Angelo’s Notepad

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Shakespeare

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
Henry David Thoreau

A philosophy that not only should you do what you believe is right, but more deeply that you cannot be anything else but who you are. If you try to be someone or something else, if you try to live by a code in which you don’t really believe, you will have internal conflict until you accept your Way.

… that’s the first Ferengi Rule of Acquisition.

Some years ago, when I heard this I thought about all those rebates I’ve done. I’ve done quite a few, and my experience has been mixed. I’m not exactly sure how the decide which people they’re going to attempt to deny (even with legitimate rebates). I’m fairly certain that they are not simply careless because the rate at which I’ve been denied at least the first time has been about 50%. That’s way too high to be coincidental considering that it’s never happened even once through all the other mailings I’ve done like paying bills where I’m actually sending them money.

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Today I noticed this article about how shipping services are done in the US.  I understand and totally agree with the sentiment.  It’s the same problem any time someone needs to actually come out to your home for anything:  e.g. cable installation.  “Yeah we’ll be out there sometime between 8 am and 4 pm.  Have fun taking a day off of work and waiting for us.”

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… except of course any involving requests I’ve made.

One of the rules for not being considered a spammer is to let people unsubscribe from your mailing list. I have tried to unsubscribe from Priceline’s list(s) three times now (a generous allowance only because I actually signed up with them). From now on, every unsolicited email I get from them is going to be marked as spam.

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I came up with a technique for making money off of school books on amazon. Find a recent book that you have for which a used version doesn’t go below a nice price. So let’s say people are selling it for $40 used. I’ve noticed that if you try to price war with them, they often lower their prices to match you. You can lower your price to say $20. The risk is that someone comes and snaps up your book for $20 which is bad (you might want to gradually lower it). But if they don’t and another seller lowers theirs to 19.95, you can immediately buy their book, put yours back up to $40 and then sell their book later when you get it.

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After playing Blacman, here are a couple of games that will help you become more diplomatic and probably politically correct.

The first one is A Force More Powerful which is a strategy game in which you use diplomacy in order to avoid conflicts. Unfortunately, I bet this kind of thing doesn’t sell very well and it does come at about $20. Maybe after a while you’ll find it in the discount bin at your local tech store. (more…)

This was on slashdot a while ago:

An anonymous reader writes “Google organized a flyover of Sydney, Australia last Friday for Australia Day. The images taken on the day will be posted to Google Maps in a few weeks. A number of dotcoms spent hours making huge signs that would be visible from the air. It will be interesting to see whether Google will repeat the event in other cities. If they do, get prepared early. What sign would you make?”

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“There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards, and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista — except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That’s an offensive cost to the environment. Future archaeologists will be able to identify a “Vista Upgrade Layer” when they go through our landfill sites.”

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