Moving Woes

I took a day off work this week to do something unexpected. Yikes, taking a day off work was unexpected enough. One of the guys I work with accepted a new job offer and was moving across the country. He had scheduled a U Haul and I offered to help him move his spartan belongings from his third story apartment and help pack it in the U Haul trailer for him. I had no idea that a Queen size bed fits so perfectly inside a 5'x8' trailer. 

Alas, there was one incident worth remembering for future moves. Some of the boxes were standard weight, the dishes were understandably heavy, and yet other boxes were surprisingly light. The most prized possession was the box of computers. It also turned out to be one of the heaviest - and unfortunately, happened to be the one box that was dropped.

The takeaway lessons - Don't put all your eggs in one basket, and secondly, don't over pack your boxes. When you are moving, things are going to get disorganized anyways, so don't try so hard to put all of the same thing in one box. Diversify. Put some soft, light stuff in with your fragile, or heavy and expensive equipment. Packing it all together, two desktop computers in this case, causes unnecessary risk from the added weight and from single points of failure.

I did notice that there was a package of packing paper on the counter, so hopefully, it was used in abundance. Packing paper is great for protecting your valuables in creating a crush zone around your items.

Disclaimer: I really like the Berenstain Bears Books and I don't know what kind of paper that is, but the stuff I used, looked like it, and it's worth it.

Tuesday Tip: Baking Soda

The many uses of Baking soda. You can do more than cook with it!


Do you have some old baking soda you don't want to cook with or is no longer useful at sucking in yucky odors in your fridge?
 
Use it to clean off all the corrosion on your car battery terminals. One day I walked out to the parking lot after a long day's work - alas, my car would not start. I popped the hood and saw that my battery terminals were showing signs of excessive corrosion. My wife came to the rescue with some warm water and some baking soda. We dissolved the baking soda in the warm water and then slowly poured the mixture over my battery terminals. Once clean, a solid electrical connection was possible, and my car started right up.

Use it to kill mushrooms on your lawn. When we moved into our new house we discovered after an especially rainy spring that a huge patch of mushrooms had grown into our lawn. Apparently, an old tree had been cut down years ago, but the root system was still underground providing ample food for mushrooms. A little baking soda sprinkled on them took care of that problem.


Use it down your drain to eliminate smelly odors. Just like in your fridge, drop it down your drain and let it dissolve into the water in the trap to eliminate some odors and neutralize any acidic decomposition.



Disclaimer: I use Arm & Hammer Baking Soda products like the one pictured.

Tuesday Tip: Handling Bulk Purchases

It is generally accepted that buying in bulk will help you save money on your grocery bill. However, if the quantities are so large that they are cumbersome, you might end up losing money in the long run. Here's a few tips on how I handle bulk items.

Olive oil. Buy this heart healthy food in a nice large can - and then what? Who wants to drag out a gallon can when they just need to measure out a tablespoon of oil? And who really measures anyways?
My trick - save your syrup bottle, wash it out, and make it your new oil dispenser. It's just the right size, and a little squeeze of oil in the pan is all you need. If you do not like the old syrup bottle idea - then a nice glass oil dispenser might be what you are looking for.



Disclaimer: The above picture is for reference only and is not the brand I use.

How do I add a second Y-axis to a Microsoft Excel plot?

I keep forgetting how to add a second y-axis to a plot made in Microsoft Excel. And I figured this might be helpful to other people as well.

Remember the plots from my little dollar cost averaging example? They all employed two y axes; a primary and a secondary. For illustration, here is what the plot would look like without the second y axis.

The price data appears to be zero because it is so small on the range of the value of the fund which reaches nearly $30,000. Utilizing a secondary axis is helpful whenever you want to compare trend lines of data that share the same abscissa, or x values, but do not share the same range of ordinate, or the vertical y axis values.

How do you get the secondary axis to appear?
First, add the data to your existing plot. I always forget and try to add a secondary axis first - it doesn't work!
Once you have your data and it looks poorly represented, then you can select it, and right click on it.

From the right click menu, select "Format Data Series" and you will the following screen. Here you can choose to plot the data on the primary or secondary y axis. Woohoo!

Need further help in Excel?
One book that I would like to recommend is actually a textbook...


So, where else can you find good excel advice? I am not really sure. If you know of a good site - please share below in the comments.

Vertex42 is a great site for Excel templates. I have found some useful tools there.

Email Forwarding Etiquette

A soapbox article on email forwarding etiquette.

If you must forward on emails, please strip them of all the guilt crap and 'please forward' this garbage. I find it hard to even enjoy the nuggets of wisdom when they are coated in crap. For example, if you think an email is worthy of a forward, send people the following.

First, personalize it a bit.

"I read these and they brightened my day, hope you'll enjoy them, too."

Or, just simply -

"I liked this."

Then include the message, and tone it down so it's not shouting at us. (Huge font sizes and bolded text and the USE OF ALL CAPS when writing equals shouting in the real world)

1) Give people more than they  expect and do it cheerfully.
2) Marry a man/woman you love to  talk to. As you get older, their conversational  skills will be as important as any other.
3) And so on and so on....

But if you liked it, please do not include the manipulative, guilt tripping, sob story, endings that usually accompany these.

In other words, if you noticed a nugget of gold in the message, clean off the crap and just pass us the gold. Otherwise, to some people it will seem like you are just forwarding on crap to them.

"Hi, I was thinking of you today and thought I should throw a cow pie in your face!"  :) 

Or

"Hey everybody! I got a load of horse biscuits, why don't you have some?!"  :)

Sorry, I do not mean to rant, but that email with the burning house picture and promise of good luck and "it's been around the world ten times" really kind of tipped me off the edge and made me drag out my soap box.

Be Happy AND Fit - At Work

Get more exercise at the workplace by going out of your way, taking the long way. Not always applicable to everyone, but in large corporate offices it might work. 

Print to a printer further away.
Use the restroom on a different floor
Park on the wrong side of the building. 

Some of these tactics provide a break, a chance to stretch, and get you walking further. You may also run into people you haven't met before. Of course, it would be inefficient to go get something off the printer every hour on the wrong floor, but the idea is right. Tailor it to your needs. 

And don't forget to smile at all of your co-workers that you don't know. You will feel refreshed and ready to focus on your task again, and your heart rate will have increased and your oxygen intake as well. Both help you stay awake and be more alert.

Craigslist Scams and Spam

Wow. I finally created an account on Craigslist.com last week so that I could sell some more stuff. You might think I am a little late to the online classifieds game - but I am not. In fact, before we moved, I used a free classifieds system from the state's largest news station. They had a slick online interface that, in my opinion, was much easier and nicer to work with than the Craigslist option.

I am big proponent of getting rid of Stuff you do not need. I have used local FreeCycle  groups and the classifieds to get rid of lots of stuff and help pay down student loans and other debts. It has been great. 

I was quite displeased when I opened up my inbox this morning and found three spam messages from my one ad that I placed on Craigslist last week. Ugh! Who wants to look at more spam and phishing emails?

How can you reduce your exposure to the unwanted stuff that ends up in your inbox?  One approach that I have always found useful, yet others seem to think is complicated and unnecessary, is to use multiple email accounts.

I have simply taken the principle of not putting all your eggs in one basket to my email. I reserve one account for family and friends, one for business or where I receive electronic statements, and another that I use for dealing with strangers via online selling, or random other sign up and registrations online.

"But then you have to sign into three different accounts!"
  Well, not exactly. See, sometimes I only have a limited time to check my email and I would rather not wade through the numerous offers for Canadian pharmacy meds, the weekly office store ads, random large sums of money waiting for me in Nigeria, and so on just to see what how my family and friends are doing. It makes it simple. Because I have not used the email address to sign up for anything my chances of spam are a lot smaller because no one has sold my address or shared it with third party merchants. This makes for a family and friends account that is fairly clean because the standard filters can screen most of the automated stuff that everybody seems to get anyways.

The next time you are trying to simplify your life - take a radical approach and go for the complicated approach.

Do you have any life hacks, or things that you do to simplify your life that may be counter-intuitive at first glance?  If so, Please share in the comments.