Today I was researching coffee for some reason. So I started off researching french press coffee makers where you pour hot water over some coffee grounds and then force a strainer down over all of that and wind up with coffee on top and grounds trapped at the bottom. The nice thing is this is a pretty simple machine and they are cheap. People swear by these. I was watching a show on Discovery about coffee (maybe that’s what set this off) and a couple of the experts said that is their favorite way to make coffee. The problem with the french press is the filter is pretty porous and it lets fine grinds past, so you end up with cloudy coffee with some sediment. You can avoid that by grinding the coffee to end up with bigger chunks. Sounds simple, but most grinders can’t do that and you end up with some big chunks and some little ones in economical grinders. So french press lovers say you need to spend $200 on a special burr grinder that will only produce big chunks of beans. So much for economy: a $15 coffee maker requires a $200 grinder.
Category: Uncategorized
Flashlight Suspension
I have been learning a lot about flashlights for the last year and most of it has come from reading the discussion forums at Candlepower Forums. I’ve learned enough that I have written a couple of reviews of lights and I answer questions from newbies every now and then (I’ve also done a lot of editing of their Wiki, which was terrible). By and large the people are very helpful and incredibly knowledgeable. There is just a lot to know. And there are thousands of threads for a newbie to search through, even using Google search. It helps that the forums are strictly moderated, so flaming, bad language, etc. are simply not to be found. They have a lot of rules and zero tolerance of people who break them.
Long story short, I got suspended from the flashlight discussion board. Not long, just for a day. Here’s how it happened.
Green Weather Network
In 2006 Target had a sale on Oregon Scientific indoor/outdoor thermometers and I found out that they supported up to three different wireless temperature probes although they only came with one each. So I solved that by buying three thermometers and sharing the gauges. Two of the gauges read all three probes, while a third is only designed to read one probe, so I made sure that probe is the one outside (the other two are in my crawlspace and attic). Then in 2007 I got a wireless rainfall gauge which reads a tipping bucket gauge that is on my roof. It also came with a fourth temperature probe which runs at the same frequency as one of the other probes, but will be ignored by the other gauges as long as it is on a staggered 43-second reporting cycle. So I have the fourth probe in one of my closed off bedrooms to see how cold they get. Only the rainfall gauge reports that temperature.
Fourth Quarter Report
I had a pretty good quarter on Amazon, but it was primarily due to some flukey things. At the end of October someone bought an expensive GPS system that earned me $31 all by itself. Then in December one of my co-workers did all of her Christmas shopping through Amazon and remembered to use my web page to start it off. Also I got my count of items way up when someone bought about 20 MP3’s from Amazon after following a link. At only 99ยข per song, even with a 10% commission I don’t get a whole lot of money (MP3’s have a bigger commission than anything else). So for the quarter, I sold 69 items worth $1,835 for $87.30 in commissions. The most unusual item I sold is a Bottle-Top Pod which screws into the tripod mount of your camera but has a bottle cap on the other end that lets you use a bottle as the tripod.
AdSense revenue stayed about the same at $10.09 on the quarter. And this is despite me replacing the old private party ads on my iPod pages with Google ads after my advertiser stopped sending money due to my loss of Page Rank. I used to have a couple of pages listed on DMOZ Open Directory under iPod, but they seem to have cleaned that up and axed my pages. Then my Page Rank went to 0.That was some easy money. After PayPal fees, he paid me $867.84 since he first approached me.
Top 10 Movies of the Decade
The Siskel and Ebert movie review show that started out as Sneak Previews on PBS eventually has morphed to become At the Movies with Michael Philips of the Chicago Tribune and A.O. Scott of the New York Times. This is a better pair than some of the iterations they have had in the past, though Richard Roeper was pretty good as a replacement to Gene Siskel.
Anyway, even though the current pair have only been on the show for a few months, they are both professional movie critics, so they have been watching movies long enough to compile a list of the best movies of the decade, which they presented on the show over a period of ten weeks. So I’m going to show you their picks and then, based on my database of movies, I’m going to take a stab at it as well. First, A.O. Scott’s list: Continue reading “Top 10 Movies of the Decade”