The Old P60 Drop-In

More research on flashlights, so you can skip this . . .

The main high-end US flashlight company, Surefire, sells innards of a flashlight called a P60. It consists of three parts: a reflector, a bulb, and the electronics that drive it. Surefire uses this assembly in several different models of flashlights. It has become a standard part and now many off-brands offer P60 drop-ins that can be used in Surefire lights. And because there are so many P60 drop-ins and Surefires are so expensive, now people make P60-compatible bodies that will accept the drop-ins. So instead of spending $150 on Surefire’s system, you can spend $18 for a generic.

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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.

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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.

Roth 2010

Last year I put my Roth contribution into Fidelity Contrafund, a large cap growth mutual fund. It did pretty well, returning about 26% on the year. But in late March it seemed sluggish so I took some out and put it in the peppier Fidelity Small Cap Growth fund which turned out to be a good move since it has gone up 51% since then vs. Contrafund which was up “only” 36% since that time.

If 2009 trends continue, then small caps will continue to outperform large caps and international funds will do well (I put some money into Vanguard’s emerging markets index last year and holy cow! 70% gain). But I looked at how my Roth funds are allocated now and I feel like I have a lot of representation from small caps already, so I think I will put some money in large caps and hope they have a good year. I tried to see what sectors underperformed this year, thinking they were due to do better next year. Some of the big tech companies haven’t done as well and biotech didn’t do very well. So I was thinking that I might try out Vanguard’s FTSE Social Index fund again which has pretty big positions in tech, health care, and financial companies. Maybe those will do pretty well, so I was thinking I would put $4k of the 2010 IRA contribution there and then throw the remaining $1k I’m allowed to contribute at Vanguard’s Total International Index to give me a little more foreign diversification.

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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”