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Fixing a microwave with soap
One of the problems with being an engineer is that I have ideas on how to fix things and it takes a lot for me to have someone else fix things. Lately we're been having problems with our microwave door closing; it was just sticking. So, I finally got annoyed at it and decided to take a stab at fixing it. I figured it just needed to be lubed up, but what type of lubricant would work that wouldn't blow up. I had WD-40, but that was a bad choice as I thought that it could be smelly, wasn't good around food, and could blow up the microwave. My second choice was a bar of soap. Sounds stupid, but what did I have to lose. I used a bar of Irish Spring (it makes things smell better) to lube up the prongs on the door that go into the microwave. That seems to have been the ticket; after less than a minute of trying to fix the microwave, it was as good as new!
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Lets' spy on the competition
Today I saw that NEAT Receipts has provided more information on their Mac version, and here. Just about a month ago, the founder of NEAT Receipts (or one of his employees) purchased a copy of ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. At first I thought maybe they wanted to talk to me about the products and I contacted them about it, but now it seems that the goal was simply to either look at the competition or learn from it. So it looks like NEAT Receipts has 3 developers working on the program; I wrote ReceiptWallet initially in about 2 weeks part time and have had over a year to perfect it.I just hope that they don't copy my ideas and interface as it has taken me a long time to get things quite usable. They're exhibiting at Macworld, so I'll have to take a look at what they have and maybe change my marketing message, "The original receipt management program for Mac OS X".
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Email and DNS Services turned off!
I'm pleased to say that I'm out of the DNS and email services businesses. I'm now relying on GoDaddy for DNS and some of my email forwarding and Google/Gmail for email. While it may seem risky to rely on Google's free service and GoDaddy's low cost service for stuff as important as mail, but I'm confident that things will be fine. Gmail did have some slowness yesterday, but it cleared up today. The only hiccup is that my brother-in-law couldn't send mail when he got home. After asking my sister a bunch of questions to nail down the problem, I discovered that Cox blocks outbound connections on port 25 which is great of them to try to prevent spam from originating from customer machines. Luckily, Gmail also accepts outbound mail on port 587, so a quick change got around the problem.
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One year of selling ReceiptWallet
Yesterday marked the 1st anniversary of ReceiptWallet! When I started ReceiptWallet, it was simply out of my own desire for a program to keep track of my receipts. A lot has happened in one year and I'm quite pleased with how mature the product has come as well as the number of users using it. I hope that the next year brings as much success as the first year and then some!