Month: February 2007

Cookie Bear on Honeymoon Patrol

As a gift for Paul and Jordan, Jamie got them a sugar cookie as their wedding gift since we, as a couple, totally forgot a gift. Well, I kinda forgot too since Kyle and I got them a tent from REI. So, I can see how it happened. What I didn’t expect was the following:

Cookie Bear takes a Shower

Cookie Bear on the beach

Sand castle cookie bear

Cookie bear at the beach

Jamie thought there was only one picture until she clicked on the cookie bear tag in Jordan’s photostream. When she saw that there was around 50 photos, she just about lost it. But as you can see, they enjoyed the cookie… a little too much. Which is a good thing!

USB Key Lost and Found

Yesterday afternoon was a whirlwind of meetings. From 1pm until 5pm I was booked solid in four different meetings. I was going from room to room and building to building at Microsoft. Usually this isn’t a problem, but yesterday was a big day. It was the day that the system requirements, which I am responsible for were to be sent out to be signed off by the business. And when I say “by the business”, I mean that 25 people have to all say “yup looks good to me!” Somehow in the moving from room to room I had removed my USB key from my pocket and left it somewhere in building 40. I didn’t realize that I was missing it at the time.

Fast forward to this morning and I’m in the process of gathering the items from my “pile” of stuff that I use everyday. Wallet, check. Phone, check. Keys, check. Chapstick, check. USB Key, uh…. where that thing?

After I have the items from my pile the next part of my morning routine is to check the traffic and my e-mail on my phone when I am leaving for work. When I checked my e-mail I noticed a mail from Trevor, who is also working out at Microsoft on a different project, asking if I was missing my USB key. Holy Crap! Yes! I quickly replied in my car (I was parked in my driveway) and sent it off. But, minutes later I realized I had only sent my response to Trevor and not the rest of the folks on the thread. Doh!

Once I arrived at my desk, I cracked open Outlook and read the thread. It’s actually pretty amazing how this got linked back to me.

A very nice man finds my USB key in one of the two conference rooms I was in yesterday in Building 40. He e-mails somebody he knows to ask her if it is hers. He asks her because he saw a folder on the root of my USB key that is jamiey.net. Her name was Jamie Yu… jamiey. Go figure, she happened to be missing a USB key as well. Since it wasn’t hers, she decided to visit jamiey.net to see if she could get any info about who it might be. She finds out that Trevor’s name is listed as a friend on her site and she looks him up in the GAL. Next, Trevor is brought into the thread. It’s not his USB key, but Trevor includes me since he knows I spend quite a bit of time on that side of campus. Now I enter the thread and see that my missing USB key was found. Sweet!

When I couldn’t find it this morning I figured that I had thrown it in my bag and that I’d look for it when I got to work. Needless to say, this was a awesome surprise when I checked my mail this morning. After loosing my digital camera on the plane back from my brother’s wedding, you wonder if people return things that are found. This was a huge thing to me to have this returned to me. Not only is there highly confidential information on this USB key, but somebody thought to take the time to seek out it’s owner. That’s the part that really impresses me. Needless to say I am extremely thankful and now there’s a “HELP_IM_LOST.txt” file on the root of my USB key now.

Amazon Price Protection

So, you just bought that new gadget, but you want to make sure you got the best price. Well if you by from Amazon.com, I might have a solution for you.

Having recently spent a tidy sum on items from Amazon, I wanted to make sure that I was getting the best price I could. Some credit cards offer up price protection polices that guarantee that you’ll get the lowest price if you find one within 30 days of purchase. Well, Amazon.com is no different. OK, they are a little different in that they don’t advertise that they price match… on their own site. Wha? How’s this work? Follow along…

  1. Buy your item on Amazon.com.
  2. Use a service like Price Protectr to track the price of your item.
  3. When you’re notified of a price change, head to Amazon.com’s refund page. Be sure to click the “By e-mail” link on the right. And file a request for a refund.
  4. Sit and wait for the refund to be credited back to your method of purchase (Ex: credit card)

Note: Marketplace, affiliates of Amazon.com, or any other non-Amazon.com seller will not support price protection. So, try it at your own risk.
Note #2: You can’t price match, say, Best Buy against Amazon.com. Only Amazon to Amazon.

This is really simple to do and it works too. In your refund e-mail state that the price has dropped and that you would like a refund for the difference. I think my mail was a sentence or two; not long. After I sent in my request I heard back in about a day and was credited shortly there after. The best part about this is that you can keep doing this to the same item over and over if the price keeps dropping. Just stay on top of it and make sure you are getting the best price you can within your 30 days of purchase.

Neat, huh?

What to do

It’s been an interesting start to the new year. Nothing bad has happened, but when I sit down to try and figure out what I want to do in the upcoming year I have lot of things that I want to do. Some of them are much more practical than others, but I have a good mental listing of things that I’d like to accomplish before the clock ticks out the last remaining seconds of 2007.

But, here lies the problem. There are so many things that I want to do, that I can’t figure out where to start. I swear that I am the king of half started projects that just stop before they are done. Then there are the great ideas that I have that never make it past the idea stage. So, where does that leave me? Well, it leaves me confused on what to do next. I’m thinking that I need to physically write down a list of what I’d like to do and in what order. I’m very much a check a box kind of guy and if I have something physical that I can check off I think I’d be better at completing the things I want to do.

Granted, it’s already a week into February and I haven’t done this yet, but there’s a lot of time left on this year and plenty of time to accomplish lots of things. I’m sure at a later date I’ll post what I want to do, but I think that in the mean time I need to prioritize what I want to do and when I want to complete it. I could just say “before 2008”, but that seems like too big of a time frame for me. So, it’s back to the drawing board and time to actually write down what it is I want to do this year.