I’ve been fascinated in one way or another by gas prices ever since I worked at a gas station in college. At first it was just the geographic variation in prices, like how I could drive across the river from … Read More … Read More
Decisions
What to do when an emergency isn’t unexpected
I’ve long said that you can gauge whether something is an emergency if the following three “U” words describe the situation: Unexpected Urgent Unavoidable I use this metric to be able to distinguish between actual emergencies and things that feel like … Read More … Read More
Online trust, or How to figure out your biggest threats online
How I tried to buy something totally anonymously online
My experiences with trying to buy something online without revealing anything about my identity, and why this is so difficult. (I talk about using products or services, but I received no commission for this. I do not do affiliate marketing. … Read More … Read More
Why it’s so hard to buy online and maintain any privacy
In a perfect world, no one would have any right to know what I buy, where I go, and what I do unless I gave them that access. This seems rather quaint now. Today, everything you do is scrutinized, advertised, … Read More … Read More
How not getting the sale can still be successful haggling
Here are some better ways to spend $600 than on hard drive recovery
I spent roughly $600 to recover personal files from a dead hard drive. Now, $600 is a lot of money. It was half of the price of my first car when I bought it. It was more than what my … Read More … Read More
À la recherche du hard drives perdu: my data recovery experience
So as I reported earlier, a hard drive containing valuable personal files died on me recently. I thought I hadn’t backed up in a few months, which would have been hard enough, but it turns out that I hadn’t backed … Read More … Read More
Another way to track cash expenses