Here's an example of what I do in my spare time. This video is not that bad actually. I spent a couple of hours correcting it. The result is not entirely origional but the errors in the video stream have been removed, with a little boop-oop-a-doop audio and the ending added.
Took the cover off the swamp cooler today finally.
Decided I didn't really want to play the EBAY seller game today. I came up with a much more lucrative plan to sell DVD's. I will be selling DVD's in lots of 10 and offer drop ship services to thier winning bidders with established clients for a nominal fee.
One of the problems with selling on EBAY is finding products at low prices, storage and shipping. I figure I can do that part of it to free them up to managing thier auctions. The way I figure, eventually all we have to do is box it up and mail it. I'll pay to have the discs commercially produced or buy some high-speed duplication equipment. That of course depends on demand.
Also I'm toying with an idea for consignment sales in local convenience stores that already sell DVD's. Ultimately I should make the money I expected to clear off EBAY sales but much more quickly.
Kind of a quiet week at work. In between thumb twiddles I've been working on restoring an old video. I've started and restarted several times. Very time consuming. I'm trying to come up with a routine to follow to clean-up old movies. Previously I was hand editing individual frames and getting excellent results. But it is very tedious to say the least.
Over the last couple of weeks I've been playing with a VirtualDub filter that is supposed to remove spots but I think it does more damage than good in some cases. It it probably be a mixture of techniques that finally works.
Sunk another fence post in the backyard today. It's close to the mulberry tree so I was wondering about roots...not too bad as it turned out. I'm running out of materials so the fence may go on hold for a while. I still have a couple of panels I can canabalize for some custom panels I need to make. So I'm not without things to do.
The plants seem to be going crazy this year. This is pretty cool. I still haven't decided where everything is going but they seem happy just to be in bigger pots for now.
The rototiller is another project. It's one of those you can't let it set forever things. I have it running and it sounds really good....but it dies after a few minutes under a load. I may have to pull the carb and take off of it to see what gives with that. It may also be a govenor problem but more likely fuel issues. I need to get it working to prep the lawn area again.
Never Ends!
Also today I started getting ready to sell one of my DVD's. Printed the disc and DVD jacket covers, burned the discs and popped them in heatshrink bags. The hair dryer won't shrink the bags so I need to get a real heatgun this week maybe. Then I have a finished product to sell. Made one for me and 10 to sell...what a job that is.
Hope everybody is ok!
This is an article sent to me by my other half from an online newspaper in Tennessee. Michael Reagan (son of Uncle Ronnie), shifts the blame to the environmentalists. My take on this is these are the guys possible hammering Congress into Compliance...I still blame Congress as they have the final say...
Put the blame where it belongs
By Michael Reagan, Monday, May 5, 2008 12:12 am
Updated: Monday, May 5, 2008 12:12 am
In case you haven't noticed, gas prices are soaring, hiking the cost of food and just about everything else.
If you believe Hillary Clinton, the blame for all this lies on the shoulders of those greedy oil companies and their bloated profit margins, a notion that like just about every other snake-oil remedy she tries to peddle is simply not the case.
We're in the mess because of a small handful of people with the money and the power to inflict grievous harm on their fellow humans, whom they just happen to despise.
It's about time for you and your fellow Americans to know just who they are and what they are doing to all of us in the name of saving the planet that for millions of years has shown to be perfectly capable of saving itself without their help.
If you are really sick and tired of $4-a-gallon gasoline, really sick of being dependent on foreign oil, and equally as sick of seeing your food bills go up, the conventional wisdom would lead you to blame the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. But that's a waste of time, as is blaming George Bush or the oil companies.
None of them make environmental policy. That policy is set by three individuals, two located in New York City. If you want to drill in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico or in the continental U.S. — where billions of gallons of petroleum are just waiting to be tapped — or build refineries, these three people stand in your way.
They are John Flicker of the National Audubon Society, Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Trip Van Noppen of the organization Earthjustice.
Flicker and Beinecke both live and work in New York City where they probably don't own cars, and they are happy that you have to spend more and more of your budget on food and fuel. You are being punished for being Americans.
Van Noppen runs Earthjustice from Oakland, Calif. None of these three is in touch with America. They hate America, they hate you. And they want your gas to cost $8 a gallon.
Earlier this year they filed a lawsuit to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas in Alaska. This is just a leading tactic in their arsenal. All of you need to call these three and demand that they get out of the way and stop impeding our rights to find and drill for petroleum here in North America.
After all, if the Chinese are drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, shouldn't we be allowed to do so too?
They must be made to feel pressure — the pressure you feel every day when you juggle your budget to cope with rising prices. These three people set energy policy in this country. They order Reid and Pelosi to do their bidding, and thanks to them and their allies in the radical environmental movement we are getting economically weaker.
Call Flicker at the Audubon Society at (212) 979-3000.
Call Beinecke at the NRDC at (212) 727-2700.
Call Van Noppen at Earthjustice at (510) 550-6700.
Beware of environmentalists bearing axes.
Contact Reagan at Reagan@caglecartoons.com
It's time for consumers to strike back against the real culprits behind rising gasoline and food prices.
Who deserves blame? Middle East sultans? Oil company executives? Commodities speculators?
How about blaming our very own United States Congress? For decades, Congress has led our government into disastrous decisions by being the patsy of radical environmentalists, naysayers and prophets of doom. Recent presidents have done little to resist.
Now American consumers pay the price while politicians try to evade and shift the blame.
However, we can lower gas prices by reversing misguided federal policies, and lower food prices, too. It's all about what we learned (or should have) in Economics 101 – supply and demand.
The stifling of domestic oil and gas production and the suppression of new refineries and nuclear power plants have choked off the supplies of domestic energy, forcing us to rely on foreign oil. In the international market, we must bid against the growing energy appetites of China and India, and we're held hostage by the oil cartels of OPEC. The world market is unstable and expensive, and we shouldn't be at its mercy.
Politicians keep promising a plentiful supply of alternative energy, but that remains far in the future, and much of it will be more expensive than $4-per-gallon gasoline. Ponder this: How could you afford any fuel that needs government subsidies to compete with $120-a-barrel oil? Those will never be affordable for consumers.
We don't have a shortage of oil and gas reserves; they've just been placed off limits. They include parts of Alaska, other public lands, the Gulf of Mexico and offshore areas. The American Petroleum Institute, or API, reports that opening up these areas would provide enough oil to power 60 million cars for 60 years, plus enough natural gas to heat 60 million homes for 160 years. But 85 percent of coastal waters have been declared off limits, along with similar restrictions on 75 percent of the onshore prospects.
That's why 60 percent of our oil is now imported. And these restrictions caused America to lose more than 1 million jobs in oil and gas during the past 25 years. How many "green collar" jobs have we gained to replace them?
Similar federal policies have blocked construction of oil refineries and nuclear power plants for more than 30 years, again increasing our dependence on foreign supplies of energy.
Yes, our modern technology can produce the energy we need without harming the environment. Unfortunately, liberals have sought to demonize the oil and gas industry, hoping to destroy its credibility so the public will see it as a greedy bunch of rich polluters.
With gasoline so expensive, oil executives were called before Congress to discuss record-high profits. The hope was to justify taxing them for another $18 billion, on top of the $90 billion they already pay. Politicians then would give that $18 billion to subsidize other types of energy that are too expensive to operate profitably.
Yet the profit margin for oil and gas is about 7 cents for each dollar invested, according to Business Week. That's about the same margin as Avon Cosmetics, Amazon.com and Bed Bath & Beyond. And toothpaste maker Colgate-Palmolive. Apple, with high-tech gurus, was twice as profitable. So were Coke and Pepsi. And Microsoft and Google made four times the average oil company's rate of return.
But is anybody angry about the high cost of toothpaste, iPods or soft drinks? Why don't more profitable companies get raked over the coals by Congress? Because Congress doesn't need them as scapegoats. Lawmakers have messed up America's energy supply so badly that they need someone and something else to blame. They're creating a diversion – trying to brainwash the public into how to think and who to accuse.
Another reason for high gas prices: federal and state regulations that require dozens of "boutique fuels," dictating different blends of gas for different regions. As a result, we no longer have an efficient national market that enables a surplus in one area to be shifted to another part of the country. Boutique fuels require expensive refinery shutdowns to change output from one formula to another, lowering production and risking overproduction for one area and underproduction for someplace else. Consumers pay the price.
A big part of boutique fuels is the ethanol mandate, now set by Congress at $18 billion a year, which shifted the corn supply from food to fuel. The mandate set off a domino effect as the government pays farmers to grow corn rather than other grains, and to sell it for fuel instead of food. And because corn is the major feed for livestock, the prices of meat, eggs, milk and so on climb along with prices for grain, flour, baked goods, etc.
Nobody wants to be blamed for food riots and world hunger, but the public is realizing those are the outrageous results of ethanol subsidies.
Besides, ethanol reduces all-important gas mileage. As the Heritage Foundation's Ben Lieberman put it, "America's energy policy has been on an ethanol binge, and now the hangover has begun."
Unfortunately, we've lost time while we were on that binge. Now, if we want to get serious about lower gasoline prices (and food prices), here's a simple five-point checklist:
2. Open up reserve areas
3. Build refineries and nuclear power plants
4. End expensive and wasteful mandates, especially ethanol
5. Let the free market develop alternatives for the future
Finally, remember patience: These problems didn't develop overnight and can't be solved overnight. America's consumers should wake up and realize taxes aren't the only way elected officials reach into our pockets. It's time to slap away those hands.
Ernest Istook is recovering from serving 14 years in Congress and is now a distinguished fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
First appeared in World Net Daily
last year it didn;t do this well. We are using a plant care stuff put out by Bayer the aspirin people in a big blue bottle...makes red flowers.
Spent all day yesterday finishing up the pictorial to sell on EBAY. Then half the night figureing out how to giet it listed properly. EBAY has changed thier rules and no longer allow electronic delivery.
It took me awhile but I believe I have figured out a work around. I think they figured you should be selling a tangible product. Something that can be tracked, not loaded with spyware and stuff. I'm assuming they may have had just one too many complaints about people buying things and not being able to recieve them.
Right in the middle of creating my first listing, I looked at the filesize of my pdf file. Way too big for email as it was around 10mb. I figured it was the pictures that where making it so big. What I did was take all the pictures and run them through an optimizer to compress them down about 50%. They still look pretty good and cut the file size down considerably. I think it's now down around 6.5MB or so.
No takers yet but I'm not suprised. learning how to list things and get results is an art. Unfortunately the learning curve can be costly. One of my keys to success will be little upfront cost. That way there is a little more room to pay EBAY's and PayPal's cut and still make some fair coin. And there is tons of room to workwith on the pictorial. Didn't cost anything but time to produce.
The good news is that because of my track record as a buyer...it gave me a jump start as a seller. I have the ability to use Buy-it-Now which is not available without a track record. Initially I though I was going to have to make 30+ sales to get to that status. 100% perfect feedback helps.
On the far right you will see my new tree I picked up at Wally World. Its a cherry plum tree that's supposed to get to around 20 feet tall by 15 feet wide. Should provide plenty of shade someday for the gazebo if I get around to planting it.
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Finally!
Took a little time today and weed whacked the work area and made the gazebo into usable space. We have several plants in pots ready to plant when I am. I need to get a picture in the morning light I think so the weathervane shows off a bit better. But the poles are all cut off and caps are on.
This completes phase one. Now I can finish my pictorial for selling on EBAY.
I've also been toying with an idea to add sun screens that should look really cool. I might just do a quick mock-up for a photo. Wally World has the screening I need.
To describe it, basically they would be cafe-type curtains that have ties to tie then to the post to create an archway effect with the plants hanging in the arch. They will also be able to be untied and then tied together to to close the archway between the poles.