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Telemarketers be gone!
A few years ago, when I became self employed, I was looking to simplify some things about my business and decided to get rid of our second and third phone lines (one was a fax line). I had to find a way to handle the occasional inbound fax and messages for work. All my outgoing calls were made on our home phone as we have unlimited long distance and don't get that many calls on it. I decided to get a number from JConnect as it handled both voicemail and faxes. It worked out well and I soon realized that I should just give out that number as our home number so that we could cut down on the telemarketers. That started working OK, but its important didn't solidify until we moved and we chose not to forward our old number and couldn't keep it. Now we use this number exclusively for all, but family, friends, and a few others. It has been a huge help in eliminating unwanted phone calls. The $165 per year is a small price to pay for this little bit of peace and quiet.
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Is my job easy?
I sure hope my job isn't easy, because if it was, I'm definitely doing something wrong because it isn't easy for me. Over the years, I've heard people say that other jobs are easy or are hard without ever experiencing them. Take teaching, for example, outsiders think that teachers get it easy with summers off and leave school around 2:30 pm or so. What they don't see is teachers getting up at 6:15 am, staying at school until 4 pm and then coming home and doing lesson planning for awhile (at least the dedicated ones). Do I know what it is like to be a teacher? Not really, I've given a few lectures for my local CERT, taught CPR and First Aid in college, but I really don't know what it is like to be a teacher day in and day out. However, my experiences have shown me that it is damn hard to prepare for a simple lecture and can't imagine what it is like to prepare for 5 classes a day.
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Yojimbo, funny name, cool app
I just started using Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software to store random stuff as I'm working on dropping all non-Intel native software. One of the features that it has over some of its competition are ability to encrypt items and/or passwords (allowing me to drop the other password storing app I was using that isn't Intel native) and it is extremely fast. They appear to be using SQLLite which is built into the OS; the app I was using before seemed a lot slower and had to load an extra database application at startup. This allows me to trim down the software that I'm running. Yojimbo's support of inline PDF and other files is excellent. I played around a little with syncing to another machine and that worked flawlessly as well.If you don't already use an application for storing random stuff (passwords, commands you can't remember, tips, etc.) or even if you do, definitely take a look at Yojimbo.
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Trash, trash, trash
Normally when I go for my run, it is late morning, early afternoon, way after the beach has been cleaned up. Yesterday was quite interesting as I saw the trash truck and city crews cleaning up the tons of trash on the beach. It was truly a disgusting site. Granted some people did put stuff in the trash cans, but the park at Crown Point had trash all over it. Can't people clean up after themselves? It's a shame our tax dollars have to be used to clean up after slobs.