03/01/2010
I have been selling old coins on the auction sites for year and have been able to put myself through college that way. In fact, I just recently started helping out some friends and selling coins for them too. I take just ten percent of whatever they make but I handle the listings, and also the shipping and handling.
I guess that I am not the only person here on campus that had a hobby of collecting coins when I was a kid. I would have never started, had my grandfather not given me a few rare coins to get me going. I will never be selling old coins from my grandfather; I only sell coins that I found myself.
I hope to pass along the coins from my grandfather to my grandchildren someday. Then if they want to start collecting and selling coins when they get to college it will be their choice. I will tell them my story and how I did not have to borrow money from the government or my parents and I paid for college all by myself. I would hope that they might be inspired to at least add to their collection that I give them, even if they do not go to the extremes that I did.
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Shopping — FlyGuy @ 3:02 pm
02/22/2010
I would love to have some footed pajamas to take with me on my ski trip. I always had them when I was a kid and we would head up to the mountains and go skiing. I know that a man, who is thirty years old, should probably not wear them but it just sounds like fun.
I told my wife all about the idea I had to get footed pajamas and she laughed at me. I figured that she might think that it was cute that I wanted to do something from my childhood. I guess that it did not completely backfire; she went to the store and brought me back some boys pajamas. I laughed and took the boys pajamas to my nephew and my sister thought that the story of me wanting footed pajamas was really funny. She really liked what my wife did better though.
I told my sister that I had actually found a company that sold footed pajamas for men and I was going to order some and surprise my wife when we go skiing, since she thinks she is so funny. I made sure to put a rush order on them so that they would get here on time.
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Shopping — FlyGuy @ 2:48 pm
02/09/2010
The cleaning supplies company that our office has used for years has just let us know that they will be going out of business at the end of the month. I guess that since we have lost our food service supplies company too, we should not be surprised. The economy is claiming all sorts of companies, big and small.
It would be nice to find a new company that not only sells the cleaning supplies that we need but also food service supplies, only having one order to place would be great. My friend told me that they switched to an online service last year when it seemed that some of the local suppliers were raising prices to just stay afloat.
I remember our cleaning supplies company raising their prices but I just figured that it was time for their yearly increase that they had been doing for years. Every year, they raised their prices, just a little bit, like one or two percent. I did not see how much they had raised the prices this year, till right before they told us they were going out of business and since I do not pay the bills, I did not know. They had raised their prices by ten percent and we had been paying it all this time. I am glad that we will be looking for a new company either way.
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02/02/2010
I have been put in charge of getting our company website up and running. We had it built about two years ago and it has pretty much been just sitting since then. Our current customers use it to place orders but we have not picked up too many new customers who have just found us by surfing the web. That is what my main focus will be on, search engine marketing.
I have been reading up on how search engine marketing works and have found that our entire office can contribute a little here and there along with hiring one of the web design service Raleigh companies that advertise how they can get your site noticed on the search engines for a fee. I did some checking into those companies first to determine which one would give us the best bang for our buck and came up with one that is located just a few minutes from us.
I called the web design service Raleigh company that seemed to be the best for the job and explained all about the issues with our company site and they assured me that with a little effort on our part, a great marketing plan and some money, we could get our site ranking where people can see it.
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01/31/2010
I found out that the jewelry store on the next block is selling silver necklaces at half off. They are trying to get people in the store to talk about how they are buying gold right now. They have been advertising it like crazy, so I do not know how anyone in the city does not know this fact by now. Gold is at an all time high and people are selling it to gold buyers for record amounts of money. I do not see how selling silver necklaces will help the gold buying, but I am all for saving half off on jewelry.
I am just hoping that if they sell silver necklaces for a discount, that they do not lose so much on them that the gold they get in return from the customers does not break even. I was telling a friend about the sale and she told me that she had already been in and bought her half off necklace and had no plans of returning to sell them any gold.
I guess that with every customer, there is no guarantee that the sell silver necklaces promotion will pay off. I am taking my old gold pieces with me, so they do not bother me about bringing them back and I do not feel guilty about getting a deal and not doing something for them in return. I hope my old gold pays for my silver necklace.
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01/18/2010
The website design company that we hired last fall has just informed us that they are offering some new services and they are offering them at a reduced rate to their past clients. I called and set up a time for one of the custom web design salesmen to come in and show our entire office what they have to offer.
The website design company does not know that we have read all about what they are going to offer us, and have all the intention in the world of taking them up on it but we still want them to explain in detail how it will all work and how it will benefit us.
The meeting with the custom web design salesmen is scheduled for later this week and I have made sure that anyone who has any questions for him attends. I am sure that most of my staff will be there since they have been asking me question all week and I do not have all the answers they are looking for. In the end, we all know that these new services have proven results and that we would have probably had to hire them out anyways, so we might as well get the discount and the presentation at the same time.
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Shopping — FlyGuy @ 2:13 pm
My father asked me to help him out at his office over the summer and see if I could regain some sort of organization to the office supply closet. I loved spending time with my dad and had not been to his office in quite a while so I agreed to do it. He was of course going to be paying me a very nice salary to just help him for a couple of months.
I could not believe the amount of office supply items that were laying all over the floor and how much excess of one item he had, and hardly of others. I am not sure why his secretary would allow this to happen but I needed to take an inventory of all the office supplies and then find a good affordable office supplies store to stock up on the necessary items right away before he ran out.
There were six unopened boxes of paper clips in the office supply closet and only one pad of paper. Why would you need so many paper clips if you have no paper to hold together? I could see that my father was not kidding when he told me that he needed my help. I think that I might have gotten here just in time.
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01/12/2010
I have been searching for just the right insurance company, and I think that I may have found it online. I am a very private person who does not like to have anyone in this small town knowing my business. If I were to walk into the local insurance agency, and ask for a life insurance quote, then half the town would know about it before noon. I suppose they would all speculate on why I was getting my affairs in order or worse, they would assume that I was sick.
I think that by requesting my life insurance quote from an online source, no one but me and the computer will know that I did it. I have also considered just applying for no medical life insurance so that I do not have to see any of the local doctors for a physical. I can imagine if they would find something wrong with me that would give the insurance company a reason to turn me down.
So, after much consideration and searching the web I am pursuing my no medical life insurance quote from the online company privately and quickly. From everything that I have read on the site, I should be able to make a decision and have my new life insurance policy in order by the end of the week.
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12/31/2009
I may have to think twice before I go and okay the buying of the used poweredge servers we have been talking about. Our sales for the last six months just came in and they are much lower than what we had first thought they were. I am thinking that they are so bad, that we may need to nix the used servers and layoff some people in the office or even in the shipping and receiving department.
My secretary told me to look at all the time the old servers went down and figure out how many sales we missed out on because of that. I did as she suggested and was pleasantly surprised with the results, well not pleasantly, but happier than a few minutes before. I could see that had we been up and running for those many times, we would have met our goal of sales for the month.
This information just enforced that fact that we indeed needed the used servers and we needed them very badly. We could not have another month like last month so the plan to buy the used poweredge servers was inevitable and it was going to help us to turn around too.
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12/30/2009
I was reading a new computer magazine that I had found in the lobby of the doctor’s office and it compare buying new servers to used servers and what the cons and pro were for both. I noticed that the exact kind of used hp servers were named in the study and I wanted to see what was said about them but I was called into the doctor’s office.
When I came back out, the magazine was gone and I asked the girl behind the counter, where it had gone. She told me that they got their new shipment of magazines and had thrown out the old ones. I got her to dig through the trash and get it for me.
The article went on to say that the used proliant servers were very reliable and could usually be found for very reasonable prices. I was wondering if that was the name of the used hp servers we had or not, I thought it was but now was starting to think that it could be any of the used hp servers that were named in this article.
I called my office and asked my secretary to run down to the computer room and read me the name of the server that we had just had installed. She confirmed that they were in fact used proliant servers.
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