Along with the economy in general, my web site revenues seemed to have put the worst behind them, but the recovery is slow. I had three months in a row where I will earn a payment from Amazon (greater than $10 worth of commissions earned) whereas last quarter I only had one. AdSense is still anemic, but I got $5 in September. Somebody bought a couple of LED flashlight bulbs, so that sale almost certainly came from a link on the blog when I wrote about those. The most expensive item I sold was a Casio Men’s Pathfinder Multi-Band Solar Atomic Black Watch for $167.92. That locked in a payment for the month all by itself with a commission of $10.08. For the quarter I sold 40 items worth $1,060.52, earning $54.38.
Category: Uncategorized
Yard Man, Meet Lawn Boy
When I first bought my house, Mr. Deckbar donated his old Lawn Boy mower to me. It was just like the one we used to have and I used it for several years but each Spring it was harder to get started. Norm turned me on to Starting Fluid which will bring just about any engine to life (it is pure octane, actually ether I think) but even with that it was sluggish. So I checked out Consumer Reports in 2003 and they had a Yard Man mower that they liked and said did a good job of mulching. With the old mower I would bag and compost the clippings sometimes, but mulching is better because it just recycles the clippings into the ground where they help the grass grow.
JP1 Still Kicking
Five years ago, I got a JP1 cable to connect my computer and JP1-compatible remote control. That remote stopped working (some of the buttons wore out, but I was able to remap those functions to other buttons for a while). I was at Mom’s house recently and wanted to help her JP1 remote learn to run her new iPod boom box. The easiest way is just to learn the signals from the device’s remote into the universal remote by pointing them at each other and pressing some buttons. But because I had done this to learn everything for her HDTV to analog converter box, there wasn’t any memory left for the boom box.
AJC Discount
I recently let my subscription to the newspaper lapse. They wanted a lot more than I had been paying in the past to resubscribe and their discounts were lousy. Mom showed me a flyer today with a 50% off discount, so I have re-upped. It is for new subscribers, but they had an ominous warning that they would charge for amounts past due (which I have because they always keep delivering the paper after it lapses), so we’ll see what happens with that.
These are 13-week prices, but you can also get 26 weeks for a little less:
7-day: $2.49/wk
Thu-Sun: $2.25/wk
Sunday: $1.47/wk
Just go to ajc.com/discount. You don’t seem to need an offer code, but the one I got from Mom was 2130.
New Dishwasher
When I moved into my house about 12 years ago, the Frigidaire dishwasher was pretty new. It worked fine for the most part, but the soap tray wouldn’t stay closed, or if it did, it would never open during the cycle and would still have soggy soap in it when the cycle was done. At one point it wouldn’t come on at all and I had to call a repair man. I watched him take it apart and he showed me that the handle that you turn to lock it down wasn’t pressing down hard enough on the safety switch. He said I would need a new handle for $120. I said don’t worry about it and when he left I took it back apart like he had done and put a piece of cardboard underneath the switch so it would sit up higher and now the handle would trigger the switch. So either a $120 handle or a piece of cardboard would have fixed it. It’s worked for years after that.