I was on a tight deadline last week, which is now mercifully past. I made it, just barely, but I was working on it until Saturday afternoon before I finally got it done. I don’t love deadlines, but they do make me awfully productive.
Today, I made three purchases, two of which were intended and one of which was not.
Purchase #1: The first purchase was the new Amazon Kindle 2.0. I actually paid for the Kindle awhile back, but it wasn’t available just yet. I got an email from Amazon this morning telling me that my Kindle has shipped. I know there is a lot of debate about whether the Kindle is a good deal or not. I think it will meet my needs, one of which is to allow me to read Word documents away from my computer. I find it uncomfortable to read Word documents on the computer for long periods of time. I’m told by my many Kindle-owning friends that the Kindle is very easy on the eyes and it allows you import Word docs easily. So I bought one. This way when I read manuscripts for endorsement, I can just have them email me the Word doc and I can read it anywhere.
Purchase #2: A few minutes after I got that email, the UPS man knocked at the door with a box containing something I ordered last week. It’s a small monitor stand that holds my iMac up just high enough that I can slide my keyboard under it. I wanted this because I often need to get the keyboard out of the way so I can write something on paper or pull my laptop over. I got this on the Macessity web site. It took minutes to install, and has the added virtue of having a powered USB dock with 4 USB connectors. The monitor stand looks great and is exactly what I wanted.
Purchase #3: The third purchase I made was accidental. A year ago, I signed up to receiving a paper newsletter by a marketing genius named James Brausch. James is the guy behind a number of unique and excellent products, such as MuVar, RaSof, and Glyphius. I have bought all of these and I think they are terrific. So a year ago when James ran a special on his new Testing Newsletter, I signed up for it at a reduced price of $100 per year. The only problem is that I only ever got 2 or 3 issues. For whatever reason, most of the issues never arrived. I’m a busy guy, and I basically forgot about it. Out of sight, out of mind. But it’s an annual $300 subscription. So this morning, I got an email from PayPal to notify me that I had just spent $300 on a renewal of a product that I have not been getting. Dang! I hate when that happens! I got on PayPal and cancelled the subscription. Then I emailed the current owner of the Testing Newsletter (James Brausch has rebranded his business under the name “Diego Norte” and it now is run by employees) asking if they would refund my subscription, given the circumstances. Will the folks at Diego Norte do the right thing here? I expect they will. James always treated me well, and I expect that the systems he’s left in place at Diego Norte will continue to do that. I’ll keep y’all informed.
Tomorrow, I’ll pick up where we left off last–our analysis of the characters in STAR WARS.