CK Blog

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. =)

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.

All over the news lately are stories about consumers facing more and more credit card debt problems. I wonder why that is…

Then I checked my mailbox when I got home tonight. Inside I found, a catalog from some company that I will never buy anything from, junk mail from Comcast, a HIPPA notice from my health insurance company, and …

• American Express Preferred Rewards Green Card
• American Express Cash Rewards Card
• Disney Rewards Visa Card
• Debt Conslidation Loan offer
• and of course a credit card bill.

Have you heard about Payperpost? It is a service for bloggers to make money with sponsored articles on various topics. The sponsored topics available of course will vary depending on your blog’s category I have to thank Krystal from Give Me Back My Five Bucks blog for pointing me into learning more about Payperpost. I had read some news stories and various blogs postings over time about Payperpost, but Kystal’s site provided a real life example of someone successfully using the system with their blog. It has seemed to work out really well for her and I would hope to have a similar successful experience with Payperpost.

Briefly, you look through their opportunities; pick topics that are relevant to you. Then you write about it based on the guidelines provided, the post gets reviewed and approved, you get paid…easy!. It is free to join and provides some extra money that can help pay for your hosting fees or even more depending on the amount of your traffic and opportunities. I do not have some grand plan yet of what I might do with the earnings from Payperpost, but I am sure I could figure out a few ideas when the time comes.

Have you gone already and checked out their website yet? If not, hurry up and click! =)

Over time, I have discovered a simple problem that I have as a single person…spoiled food. I cannot tell you how peeved it gets me to discover that item sitting on my cabinet or fridge shelf has zoomed past its expiration date. I try to keep a close eye on the dates when I buy stuff so I do not get things that are set to expire soon if I can help it and keep portions small enough so I have a shot of using them up. However, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that I end up with part of a loaf of bread unused or some leftover meat gone bad depending of how much I am home.

Part of the problem ends up being that I get busy with life and am not as home as much to use up some items. There is only so much I can do about that part, but I am doing some more studying about better utilizing my freezer to improve shelf life of my items.

Of course, sometimes I do dumb stuff like leaving the brand new package of ham I brought so I can make some of the grilled cheese and ham sandwiches that I love out on the counter all night instead of putting it in the fridge.

Awhile back I came across a post by RideFree on Anandatech Hot Deals forum about a bread recipe that could be made for 11 cents a loaf. It caught my attention since it combines two things I like, bread and saving money. I did not have a bread machine so I did not try it out, but I have kept a eye out for a machine when I stop by somewhere like Goodwill incase I see one that just says buy me. Sorry I cannot find the link right now, although if visit the Simple Dollar article below, someone has copied the recipe into the comments section.

Trent over at The Simple Dollar wrote about the art of bread making as well. It is really detailed with pretty pictures and tips how to bake a good loaf. Check it out!