the jump early in the day and got gas at a station that had not raised the price yet. It was busy there, but not horribly crazy busy.

Later in the day after the local news stations had a chance to hype the price rise and more stations adjusted their prices, I noticed in particular a small gas station that I drive past a lot was still at $3.56. This station has maybe 6 pumps and had a line out into the street going both ways into their enterances. Therefore, you have a line of cars burning gas to save money on gas, not to mention the cost of people’s time to wait just to get into the station.

Lets think about how much they are saving on their gas for a moment. If their gas tanks can hold:

So unless you have a large vehicle such as an SUV with big tank, you will not really be saving a huge amount of money. Besides, if you do have that large a vehicle, chances are you have more issues with gas mileage that would affect your savings than a change in the gas prices.

Also, if you were to go down the road a few miles, another gas station had $3.67 a gallon, a jump over previous prices, but now on that 33 gallon fillup, you are saving only $3.63 by going to the cheaper station but there was no wait at the $3.67 station.

While on the road for work, I had little choice but to eat out for most of my meals since I did not have a fridge or microwave at the hotel. I did have a nice little budget for meals from the company, but after a few days, a lot of restuarants start looking the same and you really notice the difference between good service and so-so service. After a little while I was just tried of looking at what seemed to be the same menu, high prices and little variety in food choices with just a different name on the bill.

Part of the problem was that I had been sick for part of the trip and did not have a huge appetite so it felt like a big waste of money to spent $10 or $15 a meal and eat half of it. Nor did I have a way of taking the leftovers back to my hotel given the lack of a fridge.

On the other hand, it was nice to try a few places I probably would not have tried if I were paying the bill. =)