CK Blog

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Try it for yourself..maybe there are millions in your future! (I still have a little ways to go to hit this goal…)

I had been planning to write a little blurb about Twitter and some problems with it that related to bigger problems in general with Web 2.0 life. I may still write that post later, but in the course of composing the basics of the post in my head, I started thinking about why I tried twitter in the first place and was probably going to say something like “well if people like Seth Godin and Penelope Trunk use it, I probably should at least check it out.”

One problem though, I decided I wanted to check Seth’s twitter feed so I went to his website and searched for Twitter figuring I would find the address for the feed there. Instead I found a post that mentions he does not even use twitter. I did some more research and found out according to this article that someone else, probably a Seth fan registered the twitter account and had basically being posing as Seth. Reading the comments in the article, you can see that people were making inferences, good and bad, about Seth based on his twitter usage and he actually had nothing to do with it. Remember the old saying, on the Internet noone knows you are a dog. For better or worse, it is really easy for anyone to sign up with any name they want, including yours. So next time, you see something like this on ther net, remember things are not always as they seem.

P.S., I just read a post from Penelope Trunk that points out that her name is really a pen name, so Penelope really isn’t Penelope either! Somethings aren’t as they seem.

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. =)

I checked my 401K online and so far this year, I am down 10.7%! Yikes! What is really killing me is the company stock that they provide as my match, which is now down over 63%. I usually move everything out of it during my rebalancing, but it still builds up. My other funds are International down 5.8%, Institutional Index down 4.6%, Large Cap Growth down 0.2% and Intermediate Term Bond is up1.3%.

I did give some thought to stopping my 401K for the moment to have some extra money to build my emergency fund and pay off some stuff, but hated the thought of missing the match and so forth. I know some people would just consider not doing the 401k unthinkable, and part of me agrees, but in certain cases I think you can justify it.

Note: This following post is sponsored.

There is an increasing focus on the environment and reducing the impacts on the planet through actions such as recycling. For instance if you walk into many grocery stores such as Wal-Mart and you will see a big collection bin for recycling your plastic grocery bags that seem to multiply all around you. What happens after you recycle your items? Companies such as Raw Polymers Ltd. purchase plastic, recycle it and sell it as raw materials to others.

High Density Polyethylene is the type of plastic commonly used in your milk jugs and similar items and can be easily recycled. According to HDPE Scrap, over 60 million tons a year is produced and then just thrown away! Imagine how much landfill space could be saved if just 20% (12,000,000 tons!) were recycled and reused in the manufacturing process as raw materials. Regrind HDPE explains the process of how material goes from being big bales of plastic into HDPE regrind that can be reused into their new lives as items such as bottles and pallets.

Later this week, I get to go on a road trip to help setup a new site for work. It is my first one with this company and probably the last one as well. They are getting new (to them at least) equipment, so myself and another person will be going to train them on the equipment and keep the work flow going so our processing deadlines will be maintained.

A good part is the company is advancing the money for the trip since employees in general pay for the hotel, meals and car rental and then get reimbursed later. The trick will be finding meals within our budget since the other people who have made this type of trip before have said the costs are a lot higher than my quaint midwestern city is.

Do you ever feel like you have reached this page? The Internet for its vast amount of information and data can seem overwhelming in its ability to suck up time and yet sometimes feels so small. Think about it for a second, I am willing to bet if you looked at your Internet usage over time, you mostly tend to stick to a really small group of regular sites and subject areas.

I know there have been times I have checked my RSS feeds, hit a few other favorite sites, and hit the what now point. On the one hand, you feel like surely there must be something else to read or check, its the Internet after all, but it also feels like okay I’m bored there is nothing else here to do why am I even trying.

I try listening to that little voice as much as possible and just shut the computer down at that point and do something else. I usually have a nice stack of books from the library I am working through and projects that needs a little time on even if they never seems quite finished. It comes down to priorities in life and I am trying to get better at how I make use of my time. I do not always select the right option, but I am working on it!

In an unpacked box somewhere in my apartment, sits two little pieces of paper that confers onto me degrees from an institution of higher education. I took a bunch of classes in subjects related to the degree’s subject and got a lot of student loan debt to prove I was there. Thanks to my current workplace making a few “changes”, I now get to spent plenty of time deciding the Quo Vadimus (where are we going) question about my life and career.

My current job is not related to either of my degrees, I could easily do this job without ever stepping foot at college. In fact, I did the job during the last part of getting my masters degree. It paid decent thanks to lots of overtime and gave my some breathing room to pay my student loan bills while I applied for areas in my degree field. It was a little bit of a curse though career wise, it was easy to get a little comfortable and not rush as much about looking for a “better” job thanks to the pay and mindless ease of the job.

I guess my biggest problem (I know I am rationalizing so hang with me) is facing the question of meaning vs. pay. In my degree field, the jobs are not known for being exactly high paying until you really start getting up the organizational ladder and even that is no guarantee. The upside though would be having a lot less trouble telling people what I do for a living. One classmate of mine is doing fundraising at Yale, another got a little write-up in the local newspaper and so on, and I know several have gone onto nice jobs or promotions since we graduated. In my case though, I get the “…you have those degrees, so what are you still doing in that job” question. I rationalize the pay aspect, but it only holds so much water.

I can think of so many things I wish I had done differently career wise so far, maybe I will learn from a few going forward.