Year: 2008

I’ve used the website www.atlantagasprices.com to find out where the cheapest gas is (it is part of a nationwide system called gasbuddy.com). When there were shortages, it was very helpful just to find out where any gas was. It is one of those great internet collaborations where a few people making small contributions of information can create a treasure trove. From time to time I might enter a gas price into their database, but nothing much. However I have a couple of gas stations near me that are never listed in their database and sometimes they have cheaper gas than anywhere I know about. But the only way to add a station to their database is earn a certain number of points. My thinking from reading the complex rules is that would happen if you had 10,000 points. The way you earn points is by entering gas prices, but you only earn 150 points at a time that way. I figured I would never get there. The people that enter prices regularly seem to be the same over and over again and you can tell roughly how many points they have by how their car icon. The red icons mean they have the most points, millions of points. I did find out that you get 150 points for every price you enter (and you could enter 4 prices for one stations: regular, midgrade, premium, and diesel), so if you enter a lot of prices you can earn points a lot faster. It’s still not that easy for me because I only pass one gas station on my way to MARTA (actually two, but the other isn’t in the database!). I also found out that if you answer their weekly poll you get 100 points. So I started doing it.

After a couple of weeks of entering prices fairly regularly, I’m getting the hang of it. One key is to set up favorite stations because these show up on your home page and are ready to be filled in right away. So I have about six favorites. I also need to write down prices in the car because I quickly forget them (try remembering prices from three different stations, then try doing different grades of gas too). So I’m up to 5,000 points so far, halfway to getting a bronze car icon. The max you can earn is 750 points a day for gas prices, but I’ve only done that twice.

This weekend my DSL account started having problems holding a connection. It isn’t that uncommon for the connection to drop once a week or so, but it was dropping every 15 minutes. I was watching a movie online from Netflix which was grainy anyway because I have the slowest speed of DSL, but then it would just freeze. Sometimes the connection would come back on its own and sometimes I would go and unplug the modem so it would restart (the modem would re-initiate on its own, so really it was the same process either way).

Continue reading “FastAccess Isn’t Either One”

Last year I bought a 4 GB SD card that it turned out was incompatible with my Palm, so I decided to sell it on eBay and actually wound up making about $10 profit. This year, I bought some new memory for my laptop computer so I had two 1 GB memory boards that I no longer needed. I figured I would try selling them on eBay.

The process was much the same as last year but the price had gone up from 20 cents to 35 cents to post an ad. That’s still less than a stamp. I took a picture and wrote up an ad and decided that a 5-day ad would be appropriate (last year I did a 7-day ad which was probably too long except that I ended up revising my ad a little). That was Wednesday evening, so the 5-day period would cover all of the big Thanksgiving shopping weekend but still give people who shop from work or school a chance to see the ad on Monday before it closed out.

Still, I didn’t get any bids until tonight, when the first bid came in at the minimum of 99 cents. That’s good because that means that at least I will sell it and somebody else will be able to use the memory. Also I am charging $4.60 for shipping and handling like I did last year. I told Mom that if I got a second bid, the price would probably go up pretty quickly to $5 or so because the first bidder probably bid more than the minimum of 99 cents. A few hours later, the price had jumped up to $7.20 when a competing bid was entered. I don’t know how much higher it will go, but it would be great if it would get up to $20 because that’s how much I got the upgraded memory for (after a $40 mail-in rebate, so I’m also out $4.20 in sales tax) and that would pay for itself!

Here’s the listing.

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got a Blu-ray DVD player. I was psyched when I first heard about the new high-definition DVD’s that were planned. But then Sony introduced one standard and a competing standard called HD DVD was being developed too. So there was a long format war with studios lining up on different (sometimes both) sides. Buy the wrong technology and you’d be stuck with a dinosaur. That’s ultimately what happened to those early adopters who bought the lower tech, more affordable HD DVD players.

Continue reading “Blu-ray”