Hack Your Soap!
I'm a fan of the newer foaming type of hand soap. It's probably a fad but I like that it's easier to spread around my hands and isn't nearly as viscous.
The other day I saw on instructables.com a tutorial on how to refill your foaming hand soap with regular soap.
This is perfect since I have a 2 gallon jug of regular hand soap that I bought at Sam's Club about 5 years ago that still almost full. Who on earth needs that much hand soap? Let me just say that places like Costco and Sam's Club make people make irrational decisions.
"Honey, let's get this industrial sized box of paper clips. It's a 750,000 count box, but look how cheap the unit price is!"
So all this to say that I tried to refill my foaming soap with regular soap and it worked! The foaming secret is that the dispense injects air into the soap. Just fill up the old foaming dispenser with about 1/5 regular soap and the rest with plain old tap water. Put the cap back on and shake vigorously for a minute.
The soap and water should become a less viscous homogeneous mix and work perfectly.
This makes me wonder... why are people paying more for watered down soap? I guess it's the novelty of the foam.
Watered down Dial brand soap in a foaming dispenser:
Amazon is Cat-tacular!
I found a little funny easter-egg on the amazon website that I've never noticed before. If you go to www.amazon.com
and view the page source. If you don't know how to do that, this post probably won't make much sense to you or be funny in any way, shape, or form.
One the very last line of the source is a comment: <!-- MEOW -->
What the heck? It made me laugh that the amazon developers would put something like that in the source code.
How much does this little gem cost amazon to serve to all their customers? It is, after all one of the highest trafficked sites on the internet. Adding that to every page has to have some sort of effect.
Total worldwide internet users: 1,407,724,920
Percent of global Internet users who visit this site: 2.13%
Unique pages viewed per user per day for this site: 6.64
So that put the estimated total users for amazon.com at 29,984,541 unique people and the total pageviews per day at 199,097,351.
The data for "<!-- MEOW -->" is 14 bytes including the newline character before it so this addition to the source costs amazon approximately 2.6 gigabytes of bandwidth every day. Amazing!
Let my know if my calculations are off.
The Panama Canal Costs HOW MUCH to Cross?
I was watching a show on Science HD about the Panama Canal on Saturday. They discussed the construction and operation of the canal and presented the challenges it faces in the future with bigger cargo ships being built.
A thought popped into my head: "How much does it cost a ship to cross from one ocean to another using the Panama Canal?"
Ah, I love the internet: Instant answers to all my questions!
A search on "panama canal fees" led us straight to the Panama branch of the Barwil worldwide shipping agency network. A couple of clicks into the site, we located a Panama Canal toll calculator.
Enter the vessel's length, beam, and something called the "PC/UMS Net" and it does the rest. The calculator even itemizes an additional 2,000 dollars of miscellaneous charges including taxes, telexes, and fumigation fees.
Since we're not very sea-savvy, we found ourselves wondering what PC/UMS Net was -- we had a hunch it was a measurement of weight, but it sounded more complicated than roadside truck scales.
We returned to our search results and clicked on "web page matches," which took us to the Zonian Web Site. It offers a nostalgic look at the history of the now-defunct Panama Canal Zone. We clicked on "How the Panama Canal works" and viewed a Java animation demonstrating how a ship navigates the canal, from the Pacific to the Atlantic through a complex series of locks.
From the site, we also gleaned these relevant facts: The highest Canal toll was $141,344.91, charged to a cruise ship called the Crown Princess, and the lowest toll ever paid was 36 cents by Richard Halliburton, who swam the Canal in 1928.
We still wanted to find more about PC/UMS Net, so we consulted the official bilingual site of the Panama Canal Authority. On the toll assessment page, we learned that the rules of the game had changed back in 1994, in order to comply with a new, worldwide standard for measuring the weight of vessels. This system is referred to as the Panama Canal Universal Measurement System (PC/UMS).
Using this system, the weight of a vessel is calculated by applying a mathematical formula to its total volume. Non-cargo ships are assessed based on the vessel's water displacement.
Final notes: It's nearly 8,000 miles shorter to traverse the Canal than to go around South America... that's a huge savings in fuel and time. And swimming the Canal is not recommended these days.
There you have it. Thanks, Yahoo! (do I put another exclamation mark after "Yahoo!" since it's a proper name as to finish the sentence?)
On another note, If you wish to take your personal yacht (what? You don't have your own yacht?) through the canal, the fees seem to be a bit different according to MichaelBriant.com:
Please note: these numbers are not from an official source.
| overall length feet | fixed transit fee | buffer | total deposit fee |
| up to 50 feet | $500 | $800 | $1300 |
| 50 < length <80 | $750 | $650 | $1400 |
| 80 < length <100 | $1000 | $700 | $1700 |
| length < 100 | $1500 | $900 | $2400 |
Auto Loans – What a Hassle! (UPDATED)
UPDATE:
CarMax corporate customer service contacted me. Apparently, 7.69% is the lowest APR they offer any of their customers... even customers like me with a credit score in the high 700's to low 800's. They were very apologetic about any misunderstandings that may have occurred. I was ready to let it go in my mind before they called, but I'm glad we were able to open a dialogue and get to the root of why I was dissatisfied with the loan experience (the actual car BUYING experience was great!).
Bottom Line: Buy a car from CarMax, but don't (under any circumstances) go with their "perferred rate" financing. You're more than likely to get a better loan rate getting financing through your bank or local credit union.
I'm going to try to be as objective as I can on this topic. But, needless to say, I'm pretty ticked off.
From my last post, you know I unexpectedly had to purchase a new car. I had to finance a portion of the purchase (which I'm not too happy about since I'm trying to do the Dave Ramsey thing).
At the time of purchase CarMax pre-approved me for a loan from Bank of America for 7.69%. Woah... kind of high in my books. They told me I had three business days to procure my own financing so I shopped around.
Since my mortgage is with Bank of America, I decided to try them and got a great interest rate of 5.29%. I talked with on of the Bank of America loan officers and she faxed me a letter which she said would be sufficient to switch the contract on the car. The loan officer said that since CarMax was an authorized Bank of America dealer, they would be able to do this no problem whatsoever.
I went into the Carmax on the third business day and that's where things started to get confusing. All I got were excuses. Here's some of the things I heard from the business office:
"I've never seen a letter like this." - Bank of America said they use these documents all the time
"This is the 4th business day." - I purchased the car on Thursday. Friday (1), Monday (2), Tuesday (3). I fail to see how it was the 4th business day unless they were counting from when we were approved for the loan (which was Wednesday).
"Your loan is already with Bank of America. We can't change the contract unless it's with another bank" - Why did Bank of America say that I could?
"You'll need your wife here to sign the new contract" - Then why did she sign a power of attorney, allowing me to do business for her? She could not have made it to the business office by the time they closed that night.
"You need to call and deal with Bank of America directly. Since they're the current lien-holder, they can just switch the terms over to the better rate."
It's that last quote that I want to talk about. I think that they just wanted me out of there. So I did what they said and when home. The next day I called up the bank and told my loan officer what had transpired. She said that I had been "grossly misinformed" and that they could not simply change the terms of my current loan. It was going to require a refinance to do that which would incur a $200 fee.
Great. Now I was past the 3-day limit and totally screwed (in my opinion). Now I'm stuck with a 7.69% rate on my auto loan and it won't be worth it to refinance because of the fee.
I asked the loan agent how my rate was calculated and she said that it was solely based on my credit score and the loan amount. A conclusion I can come to is that CarMax purpose artificially increases the interest rate to take a cut (2.4% APR in my case). Another conclusion could be the fact that when our salesperson entered the loan into their computer, he neglected to take into account the $5,000 down payment I was providing. The computer then calculated the APR based on a $13,000 loan instead of an $8,000 loan like it should have been.
My loan officer was very helpful and said she'd reduce the interest rate to 5.04% to try and help offset the $200 fee. I worked out the numbers and if we pay it off as aggressively as we're planning, it would cost us more money to reduce the rate from 7.69% to 5.04%. So we're leaving it.
Oh well.
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Nike+ Running Stats
- Total runs: 169
- Total distance: 298.44mi
- Total time: 86hr 53min 47sec
- Total calories: 39,935
- Avg pace per mi: 17'28"
- Avg distance per run: 1.77mi
- Avg calories per run: 236.30
My Records
- Farthest Run: 6.43mi
- Fastest Mile: 8'40"
- Fastest 5K: 32'10"
- Fastest 10K:2hr 16min 12sec
My Recent Runs
- June 1, 2010, 11:39pm
- Distance: 2.20mi
- Duration: 41' 12"
- Calories: 279
- May 27, 2010, 9:59pm
- Distance: 1.16mi
- Duration: 19' 44"
- Calories: 146
- May 10, 2010, 10:56pm
- Distance: 0.67mi
- Duration: 10' 57"
- Calories: 85
My Nike+ Goals
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