« December 2004 | Main | March 2005 »

February 10, 2005

OneWord: Smudge

I work at a photo printing store now, which doesn’t mix very well with my hands, because they are oily pretty much all the time. It’s not that I don’t wash them or anything, I’m just a naturally oily-handed person, you see, and it’s a condition that we have to live with.

But back to the point, the problem is that when I handle the photos to put them in a little bag or something, I can easily get finger prints and smudges on them. We have special cotton gloves, but they are all too small because all of the other people that work here are small-handed women.

That is my story about the word Smudge.

OneWord

PayPal Fee Calculator

After starting a new job where I was hired to program an online photo uploading and e-commerce site, I figured it was time to learn to program in PHP. So I got a book and read it for a couple of weeks and then pieced the site together. I’m sure I made hundreds of mistakes, but I’m still not good enough to realize it yet.

But anyway, today I will tell you about a different site, that is much more simple, but was still a fun programming project for a beginner like me.

It’s called PayPal Fee Calculator and it can be used to tell you how much to charge someone thru PayPal to make sure that you get a certain amount.

For instance say you want to get $100 from someone. If you just charge them $100, you will actually only end up with $96.50 because PayPal takes out their fees first.

But, if you enter $100 into my site, it will tell you how much to charge in order to be left with $100 after PayPal’s fees are taken, which happens to be $103.29 in this case.

You can also ask how much will be taken out of a $100 transaction, which is where I got the $96.50 amount earlier.

Like I said it’s really simple and took less than a day to put together, but it was fun for a beginner programmer like me.

So bookmark it and use it the next time you need to send a PayPal money request to someone.

February 09, 2005

OneWord: Wires

My desk has a pretty huge pile of wires behind it, as do most computer geeks. You’ve got powercords to almost every device, monitor cables, mouse/keyboard cables, USB wires, USB hubs, external hard drives, the list goes on and on.

Pretty soon most of that stuff will be wireless though. I already have a wireless mouse, though it still requires a cradle to be plugged into the computer with a wire. Then you have the wireless keyboards, and now even wireless battery recharging.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the room behind my desk once everything is wireless though. Maybe I can rent it out as storage space or something.