July 21st, 2009 §
Often, when people ask me if I need anything my canned response is “A pound of Fifties”.
Up until about 10 minutes ago, I never was asked how much money was in a lb of 50s. Leave it to my boss to ask.
So, I quickly did the math.
Apparently, a dollar bill weighs 1 gram. (I am going to assume this site is correct, even though it looks less than reputable…it is the internets). Going with this math, I calculated that 1 pound equals about 453.59 grams, approximate to 454 (because this is money I hope to get some day, I rounded up).
This means that if you calculate grams times $50, you get $22,700.
So, if I ask for a pound of fifties, you now know that I am looking for $22,700.
Except, that if you know currency rules/regulations, you know that a dollar bill does not have to be whole in order to be considered legal tender. It actually just has to have the denomination visible and both serial numbers in tact.
So, lets consider that if you ripped the corners off all the bills and assume that the corners constituted about 1/6 of the total weight of a bill. This was done by borrowing a bill from a friend, folding the corner over, then folding the bill across that line to get about 6 sections. I assumed that the two corners from one side plus the two corners from the other side constituted about 1/6 the total surface area and therefore the total weight. I am not accounting for the metallic strip that is in the bill.
This means that I could fit 1/6 of the 454 more bills into the pound. Which adds up to 75.666 more bills (76, because we are talking about money I want to receive). This adds up to $3,800 more.
Which means, that if I had an ideal no corners pound of fifties, I would have $22,700 + $3,800 = $26,500
Yes please, and thank you.
Now, to go along with one of the conversations that happened in the original thread where I got my most trustworthy information about how much a dollar bill weighs, they discussed Ocean’s Eleven. Where the characters stole $150million.
Using $100 bills, this is 1,500,000 bills. At 1 gram per, that equates to 3,303.9 pounds. There were eleven of them. That means ~300 pounds per person. Or, if you remember how they each carried out 2 bags, 150lbs per bag. That is a lot of weight, especially for the smaller and older of the group. However, if you factor in the adrenaline of stealing money from 3 casinos in Las Vegas, underneath their own noses, I believe they could have easily managed this weight.
Our national deficit is $11,615,800,451,825, according to the US National debt clock, which equates to 255,854,636 pounds of $100 bills. That’s a lot. The average weight of an American male is 191 pounds. This means that our deficit weighs as much as 1,339,553 American males. That is more than the entire population of Jacksonville, Florida’s Greater Metro Area.
So, the next time you ask me if I “need anything”, and I reply with “a pound of fifties”, I sure hope you have a spare $26,500 laying around.
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June 9th, 2009 §
Since Startup Weekend, I have noticed the impact that having that many top-notch people around in one place has had on those same top-notch people.
Many different blog posts, tweets and general conversation has come out of this weekend. So I am going to do my best to aggregate some of that information here.
Twitter Posts #swb09
LilBiker’s Startup Weekend Boulder 3 (note: Neal and I are in the picture towards the bottom of the article!)
LilBiker’s Flickr Set of Startup Weekend Photos
Presentation Video of all of the Startup Weekend Ideas.
The Official Startup Weekend Boulder 3 Page
Startup Weekend’s Idea Fuel (Illegal Pete’s)
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If there are any other links that I am missing, please tell me and I will add them!
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February 8th, 2009 §
Yes, I have heard it more times than I can count:
How many projects do you have?
The answer is, too many, of course! When you are a person like me, your mind is constantly racing and you see ideas and opportunity everywhere. Or at least I like to think that it is that…and not just insanity.
I started a new project recently, called My City Headlines.
The idea behind the project is to aggregate specific city’s news in one place. This provides people with a single location to get their local news without having to search multiple sites.
I am inspired by Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop.com. They pick a subject, any subject, and find the top news/blog sites on that subject from around the web and aggregate their headlines on one page. This is a really cool idea and it seems to be doing well. If you follow Guy Kawasaki on Twitter, you will quickly notice that they are constantly adding new subjects to their site.
I wanted to take this idea, without completely ripping it off, and provide a similar service in my own way. Not only do I aggregate the news from a city on a single page, but I provide subject based RSS feeds that aggregate the headlines and excerpts into a single feed.
I hope that people find this site useful. For more information or to see if your city is added yet, please visit http://www.mycityheadlines.com. If you want your city added, you can comment on this post and I will add your city ASAP.
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February 6th, 2009 §
This post is a continuation of my post about managing my tasks, projects, and responsibilities. There are links to the other posts at the bottom of this post.
Lists In Notepads
Recently, I found myself writing everything down in a notepad. I was writing all of my personal to do items as well as my client and work to do items in the one list. I quickly realized that it was getting to be too much in one list and maybe even too much for a single notepad.
My solution was to run to Target and get some new stronger notepads that will withstand the wear and tear of being transported in my backpack to and from work and all around Denver. The notepads I used in the past were either legal pads, half-legal pads, or bound notepads.
The notepads I chose are “Cambridge Limited Business Notepads”, because of the quality binding, covers, and thicker paper. Also, they are taller than they are wider so I can keep good long lists in them.
I have two of these notepads, one for my personal stuff and current to do list. The second notepad is where I keep my client and project information.
Every client or project has their own page, where I keep information about what is currently going on, the todo list, and ideas I may have for their sites. I am constantly flipping through the pages and writing something down, because I can’t remember everything.
When I finish an item on one of my lists or decide not to do it, I just cross it out. Sometimes, I get to the point where a page is mostly crossed out. At this point, I just rip it out and start a new page for that project. I write down everything that wasn’t crossed out on the previous pages and go about my business.
This process, while time consuming to set up, has made keeping my ideas and project information all in one place easier. The only real downside to this is if I lose the notepad. So, I just keep a strict rule to keep the notepads with my laptop so that I will not misplace them
Conclusion
I hope that he information I have provided in this thread was useful in helping your stay organized and sane (disorganization makes me crazy!). If you have any ideas or comments, please leave them!
Other Posts In This Thread
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February 5th, 2009 §
I was replying to a friend on Twitter using trim, and I had a <script> tag in the post. I realized when I submitted that the tag made everything after it in my tweet dissapear. If you want to see the actual tweets, you can find them in my twitter feed here: Matt Bernier’s Twitter Feed
First thougt was, “No Way!”. Second thought was, “What Else Can I do?”.
So, I tried basic HTML with this tweet:
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<h2>Testing whether HTML breaks tr.im</h2> B/c my
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<script> tag did earlier</script>
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<span style="color:blue;"> ScreenShot coming</script>
This got me this result:
Just HTML in the Tweet
Then I tried an alert:
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<script type="text/javascript">
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alert('does this work?');
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</script>
That got me this result:
Javascript Alert in a tweet
Then lastly, I tried a little more JS, pay attention though. To make it fit, I used a tr.im URL!!
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<script type="text/javascript">
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document.body.select('img').each(function(e){e.src="http://tr.im/evmz"});
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alert('check the images')
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</script>
Which got me this result:
Replaced Tr.im's images with Google's!
I have submitted this information to tr.im. I did very mundane, topical things to the page I was looking at, and did not even attempt anything more dangerous. My hope is that you will see the humor in this, urge tr.im to fix this issue and to continue the amazing job that they do.
UPDATE: The Tr.im developers are quick to read their emails, respond, and fix issues. It took all of twenty minutes from when I sent the email to them, for a response saying that this issue was fixed.
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February 3rd, 2009 §
February 2nd, 2009 §
February 1st, 2009 §
January 30th, 2009 §
January 29th, 2009 §
Maybe tomorrow?