antipaucity

I recently came across “The Two Things“, a somewhat old, but possibly still accurate (or at least humorous look) at a variety of topics.

You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.

It’s got me wondering – if you had to give The Two Things about your job/field, what would they be?

And – if you had to describe your whole job in a tweet (<= 140 characters), could you do it?

At various stages in my career, I have traveled extensively - yet never even thought of “gaming” the expense reproting system the way it has been recently reported by CNN.

Being terminated over charging a movie to your room? Seems harsh (getting the $9.95 back from the employee would seem to be easier) – but breaking the rule is breaking the rule.

Being terminated over buying gum? Ok, so I WOULD terminate somebody over that … but I hate the stuff

But it’s repulsive, revolting, and wrong
chewing and chewing all day long
The way that a cow does*

There are a host of ways listed in the article – that I find truly shocking – to cheat on expense reports: blank receipts? buying gifts and then selling them on eBay? double-billing? Wow. The sheer effort taken by some people to cheat is astonishing!

Where I work now has a corporate credit card issued to every traveling employee. The only time we submit non-AmEx charges is if a place doesn’t accept AmEx: it’s just way easier to use the corporate card than it is to try to give all the supporting documentation of a personal card. Plus, there’s the benefit that it’s not my personal limit that is being affected if a customer delays in paying a bill.

Everyone that works where I do now also follows the expense guidelines we have – don’t exceed the IRS per diem rate for your region (on average). If you want to eat someplace nice for dinner – that’s fine. Just eat someplace less expensive the next day. Sticking within the rules isn’t that hard … so why would you want to try to evade them and end up with employment history issues like termination on your record?

A friend of mine recently pointed me at the newspaper-associated blog of a “recent Appalachian State University graduate and now a freelance reporter for The Charlotte Observer”.

Ms Penland seems like a nice person – but her writing is not at all what I would expect for a blog associated with a newspaper – it is far more like a personal journal of a teenager than a professional blog of a reporter.

I’m all for personal voice showing-up in folks’ writing (it certainly does on all of the blogs I follow – and on the ones I write ) – but when you’re writing reviews for a newspaper, it would seem like you’d try to be a bit more … professional in your writing.

Besides the myriad grammar errors (I know – we all have them, but certainly some proofreading should be done to catch things like “was is“), it seems she has a routine dislike for “chains” – and yet visits many. She also refers to her boyfriend in many of her reviews: a perfectly fine thing to do in passing, but she ends up making some of them more about him than about the place they went.

As a “recent graduate”, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Brittany’s writing to be on par with, say, Malcolm Gladwell, but I would expect it to be at the level of, well, a college graduate. (I have seen some collegiate writing that appalled me when I was in school – writing submitted by 4th year English Majors that looked like it was pulled from a 6th grade student’s portfolio: but those folks don’t [typically] get hired by newspapers… do they?)

I hope Ms Penland’s writing improves dramatically through her “freelance” association with the Observer, but I also hope that the Observer doesn’t have too many folks like her writing in association with them: it reflects poorly on their editorial staff and hiring practices if they do.

As with many others, I suppose, I have various email address come and go: perhaps via job changes, or graduating/changing schools, deciding to sell a domain, or any of a host of other reasons.

There’s a problem with that, though: when those changes happen, sometimes access to other digital resources becomes…difficult. For example, I have an old (now unused) merchant credit account that I opened about 7 years ago. For reasons I cannot now recall, I linked that account’s digital updates to my school email address. Problem: I graduated school Dec of 06, and my account ceased to exist sometime after that.

Woops.

And the password reset goes to that email address.

Double woops.

So the question now becomes – how do you ensure that when you switch email addresses, you don’t lose anything “important”?

It’s a problem I have yet to solve – any thoughts?

I’m trying to do some research regarding swagbucks, but so far haven’t found much about them – other than they appear to be legit.

Are they the 2011 incarnation of iWon?

Burger King has a new series of sandwiches called “stackers“. It’s a cheeseburger with bacon (and fairly tasty, as fast-food burger go).

They come in three sizes: single, double, and triple. The single is $1, the double $2, and the triple $3.

What do you get on the sandwich? A bun, patty, cheese, sauce, and bacon. What about on the double? A bun, 2 patties, two cheeses, sauce, and bacon. The triple adds another patty and cheese.

Nifty. So for the cost of two single burgers, you get less bread and sauce. If you’re trying to cut-down on carbs, or don’t like the sauce much, that’s cool. But if you’re looking to maximize your caloric intake for dollar output, buy three singles and not one triple.

For several years, I have done business with Harbor Freight and Northern Tool and Equipment. Both are low-medium cost suppliers of tools, supplies, and equipment.

This morning I received the weekly email sales flier from Harbor Freight, and see they have a 19.2v cordless drill for $24.99 (regular price $29.99). This got me to thinking – why would I want to buy a “high quality” or “name brand” cordless drill from a place like Lowes, when their least-expensive, similarly-rated, drill is $79.97? Is a Black and Decker really nearly 3x better? Will it last more than 3x as long? Or drill 3x as well? Is the battery-life that much more impressive on the $80 item over the $30?

My gut feeling on this is no: the “name brand” is not that much better – but it’s what folks “expect” it to cost. And let’s not even go to high end (at Lowes, that’s about $280 for an 18v DeWalt). I do happen to like DeWalt drills (along with Bosch and Makita). But I have a hard time justifying spending 9x the money for something that – from all I can see – is not fundamentally different from the less-expensive off-brand.

If the batteries really don’t last as well, you can still buy 3 “drill master” drills and charge the out-of-use ones while using the next one in line. And if they do work as well, then you and your two bestest friends can have a drill party and get more done in less time – and for less money to boot!

The drill I use most frequently is a Coleman rechargeable drill I recovered from a car when I worked at Hertz about 10 years ago. It’s not the most amazing drill ever, but it does what I need it to far more well than I need it to.

I’d wager the above-mentioned drill from Harbor Freight would more than adequately meet the needs of most folks -and leave them $50 extra to pick up that other really cool item just down the aisle

A recent Final Jeopardy! question said there are two pairs of countries which differ in spelling by only two letters: Australia/Austria and one other. The answer they were looking for was Niger/Nigeria.

Well, I was thinking about this recently and realized there is a third pair: Mali/Malawi.

It’s not often you see errors on Jeopardy!

I saw this in /. earlier in the week.

Apparently NASA is turning to the American public for new challenge/contest ideas.

I don’t know whether to be impressed that they’re trying to get new perspective.. or scared that they can’t come up with it on their own.

There’s lots and lots of smart people at NASA. I hope it works

The NY Times has an interesting op-ed on this topic today.

Maybe we should consider sending people on one-way trips to Mars because if they’re explorers as earth-bound ones were, presuming a return trip may be too expensive – or even undesirable.

We’ve had lots of experience as humans of sending people on one-way trips. Maybe we could turn Mars into a penal colony like Georgia and Australia once were

More seriously, though – this has been proposed in various contexts before, but if the people signing-up for the program are truly volunteering, then why not?