Ryan McFarland

I was poking around the interweb and found this contest sponsored by StoreStacker.  Seems like quite a few of the prizes would be useful to me.

Here are links to .pdf files so that you can print your own One, Five, Ten, Twenty, Fifty, One Hundred and Five Hundred dollar Monopoly money.  These could be great to use as original graphic files to make your own money for games.  Easy to print of a few hundred dollars in custom money than to get your own custom poker chips!

Litter benefits me

Originally uploaded by zieak

I spent a few minutes and checked a spot near my office that high school kids go. I’ve seen them sneak down there during school hours and before and after school. I found plenty of cigarette butts, beer and liquor bottles, pop cans, and empty snack wrappers. I’ve decided i’ll start to patrol it and will harass kids I see go down there. I picked up 10 botle caps that got me 3 points each in the mycokerewards program. Big thanks to Kevin for texting me codes when he gets them!

…just in time to pay the property taxes on it!

If you really want cheap property look into real estate in the Detroit area.  Seriously.  But if you want to win a nice place like this you’ll have to enter the blog cabin contest.  You can enter daily.  Use my trick to enter sweepstakes easily and all you need to do is remember to go to the site each day.

I found that the things that i write about change along with my interests.  Since i seem to have been writing more about beards and want to document my finds from thrift stores and garage sales i added categories for those posts.  I also went back and added old posts to those categories.

Every now and then some spam slips through the filters that Wordpress has.  Since I switched to Wordpress to publish my blog, 38,137 spam comments have been caught and not posted by Akismet.  I’m ok with having to delete one or two comments manually.  But adding the reCaptcha service to the site might make that unnecessary.  It also might really annoy some of you that post on here.

But here’s the neat part.  I heard about reCaptcha on an NPR story last week.  Tens of millions of Captchas are solved by humans daily.  And we’re solving these stupid letter and number combinations to log into sites, leave comments, or otherwise prove that we’re human.  Well, the inventor of these tests realized that we humans could use our numbers and brains to the advantage of everyone.  The captchas that you solve on my site are actually words that were scanned from a book and a computer couldn’t figure out.  Well, one of the words is on e the computer couldn’t figure out.  The other the computer knows the spelling of and that’s the one that you’re really being tested on.  The second word it is waiting for your spelling and a few other people to spell and then it will determine the result based on the majority.  Using this technology will allow our millions of entries to transcribe old issues of the New York Times and books for the Internet Archive.  More info here.

I found that i really missed the valuable information that AXS provided regarding my site visitors.  I was using Google Analytics (which I’m still using) but it couldn’t isolate IP addresses (probably over concerns over people’s privacy) or give much more than very generic and vague information on site visitors.  I’ll still use the service they provide but it doesn’t let me really drill down and see what is going on with my site.  I made a small modification to the code to allow me to see users that have switched to Firefox.  I also resumed tracking Myspace with AXS.

Here’s a good example of some data that AXS shows me.

So this person from oag.state.ny.us did a google image search for “french doors installation” and my photo was somewhere between 19-38 in the results.  This was at 6 AM (Pacific time so at 9 in NY).  I looked up oag.state.ny.us and…

…it is the Office of the Attorney General.  Someone in Albany installing a french door?

Last week i noticed that my chainsaw was missing from the carport.  I looked around but didn’t notice anything else missing.  The last time i used it i noticed that the bar oil had been leaking out of it because of the way it was hanging up.  So a month and a half ago i put it in a different place - where it could be easily grabbed by someone outside of the carport.  I’ve written about my chainsaw two times on here before.

I have a hunch that it has to do with our frequent calls to the police because of our neighbors screaming at each other.

I filed a report with the police.  If they find the saw they’ll let me know.  And they told me that it is likely to be a felony because of the value of the chainsaw.

Ash hanging out

Originally uploaded by zieak

We cleaned the house for about 5 hours today. Laundry, vacuuming, sweeping, liter boxes, hot tub chemicals, dishes; all those usual things. But we also hung things on the walls, tidied the boiler room, removed the “doorbell”, loaded the car with donations to th Salvation Army, moved the porch swing and other things that are not part of the usual chores. Ash followed us around everywhere.

On my new quest to grow every beard (and mustache) style possible I declare success with the Amish Style. Next? well, I trimmed it to a goatee.

My progress on the beard types