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I recently became a Flickr Pro member and am now using their excellent photo gallery service for my photo blogs RandomSnapshot.com and FearlessPhotos.com. The DNS entries are updating now. If the links don't work, you can also go here.
I've been waiting for this movie for a very long time.
Saw this one over the past weekend and it was pretty fun. Not good, mind you, but relatively fun. Pitt and Jolie have real chemistry on-screen and its enjoyable to see them dodge and parry with each other during the more heated moments of the film.
Well, after the Winter Quarter ended at DePaul, my focus has been almost entirely on getting in shape for the summer season of track cycling. What is track cycling, you ask? It's bicycle racing around a banked track called a velodrome. Track cycling is not a very popular sport in the United States. There are only 18 velodromes in the United States compared with over 70 velodromes in Japan, for example. Cycling in the United States is dominated by road cyclists, inspired by Lance Armstrong, and mountain bikers. Due to the lack of velodrome access, there are less than 1,500 competitive track cyclists in the United States and only a handful of those compete at the Elite level. Since two of the U.S. velodromes are in the Chicago area, I decided to take up the sport.
Ah, Slashdot... Someone posted images from the new Star Wars movie last week. There were about 80 images leaked in total covering every major scene in the movie: The Revenge of the Sith.
I recently received a strange letter in the mail. I haven't actually opened it as it was not addressed to me. In fact, the address is the weird part of the letter:
I am a new Amazon Prime customer. What is Amazon Prime? Well, I paid $79 and for a year I get unlimited 2-day shipping. And if I want it overnight, I pay only an extra $3.99. Now, I've already placed 7 or 8 orders in the few weeks since I went Prime. So, say $80 divided by 8 orders is $10 per order, so far, to get 2-day shipping. That will continue to be diluted with every order I place in the next year. Last year I placed 20 orders with Amazon. That would have brought the per-order shipping cost down to $4 per order for 2-day shipping. That number, by the way, is unheard of for that kind of expedited shipping. FedEx 2-day shipping is around $12 for a 1 lb. box. So I'm getting a good deal. But how is Amazon going to continue to pull this off? One major difference between last year's orders and this year's orders is that last year's orders required a minimum purchase of $25 to get free shipping. So for all of those orders, I had at least $25 worth of goods in the order. Now that I have unlimited shipping, I just click the "1 Click" button that buys and ships in one click. So I've been getting $6 items and $12 items sent to me in separate 2-day shipments. Given the FedEx rate, that would be $12 in shipping costs for a $6 item. Amazon must be getting a huge discount or they have figured out some other interesting arrangement with FedEx. Either that or they didn't plan on customers like me.
I was listening to the news on the way home last night and heard some guy being interviewed about sick days and whether to take a sick day or not. The guy was some union worker and he said that the first thing he learned when he started working at a union shop was to never, ever take a sick day when actually sick. Always drag your ass in to work no matter how sick you are so that you can use your sick days for something fun, like fishing. Seriously, he said fishing. This whole concept is wrong on so many levels, not the least of which is the fact that when you are sick and at work, you are getting everyone else sick. I have already blogged about this before so no more here. But it just goes to show yet another reason why businesses don't like unions.
