CK Blog

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.

I have discoved a true measure of denial. I was paying bills tonight and decided I better update my Quicken accounts. It turns out the last time I updated most of them was the middle of March. I used to be really good about keeping them up, but between Yodlee and burying my head in the sand, I have fallen off the wagon a bit.

Now I’m just a bit more bummed out now than I was before I calcuated out my updated (non-existent) net worth. But at least my Quicken is updated right?

Hey, I got good news! Check this out…=)

18,850,707
How much money will you be worth?

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. =)