Shoestring Theory

My new office was hiding a multitude of surprises, including two windows, a door and hardwood floors that had all been covered up. I understand the door, someone moved the front door to a different side of the house at some time. But covering up two additional windows? Really, why?

The hardwoods are an unknown at this point. The section I revealed has a fair amount of damage. It will depend on the rest of the room on whether they are savable or not. If the majority of the room turns out to be in serviceable shape, I think I can save the section I found last night. If the rest of the room is in similar condition, I don’t know what I’ll do with them.

Tags:   house · remodel · surpriseNo Comments.

A few minutes after I got out to the place to work this evening, I watched a bald eagle fly over the river behind the house. Little things like that make the hard work seem that much easier to handle.

Tags:   bald eagle · house · remodel4 Comments

The ladytheorist and I finally found a house we liked and that was in our price range. Yah! It’s a 108-year-old rather run-down farmhouse a couple of miles outside of Eudora. The house needs a bunch of work, but the property rocks. It sits on a couple of acres of land and looks north over the Kansas River.

It will be a wonderful home for us once we’re done with it.

I miss the country some days. Mostly I miss the sound and the stars. Though I’ve grown increasingly cynical over the years, I’ve never lost the childlike wonder of staring up into the heavens. A few evenings ago, I was locking the place up for the night and loading my car to head back to town. I glanced up at the sky. I forget sometimes how beautiful the night sky is. My friend Ryan used to say, “Sure you can see the stars in the city, you can even count them.”

I miss not being able to count the stars.

Okay, enough waxing poetic, below are some of the early pics. I’m going to try and put up one post a week updating the work we’re doing. Let me know what you think!

Tags:   house · remodel12 Comments

Awhile back, I posted on joining the Upromise program.

To update, I am still very happy with the program and would highly recommend it to anyone who is saving for college or trying to pay down student loans. It’s been about nine months since I joined. In that time, I’ve picked up $204 in rewards towards my Sallie Mae college loan, though I would tend to think that I buy more stuff online than most people because of my business.

The bulk of the rewards comes from two sources: eBay and eRewards. eBay offers 1 percent rewards for every purchase. We buy a lot of our business supplies through eBay venders rather than traditional suppliers. As example, we buy packing tape, static bags, some boxes, packing supplies, office supplies, general equipment, and more. Since I already bought these items on eBay, it fit right in without any disruption to my normal habits.

I was highly skeptical of eRewards when I signed up. I just didn’t buy into the whole “take surveys, earn money” line. But, I figured if they had partnered with Sallie Mae, I would give them a shot. I might spend an hour a month taking surveys, quite often taking them as I’m working on other tasks on my computer. I’ve managed to get $50 worth of credit to my Upromise account through eRewards during the nine months I’ve been signed up.

I’ve also picked up rewards from Newegg (the best place in the world for desktop computer parts), Office Max, our local grocery store and our favorite local BBQ joint, Biggs.

The best, and most consistent, way to use the program is still to install the browser toolbar. Otherwise, you have to go to the Upromise site, log in, find the store you want to shop at, then finally click on a link to the store to make sure you get your rewards. It’s a pain. Sadly, while a better option, the toolbar is still annoying. It briefly routes you through the Upromise site every time you visit a site that gives rewards. It delays loading the desired site by maybe a second. Sometimes, if you open a page on a rewards giving site in a new tab, the re-routing kicks in again and dumps you off at the stores main page. Annoying. But, still better than having to manually go through the Upromise site. I still suggest running two browsers, one for you daily use and one for shopping. I run dual instances of Firefox (which I finally learned how to do a few months ago).

At the pace I’ve been earning rewards, I figure I will have earned the equivalent of three extra payments by the end of the year. I can’t stress enough that I think I buy more online than the average person, but I still think the program can be good for anyone trying to pay down a Sallie Mae student loan. Even earning one extra payment a year for a few years could shave serious money off your student loans.

Tags:   eBay · rewards · upromiseNo Comments.

I’ve been having an ongoing political discussion with a friend via email for most of the week. Quite often, I’m working at the same time I’m writing replies to him. There are certain messages for my customers that I keep saved in text files for handy reference. Things like our detailed return instructions, some standard guides I haven’t got around to formatting for our website, or a short thank you message that gets sent out to all of our customers along with the tracking info. I just copy-paste when I need one of these.

A couple of days ago, I was sending two of these boilerplate messages to customers and *thought* I had copied them out of the text file. I was about to hit send when I suddenly realized what I had really pasted was part of an inflammatory political analysis regarding Gov. Palin. I had copied it earlier to send to my friend as part of our ongoing political argument.

A fine lesson on why work time and personal time should be kept separate. It keeps you from sending angry political rants to your customers.

Tags:   argument · politics · whoopsNo Comments.

Kraft Brown Paper from Uline (photo from uline.com)

Hi folks, been awhile since I posted (how much of a blogger cliché is that?). For one, the business this summer has been going really well and I haven’t had the time during the day to write anything. For two, I came to the realization that I spend all day thinking about eBay and e-biz and didn’t necessarily want to be thinking about it more in the evenings once I’m done working. I’m still going to write about eBay, but I think this blog will begin mixing things up a bit also.

Anyway, we were looking at some more shipping options this week and I ran some basic calculations on packing materials to see what our best solutions were. I couldn’t find a good guide on cost per volume, so I figured it up myself. We typically use peanuts and bubble wrap. As of this week, we added newsprint. We have a wide range of products, ranging from very fragile to almost indestructible. We started using newsprint for those items which we know won’t be hurt during shipping. We buy peanuts and bubble wrap from our local UPS Store. I have found that most UPS Stores that they will sell you the industrial size packing supplies they order for themselves if you ask. The managers get to set the prices on large packing supplies, so you may find some variance on how much they charge you. There are cheaper options, but not if you have to have them shipped to a residential address. We buy rolls of newsprint from Uline. The breakdown in cost is as follows:

Bubble Wrap – ½” bubble, 24” wide x 250’ long
$60 for approx 14 cubic feet
Cost per cubic foot: $4.92

Packing Peanuts – white Styrofoam
$30 for approx 11 cubic feet
Cost per cubic foot: $2.70

Newsprint – 24”x1695’ roll at 30 lb weight paper
$45.89 for approx 41.5 cubic feet if packing things very well.
Cost per cubic foot: $1.08

Kraft Brown Paper – 24”x1200’ roll at 30 lb weight paper
$36.30 for approx 29.4 cubic feet if packing things very well
Cost per cubic foot: $1.23

Clearly, newsprint is the cheapest void fill option, but also the least secure. We’re going to stick with this combination for now, using the packing material that is best suited to the object being shipped. If you can buy in larger quantities or at cheaper prices, the cost per cubic foot will obviously drop. Still, this guide should give you a good idea of the ratio in price to volume for these common packing supplies.

Tags:   newsprint · packages · packing peanuts · shipping · supplies · uline · void fill1 Comment

Among all the changes happening to eBay worldwide, one of the most startling announcements has been that eBay Australia will require that PayPal be used for virtually all transactions in Australia (except for items picked up locally).

eBay Australia is hosting several Q&A meetings with eBay users to discuss the new policy. According to APCmag.com, an eBay executive dropped this gem on the crowd when asked why sellers couldn’t offer choices to their buyers:

We’re not allowing people to offer unsafe choices, just like in this democracy you can’t go out and buy heroin on the streets. – Simon Smith, Regional VP for eBay Australia

Classy.

Tags:   Australia · eBay · heroin · PayPal2 Comments

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (photo from nobelprize.org)

There exist certain cues throughout my day that kick off the urge to smoke. Some activities are SO heavily associated with smoking that it’s hard to imagine one without the other (morning coffee). Smokers are but one of Pavlov’s dogs. If I want to quit smoking, there are certain aspects of my life I must reclaim. I must learn how to enjoy them smoke-free.

• Eating
• Drinking coffee
• Drinking alcohol
• Talking on the telephone
• Reading
• Writing
• Driving
• Gaming
• Sex
• Going Outside (really, I’m serious)
• Playing pool

I will try to fill out some explanations for each of these, particularly so those of you who are non-smokers may understand why they kick off the urge to smoke.

One of Pavlov’s Dogs (photo from Wikimedia Commons by Robert Lawton)

Tags:   bells · pavlov · quitting · smoking1 Comment

Screen capture of eBay home page.

Today’s 10 cent list fee special is sponsored by Monster. So, apparently eBay is encouraging you to look for a job on Monster. I guess that makes sense if eBay’s news policies are driving you off the site. This seems like a really odd marketing partnership for a site that has long billed itself as a way to escape having a normal job.

Tags:   eBay · job · list fees · monsterNo Comments.

Okay, so today has by far been the worst, though also the most successful for quitting smoking. By the end of our workday, I’ve had three cigarettes. I also haven’t been able to focus on anything for longer than ten minutes. I’m not cranky or jittery, I just can’t concentrate.

This was a somewhat out of the blue decision to try and quit again. I like to sneak up on my addictions and subdue them when they aren’t expecting it…a kind of addiction ninja. Well, and I tend to be pretty spontaneous about making decisions anyway. What got me seriously thinking about quitting again though was a post over at DS Fanboy (a gaming blog focused on Nintendo’s portable gaming system). One of their readers, Dan, quit smoking using the game Pokemon. Whenever he got the urge to smoke, he’d just start up his DS and play some Pokemon for a bit. And all those news shows say that video games are bad. I’m not using Dan’s plan exactly, but I did spend a lot of time gaming over the weekend. It keeps my hands and mind busy. Dan hunted little adorable monsters, and I’ve been hunting a little bigger game: Dracula!

Tags:   cigarettes · Marlboro · Nintendo DS · Pokemon · quitting · smokingNo Comments.