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Affording cell phone service
Recently I replaced my cell phone and my wife's phone with new ones. As I was doing so, I was quite careful about not getting a phone that would require me to change my cell phone plan. Many of the new phones (at least on Sprint), can't be activated on the plan I have. My plan is over 7 years old; I got it when I first got my Handspring Treo 300. This plan originally cost $85/month which included unlimited data, unlimited picture mail, unlimited SMS, 2000 anytime minutes, free mobile to mobile (on Sprint), and a second line. Since then, I've been able to get some additional discounts on it and I've added 2 lines to the plan (for my parents). Now I pay about $90/month including taxes for the 4 lines (unlimited data and SMS is only on the primary line).
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In search of the ideal drill (for me)
A few months ago, my Makita Cordless Drill started to die. The NiCad batteries were basically at the end of their useful life. This drill has served me well over the course of the last decade (yes, the batteries have continued to work for over 10 years). I started looking at replacing the batteries and the cost was about $35-$40 a piece which almost didn't make sense to just replace the batteries when I could get a brand new drill with 2 batteries for a similar cost or I could upgrade my drill.
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Programming extortion or poor estimating?
For a project we have at work, we needed to have some Java code written for encryption. The tool we have has example code for it, but it wasn't quite what I wanted. So, one of our developers got a quote from the company that put together the example to change the code to what I wanted as I don't know Java. The quote to modify the code was 4 hours @ $155/hour. While I don't have a problem with the hourly rate, I thought the 4 hours was utterly ridiculous as the example code was almost what we needed and the encryption libraries are already built into Java. In addition, getting $620 approved for this might have been more trouble than it was worth.
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End of "Sacrifice the Tree" Holiday
While Christmas was yesterday, I consider today the end of the holiday as it's when I started to see Christmas trees ready for recycling. While running today, I saw a number of trees at a local drop off facility. This seems like such a waste to me; forget the environmental impact (I'll get to that later), but if you went to the effort of finding a tree, lugging it home, putting decorations on it, and putting gifts under it, wouldn't you at least want to keep it for a few more days? I wonder if some people took the tree down right after the gifts were removed from beneath it?