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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Why I Use Amazon for Most of My Online Shopping

Monday, June 13th, 2011

While I had been online for a long time, over the years I gravitated to use Amazon.com for most of my online shopping. While I do not necessarily like big companies, in this case a lot of what Amazon brings to the consumer is something all online companies should learn ...

Garden Project 2011: Introduction

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

As in the years past, my family is trying a hand at gardening this year again. In this post, I am going to outline what we have done in the past, what worked and what didn't, before moving on to this year's experiment. All of this information is for Baltimore ...

Reply from Baltimore City Regarding ECB Meetings and Hearings

Friday, March 25th, 2011

You can view it here: ecb-letter. UPDATE: All of the ECB related documents I have collected are now available here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe.

Saying GoodBye to Palm and Sprint, Part II

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

(followup to part I) I have been using Virgin Mobile USA's Samsung Intercept for about 2 months now. Good things I have found: Cheap pricing - paying a little less than $80/mo for two phones, with 1,200 minutes each, and unlimited texting/web Android 2.1 with access to Android Market Pretty much the same coverage ...

Saying GoodBye to Palm and Sprint, Part I

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

I have been a loyal user of Palm's PalmOS devices since their earlier days. I have gone through the full gamut of Handspring and later Palm devices such as the Treo 300, 600, all the way to the latest WebOS and the Palm Pre. I have also been a SprintPCS ...

My Letter to Baltimore City Government Regarding Reforms at the Environmental Control Board

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

UPDATE: All of the ECB related documents I have collected are now available here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe For those of you not local to Baltimore, the Environmental Control Board informally known as "trash court" is an agency of the city government that does administrative hearings on trash, health, safety and related violations. My ...

Free, Easy to Use Porfolio Tracker

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

My brother just released version 0.7 of his free and easy to use porfolio tracker called "Frano": The application is located at http://frano.carelessmusings.com and is a transaction based portfolio tracker similar to yahoo/google/morningstar portfolios. If you have an investment portfolio and you want to be able to take a ...

Very Powerful Article: “Regrets of the Dying”

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Written by Bronnie Ware who works in palliative care. She discusses the top five regrets most dying people have: 1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 2. I wish I didn't work so hard. 3. I wish I'd ...

Op-Ed for the Baltimore Sun on Government Transparency

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Copy of my op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun: A better plan for transparency Instead of televising city meetings on cable, publish all relevant information online By Yakov Shafranovich; 5:35 p.m. EST, November 17, 2010 Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young recently proposed new legislation to achieve greater transparency in the ...

Replacing Chitika Ads with Amazon Omakase

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

For almost two years, I had ads running on the left sidebar from Chitika. I made no money at all from these ads. Today, I am replacing them with Amazon's Omakase ads. We'll see if they perform any different.