Nerdy Dork

I’m very mediocre at online marketing. I know all the theory and things I should be doing to make money online, but I haven’t hit the big time by any means. I think a big part of the problem is that I’m not very motivated by making money. For for some weird reason, I’m very motivated to save money!

This is where the knowledge and skills I’ve developed in internet marketing begin to be entertaining and profitable. I have two example to share. One I’ll share now, the other I’ll share after May (you’ll understand why when I share it then)

Example the first:

I love Rocketman! It’s one of my all time favorite movies. It’s just plain clean stupid humor. I wanted a copy of it so bad on DVD. At first it was only available as a region 2. I couldn’t take a chance of it not working. LaterI found that it was released in region 1. I saw a few copies on Amazon, but they were selling for over $50 per copy. I did some searching and found that the only way to order them was by joining the Disney DVD club. I didn’t want to join the club for one movie. I did some calculation, and though I can’t remember the exact numbers (this was two years ago) I figured if I joined the club and bought filled my requirements by buying all Rocketman movies, I could get approx 9 copies for $118.00 ($13.10 each) and then quit. So, if I kept one and sold the rest to break even, I would just need to sell them for $14.75 each. Since they were selling on Amazon for $50 I figured it wouldn’t be a problem.

My wife was quite surprised when she saw 9 copies of Rocketman show up in the mail. Ok, by now she’s probably not surprised by the weird things I do, but rather curious. I kept one copy for my personal collection and sold the other 8 on Amazon for an average of $40 each after shipping. So, to do the math, I got my movie and made $202.00 in the process!

I told a friend about it and he was elated because his wife had joined the Disney DVD club and they still had 3 movies to buy before they could fulfill their commitment. He bought 3 copies of Rocketman and sold them promptly.

So why not wash, rinse, repeat? I told you, I’m lazy. I hated going to the post office and shipping movies. Besides, I’m sure they have some kind of rules about household quitting and rejoining. I did tell everyone what I did and said they could do the same to make a quit buck, but I think they were all too skeptical and no one took me up on it.

Don’t bother now, because you can buy them new on Amazon for under $10.

Look for the follow up to this post in a couple of months.

About 2 years ago a friend told me about Dave Ramsey. At the time I was struggling to figure out a way to do better with finances. I had visited financial advisers and been given bad advice. I was really quite frustrated. After listening to Dave Ramsey things started making sense and budgeting didn’t sound so scary. For those of you not familiar with Dave, he recommends a zero based budget system and especially recommends using cash and envelopes to budget for items such as groceries, clothing, entertainment, etc.

We gave it a try for a few months, but it just didn’t seem to work for us. We were just too used to the conveniences of debit cards. I tried programs like Quicken and Microsoft Money, which were great for tracking your money AFTER you spent it, but their budget systems didn’t work for us. They seemed to be based on averages and the perfect month in a perfect world. They just were not flexible from month to month. I went online looking for a virtual envelope budget system of sorts (I was ready to write my own if I couldn’t find one). That is when I found Mvelopes.

I gave the free trial a go and liked what I saw. Initially it was buggy and slow, but since it has been rewritten in Flash the performance has been much more reliable.

Before Mvelopes, we used to dip into overdraft EVERY month. It was just a way of life. Now I really don’t monitor what my bank balance is because it really doesn’t matter. Every dollar has a name and it in in virtual envelope in the Mvelopes system. Now we put money aside each month for Christmas and for those yearly expenses such as life insurance and gym memberships. I’m enjoying saving money by paying these things yearly because I know I can do it now, I don’t need to pay the extra fees to be on a monthly plan. In the past two years we have reduced our debt by $20,000 and I believe by the end of 2008 we will be debt free except for our house.

Budgeting with my wife has gotten much easier. I’m the nerd in the family so I fund the envelopes, print out a report, then we take 10-15 minutes to review it together. She can tell me what adjustments to make (if we need more money for close or a birthday or something) and I and adjust envelope amounts. So, not only has the application helped our finances, it has helped our marriage.

I highly recommend Mvelopes to all my friends. I tell them to give the 30 day demo a try and and you’ll find the subscription cost is totally worth the value you get.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, Amazon has increased their price to $169.99, but the coupon below still works so you can get it shipped for $149.99.

So I have a small business. After meeting with my accountant last night I determined I really could make my life easier by using Quickbooks. I’ve tried the free version and it’s crap. So I figured I’d bite the bullet and shell out $200 for the pro version. Yeah, my business is growing, I guess it makes sense.

But being the budget conscious guy that I am, I figured I’d search the net for a better deal. I was nearly ready to head over to Costco to buy it for $150 plus tax, but after some further research I found a way to get it for $129.99 - no tax, no shipping. Better yet, it’s from Amazon so you know its the real deal.

It’s simple really. Amazon has it listed for $149.99. After adding it to your cart, and before you checkout, add coupon code UPINR5SC

Click Here To Order QuickBooks Pro 2008

Caution: Don’t delay if want this deal. The coupon expires Feb 15th.

Note: It works. I’ve done it. See screen shots below.

At Buy.com they are offering a Kingston 1GB microSD Secure Digital Card for only $10 and free shipping. That’s a sweet enough offer in and of itself, but there is a way to get it free.

If you have never bought anything from Buy.com using Google Checkout, they offer $10 your order for doing so. So that’s basically all there is to it. Buy the card with Google Checkout and its free.

So what are you waiting for. This deals going to be gone by the end of the day!

While pregnat with our 3rd child my wife started breaking out with some kind of rash on her face. She went to a dermatologist, but whatever he gave her didn’t work. She then went to a kiosk in the mall and bought a small sampling of Proactiv. It cleared her right now.

Now I think she is addicted. She loves the stuff. So now we just save money and the trouble and buy it online.

I’m not a big fan of puns. But the last two made me smile - maybe because the first 8 were so bad.

1. Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and says, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, only only one carrion allowed per passenger.”
2. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. The one turns to the other and says, “Dam! … “
3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
4. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, “I’ve lost my electron.” The other says, “Are you sure?” The first replies “Yes, I’m positive.”
5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.
6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. ‘But why?” they asked, as they moved off. “Because”, he said, “I can’t stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named “Ahmal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.” Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal.”
8. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to “persuade” them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he’d be back if they didn’t close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.
9. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him …(Oh, man, this is so bad, it’s good)… A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
10. And finally, there was the person who sent ten different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

I was happy to receive an email this week from the author of MySQL Front. The product is now SQL-Front. So far, I don’t know that much is new other than the name change. The best part is that all license keys still work – better yet, if you once registered and lost your registration information, you can easily request it online. Since getting a new computer and not having MySQL Front available, I’ve been getting use to the subtle differences of SQLyog. When I evaluated the two a few years ago I decided I liked MySQL front better, plus it was $10 cheaper for the registered version that included http tunneling which I needed at the time. Welcome back SQL-Front!

I was tasked with exporting report to Microsoft Excel files. There are a number of ways to do this. One of the easiest I have found it to create a tab delimited file and give it an .xls extension. You can also create a table using html and give it an .xls extension for similar results. The main issue with doing this is that it is not really an excel file so you may get an error like this:

So, not wanted to re-invent the wheel, I went searching for a good php class I could use. I ended up selected this one. What I liked most about it was that I could just pass in a multi-dimensional array (which my data was already in) and it would create a Excel file from that.

Well, soon I got complaints that number fields were being stored as strings so it was back to the drawing board. I then came across this port of a popular Perl package. It had a lot more features I could use and it wrote numbers as numbers. I wrote a simple function that converted an array to an Excel file. I’ll post it here for your enjoyment.

$test = array(
array (
'Text' => 'abc',
'Number' => 123,
'Date' => '28345.345'
),
array (
'Text' => 'def',
'Number' => 456,
'Date' => '8/8/1977 7:00 AM'
),
array (
'Text' => 'ghi',
'Number' => 789,
'Date' => '1/1/2007'
)
);
echo '

'; print_r($test);
Array2Xls($test, 'test.xls', 'Report');

function Array2Xls($array, $filename, $worksheetname = 'Sheet1') {
	require_once "php_writeexcel-0.3.0/class.writeexcel_workbook.inc.php";
	require_once "php_writeexcel-0.3.0/class.writeexcel_worksheet.inc.php";

	$workbook = &new writeexcel_workbook($filename);
	$worksheet =& $workbook->addworksheet($worksheetname);
	$heading =& $workbook->addformat(array('align' => 'center', 'bold' => 1, 'bg_color' => 'black', 'color' => 'white'));
	$date_format =& $workbook->addformat(array(num_format => 'mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM'));

	$worksheet->set_column(0, 3, 15);

	// heading
	$i = 0;
	$h = array();
	foreach(array_keys($array[0]) as $val) {
		$worksheet->write(0, $i++, $val, $heading);
		array_push($h, $val);
	}

	// values
	for ($i=0; $iwrite($i+1, $j, $array[$i][$h[$j]], $date_format);
			}
			else {
				$worksheet->write($i+1, $j, $array[$i][$h[$j]]);
			}
		}
	}

	$workbook->close();
}

There is still one issue I have yet to resolve and that is concerning dates. I’ve been searching for a PHP script that can convert Unix timestamps or date strings to Excel date numbers. I gave up on it figured I will implement it when or if the request comes in to do so

I use DirectAdmin for my hosting control panel. There is a nice plugin to add awstats, but I’ve found they don’t work on sites where I have WordPress set up (such as this site) because I’m using permalinks. No worries though. I found a way to fix it. Just put the bolded line below in your .htaccess:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/awstats.*$ [NC] [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

*Note: Replace “awstats” with the name of your stats location

I’m sure this is nothing more than link bait, but what the heck, I got 100% the first try, so I’ll bite.