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A co-worker and I switched natural gas suppliers at the same time when we got the really good deal from Georgia Natural Gas that I wrote about in October. He told me about a program that GNG has where they will donate $25 to the school of your choice plus $5 per month that you remain a customer. I think he had gotten a card about the program in the mail, but I was able to go to the site and sign up on my own since it doesn’t cost me anything and a school would benefit. I chose my local elementary school.

The program is called True Blue Schools

A week or so later they sent me an e-mail saying thank you for participating and congratulating my local school for getting a total of $0, with $0 earned to date. I think I must have missed the deadline for that quarter’s distribution because they were thanking me for nothing.

While I was doing research on my car, I found out about a type of car polish called Zaino. It sounded interesting and is enormously complicated, which makes it even more appealing. I thought about ordering the starter kit (it’s kind of expensive) back when I wrote about car clay, but decided not to since we aren’t allowed to wash our cars and that’s a big part of the process. Then time went by and I felt like I really needed to put some kind of protection on the car so the finish doesn’t go bad like it eventually did on the Honda. I’ve paid to get the car washed a couple of times, but getting it waxed properly is really expensive and doesn’t last anyway.

Continue reading “Zaino”

I have been with Scottrade for almost six years. They are no frills, but they are cheap, charging only $7 for any kind of trade that I would make. Generally I don’t trade that much, keeping just a handful of stocks, maybe buying something when it seems like a good company is down. Then I follow my 20% rule where I sell when I make a 20% gain, or buy more of a stock when a stock I own goes down by 20%. In 2005 and in 2007 I made only one trade the entire year. I felt bad that Scottrade was making no money off of me, but one of their selling points is they don’t have fees for inactive trading. Other years were busier. In 2006 I made 4 trades, in 2004 9 trades, and 2003 was a big year with 11 trades. But 2008 was crazy. I made 45 trades as it seemed like there were a lot of good companies with low stock prices and I was able to buy and sell as stock prices went on roller coaster rides. Goldman Sachs was one of those: I bought it for $62 on Nov. 13, entered a limit order for my 20% gain price of $75.94 which it hit less than 2 weeks later. I then entered a buy order for the same old price of $62, which it hit Dec. 2. On Dec. 8 it triggered a sell for another 20% gain. That was 4 trades. Things haven’t been moving as much lately so maybe 2009 will be another slow year. I certainly won’t feel sorry for Scottrade after giving them $7 so many times in 2008.

The website enterprise has been reeling lately. In May I moved copies of the money-making web pages back to Speedfactory, my dialup provider even though in January I switched to DSL. This gave me a bump in traffic and I also got page rank back, including at the new iGirder site. But in September, Speedfactory took the web page down and haven’t brought it back after months of me asking and them promising they would do it.

So anyway, traffic has come back a little, but it hasn’t been great. Around 100 visitors a day. In 2007 Sitemeter counted 137,000 visitors and in 2008 I got only 61,000. Extrapolate 100 visitors a day and I will be down to 36,500 in 2009. Amazon revenues have been way off too: $581 in sales in the 4th quarter, generating only $27.70 in commissions for me. In November I actually lost money, selling two small items, but getting a return on a more expensive item. Amazon will send a payment each month as long as you have more than $10 in earnings, so some months I don’t make that. In December someone placed an order of about 12 items, so it turned into a decent month with $15 in earnings (though by comparison the previous December saw $53 in earnings).

The best seller was the Turbo iPod charger with 3 sold, displacing the Maxell iPod battery pack, with 3 sales, but one return. The most expensive item sold was an $89 iPod to car stereo adapter. The most unusual thing sold was a pound of almonds.

AdSense has been off too, which is to be expected since I only have ads on the Sony and DeJumbler pages. So for the quarter I had revenues of $8 and it will be years before I see another $100 payment from Google. The nice thing is my advertising deal continues to pay $52 per month.

This evening at work Paul was visiting a couple of the groups and looked out my window at the sunset. He pointed out a sundog. I usually kind of ignore stuff like that, but he asked if I knew what a sundog is. I didn’t. He said I should look it up, so I went to Wikipedia really quickly and found an article about them. Only then did I actually look out the window, and there in the clouds about 20 degrees to the left of the setting sun was a bright spot. He said that was the sundog and it was caused by ice crystals in the cloud refracting the sunlight back towards us. The hexagonal shape of a snow crystal bends the light, similar to a rainbow (except rainbows are on the other side of the sky from the sun). Today’s sundog showed a little bit of color refraction, reddish on one side and bluer on the other side. He said there was probably one on the other side of the sun too, so we walked around to another side of the building to go look. Not quite as bright, but there was a spot in the clouds on the right also.