I’ve been lazy this year about riding my motorcycle to work.  Blame it on the weather, needing to haul stuff blah blah blah, I really should be riding more.  We finally are having hot dry weather in Minnesota so I decided to compare the MPG for my Motorcycle vs my Chevy Truck.  The savings is astonishing.  So much in fact that if I rode every day for a month i’d save about $200.00  Here’s how it breaks down.  The Motorcycle MPG is 48 miles per gallon.  The pickup truck is 16 miles per gallon.   So I drive 68 miles round trip from home to work each day.  At $4.00 per gallon it costs a whopping $17.00 for me to show up for work each day.  Since I don’t get a full work at home day I spend a minimum of $85 each week driving to work in my truck.  Now take the bike’s numbers, just $5.66 each day to drive to work.  Peanuts at a weekly price of $28.33 leaving me $56.66 in my pocket if I rode five straight days.  Now further, lets take this “income” and pay me an hourly wage.  It takes about 2 hours each day to drive to work and back.  So taking my $56.66 profit and dividing it by 10 hours i’d get paid $5.66 per hour to ride my motorcycle.  How many people do you know get PAID to ride a motorcycle.  This article was written to motivate me to ride more often despite the weather but may open some eyes into just how well motorcycles do at reducing commuting costs vs cars and trucks.

A friend of mine is a wedding officiant and just redesigned his website.  I was checking it out and noticed that he has a section for Green Weddings.  Sending that this is a popular trend I checked what people are searching for.  Turns out Green Wedding, Green Wedding Tips and Green Wedding Ring are the top Google searches on the topic.  I found a great domain name and threw up a Green Wedding Blog which should be a fun ongoing project to maintain.  It’s a subject I know nothing about so it will be fun learning about Green Weddings while I build content for the blog.

Sometimes on the web businesses run even when you think they are dead.  Awhile ago I bought some software that makes birthday history cards.  I bought what materials I could find locally to create these birthday greetings and priced them $2.00 lower than the competition.  My problem is that I have a crappy form for submitting information to me and then the person has to visit paypal and manually pay me once more.  Once I finished it I thought it was crap and had lost interest.   Well on the internet nothting truely dies and to this day I get an order or two every couple months.  I really should find a way to improve this business and do something with it because when they do order typically it’s 2-4 units at a time.  If I can improve the site and payment process it then might be worth steering traffic to the site with Google Adwords but with other projects, and a day job not much time to work on this.Â

I attended a great real estate investing seminar this evening called Tennants, How To Get Them In And How To Get Them Out.  This was put on by the Investment Property Guys who are a group of real estate professionals who put on these seminars.  I liked this one because it was not the usual why to buy real estate type of seminar, this was for folks who have property and may want some information and feedback on how to advertise, screen and sometimes evict tennants.  The information presented was great but what I took way from it was that out of five types of advertising each landlord will find some work better than others depending on their properties and clientele.  For example.  Take Craigslist, StarTribune, Signs, Referrals, and Rent.com one investor who rents single family homes in the suburbs likes Rent.Com.  One who rents inner city houses and apartments likes a good quality For Rent sign.  Myself renting in blue collar suburban neighborhoods, I hate Rent.Com but LOVE Craigslist for advertising rentals.  Just goes to show one size doesn’t fit all in the world of landlording.  One of the presenters Scott Ficek has a great real estate investing blog well worth checking out.  Other presenters included Erik Ostigard, and I believe Brian Peterson.  If your into property management these investing 201 seminars might be something you would want to check out, even if it’s just to network with other landlords to compare notes etc.

If you are experiencing slow or unstable performance using Word 2007 check out the add-ins.  It’s very likley that a 3rd party add-in is causing slow Word performance or sometimes causes Word 2007 to become unstable.  To check out your Word 2007 Add-in’s click the Office Button.  Click Word Options and click Add-Ins and then highlight the addin you want to disable and click the Go button making sure that COM Add-ins are selected.  Simply uncheck any COM add-ins and click ok and see if your Word 2007 performance has improved.  We found that OrgPlus 7 by Human Concepts caused Word to become slow and unstable until we disabled the OrgPlus 7 add-in.  Snagit also has an add-in but i’ve not tied this to any Word 2007 problems.

I honestly don’t know why I EVER shop at Menards.  It always turns into a problem or hassle.  Unfortuately my latest attempt was no more pleasant than normal but this time i’m steaming.  My wife and I visited the Elk River Menards on 6/18 and discovered that as usual they were out of the item we needed.  It was a copper solar powered deck post light set.  The employee told me their Maplewood store 45 miles away had 16 units and most other stores around Minneapolis were out.  I called the Maplewood Menards and prepaid for three units and told them i’d pick them up Monday.  Today I travelled 45 miles one way, sat through single lane construction on my lunch hour to get to Maplewood to buy these lights.  I get to the lighting department and they pulled white not copper.  Of course now they are out of Copper.  Ok now my time and about $10 in gas have been wasted but it doesn’t end there.  THey can’t just refund me there they need to walk me to customer service where they literally have a line of people out the front door waiting to return stuff to Menards.  We wait in line for 20 minutes and finally I get to the counter.  The lady instead of crediting my credit card CHARGES me for the three white lights.  I go back after realizing this and she’s like I thought you wanted the white since we were out of Copper.  I’ll be amazed if I don’t see two Menards charges on my credit card after all this.  So not only am I out my items, I now have to watch my credit card like a hawk and drive 45 miles back home without my lights.  Thanks Menards, you suck and i’ll be doing my damndest to never shop any of your stores again.

When using the F5 Firepass SSL VPN you click the link to enable the Firepass VPN and it sits on connecting for a bit.  Then Firepass produces the error Couldn’t Open Proxy Server and the VPN does not enable.  I did not yet find out why this happens but a reboot of the PC seems to cause the error Couldn’t Open Proxy Server to stop appearing and the VPN now works.

When you click the link to make the Firepass VPN you may see an error Network Connection Not Found.  If you see this error check to make sure that BOTH the Telephony service and Remote Access Connection Manager services are running.  In most cases when seeing the Network Connection Not Found error with the Firepass VPN client you’ll find one or both services are not running.  Both of these services are required by the F5 Firepass SSL VPN.

Trying to use Firefox 3 with Firepass and so far no luck.  Despite my PC being compliant with the Host Integrity Checker settings, I can only logon to Firepass with IE or Firefox 2 but not Firefox 3 it says what you see below.  Seems to be a problem installing the add-in even if I choose allow it doesn’t work.

Logon denied

Your device does not comply to current client security policies.

You are attempting to connect using a Windows OS system which has FAILED the HIC.

To open a new session, please click here

I manually downloaded and unzipped the plugin to the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins restarted Firefox 3

Now it doesn’t offer to install the plug in but just spins on the checking client and never returns.  Hopefully a patch for Firepass is coming.

If after upgrading to Office 2007 you find that using Outlook 2007 you cannot forward messages as attachments you might want to check for Google Desktop Search on the PC.  If you cannot forward messages as attachments in Outlook 2007 you need to either remove Google Desktop Search or visit Google to obtain a newer version of the software.  Either solution should restore the ability to forward messages as attachments in Outlook 2007.