2008 Stats

January 2, 2009 - 8pm

I actually began recording this in the middle of January, because I thought it would be interesting to compile statistics on a year of my life.  I’d been planning to add more categories as I went along, but nothing of interest came to mind.

Books read

  1. The Assault on Reason - Al Gore
  2. Neuromancer - William Gibson (reread)
  3. Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson
  4. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security - Kevin Mitnick and William Simon
  5. The Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson
  6. Roughing It - Mark Twain
  7. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Stephen King (audiobook)
  8. Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
  9. Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
  10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (audiobook, reread)
  11. Naked - David Sedaris
  12. The Gunslinger - Stephen King
  13. The Drawing of the Three - Stephen King
  14. The Waste Lands - Stephen King
  15. Wizard and Glass - Stephen King
  16. Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King
  17. Song of Susannah - Stephen King
  18. The Dark Tower - Stephen King
  19. Faces of the Visitors - Kevin Randle and Russ Estes
  20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (and Other Clinical Tales) - Oliver Sacks
  21. Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80’s - Hunter S. Thompson
  22. Diary: A Novel - Chuck Palahniuk
  23. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet - Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
  24. It’s a Magical World - Bill Watterson (reread)
  25. ReVisions - Edited by Julie E. Czerneda & Isaac Szpindel
  26. Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Paid

  • To beggars: $71
  • In parking fines: $230
  • To political campaigns: $75 ($25 to Kucinich for President, $50 to Cindy Sheehan for US Congress)

Miles

  • Run on a treadmill:32
  • Run outside:25 (approximate)
  • Flown: 7,264 (Madison -> Chicago O’Hare -> LAX -> San Diego -> Denver -> Madison)
  • Driven in my new car since August: 4,911

Just more senseless jabbering

November 17, 2008 - 10pm

I recently started using Craigslist for buying and selling stuff, and I’m loving it.  So far, I’ve bought a set of bedroom furniture (second-hand Ikea, but very nice and far better than anything I had), gave away a laptop I couldn’t bring myself to throw out, sold some laptop RAM, and bought and  sold an aquarium.  I also have a couple ancient Pentium-3 computers that I’m hopefully giving away tomorrow night.

It’s so easy to unload my old junk that I’ve been looking around my apartment, wondering what else I’m willing to part with, and whether or not anyone would be willing to pay for any of it.  It’s certainly tons easier than eBay–I’ll never waste my time on them again.  It’s easy to see why eBay tried to buy Craigslist a while ago.

In a totally unrelated matter, I’ve discovered that it’s ridiculously expensive to find spare parts for my Roomba (those little robotic vacuum cleaners).  Mine stopped picking up dirt a while ago because of a stripped gear–too much cat fur–but I never got around to actually doing anything about it until this weekend.

Here’s the part that I need to replace:

I think a reasonable price for something like this would be about two bucks, if that.  It’s just a small chunk of plastic.  But, since it’s a niche product, I expected it would be around ten dollars.  After some searching, I found it for $11… plus a $5 service fee, plus $12 shipping.  I swore at the site for a while and kept looking.

I called every vacuum store in the city with no luck.  The majority of them didn’t even know what a Roomba was.  I then tried calling the manufacturer directly.  My reward for twenty minutes on hold was to be told that they don’t sell spare parts. Finally, after more than an hour of searching, I found another site selling the same part for $20, plus $5 shipping.  Unbelievably, that was still the best deal I could find.

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© Marc Teale 2009.