Are these books worth keeping?

The year 2007 brought about The Great Book Purge. Our personal library has been slowly growing and we have insufficient space for them. To inflict our books on someone else’s bookshelves, I set up accounts at half.com, Bookins, and Bookmooch.

To get started, I checked the value of each of my books on half.com. Any books worth more than a few bucks ($5+) I listed on half.com for a little less than the highest priced similar item. Most of those books sold within a week, clearing off almost an entire shelf.

I listed another batch of books on Bookins, a book swapping site. On Bookins, the buyer pays $4.95 for shipping. The seller (me) gets a USPS label printed with the persons address. I have only to wrap the book, tape on the label, and drop it in the mail. After a month, I’ve shipped off a half dozen books and have a bunch of points in my Bookins account. However, I’ve only received a couple books of my wishlist. Bookins only has a couple thousand members and most book trades are fiction, a genre I have little interest in.

The last site I’ve been using is BookMooch. As with Bookins, on Bookmooch I created a list of books I wanted and books to purge. When a book I want becomes available, I get an email alert and can request the book from the giver. The giver pays the postage to send the book to me. They gets points when I receive the book and those points are redeemable for books that they want. It’s a pretty good system and my biggest complaint is that with BookMooch, as a giver I must take the book to the Post Office due to new Media Mail regulations enacted in October. It would be most excellent if I could print online postage as Bookins does.

While going through our books, some stand out as truly excellent books that deserve a mention. Here are my three favorite books on child raising.

Why Gender Matters

Seasons of Life

Making Children Mind
Without Losing Yours

A hard won lesson on investing

I started saving for my retirement in 1991 because my employer offered matching contributions. Matching money is free money so I saved exactly as much as they would match. Since I started at $7/hr, two percent of my check was about $6 per week. It’s a trifling amount but when I quit to found MichWeb 3 years later, I had saved about $900.

I paid no attention to that account until Kysor was acquired a couple years later. I was forced to roll over my retirement account and the dollar value was quite surprising. I had invested $900, the company match had kicked in another $900, and over 5 years it had grown to around $5,000. I invested for the match but learned a valuable lesson on leveraging compound interest.

Years later I read a book by Peter Lynch. One of his most famous bits of investing advice is, “buy what you know.” Instead of taking the advice of Wall Street or your neighbor, invest in companies whose products you are familiar with. If you eat Cheerios every morning, General Mills might be a good stock for you. If you ride a hog, Harley Davidson might be a great choice.

I know AAPL because of my familiarity with their products. For several years, I got into the habit of buying their stock at $15 and selling at $25. That was fun until one day I sold and the stock never came back down! After months of waiting, I bought back at (gulp) double the price I had sold at. This brings me to my hardest won lesson on investing: every notable error I’ve made investing was a sale. Over all, I’d be better off if I had never sold anything.

I ran the numbers to answer a nagging question, “How much more would we have in our retirement accounts if I had never sold AAPL stock?” $15,950. Tomorrow, that number will be even bigger.

my $0.02 on Leopard

Disclosure: I own Apple stock.

I first installed Leopard in early 2007. I backed up my system and installed. Since I have a spare mac, I can tolerate a fair bit of breakage on my main system but the pre-WWDC builds of Leopard exceeded my threshold. After a few days I reverted back to 10.4.

At WWDC, Apple seeded a new build and I backed up and installed again. After a few days of using it, I deemed the bugs I ran into as tolerable and have been running Leopard on my main desktop system since. Note when I placed my order.

Order Date: June 28, 2007
Order #: ***-*******-*******
Recipient: Matt Simerson

Items not yet shipped:
1 of: Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard Family Pack
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

Amazon was running a promotion and guaranteed their lowest price on Leopard Family Pack if I pre-ordered. My experience with the pre-release versions had me convinced that it was just as compelling an upgrade as its predecessors. If you do buy from Amazon, which I recommend, please use the link above and it’ll provide me with a referral bonus. If you don’t need the family pack, here’s a link to the single license version.

Since then, new beta releases of Leopard have arrived and all the worst bugs have been exorcised. I find that build 9A559 is far less problematic than the four days I spent with the release version of Vista. Despite having a Vista license that came with a new machine, my experience with it compelled me to upgrade to XP.

iBought an iPhone

On Jan 17th, I wrote about the iPhone:

The ease of using all the devices is likely the phones most endearing feature, but I’m not in love. Yet.

And I went on to detail my reservations about the $599 iPhone.

Cons:
Painfully slow data access (EDGE).
Cingular AT&T only
No tethering (with a PDA / laptop)
Expensive.

Concerns:
SSH client
Email: multiple IMAP accounts? SSL/TLS encryption?

A lot has changed since January. Continue reading “iBought an iPhone”

Even Windows is better on a Mac

You’ve probably heard it from me, and if you follow Mac news at all, you’ve probably heard it from Gruber and now you can hear it from another that a Mac is the best PC to run Windows. I couldn’t agree more.

I have used Windows under emulation almost as long as Windows has been shipping. I ran Windows on SGI hardware first and then later on Mac OS. I wrote the Kysor Fan Program for Windows, using Visual Basic. The notable part of that is that Kysor bought me a license for SoftWindows and I wrote the vast majority of the KFP on my personal Mac, because it was so much more stable than Windows on bare iron.

Since then emulation moved from software to hardware and now Windows can run natively on my Mac via Boot Camp or virtually under Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. As I’ve blogged about before, getting a clean and happy install of Windows has never been easier than when installing it on a Mac.

MacBook for sale sold

This MacBook is the one I reviewed here. The MacBook was an interim laptop, to bridge the gap between my PowerBook and my new MacBook Pro, due to arrive later in the year. I skipped the first edition MacBook Pro, substantially because the MBP wasn’t substantially better than the MB. So I waited.

With the July 2007 MacBook Pro, Apple finally made the upgrade compelling. Continue reading “MacBook for sale sold”

435

The letters were great, my brain was firing on all cylinders, and the scoreboard has a nosebleed. With two sevens, both 10s, and a handful of accessories I did quite well. I think 435 might be an all time personal best score.