Why my waitress hates me.

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Randall

I recently stumbled across this news article about annoying things customers do to waitresses. She lists off a pretty long list of complaints that includes things like paying with a credit card after saying you’ll pay cash and calling her waitress and waving at her. Most of them aren’t things a waitress should complain about. There are a couple valid ones (the ones about grabbing her, who actually does that?) but mostly it just seems like whining.

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Good Luck, Have Fun: Starcraft 2

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Randall

I’ve been playing Starcraft 2 for a couple weeks now. It has become a regular lunchtime thing with my coworkers and I have regular Starcraft sessions with my girlfriend.

An interesting thing about starcraft is the lingo. Lots of players start with the simple message “gl hf”. What does that mean? Good luck, have fun. I have pretty much taken that to mean “I’ve been playing this game way longer than you, have fun wasting 20 minutes while I DESTROY you.” Seriously, how is everyone so good at this game already? Is Blizzards supposedly magical matchmaking actually terrible? The game wasn’t even fun until I put in a solid 2 weeks of playing and spent time studying strategies on the Internet and talking about it at work. There are literally hundreds of undocumented features that apparently I am the last to know about.

Check out my list of things I’ve learned you can do in Starcraft that blew my mind after the break.

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Mechanical Turk and Trendy Jewelry

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Randall

Awhile back I heard about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. It’s a service that lets you outsource simple tasks. It basically works on the principal that there are some things that people are still WAY better than computers at doing. For doing these things, people get a small fee (somtimes very small). In an effort to make more money in my spare time I decided to check it out. I’ve done a few simple things like finding email addresses on websites (which made me feel pretty scummy) and solving simple puzzles.

My latest HIT (Human Intelligence Task) is to write a blog post that uses the words “trendy jewelry“. I also need to link it to TheLimed.com. Its a website that sells “limes” or a single design for a certain price. What is interesting is that you pick the price for your item, and once you buy it, nobody else can buy it for that price. The website seems fairly well made and uses some casual humor while you browse the site.

So is the Mechanical Turk worth it? Probably not. I don’t think I’m going to make much money off of this but it might be a nice way to make a few extra dollars (and I really mean only a few extra dollars) while I veg out in front of the TV.

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Making Money On The Internet

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Randall

How can I do it? Its something I’ve been interested in for as long as I’ve had access to the Internet. On the surface, it looks like free easy money. Below the surface, it takes a lot of hard work and a little luck to strike it rich on the Internet. I’m not trying to make a living though, I just want to supplement my income a little bit. I already have a great job working at TechSmith, a software company in Okemos Michigan. I just want to figure out a way to make money out of things that I already do.

Whats my plan?

Toto: This is a simple to do list application that I wrote in college to keep track of the huge list of things I had to do. I have even made an iOS version. In the future, I plan on making the two sync together and charge for the syncing.

farp.me: This is a url shortener I made just to see if I could do it. Its gotten more usage than I expected, although I suspect many of the urls that have been shortened are robots trying to spam or something. I put an ad at the bottom and have made a few dollars off of it.

This blog: I plan on posting about my side projects and interesting things that happen in my and my friends lives. Will it be something anyone wants to read? Probably not.

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