One of the early and best tools I bought when I got my house was a Makita cordless drill. I bought it as part of a combo pack that also included a cordless circular saw with a 3 and 5/8″ blade. That blade is too small to cut a 2×4, but is enough to cut through plywood, siding, and 1×4’s. I used it to cut siding for the garage and the back of my house. I use it sometimes when I have a bunch of limbs that I am trying to cut down to 4′ lengths, working very well on the tangle of limbs that is privet. But the batteries are really old now and don’t hold a charge for more than a few minutes. New batteries are very expensive: at least $50 for one. The nice thing is they have NiMH batteries with more capacity than the NiCad one I have, but those are about $70. This is kind of similar to my problem with VersaPak tools that I bought at about the same time, actually. I wound up paying extra for NiMH.
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Category: Uncategorized
Yellowstone Trip
Last weekend I got back from my trip out West to go to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. I booked a room at Yellowstone last Fall and they were still mostly full already. I had a couple of days in Salt Lake City, so I got to see some sights around there as well, including the botanical gardens (which I saw last time, but during a different season), Golden Spike National Historic Site, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, one of the coolest places in the world.
After that it was off to Wyoming for the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, but we had to pass through Idaho, and also went up to the northern entrance, which is in Montana. Plus after Bonneville, we had continued a few miles further into Nevada, so I got to add 4 new states to my list of states I’ve visited.
I worked this week on a website for the trip and just got it ready (subject to change). It uses picture captions based on Wikipedia’s stylesheet. I had used a stylesheet with my movie reviews, and thought I would try one for a trip site this time.
Some sample pictures (bigger versions are available by clicking pictures on the website, but not here):
Dividend Reinvestment Plan
I have heard about dividend reinvestment plans (or DRIPs) for a long time. By buying as little as one share of stock and reinvesting the dividends, you can end up with a whole lot of shares of stock. Sort of. Actually I almost always reinvest my dividends and distributions from mutual funds, which is where most of my money is invested, but I have never bothered doing that with stocks. I think the main reason is that I plan on selling the stocks as soon as they go up (typically 20%) rather than hold on to them for a long time. But sometimes they don’t go up very fast and I end up holding onto them for a lot longer. One of those that I have had for quite a while is Coca Cola. I think I bought them after they had years of great increases, and Coke did nothing much for the next few years. It always had a nice quarterly dividend, but for the 30 shares I owned, it was about $7 a quarter. The nice thing about Coke stock is they didn’t seem to be affected as much by big market downturns, dropping about 20% during the mortgage meltdown compared to 50% or more for most stocks. Last year the stock split and I was well over my 20% gain. Meanwhile the dividend had gone up and that same batch of shares is now giving me $17 per quarter, a 2.6% yield, more than I get with bonds.
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Lotto Fever!
Today’s projection for the PowerBall jackpot jumped to $600 million. Because the odds are so ridiculously bad, all of the money that people who lost in previous weeks could eventually store up and make playing the lottery a good investment. Like if you could pay $1 on a dice roll and win $10, that would be totally worth it (the 10 to 1 payoff is greater than the 6 to 1 odds of losing). So I looked up the odds of winning PowerBall: 175 million to 1. Even though it costs $2 to play, winning $600 million for an investment of $2 seems like it works pretty well. It’s a 300 million to 1 payoff and the odds are 175 million to 1.
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Cracked iPod Screen
On Thursday night, I dropped my iPod Touch as I was getting out of the car. Although it wasn’t much of a drop, the screen was shattered. The iPod still worked and the touch screen was still responsive, but there were a lot of cracks towards the top and bottom of the screen. I didn’t want to try a repair myself since it involves using a heat gun to melt the glue that holds the iPod together. But I knew that a repair would cost a fraction of what a new iPod would cost. I started looking around online for different services and it seemed the going price was $80-150. One problem is the LCD display and the glass touch screen are fused together, so you have to replace them as a unit. The screen alone is about $45 if you want to try the repair yourself. There are a number of places online where you can mail the iPod in and they mail it back. But that would mean a week or so without the iPod, plus the additional cost of shipping. One of the places said they offered same day service for walk-ins, but they were in Texas. I wondered if there were places in Atlanta that could do the repairs. One nice thing about the iPhone and the delicate screen is that there is a pretty big market for repairs. I found out about a guy who you can email and he gives you an appointment time to meet him at a bar in East Atlanta and fixes it at your table. He has a professional looking website and the reviews are positive, one saying he was able to replace the screen on an iPhone before the customer could finish his beer. One problem was the website didn’t mention iPods, just iPhones, and the other problem is how can you guarantee the repair? Do you take it back to the bar if it doesn’t work? A friend at work said I should take it there just to have the story. But I’m telling the story anyway.
I ended up finding a place in Chamblee called Phone Fixation that does all kind of phone repairs. I called them and they said they had the iPod screen in stock and it would take a couple of hours. If I could get it to them early Saturday, they could have it by the end of the day. Instead I took it in Friday night and then picked it up today to make sure they had enough time. The repair was only $80, which seemed pretty fair. It seems to work just fine. The screen tint is a little yellowish now, so I don’t think the quality is as good as the original, but it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.