How do you turn this runoff into a decent drink?

You filter it many times through your faucet charcoal filter. And by ‘many’ I mean about 50.

I built this little contraption out of a two-liter plastic bottle and three styrofoam plates. Of course, a container with an outflow hole the size of the diameter of the charcoal filter would be nice, but I didn’t have the luxury of looking around for parts – I needed to quickly turn Mohawk Rum into something drinkable.

I poured the liquor into the filter. The liquor collected around the filter in the top plate and seeped through the sides of the filter into the bottle.

Any leakage went into the bottom plate.

So did it work?

Oh yes. The nasty burning taste of ass is gone, and the liquor is very much smoother. Judging by its original taste, Mohawk people distil this rum out of street garbage, so I couldn’t turn it into a high-class rum. However, this method does work. Guys on Mythbusters ran their cheap liquor through a pitcher charcoal filter 6-7 times, but I went full 50.

Now I must retire to the living room and degustate.

I’ve never really wanted a laptop. I thought, “the keyboard is annoyingly flat, the touchpad is no substitute for my Logitech optical mouse, and the small screen won’t properly contain Photoshop, Fruity Loops, and Cool Edit Pro”.

However, when wi-fi and freelance projects came into the picture, I started to wonder whether it’s really necessary for me to sit in the same spot in front of the desktop to get anything done. Why couldn’t I be in the library, or by the pool, or at a friend’s house? Why couldn’t I write some code whenever the inspiration came – without waiting to get home and wake the desktop up?

It is no surprise why I traded my 3-year-old desktop for a brand-spanken-new Presario. Now I can be mobile. Now I can show my projects to clients in the gorgeousness of the Brightview screen. Now I can sit on the couch, watch the History Channel, and program away.
So why did I get this particular laptop?

• Price
• Quality
• Features
• Service

It rules on all levels I need it to rule on.

This laptop is pretty light at 6.6 pounds. My boss got something similar, but his is honken huge, which to me negates getting the laptop in the first place.

This laptop is ergonomically designed. Because I type a lot, my wrists immediately know an uncomfortable position. It’s been great for far (2 weeks).

The Brightview screen, a $50 option, is worth every penny. It is reflective/glossy, not matte/smudgy like its unBrightview counterparts, so it could be a problem out in the sun. However, indoors it’s a work of art. I can just sit and stare at the fonts. Here, you decide:

You might say, “dude, just turn on the ‘Smooth the edges of screen fonts’ option”. Not the same. This picture is stunning. This is coming from a guy who used to hate laptops and love his 19″ ViewSonic. Trust me on this one.

The widescreen is a cool feature allowing me to work on 1280×800 and watch Serenity like it was meant to be watched. It’s super handy for my spreadsheets and my wife’s gradebooks.

The 12 cell battery (+$80) is said to last for 5 hrs 48 min, but that’s obvious bullshit. It lasts 2.5-3 hours tops with intermittent wireless. I upgraded to 12 cell for that very reason – the 4 or 6 cell battery is crap if you plan on watching movies and use wi-fi.

Speaking of wi-fi, I got a Wireless-B Router on eBay for 25 bucks, plugged it into my cable modem, and now I’m free to roam around. That rules.

The innards are not bad – CD-RW/DVD, 512 Mb RAM, Sempron 3000+ at 1.8 GHz, ATI Radeon Xpress. It’s not decent to play Doom 3, but it has enough balls to run MySQL, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fruity Loops, Firefox, Excel, a few Explorer windows, Antivir, and ZoneAlarm Firewall. The bloatware Norton Internet Security, by the way, got whacked the minute the laptop arrived – it slowed this otherwise fast machine to a crawl. Who needs it? Anyone out there still opening *.exe email attachments from Antelopa B. Prarie? Just update your Windows, run Kerio or ZoneAlarm firewall, have free AntiVir handy for suspicious stuff, use updated Firefox, and scan with Ad-Aware once in a while. Oh yeah, and kill Norton.

The out-the-door price was $770, but I got the $50 rebate. A brisk 8-10 weeks, and I’ll get some of my money back. And by out-the-door I mean, “off the HP website”. I shopped around, and this is the best I could find. Toshibas are too bulky, Dells are more expensive, I didn’t want at off-brand, so I got an HP after getting five last year for everyone at work.

Yeah, I tried second hand – Craigslist, eBay, etc. After being around people telling laptop-related horror stories and seeing a steaming pile of shit arriving in the laptop box from some dude in Florida, you’d think it’s crazy to buy used laptops, too.

Verdict – if you need a laptop, look no further. You won’t be able to play newest games or burn DVDs, but a measly seven hundred bucks later you’ll have youself a kick-ass portable computer. I’m typing this from the bathroom, just so you know.

There’s nothing wrong with being frugal.  I believe when one needs something, (s)he should do the research and make the purchase based not only on the price alone, but also on the combination of reliability, aesthetics, ergonomics, appeal, etc.  When one doesn’t need anything now or in the future, one should not buy an item just because that item is cheap. 

Case and point – a friend of mine.  He runs a mediums-size hospitality business with a fairy constant demand for reliable IT solutions.  There are around 10 people performing administrative tasks, along with 10-15 more performing day-to-day tasks on IT-related equipment (scales, keypads, scanners, digital copiers, etc.)

Yesterday I stopped by to see how he was doing.  As we were conversing, he was standing in the pile of printers, cables, Nortel phones, computer parts, monitors, towers, power supplies, and other random crap.

- What’s with all this? – I asked.
- Oh, this … I got a really good deal on all this.  There’s some inkjets here, one little laserjet, about 6-7 telephones and 2 telephone switchboard systems.
- What about those? – I asked and pointed to the misshapen heap of computer towers.
- Those are computers I picked up at the same auction.  The company that sold them went belly up.

Knowing my friend, I recognized that he got excited about picking up “all those computers” for just a couple of hundred bucks.  However, I knew for a fact that his computer network a) was not going to expand b) was up-to-par with the tasks at hand.  I knew that because I set it up for him.  All machines were at least 1GHz Athlons with 256Mb of RAM.  The all ran Terminal Services, so it really didn’t matter how fast they were – the server did all the stepping.

- So what are you going to do with all this?
- Upgrade! – was his answer.

I tore into the first tower.  AMD chip, 512Mb of RAM, everything small profile, the tower was actually a little cube.  I plugged it in – not a peep.  I measured output voltage from the power supply – steady 5.03V.  Voltage from the motherboard – anywhere from 3V to 6 V.

- Your motherboard is shot, – I said authoritatively. – I’d pull out the memory and the drives, and throw the unit away.
- No, I can’t throw it away.  They’ve only used this computer for a year.
- Well, you can hire a repair guy at $50 per hour to take a look at this, but there goes your “good deal”.
- I’ll look at it later. – he said.  The tower started a new pile.

After examining 4 towers, 3 inkjets, 6 phones, and a box of keyboards and mice, I recovered 2 decent computers, 2 phones, 1.5 printers, 2 sticks of 256Mb RAM, 2 CD-RW drives, 4 optical mice, and 4 keyboards.  The rest was junk – though probably fixable, it was not worth anyone’s time.  His total bill was around $700.

Would I do something like that?  Hell no. 

I would never in a million years buy more crap while my systems are perfectly operational and do not need any upgrades.  I revel in the fact that all of my machines would be identical, with identical settings, peripherals, wallpapers, and screensavers.  They would be easy to upgrade and maintain.  I will never have to remember which machine has what type of RAM and hard drive because, that’s right, they would all be the same.

You will not “always get a good deal” because “you just know how to shop”.  If you go for a misshapen pile of computer crap, you are going to end up with a smaller pile of computer crap.  Even if “this one thing alone is worth, like, seven hundred when bought new”.  Wanna guess why it’s not worth that much NOW when you bought it from the back of a truck? 

The big picture is always this – you get what you pay for.  Exceptions don’t count – they are like winning a lottery.

Just when I thought the gravy train of context ads ended for me, Yahoo! came around and approved my membership in its beta – Yahoo! Publishers’ Network.  It’s not a “hooray” type of moment because they don’t pay as well as AdSense, but at least now around twenty of the world’s most miserable bastards will be able to get some info about the cars what won’t start while standing knee-deep in their flooded basements.

Depending on how they pay, I will decide whether or not I will create any more of these little sites.

I think Yahoo! ads are a little neater that Google’s.  Also, their backend seems to be a little more organized – Google offered html channels, some other type of channels, some worked, some didn’t … Yahoo! seems to keep it plain and simple.  I like.

Also, this time I am going to play by the book.  I’m my Yahoo! membership gets ganked, I don’t think I’ll be able to take that kind of rejection.  I guess having my IPs, addresses, name, soc. sec. number blacklisted in two of the world’s biggest online joints would make me some kind of an online renegade.  Not a cool Lorenzo LLamas-type of renegade, either.

The lack of decent material on this blog can be attributed to my increased freelance programming activity. During last two weeks, I’ve coded two websites, created two full-page ads, and set up a three-worksheet decision support system in Excel (VBA).

As a reward, I bought myself a laptop. Even if this programming gravy train stops moving, I still feel that having a laptop nearby is a great productivity booster. Now I won’t have to come home and sit in the same chair in the same room in the same position every time I have an idea. Also, I can bring client presentations with me whenever I bid for a job.

I bought an HP because I like HP. Because I purchased four HP notebooks through work within the last year, I had plenty of time to play with them. Dell was another obvious choice, but they were more expensive for what I really needed.

I got 512 Mb of RAM, which is a no-braner. I also opted for a larger 12-cell battery, which will increase my uptime from 2 hours to around 4-5. Oh, and I chose a BrightView display, which is simply awesome – sharp, bright, and glossy. After killing Norton, Zuma, and other bloatware, installing php, MySQL, and a few more choice programs, I will be all set to take my freelance gigs to a new level.

So where is all this going, you might ask? After failing with affiliate marketing and realizing it’s too much work, I’ve been enjoying the crazy money from the word-of-mouth-initiated projects. However, if I decide to take a break, the money stops. It picks up again when I decide to work again. Sounds like a huge drag.

Thus, I decided to focus my attention on learning everything there is to learn about setting up an online business. It doesn’t matter what I sell. The important thing is to learn how to set everything up. After I get it straight in my head, who cares what online shop I open – whether I will peddle car parts, cat supplies, or Swedish death metal CDs, the idea is the same.

The timing cannot be better – my boss at work wants to sell some stuff off the Internet. He already has a merchant account, so I’ll have to build a shopping cart, integrate it into the existing site, and so on … not exactly sure what else, but I’ll learn.

The reason I chose this approach is its promise of a steady cash flow. Whether I have my own store, or set up a store for someone else and take a cut, there is a potential of getting paid for doing very little work.

I’ll keep you posted, for sure.