Archive for April, 2011

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My Blogging History Part 1

April 15th, 2011

During college, I had a computer science professor that told his students to go out and purchase domain names (and I think he said to buy a range of IP addresses too) because they were cheap and being bought up quickly (at least the good ones). 

I didn’t because I was in starving, frugal student mode at that time.  A few years later after getting a decent job, I heeded his advise and bought 2 domain name.

I played around hosting websites on my home workstation for years.  It purely was a hobby for me, and I had fun.  I created my first blog over 10 years ago, but I wasn’t using blogging software and the posts were directly into html code.  I knew I could write something that could make the process easier for me but I didn’t have time.  Eventually, I let my first website slid into the nonexistence.

In October of 2009, I discovered wordpress and thought I would give it a try.  So I downloaded a virtualization software package called “VirtualBox” and created a virtual machine that ran an “Ubuntu” linux server on my Windows Vista workstation.

A Major Problem, Dynamic IP Addresses

So basically I was self-hosting my blog at home, but a problem that I had was that my ip address wasn’t static and would occasionally change on me.  This would create an outage because people trying to get to my site would go to a wrong ip address until I change the ip address in my dns provider (Zoneedit.com).

After spending a week looking for a silver bullet to my problem, I discovered the Linux scheduler “CRON” and a Linux command that would change my dns configuration automatically!  Yeah, I would still have an average of 15 minutes of downtime ever time my ip address change, but it beat my previous record of 10 hours of a wrong ip address while I was at work.  And what if it changed while I was on vacation!  It wasn’t that bad though, my ip address only change about every 2 weeks or so since my workstation was always on.

Why I moved to a hosted solution

I was tickled that my total cost for my hobby was only costing me about $10 per year!  It seemed like a great deal!

But then my ISP (Internet Service Provider) started going out on me!  My ISP is a local cable company that was providing my site internet access and unfortunately, they were running at capacity!  Fellow buddy bloggers at site “EverydayTipsandThoughts.com” and the “FinancialSamurai.com” and would occasionally shoot me an email telling that my site was down or very very slow.

At this point, I was making a little bit of money via google adsense and even had a few advertisers onboard.  So after reading a few articles and books on blogging, at the beginning of October 2010 I decided to switch to a hosted solution via a hosting company (hostgator, bluehost, etc).

After the move to a hosted solution, my traffic increased 50% in one month and doubled in three months.  Apparently google prefers a faster site…

If I Could Do It All Over Again

If I were to do it again, I would still use wordpress, but I would definitely start out with an hosting company instead of self hosting my site the way I did (in a Virutal Server on a Windows Vista machine).

-MR

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Posted in Blogging

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Benefits of Coaching A Young Soccer Team

April 14th, 2011

This year my local city soccer organization was short on coaches for my daughter’s soccer league, so I took the bait and signed up.

I have to admit, it wasn’t an easy decision for me, after all you have to deal with grumpy parent,  kid issues, and time that could be spent on other more productive things.

But is this a fair assessment?

Let’s look at the benefits of coaching soccer:

  1. This role is great training on becoming a leader, even if the audience is little girls and parents.
  2. If I do a great job, I can provided valuable guidance for young minds and influence their thoughts in a positive way.
  3. Perhaps my daughter will have bragging rights, aka “my dad is my soccer coach”, but probably not (lol).
  4. I get exposure to being head of a team and all the glory of winning (or perhaps not).
  5. If I had a business to promote, I could try to develop connections in my social network.
  6. One could develop new friends and make something more of the job than just coaching.
  7. Taking this coach position keeps the number of girls on a team to a level where all the girls get to play at every game.
  8. Ice cream for the team after wins!

Now let’s take a look at the Cons of such a role:

  1. I might have to manage criticizing and disrespectful parents, so there is some stress.
  2. There might be some problem kids on the team, so more stress.
  3. A child may get injured during my watch, did I mention stress?
  4. I lose valuable time that  don’t really have.
  5. Maybe I won’t be a mind molder, after all, I’m just a short time coach.

Well, actually these points, both Pros and Cons are moot at this point since I already signed up.  If I had a bucket list, this would be one item I could cross of the list.  Plus this is an age specific task!  Once all of my kids are grown, it would be harder to become a coach for your typical 7-year-old girls.

I’m a little naive in this new coaching role, I hope I don’t disappoint!  Have you ever stepped outside your comfort zone because the benefit to the community and in particular the girls on my team outweigh the option of doing nothing?

-MR

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Posted in Kids

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Creating Opportunities To Become Rich Using eBay

April 13th, 2011

I once worked with a technical contractor (let’s call him Bill) that had the special gift of seeing opportunities that others would consider as garbage.  Not only was Bill a technical contractor, Bill was also became an accidental eBay entrepreneur!

During a four-year time span, my friend became an expert at creating opportunities on eBay which helped him become rich!  Today, I’m going to tell his story of the way he made over $100, 000 on eBay by selling what some considered junk Cisco parts and routers!

It was the year 2001, and the tech industry was coming out of a spending freeze.  A few years in the tech market is like 20 years in normal time, or so it seems.  Many of the companies had old outdated Cisco routers and now those businesses suddenly had a budget for spending on new technology once again.  So many companies pitch or sold their Cisco routers at bargain prices since most businesses considered them junk because they were older and slower than the new Cisco stuff.

Back then, Bill had a desire to learn the ins and outs of Cisco routers, so he went on eBay and started looking to buy a few routers that he could use to setup a lab to help him get Cisco certified.  He quickly found a few cheap routers and bought them.  To his surprise, he realized that the price he paid for the router didn’t take into consider the  T1 communications card.  The T1 card was worth as much as he paid for the entire router!   Also surprising was the fact that there were a huge number of these exact routers for sell on eBay.  Instantly, Bill realized the great opportunity that he had!

You see Bill only paid around $1,000 for each router, but he could take the T1 card out of the Cisco router and turn around and sell both the card and the Cisco router for around $2,000!  That is a $1,000 profit, and a 100% profit margin percentage return!  He didn’t waste any time buying and selling this Cisco cash cow that he discovered!

As he was making money via his discovery, he still got his Cisco certification with the routers that he bought to learn with.  This is when he came up with the brilliant idea of creating a Cisco Certification kit!   He would provide the configuration need to accomplish 2 types of certification and sell his new creation for a more profitable price that just selling the Cisco routers alone.  This little modification increased his profit margin percentage return to 160% on his Cisco certification kits!

Both fortunately and unfortunately, demand outstripped the amount that he could buy.  Since we worked as a contractor, he would miss deal during work hours and during night.  At least until he came up with the idea of writing a program that would detect the auctions of this particular Cisco router target, and email him.  He had his application setup so that if he replied to an email, his application would buy the Cisco routers for him!  This enabled him to overcome the supply problems because he was not buying them up as fast as they would be listed on eBay!

He actually went so far as to modify this program to automatically buy such auctions when they came online, but he only used it a few times because of the potential risk associated with a bad buy.

During these times, Bill confided to me that he was making over $80,000 a year on his little eBay business that he created.  And the beauty was that it was big bucks right from the start!  Often times a new business could take years to build up to profitability, but here he was making great money right of the bat!

Just guessing what he was making as a contractor at the time, I would have to guess that he was clearing over $200,000 per year from working as a contractor and selling his lucrative Cisco kits!

I learned from my friend to keep my eyes open for opportunities, because there are opportunities all around us, waiting to be discovered.

-MR

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Posted in Entrepreneurship

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Saving Money By Legally Using Your Employer Resources

April 12th, 2011

Saving money by using your employer’s resources is both smart and legal.

Today I thought I’d challenge myself to think about the ways to save money using employer’s resources.

Company Resources

First, it’s possible to save money by using your employer’s heating and cooling system.  Just enjoy the mostly perfect temperature at work and turn your heating/cooling system down or off at home either by manually doing so or via a time controlled thermostat.  Think about it, why heat or cool the house for the plants?  They’ll be okay, they told me so, at least as long as it doesn’t get too hot or cold.

We always have software installs or vendor visits and they often bring bagels and coffee, or coffee and donuts from places like Panera and Dunkin Donuts!  Occasionally, my company has client site visits!  After these visits they often have left over club sandwiches and other goodies!  Every now and then pizzas will show up in the break rooms.  Yep, it’s possible to save a lot on food for lunch if you want.

Next, use their electronic technology!  My employer gives their employees both laptops and cell phones so that we can be very responsive at a drop of a dime.   That said, most of the time, I use the laptop at home for my own use.  And as for the cell phone… why buy my own when I can use the one provided from work for free?  My son likes to play the games on it, so he benefits too.

Why buy a beverage while at work?  My employer provides coffee, hot chocolate, cappuccino, tea and filtered water.   I use those single serving packets of Lipton white tea or crystal light when I want to add a little flavor to the filtered water.  It beats buying pop (soda) or a latte, at least from a cost perspective!  I even know one guy that fills up a big water container before he leaves for the day.

Lesser Ways to Save Money

  • Use their electricity for listening to music and other uses.
  • Some peers use the electricity at work to charger their electronic device batteries.  It’s very clever of them, plug it in and since you’re there anyway, you can watch it and unplug it at the proper time.  No more overcharging!
  • Need computer works?  Go to the smartest technician and plead for help!  This can save you hundreds of dollars!
  • Take their toilet paper when they aren’t looking (not really, but I thought I would add this as a joke, ha ha).
  • I know one guy that uses company paper to prints personal stuff to the printer.  Like materials for the kid teams that he coaches.  I don’t do this because this greatly frowned upon.  It’s kind of funny that the least expensive thing is what is frowned upon the most…
  • We have a shower in the downstairs men’s room and I know that of some joggers in the company use it in the morning after they’ve had their run.  Why shower at home in the morning when you can run in the morning and they get a free shower at work.  If you have a lot of members in your family, this could be very convenient!  Plus, no more cold showers.
  • We don’t have a company gym, but if you do have one… why buy a gym membership?

Of course people also use company folders, paper, notebooks, pens, pencils, paperclips and even batteries for personal use, but I didn’t include these since this type of using company resources isn’t legal.

What ways do you save money by using your employer’s resources, or do you feel guilty doing so?

-MR

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Posted in Frugality

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A Frugal And Fun Trip To The Park

April 11th, 2011

This past Sunday, my family (wife and 2 kids) decided to go to the nature park.  Actually, it was more my wife’s idea, but since the temperature this past Sunday in our neck of the country was almost 80 degree, it sounded like a wonderful idea.

So we went a park close by that was a nature friendly park (no swings and play areas).  Nobody was allowed to bring pets to this particular park.  And it was unique in that it had a swamp area and a bunch of small ponds.

We started our day at the park by going to the glass enclosed observation deck watching the squirrels, chipmunks, finches and blue birds feed at the bird feeders.  It has a microphone outside and we could hear the chirping of the birds, that always make the experience a bit more enjoyable.

Next we strolled down to the first pond.  Not much was happening, so we decided to skip some stones across the pond surface.  I taught my son a few years ago, so I mainly focused on teaching my seven-year old daughter how to skip the stones.  She was successful with 2 skips, but that was about it.  It will come with time, I told her.

From the pond we strolled down to the wetlands and onto the floating walkway that floats on the swamp-like water.  This part of the park is always a favorite!  On this particular day, we saw a goose chasing other geese out of the pond because the his mate had just laid eggs.  It was a comical sight that had my daughter laughing for a long while (what a great sound).  We then looked around and found a turtle near the weeds laying on a log next to the edge of the water.  It was just catching some rays from the sun.  Still anything like seeing a turtle on a lazy park walk is magical for the kids.

We then walk back to the park building.  Once inside, I noticed that a room called “Lab” had its door was slightly open.  The light was off, but I went in and turned on the lights (we’ve been there before in the past).  In the Lab room, we saw a spiny softshell turtle (what a queer-looking animal) in an aquarium swimming like it was desperately trying to get out.   Next we saw some snakes (rat snake and others) and another turtle (box turtle).  This effectively was the grand finale of the trips and I have to admit that even I was impressed.  Of all the animals that we saw, the Spiny Softshell turtle was the most interesting for the entire family.

 

Spiny ShoftShell Turtle

Spiny ShoftShell Turtle

 

 

My wife and I had to leave for other appointments after the lab room, and surprisingly the both kids didn’t want to leave.  Whenever your kids don’t want to leave something educational, I consider that a successful trip!

Now to some this might sounds like a boring trip, but if you were a couple, it would have been incredible romantic since there wasn’t hardly anyone there and the sounds of nature all around opens a temporary door for a little escapism from the chaos of the day’s hussle and bussle.

For my wife and I, the good time that the kids had is what made our day.  We know that the days of my son enjoying such activities are limited since he almost eleven years old.  So we try to make the best of it while he’s willing to be entertained by such family trips and time together.

We went on our park trip over 6 hours ago, but I”m still playing back the great time we had in my head!  Too bad there wasn’t someone there to video record the experience as we enjoy the time together…

While such a trip might seem very frugal, in actuality, it’s very rich in experiences and family bonding time.

Do you have any small frugal activities that you would rather do than a costly one?  I personally enjoyed the small but educational trip as much as the indoor amusement park trip we had this past Thursday.

I hope everybody had a great weekend like we did!

-MR

Please subscribe to my RSS feed so you can check out new articles when they become available.  You will help this blog grow by doing so!  Thanks!

 

 

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Posted in Family

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