A couple of weeks ago the switch on my Palm TX stopped working. I did some searching and found a good post on a Palm forum by Woz of Oz (if it is not Apple co-founder and Dances With the Stars contestant Steve Wozniak, it is someone who wants you to think it is him) that said you can use the center button to turn on the Palm and get the clock pop-up, which leaves you in whatever program you were in last (whereas the Calendar, Memo, and other buttons turn the Palm on but take you to those programs). So I have been doing that lately. To turn it off you just wait a minute and it goes off on its own. I’m hoping Apple releases a nice update to the iPod Touch next month and I can use that instead of the Palm.
Year: 2009
Clean Air Champion
Today at work I won an award for being a “Clean Air Champion” (I got a certificate and a coffee mug). As part of the Clean Air Campaign, I have been logging the days where I do a clean commute. And since I take MARTA every day, then pretty much any time I go to work is a clean commute day (twice actually, since I go to work and then go home). The advantage of logging my commute is they have a monthly drawing where you can win a $25 gift card if you participate. I have won at least 3 times, but nothing in the last year.
So I got an e-mail this week saying to meet in the lobby with the other 25,000 pound champions. By their calculations, I have saved 25,000 pounds of pollution with all of the clean commutes I have logged. I did a similar calculation when I wrote about 10 years of MARTA cards, coming up with 2,000 gallons of gasoline saved in 10 years. Now a gallon of gas only weighs 6.3 pounds, so if all of that turned into pollutants, it would only be 12,600 pounds in 10 years. But I found a government website that says one gallon of gasoline actually produces 20 pounds of carbon dioxide when it burns because every carbon atom in the gasoline is combining with two heavier oxygen atoms from the air. So that means in 10 years I saved 40,000 pounds of CO2. And with the time I rode MARTA before I started collecting cards, and the time since I wrote that blog entry, I am probably up to 16 years or more of clean commutes.
So I really am a Clean Air Champion.
Second Quarter Report
Amazon sales remained down, so it’s not quite as much fun to do a quarterly report. Still, there are some interesting surprises. I only have the one page with AdSense ads. It is getting about 40 ad clicks per month out of 2,000 page views with the result being about $3 in revenue per month. It’s a long way to a $100 deposit.
In May I thought my troubles were over as I sold 29 items with Amazon compared to 6 the month before. But in June I sold a miserable 5 items, though part of that was because 3 books purchased in May were returned, so 5 items was my net. For the quarter the total was 40 items with a price of $730.69 and a commission for me of $35.35.
The biggest seller was the Turbo Charge iPod charger with 5 sales, though last quarter I had 11 sales. The most expensive item anyone bought was a radon gas detector for $120, so I got $7.20 as a commission. The most unusual item was a handful of books on trauma including 4 copies of one book plus a couple of other trauma titles and a Ham radio book too. Three copies of that one book were returned.
I am also still getting money each month for ads on my iPod pages and right now that is more than Amazon and AdSense revenues combined.
SunriseXP and Plucker
Today is the day that AvantGo became AvantGone. I was looking for a replacement and found a discussion about the topic. The simplest replacement seemed to be MobiPocket. This used to be a $20 piece of software for reading e-books, but Amazon bought the company and now it is free. Though they want you to buy e-books from their store, they also let you set up RSS feeds for free. I knew nothing about RSS feeds, so this morning I downloaded the software and tried to figure it out. I found some RSS feeds for the New York Times, Space.com, and The Economist and sychronized. Eventually it seemed to be working okay and I was off to work. But when I went to read the articles, the ones from Space.com were good (though a little jumbled with text for credit and ads), but the Times and Economist were just headlines. I guess headlines work fine if you add them to your My Yahoo home page, but not for offline reading.
Rabid Bats
Recently there was a paragraph in the paper about my neighborhood saying that a rabid bat had been found in someone’s house. I then made a question about this the first post on the new local bulletin board to see if I could find any additional information about it. I didn’t, but one person responded and that made me go look up more information. It’s not that I was worried about it, I had just never heard of rabid bats being a problem and wondered it if was just fear mongering or a legitimate public health concern.
I found an excellent page at the CDC’s website about bats and rabies and was very surprised to find that most cases of rabies in humans are caused by bats! Not dogs, not raccoons, but bats. So it is a more serious problem than I originally thought, though rabies still isn’t all that widespread. I imagine that one reason it can be a problem is that bats are pretty small and the sick bats are more likely to get in your house or come out during the daytime. Then people try to move them and, BAM! bat bite.