Category Archives: Business

Money

Posted on by
Reply

First off, I went to the dentist’s today. After my cleaning, I was waiting for the real dentist to come in and make sure the hygienist had cleaned my teeth properly, and it was taking a while. She offered me a magazine, and I told her I’d pass. A couple more minutes went by, so I went up and looked through the magazine rack.

It only occurred to me afterwards that it probably says something about me that I moved Sports Illustrated out of the way to reveal Worth magazine, and that I found the article inside about family businesses increasingly being taken over in the rush of private-equity M&As to be fascinating reading. I was disappointed when the dentist came in before I got to the other article I wanted to read, about how Native Americans are investing profits from casinos into a suddenly-very-diverse range of businesses. (It seems like there’s some racist assumption underlying that? I’d have been able to tell you if there was one in the article, if only Dr. Las [not her real name, but all she was identified to me as] hadn’t been so speedy with whatever it was that was keeping her from seeing me.)

Later on (post-dentist), I was counting a bunch of money. We had a new ‘pack’ of 100 $1 bills, but I needed a couple, so I had to remove the band from them. If you’ve never seen a stack of new bills, it’s really something you should do. (Maybe drop by your bank and ask to withdraw $100 in new 1’s. It’ll be worth it.) First of all, they don’t feel normal. We’ve all gotten a nice crisp $20 from the bank, but pulling money out of a bank-packed stack [not meant to rhyme] is entirely unlike that. It’s even nicer. You hold it in your hand, it the feel is just… strange. It’s almost powdery, and pretty rough. As you try to take one bill out of the pile, you’ll realize that it’s very hard to take just one. Unlike potato chips, it’s not because they’re so good, but because they’re practically cohesive. (When counting new 1’s, I basically ‘grind’ it between my fingers because, more often than not, I’ve picked up two or more without meaning to.)

So at the end of the night, I had to count some unknown quantity of 1’s. I had 11 ‘old’ $1 bills that I had taken in, and some unknown quantity of new bills. I bemoaned the fact that I was about to have to count what was probably $75+ of them, which would be incredibly tedious. But then I remembered the other neat quality of brand-new bills: they’re sequentially numbered.

So I looked at the last three digits on the top bill, subtracted it from the last three digits of the top bill, added one*, and knew how many there were.

I wonder if I can start requesting that the bank give me only new, sequentially-numbered bills. But bank tellers, like chefs, are probably people you don’t want on your bad side. Especially the passive-aggressive ones.

  • Because 700-699 = 1, but you have two: 699 and 700.

Should I?

Posted on by
3

I’m often the one to close up at work. We share a long ‘driveway’ with another business, which is now out of business. From time to time–maybe about two times a month–there’ll be a car sitting, facing us, in the parking lot of the neighboring business. They’re far enough away that I’m not too concerned for my safety: if they were to come after me, I could get into my car long before they got to me/it.

Being the paranoid person I am, though, I always worry that they’re waiting until I leave to rob the place. So I’ll typically drive away and then come back a couple minutes later, although I don’t drive up the access road/driveway, I just carry on the main road as if I weren’t snooping on them. They’re often there for 10-15 minutes, and, when they’re gone, I’ll drive back up to make sure they’re not somewhere on our property. Tonight I was able to jot down their license plate, although I worry they may have noticed that I drove by at like 2 MPH and noticed me noticing them. This time, as I drove by after leaving, I noticed another car pulling in. I drove by a bit, turned around, and went by again, as the two cars were leaving.

It’s not always the same car(s), but it is always the same spot. They’re clearly not (thus far) looking to rob me / my business, nor are they doing anything else obviously nefarious. However, it still seems incredibly suspicious to be waiting in your car in the parking lot of a deserted business at 1am.

So here’s my question: what do I do? I’ve been tempted to call the police and report it as a suspicious car, but I can never decide if I should.

  • They may well be doing nothing wrong. The police would be obligated to check it out, in which case I’m sicking the police on people who are doing nothing wrong.
  • They may well be doing something wrong. It’s not breaking into my business, and it’s not mugging me, but it’s really pretty suspicious. (Selling drugs seems the most likely explanation, although all the evidence I have of that is that they’re sitting in an abandoned parking lot and meeting someone at 1am… Hardly proof.)
    • The police would be obliged to investigate and would probably catch wind of what was going on. A vote for calling them in.
    • It’s not like the suspicious cars don’t know where I work and what type of car I drive… Even though I always park right in front of one of the security cameras, I’d still hate to come out of work a few days later and find my tires slashed and my car egged.

So do I call the cops next time or not?

Computer Pricing

Posted on by
2

So a coworker/friend is toying with starting an Internet cafe overseas. It looks like OSs such as Knoppix and Ubuntu are somewhat common in those setups, partially because they’re free, and partially because they’re easier to lock down.

So I went to Dell’s site, and began playing around with their configuration utility, trying to put together the cheapest machine possible. I figure we need like a 700 MHz processor, 512 MB RAM, and a CD drive. A hard drive is nice, but not necessary. (In fact, more secure.) My findings:

  • The system ended up costing $529, but you can lease it for $16/month. (This may actually be beneficial in this situation.)
  • The cheapest processor I could find was a Sempron 3400+, but the website never defines what this is. Knowing a little bit about computers, the only thing I’m able to tell you is that it’s almost certainly slower than 3,400 MHz.
  • “Windows Vista Home Basic” is the cheapest OS I could select. (They apparently sell certain PCs pre-loaded with Ubuntu… I’ll have to try to find them.)
  • Only having 512 MB didn’t surprise me, but I didn’t expect a 160 GB hard drive to be the smallest.
  • Remember the old days when a CD-RW was the sign of a pricey system, and if you could read DVDs on it, too, it was cutting-edge? Now I had the choice between that and a DVD burner.
  • No speakers are included. Given that it’s for an Internet cafe, I think this may be a good thing.
  • I deviated from my “cheap as possible” plan and sprung for a 13-in-1 card reader for $20 or so, figuring it’d come in handy in an Internet cafe.
  • The 56kbps modem is basically free. I removed it, but it didn’t take anything off the price, so I included it again. Better safe than sorry?
  • MS Works 8 comes ‘free’ with this install. No one likes MS Works, but I digress.
  • 1 year of in-home service is included. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone with the “Consumer” machines.
  • It includes Yahoo! Media Jukebox and 6 months of AOL. Two things we’d get to uninstall as soon as we took delivery of them.

Cynical rants about that stuff aside, though, it amazes me what you can get these days. I was reading through the circulars, and there are a lot of $800 laptops that can smoke any of my current machines. It’s hard to buy hard drives under 160 GB. (OTOH, it’s hard to buy hard drives over 160 GB for laptops…)