Hijinks Inc.

Spending a large amount of time in various coffee shops has given me the opportunity to observe quite a few people breaking basic rules of laptop care, probably due to the fact that no one ever told them that what they were doing was stupid.

Here are five tips for prolonging the lifespan of your laptop computer. Please note, this list is merely in the order I thought of them and not necessarily ranked by severity.

[ 1 ] Don’t put your computer in standby, or worse leave it on, and then put it in your carrying case/messenger bag! Even if it’s only a five minute drive to your local coffee shop.

[ 2 ] Don’t close the lid while the laptop is still on. Planning on leaving your laptop on all night to finish that illegal BitTorrent download? Take the time to turn the screen off in your power prefs (or using the functions keys on your laptop to dim the screen) and leave the lid open. Closing the lid causes heat that would normally escape through the keyboard to build up and could damage your screen in the long run.

[ 3 ] Don’t use your laptop on a bed, blanket, pillow, or any surface that your laptop is going to sink into. This blocks the airflow to cooling vents on most laptops, leading to heat issues.

[ 4 ] Don’t eat or drink around your laptop. Pretty obvious, right? Yeah, but I still break it almost every day (in fact, I’m breaking it right now!). And because I ignored this rule my laptop was killed a few months ago by a poorly placed glass of iced coffee *sniff*

[ 5 ] Don’t run with scissors, right? Same applies to laptops

If you have problems with Installer.app suddenly crashing when you’re trying to install new software, fear not! Here’s the quick and easy way around that. This solution should apply to any firmware version, however I’ve only tried it on 1.1.3.

It has to do with not having enough free space, so first you’ll need to uninstall a few applications, then download BossTool (under the Utilities category).

Next, open BossTool and click “Free Disk Space”.

Now hit the “Relocate Applications” button, you’ll see a pop up asking you to confirm, do so and let it do it’s thing.

After it’s completed head back over to Installer.app and try installing several new applications, it should work just fine now.

Take an hour, sit down and go through your monthly expenses, gather your bills from the past few months and figure out what you can cut out in order to save yourself money. For example, I canceled my satellite radio, and switched to a text messaging plan with fewer monthly texts to save money a total of $23.75 a month.
The more you’re willing to sacrifice the more you can save, some things you may consider for cutting costs

• Cable
• Online gaming (Xbox live, WoW, etc)
• Magazine/newspaper subscriptions
• Movie rental subscriptions (Netflix, Blockbuster Online)
• Gym membership you never use

Of course with things like Blockbuster online, you might actually be saving yourself money instead of renting locally or going to the movies in theater, so take that into account.

Next, take that money you were already spending each month and put it into a savings account (see: Longterm Savings Growth).

Last time I talked about the quality difference in bathroom vanities at different price levels. This time around I’ll address a question a receive quite a bit when people are shopping for bathroom vanities.

Why are bathroom cabinets so much more expensive then kitchen cabinets??

The price difference between kitchen and bathroom cabinets stems mainly from the assembly line vs. handmade manufacturing. Assembly line is always going to be cheaper then paying one guy to build it from scratch. But even then, the factory made bathroom vanity I talked about in my first post is still nearly twice the price of it’s kitchen counterpart. Why is this? Well, because stores buy more of them. My store stocks about the same total number of kitchen and bathroom cabinets, but while there is probably less then a dozen kitchen cabinet SKUs, my department has upwards of forty different styles and sizes bathroom vanities. The actual number of cabinets is the same, but our stock counts per cabinet are much lower.

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Being a young guy working as a plumbing and housewares salesman has it’s challenges. The biggest being that when I started working I had hardly any product knowledge whatsoever. I knew where I few things were in the store, but I couldn’t tell you much about them. After almost two years though, I have learned a thing or two about the stuff I sell, and now I’m passing it on to you. Since I do spend most of my time working with and selling plumbing products, that’s what I’ll be focusing on.

I’ll start with a scenario: You are remodeling your master bathroom, on a budget mind you. You walk into a home improvement store to buy a vanity (bathroom cabinet), counter top, and fixtures (faucet, tub/shower).

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I love coffee, but that doesn’t mean I have a clue what goes into most of the drinks I consume.

Well, now you can find out at a glance just what was in that Caffe Mocha you just ordered, thanks to Lokesh Dhakar’s “Coffee Drinks Illustrated” an illustrated coffee guide. Simplistic, yet brilliant work. Even if you don’t drink much coffee it’s worth a look, pretty interesting stuff.