Amazon Runneth Over

I was planning on redirecting my Amazon links at the end of the month so that I would not get more than $600 in payments this year from the Associates program. Amazon reports earnings of over $600 to the IRS, meaning I would have to put that down as income and lose a third of it in taxes. Even if I earned another $300, I would only break even. There is a chance that in July, August, September, and October I could get a little more than $300, but I didn’t think it was worth it.

What really got me close fast was someone ordering a $200 book yesterday for which I received a $13 commission. That puts me at $581 on the year and I still will have a few more items ship before the orders dry up. That also put me at $1,000 from Amazon since I started.

I wanted to find some non-profit organizations that have Amazon programs, but it wasn’t easy. I did pretty well when I searched on “Amazon” and “portion of the proceeds”. In addition to the Opossum Society and American Cetacean Society, that I already knew about and would use when I ordered things from Amazon (since I can’t receive money from my own purchases), I discovered the San Diego Natural History Museum, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Rainforest Alliance.

So tonight I updated my web pages to use those different organizations’ links (I also used Movable Type’s search and replace to fix links I have on the blog). The only thing I don’t like is that I won’t be able to monitor how well my website is doing in terms of sales. But in November I can switch back since payment for November won’t come until January 2008.

Safari

Kind of funny that a couple of days after I wrote about the SeaMonkey browser that Steve Jobs would introduce the Safari Browser for Windows. People don’t seem that impressed, but to me that represents a huge step for Apple. They are bringing Mac to the people. Plus it can’t hurt sales of the iPhone if people are comfortable using Safari (most probably didn’t know that Safari was the browser for the Mac) at home and it is one of the key features of the iPhone.

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Introducing Lilli

The weekend before last Susan was volunteering for Paws Atlanta helping with adoptions at Petsmart. They had a batch of puppies and Susan wound up adopting a cute black and white female. She is half English setter, which is kind of like an Irish setter but without the sense of humor and doesn’t drink as much. She was told the other half is Australian Shepherd, which is kind of like a German shepherd but <insert gross generalization here>.

After considering hundreds of names, Susan decided to name her Lilli as a short form of Lilliputian, which she certainly is right now: She can walk right under Beacon as if she were walking under a table.

Lilli

SeaMonkey

I’ve been using Netscape and then Mozilla as my main web browser for a long time. I’ve never been crazy about Internet Explorer and, for a while at least, it seemed to have a lot of security problems. SeaMonkey.png Recently, Jeb added Snap Shots to his page. It seemed like a neat thing, so I added it to mine as well. But as I browsed I noticed that if I tried to go Back in my browser, I didn’t go anywhere. If I held down the Back button to see a history of pages, there would be about 3 copies of the current page in the Back history. So I took the code out of my pages rather than have to deal with that (although I have been getting a similar thing on My Yahoo when I would get information on a stock in my portfolio).

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iTunes Plus

This week Apple started selling songs without piracy protection, calling it iTunes Plus. They had made a deal with one recording label, EMI, to offer this. EMI made the same deal with other companies so, while some people are saying Steve Jobs pushed EMI into the decision, I don’t know if that is true. The new songs will cost $1.29 instead of the standard $0.99 (Jobs had previously insisted on the $0.99 price for all songs). But to sweeten the offer the songs are also recorded at a higher quality level (meaning the files are bigger).

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