Chaudywogbaaga

Okay, I’m a Facebook holdout. I know that I would probably get sucked into it and I just don’t have the time for more hobbies. I maintain a few websites, black smith, metal cast, and RPG for fun. I’ve purposefully given up computer games long ago because I just don’t have time so I am very cautious about adding things to my roster of hobbies. I already spend way too much time reading science and tech articles that while I find fun, don’t usually end up having any value to me.

I get why people have Facebook accounts, it’s an easy way of keeping contact with friends in a mass mailing super directory kind of way. It makes keeping in touch easy, like sending a funny email to everyone in your address book. I just don’t have time for it.

So why do I say it’s scary? As anyone with an email account and no Facebook account can tell you, they send emails. A lot of them. “Come join us!” They cry as if you are causing all the people on Facebook torment because you’re not there to enrich their day. That I find annoying but not scary. It’s the email I just got that I found scary. Facebook is stalking me! An old school buddy just emailed me to join. In the email there was one friend that had already sent me an invite that has been permanently recorded in the Facebook servers.

Then there were nine other people that it said I might know. Two of them I didn’t recognize. Three of them were old co-workers. One is a good friend from my childhood. One is a current friend. One is my Brother. And one, is a person that I’ve had discussions about publishing books on Macs on a POD provider’s forum.

Facebook connected us from a forum? So they’re compiling every bit of data they can about me and I’m not even a member! If a person walked up to you and did all this research about you, figuring out all the people you know saying “I know these are all people you care about.” you could go to the police and have a restraining order put against them! Why is it OK for a company to do this? “It’s only marketing.” “That information is freely available, we just put it together.” No! If I collect that kind of information about someone I would be a stalker. The same should apply to a company.

Facebook, stop stalking me!

I have an apprentice in metalworking. A young man that likes the idea of being able to make things out of steel, aluminum and brass. For a long time we’ve talked about metalwork and he’s helped me with blacksmithing projects. He always talked about getting some kind of forge or foundry set up. I sometimes wondered if he ever would but he’s a very determined young man so I feel it’s just a matter of time.

In fact his hesitancy is very much like my own initial fears. I turned to the internet and sites like backyardmetalcasting.com and didn’t make a move until I was sure I understood. He is doing the same, only I am his information source instead of the internet. I’m an information aggregator for him. I’m also quite sure that some of the things I’ve tried to explain to him were just as incomprehensible as when I tried to learn them through pictures and text (with the occasional video).

Well, today he surpassed me in a way. Even though it was his first cast, he found a practical use for his casting. Something I have not done. Sure I love my castings and I’m proud of them but they’re mostly art. Not really practical. His casting was to replace a part on his car. It wasn’t a big part, but it saved him thirty dollars and that’s more than all my metalwork has earned me.

I’ve been using my iPod Touch for about a year now. I like it a lot, but it is a bit small to read on. I’ve done it, it’s just not a great experience. I also read a lot of websites on my iMac. I wonder if the reading experience could be much different from a computer?

The one thing that makes me interested in the iPad is the 3G data plan. Being able to pull down maps and info while on the go would be extremely useful.

The one thing that is sort of disappointing but understandable is the size of the storage. The base iPad has as much storage as my iPod Touch. It is currently half taken up by music and then pictures (and the pictures are a small format they’d take up more space on an iPad). They show how you can watch movies on the iPad, but practically it can only store one to five movies at a time. Now that doesn’t sound too bad for a road trip but it’s not a movie repository like you would want in your kitchen. A 64 GB iPad would be able to store ten to fifteen movies.

So I’m mostly interested in the cheap 3G. A 16 GB iPad and a 3G connection for helping me when I get lost trying to find a customer’s house.

I am interested in the iWork programs, mainly Pages and Numbers. I don’t have much use for Keynote, although my daughter seems to like it. I do my book layouts in pages and I do some spreadsheet number crunching from time to time. I wonder if the iPad versions would suit my needs while I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my geek friends?

I have an Apple Store 30 miles away, I’ll be taking a trip up there to check it out when they are released.

My mother got a Mancala board for the kids. It is generally looked at as a good way to teach counting for younger kids. The board is very similar to the one in the picture. This seems to be the simplest kind of board. There are apparently many different variations. I’ve seen this kind of board before in museums, but had no idea how to play it.

As with most games play is simple to explain but difficult to explain all the strategy involved. In truth it’s a very engaging game. I found myself wondering why the game wasn’t more popular in the United States but quickly realized that there were several big obstacles to it.

One, there are many variations of the game. This is true of a number of games like dominos and many other card games like spades (i’ve never ran into two people that played spades exactly the same). This makes it hard to explain.

Two, the game is ancient. You can play it by digging little divots in the dirt and stones. There’s no way to copyright it. It’s almost too simple. It’s almost opensource before there was an opensource.

There’s something I fine especially fascinating about the game, more about it after the jump.

Read more! »

I woke up two weeks ago in the morning during a storm. My computer was shut down when I came down stairs. We had lost power during the night so I didn’t think too much of it. My iMac had survived numerous power outages. Not this time.

I tried turning it on. I heard the hard drive spin up and then a sickly click. I know that sound and it’s not a good one. It did it again and again. Then it showed an icon of a folder with an x on it. Meaning no file system found. I was unhappy.

I immediately started looking into web pages on rescuing a dead hard drive. Here are the bad points.
1. The hard drive will have to be replaced
2. Retrieving the information for sure (ok mostly for sure) is expensive.
3. Retrieving the information cheaply is not a sure thing.

Here are the good points
1. You might be able to save the information on the drive cheaply but you’ll only get one or two shots at it.
2. If it’s vital information and/or you have the money, it’s very likely that you can pay someone to get the information off it.

Seeing as I have very little money, I opted for the cheap method. This is how I went about replacing my iMac hard drive and attempted to retrieve data from my failed hard drive.

My method after the jump.

Read more! »

I’ve published seven POD (Print On Demand) books. I really enjoy the process, I really like getting a professionally bound book in the mail that I made myself. The problem that I see is that POD does not transition from hobby to income as you would expect. There is very little way for a POD book to grab people’s attention like it could on a bookstore shelf. Sure there are search engines that could somehow get people to find your book but most people don’t buy a book by just looking at it on Amazon or Barnes and Nobles website. They often hear about a book from a friend and go out and look for it. This is not what POD was supposed to be. The model was, you make your book, post it online and then people would stumble across it and every once in a while they would buy it.

What it comes down to is that a book has to be in people’s hands. You have to start out with a stock of them to sell on a bookshelf and then the people that initially buy them tell their friends then those friends go searching for it. POD printers are recognizing that by offering volume discounts, something they thought unnecessary before.

This was originally the big draw to POD. You didn’t have to buy a thousand books to get your book published. Now POD printers offer to print you a hundred books at a slight discount but you couldn’t sell them competitively in a bookstore because of the higher cost of POD printing. In essence you have to give some books away or find a physical venue to sell them at. Then maybe the critical mass of word of mouth will get people buying.

Now to test that theory out!

I’ve been putting off making this update. Thing have gone. . . mediocre. There were some rough months there and things aren’t perfect yet but they’ve picked up as far as income is concerned.

The bad thing is that I haven’t been able to get business going on the things I find really interesting. Things like my metalwork and blacksmithing. Now I have learned a lot. I know better what kinds of things sell by watching other blacksmiths and vendors. The result is frustrating. In essence most of the time people are willing to pay $5 for an item and usually the figure is closer to $4. That is the threshold for impulse buying in most cases. Successful merchants usually have hundreds of these minor items for sale and then a few WOW items. The balance of the two are important. If you have one without the other you loose sales.

If your items are priced over the impulse buy range, then very few (nearly no one) will buy. If you don’t have higher priced WOW items, then your wares are just chintzy and not worth it.

I’m trying to come up with things that I can make for $4-5 and obviously turn them out quickly. I have a few ideas but I’ve been spending all my time trying to recover from the time and money wasted on earlier attempts.

Paying Bills With Little or No Income
This is perhaps the hardest task of any budget. When you have bills that you simply don’t have the money for. It is possibly also the most stress inducing realization in a budget that the money coming in is not enough to pay for the money going out to even essentials.

There are several common reactions to this situation. One get a second or third job. If there are any to be had. Remember we’re talking about a failing economy, local or otherwise, there may not be more jobs to be had if there are any jobs to be had.

There is almost always the possibility of taking a job and being “under employed". My definition for this would be when someone is employed in a job that does not adequately compensate them for their needs. This would be a job that does not pay enough to cover living expenses. At this point the only reason to hold such a job is to delay the eventual financial crash. Delaying a financial crash may be all that’s needed but a better plan should be formulated as soon as possible.

The second reaction is to try and wait it out. I have to admit that this is my default reaction, that somehow the money will show up later and all I need to do is stretch my bill payments out until the money shows up. This generally just makes your creditors mad at you.

In the best of times, these situations do work. In more troubling times they may make things worse or just be a waste of time. There are several other options that can work in a failing economy and they really should be combined for better effect.

The first option is paying what you can of the bills you can instead of waiting until you can pay the whole amount. This shows your creditors that you do want to pay their bills and that can be important when they decide what to do with you.

The second option is talking to them as soon as you know you are going to have trouble paying a bill. I have the hardest time with this one. It is a smart move to keep the lines of communication open instead of hiding from your creditors.

The third option is to investigate any government programs that you qualify for that will help you pay your bills. These vary depending on where you live. It may be difficult to qualify for these programs and their availability may change from time to time, but trying usually just takes your time and some paperwork.

A questionable fourth option, instead of being employed in a second or third job where you are earning a comparatively low income, it may make sense to try an alternate income stream. This option is a big gamble because it is unproven and if it were cut and dry, then a large company would already be doing it somewhere. Alternate income streams usually consist of either small items you can make and sell quickly or something made once that can be sold over and over again. Crafts and book writing falls in this category. Obviously everyone that makes a craft or writes a book thinks that everyone is going to want one. This is almost always not the case. It is however possible that some people may want what you produce and it makes you some money. There are plenty of online resources that enable people to create and sell products at very little or no cost to themselves. This makes an ideal situation for someone with no money. I have heard stories of people in the Great Depression that would make some item and then walk door to door with them to sell them. Usually this is a very labor intensive effort but it may be worth it.

I’ve noticed something very odd about people’s purchasing habits. They will readily pay ten to twenty dollars on a meal or a haircut but hand them a more durable item to purchase and they will balk at the same dollar amount even if they will be able to use that item for years.

I recently made a few items and tried to sell them at a craft show. Nearly everyone that walked by would suddenly stop and exclaim “Wow!” or “Amazing!". Some items I had were priced approaching the $200 range, most were $20 to $40 dollars. Many people were interested in the $20 to $40 items and really no one argued that the prices were unreasonable. In the end no one bought anything! I debated why this was with myself for quite some time and finally remembered a principle that I had formulated years ago.

Read more! »

I periodically will draw pictures to teach my kids things. Some are about science, some about language, really they could be anything that would benefit from a visual aid. We recently found this drawing in a stack of papers. I remember it only vaguely but I can tell I drew it. The thing is, I can’t tell why I drew it yet we thought it important enough to keep. It looks like the numbers are steps to something but I can’t figure out what. Sure I could come up with explanations for each individual drawing but I can’t put them together, especially in the order they’re numbered in.

How would you interpret these?