Webs’ Random Ideas

Hopefully this works…

Go to www.google.com now and play Pacman. Its pretty cool!

It appears someone asked a question at Yahoo Questions about getting some ASCII art of a stick figure for draw Muhammed day. The question is now deleted. If you do a Google search you can see the cached text of the question here. In case that gets removed below is the text I saw:

Can you draw me a Stick figure, ASCII, letter drawing of muhammed …

May 20, 2010 … Can you draw me a Stick figure, ASCII, letter drawing of muhammed? heres mine … So much for my ascii art skills. 20 minutes ago …

answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid… – 10 hours ago

The censorship has commenced. That didn’t take long. I guess I have to give Yahoo and Comedy Central a break as they have a somewhat legitimate fear of being bombed. I don’t think neither organization censored because they hate freedom of speech.

But at some point we need to stand up to the bully and say enough. Why? Because the ones that hate us are going to use any excuse they can to hate, fight, and attack us. And whether or not we concede on specific points against us, they are going to find an excuse to continue their hatred. The same way hackers go after MS (because they are a huge easy target) so will terrorists go after us.

Maybe my thinking is wrong maybe if we concede on some points they will not attack. But I suspect that isn’t the case. If so, then whether or not we limit our own freedoms we will have to put with threats and attacks. And both shouldn’t cause us to go into a panic and start limiting freedoms. I agree with Franklin on this one:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety

So below is my drawing…

O
/H\
/ \

Just a test.

This is a test.

I have been trying to post on this for the last two days, but without luck. Okay, I have been trying to post this from a cell phone so I should of just opened the computer in the first place. But I had the picture on the phone. The WordPress app is failing me right now, but I am working with one of the developers to attempt to get some help.

So yes the garage sale was a success but we didn’t get rid of everything we wanted to. Which was our primary objective. The money is nice, but if you calculate out how much you get per hour for all the time that goes into a garage sale, it is never that much. For my wife and I we just needed to get rid of some stuff we never use. I think the plan is to take the leftovers to Goodwill.

Some tips I can give out: Price everything low, lower than you think. We did this, but I still found a couple items priced too high and had to come down on. Again, the point shouldn’t be to make money because otherwise you wont sell much. Dont price anything less than $1. Do two for 1 or 4 for 1. I think its psychological, but people didn’t buy anything on the quarter or 50 cent tables. The dollar table did great though. Try some experimenting.

DVDs do well. People enjoy movies and they like to pay low prices for them. If you got some movies you no longer watch put em out and surprise yourself. Sell stuff as a package deal to get rid of more stuff at once, but also because someone might only want 1 item of the package but will have to get multiple items for the 1 item. I found this worked well for a computer I was selling. The buyer just wanted the computer speakers, but as a package deal he got a whole bunch of stuff including a computer that was only missing a hard drive. Worked good for both of us.

Books do not do well so sell them for cheap. We only sold about a dozen books out of 6 boxes of books and we priced them at $0.25. Along with this, stuff in boxes or totes do not do well at all. Make sure everything is laid out on a table or something. Even if things are packed tightly on a table, don’t keep them in a box or tote. People dont want to dig or hunt for something that is only being sold for a 50 cents. The only items that did well in a tote were the freebies.

Put out signs. It helps. We got a lot of drive-byes. While not all of these people stopped they were still potentials. Also Craigslist was a great way to list our garage sale. There are other garage sale websites out there, but a few are pay sites. It doesn’t seem like it would be worthwhile to pay for something that doesn’t draw much cash to begin with so I wouldn’t recommend it.

All in all it was a gorgeous day and we made some money and got rid of some stuff we dont use. I would say it was a good day.

Im geeking out right now. I just preordered the new HTC Evo 4g for Sprint. When I say bleeding edge I mean it! Check out these stats: Sprint Evo 4g.

Now I just have to wait till June 4th. The hardest part!

As long as my stick with tape design holds up all will be ok…

I wanted to phrase the title there as “MS Stupidity” but I’m not sure this is only inherent to MS…

Why are windows in any OS allowed to take activation when the user is currently engaged in either typing or mouse movement? That seems incredibly stupid and nonsensical to me. Take for instance my case from this morning. I just got an advertised update that needs to be installed through SMS. Okay, no problem. I accepted and continued working on my other monitor while it downloaded.

I was in the middle of typing when a popup came up during the install and since this is MS, that popup was allowed to activate which means it has control. This means all my key strokes were sent to the popup rather than the window I was working in, without my knowledge. This means I wasn’t able to read the popup because one of the keys I pushed was Enter, so I sent that key which was sent to the OK button.

No someone could say, “Well you shouldn’t of been working on something while the update was running.” Well you might have a point there except I was simply doing some typing in a text document. And with my dual core system I should be able to use the other core that isn’t currently running.

Anyway, regardless its annoying that a window in any OS can take over control while a user is currently working. There should be a user editable parameter where the user has to be inactive for “x” number of seconds or minutes before any window can take over.

Rabble rabble rabble!!!

She is there somewhere…