Abhi Yerra

I decided to sell some of my old textbooks which I see no value in keeping for the future. I ran into a choice when going about this (like most things in life). Should I use half.com or Amazon?

Initially, I was using half.com and it seemed like the way to go. I mean they have a commission that slides down from 15% as the price of the book increases. They also have no flat or variable fee for selling. However, unfortunately it seems that eBay, which owns half.com, has abandoned working on the site. There is a complete lack of information about the books that are being sold and the site just feels like another marketplace, not really a place to buy books.

Therefore, I decided to use Amazon even though they have a commission of 15% regardless of price and charge $0.99 flat fee plus a $1.70 variable fee. However, the benefits of the site outweigh the costs as the site is a dedicated bookstore with thought given to the seller. The maintenance tools don’t seem like they’ve been last touched somewhere between 2005 and the 90’s. It overall has a simpler and more professional interface. Plus, I would wager that people are more likely to go to Amazon to find books before they ever touch half.com so the likelihood of someone buying from the site is much greater than half.com.

So what does all this mean? If you need one of my old textbooks please consider buying from Abhi’s Books.

Being a product of the web/mobile/text messaging generation, landlines are a bit of a mystery. They are phones people have at their homes, people call from them, but why are these antiquated things still around? In the land of cell phones why are those things even used. I decided to take a look and decided to put it on a diet at home, an extreme diet actually though not a diet that will lead to death.

So my parents had this $60 a month plan with AT&T called All Distance (meaning as far as the borders of the US… I guess AT&T has a patriotic meaning for all, false advertising suit anyone? I’m looking at you pre-law friends of mine) which provided all the wonderful features one would expect on a modern day cell phone on a land phone. But the pricing scheme is off the fucking roof especially since it’s only $20 bucks lower than the cell phone bill. Also, looking at the bills for the last 6 months (at least they got the website right… when it’s up) I saw that they barely made 40 calls a month on the service.

I told my parents to go basic and get the cheapest plan possible since we usually only get incoming calls not really outgoing. This automagically cut the cost of our bill by $45 bucks! So I was looking around their site and saw the “features” I could add to the phone line and was struck by how expensive it was. $15 bucks for CallerID! Are you fucking kidding me? I can get a fucking SIP provider who will not only provide a DID number with all the bells and whistles that these bastards are charging ridiculous amounts for less than they are charging for a basic plan!

My research continued a bit further. So what was the state of our cell phone? We have AT&T Wireless (I love my iPhone) and realized we were not using all of our minutes (hell we have about 10,000 rollover minutes with like a 1000 expiring every month) so I told my parents to start using the cell phone more. Your probably thinking, “You told them what? Are you mad?” Yes, I know it was unusual advice. Yes, I know I could have just gone to the lower tier rate and cut a further $20, but with almost $45 saved on landline bills and with how much my mom has her cell phone with her anyways on my parents long drive to their second store it was a fair call… no pun intended. My voice usage oddly enough coincide with the evening and weekends when calls are free so I don’t have many minutes used during the day (ah… college). Since we have enough minutes to last a recession using the cell phone a bit more is not a problem.

So what about the landphone why even keep it then? It seems a bit useless if I told my parents to just use the cell phone a bit more. Well since we did have it and local calls are free and I started liking Skype (ykabhinav… call me) so I got the $30 a year unlimited US & Canada subscription and setup Skype to Go on the home phone. Since my parents are used to the nuances of Calling Cards anyways it is not much of a hassle for them to call Skype and bridge the call. I even set it up so that it just dials through Skype in the address book.

So what did we do with the savings? Well my dad spend $5 bucks more to get faster internet at home and I spend $10 bucks more to get unlimited family text messaging, after all my sister is growing up and she needs texting as much as I do. And I figured might as well teach the parents a bit about modern day convieniences where not everything requires a call… (Sent some info to my dad about BofA which he was asking about yesterday, he replied, “Ok.” My father’s first text message…).

Update: After using Skype for a couple more weeks my parents have gotten rid of all but the minimal service at their store thus saving them even more per year. If people were to do this at this rate it would seem that the landline business is pretty dire.

I’ve started working on a simple project over break. Actually it’s a really simple idea, one which can be built in 15 minutes or so with any good screencast on a framework of choice. Then why I am I writing it? Because I can! It’s called Journlr. The idea behind it is simple, there are so many places where you can publish thoughts for others to see there is no place to just keep a plain old for my eyes only journal (or none that were astetically pleasing to me). So Journlr!

Though, it needs a lot more work especially in the departments of making it “official-looking” it is good enough for general use. I will release incremental updates to fix the sore spots. It uses OpenID so I don’t collect any information about you and is intended to get you writing as soon as theoretically possible, so just sign on with OpenID and you are ready to go. The only thing that is in the server is your identity url so if you use a service that obfuscates your identity url you are generally anonymous.

However, I feel this isn’t good enough for anonymity so I’ll be adding client side encryption in the future using JavaScript (especially since Firefox 3.1, Chrome and Safari-Nighly are kicking ass in performance. All I can say about IE, fuck you. your useless now and will be useless in the future… though I have heard Windows 7 is nice…).  But the gist of it is that data will be encrypted on the server and all encryption will happen on the client, so all data stored on the server itself will be encrypted. Hopefully, if I have money and this service becomes popular I’ll add SSL, but that’s a big if right now. This is in the works on a branch on git, but I haven’t gotten to it per usual.

You might be wondering, “What kind of half assed software is this? It doesn’t even have a damn edit button!” Well my angry friend there is a reason for that design. I don’t want the filtering of thoughts that are written. We filter too many of our thoughts, even though it is a good thing there are times when we should just write and be done with it: unfiltered, unbiased, pure stream of consciousness. That is what Journlr wants to be, a place where you just write and post once done. If you really need to edit it copy it and post again with all the nuances of reformatting the Textile markup (yes, I’m not going to make it easy on you).

My parents store uses a POS software called PCAmerica Cash Register Express. It has worked for them so far but it has a lot of problems. It uses a lot of memory; I am assuming there is a memory leak somewhere as it uses up almost 200 mb of ram for a products database that is less than 1mb, I am assuming it copies all the invoices ever made into memory. Also it’s a nightmare to configure where hardware fails to work for no reason randomly. I get really annoyed when my parents ask me to deal with that software’s issues since when one thing is fixed usually another thing is broken. The main reason that choice of software was made was due to my dad being used to the software from a previous store that he owned as well as there being no real open source alternatives.

My parents usage requirements are quite simple. They need a location to enter their stock (which all systems have), a place to check out current inventory and a daily report. All this was available in Openbravo POS. For the last week or so I’ve been working on migrating to the new system. Initially, I was looking at getting a system up for uploading data to the Openbravo ERP so they could be able to integrate their other store, but for right now I wanted to keep it simple. I want them to use the software and get it running then add an ERP to get the other store running on this software as well. This is mostly to avoid duplicating the efforts of entering stock into both stores.

I got the POS setup. This was done first by getting the CRE products database into the Openbravo POS where I had to import the data into Excel then remove all the unnecessary fields. And then import the csv files that I generated into Openbravo POS. This is the code for that. All in all it was a simple transfer, all that remains to be done are to add the specific tax categories which should be a simple SQL query and possibly import the customer table from CRE.

My parents seem happy with the software and we’ll start using it tomorrow since today I was training them in using it which was simple enough. The only major glitch I see in Openbravo is that when there is a text based barcode it doesn’t show up on screen as  you enter it this is became my parents use some mnemonics for certain items, e.g. pot for potatoes (I know what your thinking you stoner you! ). Overall, this seems to be a good investment in time and hopefully it’ll workout as they use it in the next few weeks.