Category: Uncategorized

Today I was talking to someone I work with and she told me a neat story about her daughter. She said she was going to visit her on the Gulf Coast, so I asked if she had been affected by Katrina or did she move down later? She said that her daughter had been a reporter for a major newspaper (she gave me specifics, but I thought I would leave everything vague) and was sent to cover the aftermath of Katrina. She really loved the place and now she lives there. But the neat part is how it all came about.

While she was covering the story she was talking to a lot of different people, people who needed services, stores that were open, people who needed money and had services to offer, and so forth. So she wrote up a list of local contacts and was giving them out to people. She gave out hundreds of copies. So the next week she added to the list and handed the longer two-page list out. There wasn’t a local newspaper so it was a good way of getting information out. Again, she wound up making hundreds of copies and giving them all out in no time. And it led to more people giving her names, so she started adding some stories and pretty soon people wanted to pay to advertise. It became more of a newsletter, then a long newsletter, and now it is printed on newsprint, and it has become the local newspaper. She found a photographer so she could add pictures and someone with some newspaper experience to help out. It’s about 20 pages long. So she doesn’t work at the big paper anymore.

This lady was so proud of her daughter. She said that the last time she went to visit they went to a “restaurant.” She said it wasn’t really a restaurant, it was the slab of the restaurant that used to be there and the owners had brought in a trailer to cook out of and set up tables and lights on the slab. While they were sitting there her daughter pointed out that people at every table were reading her newspaper.

Here is a mix that I made for Jeb for his birthday extravaganza at the new house in Athens. I put Aimee Mann’s two songs from the movie Magnolia because they are so pretty but largely overlooked and Rusted Root’s two songs because Jeb likes some of their other songs, and those two stand alone well (most Rusted Root tracks are long jams). But neither of those two artists mixed well with the mostly country and acoustic music on the rest of the CD, so they are by themselves at the beginning. The country part centers around Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss who both appeared on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Gillian Welch also sings on the song by the Chieftains (I admit that I got “Katie, Dear” from iTunes largely based on the title which seemed to be an ode to my dog, but is in fact a really depressing song about suicide). M. Ward’s “You Still Believe in Me” is an acoustic instrumental version of a Beach Boys song that was on Pet Sounds, but on the two songs where he sings, his raspy voice sounds kind of like Tom Waits.

1. Rusted Root – Magenta Radio (4:27)

2. Rusted Root – Heaven (4:02)

3. Aimee Mann – One (2:51)

4. Aimee Mann – Save Me (4:36)

5. Johnny and Ruth Carter Cash – Jackson (2:47)

6. Lucinda Williams – Can’t Let Go (3:29)

7. M. Ward – Vincent O’Brien (2:39)

8. Alison Krauss & Union Station – When You Say Nothing at All (4:22)

9. Gillian Welch – One More Dollar (4:35)

10. M. Ward – Color of Water (3:24)

11. Alison Krauss & Union Station – Restless (2:52)

12. Gillian Welch – Red Clay Halo (3:15)

13. The Chieftains – Katie Dear (4:28)

14. M. Ward – You Still Believe In Me (2:25)

15. Gillian Welch – Revelator (6:22)

Despite the lower commission structure this quarter, I still did surprisingly well, making a commission of $192.21 on 133 items worth $4,238 (the average commission was 4.54% vs. 5.98% last quarter). There were 73 iPod battery packs sold, mostly the Belkin with 45. The inexpensive Griffin Tunejuice sold 13 units and the EZ Gear Powerstick sold 7. I think I could have sold a lot more Belkins (and other stuff incidentally) if it hadn’t been for Amazon having higher prices than Best Buy on that model. I have a link on the web page to Best Buy for $20 and Amazon for $24 and some people still choose Amazon, but I see a lot of out clicks to Best Buy. It would be very helpful if Best Buy would raise their price or Amazon would lower theirs.

Continue reading “Amazon Q2 Results”

I thought up a project where I could turn the Powerbook 5300c that Jeb gave me for Christmas a few years ago into a digital picture frame. The first problem was the Powerbook didn’t actually work. As you will recall, I found out that if I replaced the power tip on the AC adapter that I could get it to work. But there was no modem and the splice came undone, so I lost interest.

However, the 5300c has a 10-inch active matrix screen that supports thousands of colors and I have nothing to lose. So last night I took it completely apart down to the motherboard and various components. So today I rebuilt the splice (using butt connectors) reattached most of the pieces I thought it would need (not the IR port, floppy drive, video card, battery, battery power supply). That didn’t work. So I reconnected the power supply and it started up!

Continue reading “It’s Alive!”

Seeing the makezine site reminded me of the newest iPod battery pack I added to the page. It was built by an artist/electronics geek who got a Masters at MIT and lives in New York City. People have been trying to come up with a good USB charger for the iPod for a while. A really primitive, but simple, setup uses a 9-volt battery and a voltage regulator to give the constant 5 volts required by USB devices. The problem is anything above 5 volts is wasted as heat, the thing stops working when the battery drops below 7 volts, and if you leave the battery connected it will charge all the way down even if it isn’t charging an iPod.

I’ve always thought it was sad, but not surprising, that all of the people doing these battery packs were guys. Apparently a woman’s touch was needed. Her pack uses a computer chip and an inductor to amplify the steadily declining voltage supplied by two AA batteries to exactly 5 volts with very little waste. It will supposedly provide a full charge to a video iPod giving an additional 2-3 hours of video so you can watch a long movie away from a computer or wall outlet. It doesn’t provide the oomph of my 8 AA Band Aids charger, but if you really wanted more charges you could just bring extra pairs of AA batteries. So that was impressive in itself.

But then she took it all to the next level, designing a custom circuit board so the whole thing could fit in an Altoids gum tin, thoroughly documenting the entire design and build process, and selling kits with all the needed parts as an electronics project for $19.50. I was so impressed I almost bought one even though I can’t solder worth a flip and my iPod doesn’t charge via USB.