Category Archives: Technology

Oh Say Can You See?

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Last time I needed contact lenses I went to the optometrist that has a little office next to Sam’s Club and got an exam for $70 and hand carried the contacts prescription to the Optical department at Sam’s. That was the first rude surprise. They don’t stock the lenses and would have to order them for me. It took about a week to get in and then I had to drive down to the Sam’s Club for a second trip to pick them up.

So I used them up and went down to Sam’s Club to get a refill on the contacts, figuring it would take another week to order the refill and I could deal with that. But no. Come to find out the prescription for contact lenses only last for 6 months and my prescription had expired. so now I need another exam for $70 before I can order the lenses and then I wait a week for them to come in and then I make another trip. You know what? There’s got to be a better way.

Saving on Printers, Ink and Toner

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My home office has my desktop PC and two printers hooked up to it. The first printer is a little HP color inkjet printer that does a decent job on photos and anything that has to be color. But the real workhorse in my office is an HP monochorome laserjet that prints only black and white papers and man, does it print them fast and cheap.

I have to print out reports every night of the week except Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that’s a lot of printing. The color printer would take up to three hours to print the reports and since they are just black and white it occurred to me that I should look into get a monochrome printer that is faster. The fast color printers are just too expensive for my home office budget. So I found the HP laserjet and discovered a little bonus – the laser toner cartridge lasts 6 times longer than the inkjet cartridges.

The inkjets were running out every week of one color or another, especially the black cartridge. I could easily go through two black cartridges each week. But the laserjet toner cartridge lasts about one month. Of course the price difference is huge. You can buy inkjets for $20-$30 at the discount stores but the laser runs $80. But the yield is much greater than the increased cost, so I’m saving a lot of money and time with the laser.

Trying to pinch my pennies even further, I decided to check out the generic cartridges and also getting refilled or recycled cartridges. If I know I can recycle something I feel guilty tossing it into the trash and not recycling. There’s been so much buzz about recycling printer cartridges that I knew I had to start doing that. So I surfed the internet and found a cool site called Inkjet Deals. They have information refilling both inkjet cartridges and laser toner cartridges for my HP laserjet and all the top brands of printers.

I like the sectio on their site that is a resource center with informational articles. After I read the one about “Generic and Remanufactured Cartridges,” I knew right then that I must start recycling my cartridges and also spread the word so everyone else will do that, too.

Another article they have that helped me with the penny pinching mode is called, “Seven Tips for Saving Ink.” Now some of those tips might be obvious to you, but I hadn’t thought of them until this article pointed them out.

I’m also not sure that I’m going to keep my HP color inkjet. After reading this site and learning more about printers, I might be better off buying a different brand for the photos I want to print. I’m seriously thinking about shopping around for the right site to buy Epson color printers online for less money than the local discount stores and getting a better quality photo print for my collection.

Gas Prices Across the U. S.

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Found a very cool internet tool on Gas Buddy that shows a map of the entire U.S. broken down into counties and color coded to show the current cost of gas in each county. It is amazing to see the huge disparity in the cost of gas, with the highest costs always seeming to be in California and along the west coast, including Washington, Oregon, Nevada and then over to New York on the east coast, and surprisingly, Maine is very high, too.

At the moment the three cheapest states include Missouri, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

There is also a map that show the cost of gas across Canada.

Check out the U. S. National Gas Temperature map for yourself – isn’t it cool?

Comparing Notes

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Talking with another District Manager last night we were comparing notes on how our out of pocket expenses have been increasing the past few months. With our contract renewals right around the corner, we are looking hard at how much money our current rate really nets so we can arm ourselves with information for our next contract negotiations.

One of my biggest expenses is gasoline, as I live exactly 22 miles from the office and there’s no way to shave that expense. I’m not moving out of this house – I love it here – and I’m not able to use a smaller vehicle and get the same same payload.

My next big expense is all the paperwork and all the route sheets, invoices and payroll information that I have to print on paper every week. We go through a case of printer/copier paper every week. Tommy says he buys his paper one or two packs at a time for $2.50 per pack. I told him that a case of 10 is only $21.0, so he can save a little that way.

I bought a low end HP laser printer that goes through one laser cartridge every 2-3 weeks. Tommy is using the Lexmark printer that came with his Dell computer system that he bought online last year. It uses the little inkjet cartridges and he goes through those like string through a duck.

I told him to try using the refilled inkjet cartridges – there’s a lot of money to be saved by recycling your empty inkjet cartridges and buying refilled cartridges. The refilled HP cartridges that I buy cost 40% less than the brand new ones. I’ve used them for 2 years now with no problems at all and I’ve saved a lot of money. Tommy says he had thought of that but was concerned that the refilled inkjets might hurt his printer. I had to laugh – he is so gullible if he believes that he has to buy new inkjets!

Shopping for Bargains

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While at shopping today I was paying a lot of attention to the prices and stocking up on things that were either on sale or at a good discount for buying in bulk. We’ve gotten a little spoiled these past couple of years by making good money and spending rather freely. Now, the economy is going in the tank – pun intended with the cost of gasoline at $4.01 a gallon now – and we need to cut back on the spending.

One way to make the dollar go farther is to use coupons and plan your shopping around those kinds of bargains. The wife has an online coupon site that she always checks before buying big ticket items and now we check it before going out shopping for all our purchases.

For example, we used to go to one of the local discount eyeglasses stores with the $39 vision exams and the two for one price on eyeglasses. But the wife wanted to go back to contact lenses, so we decided to price shop on that before getting pressured into buying them from the optometrist. We found good prices on the internet and with the discounts on the coupon site we can save a lot of money. With the new prescription we can order Acuvue and Freshlook lenses at cheap prices online and have a 6 month supply delivered to our house.

We had to buy a wedding present for one of my employee’s getting married next month, so we found coupons for linens and housewares and spent about an hour browsing the store for a gift. To wrap up all our gift giving duties for the summer we also took advantage of discount online shopping for handbags, wallets, backpacks and luggage.

With summer here and mosquitos becoming a problem each evening, we decided to stock up on heartworm medicine for the dogs and found some great deals online for pet meds instead of buying them for full price from the veterinarian. Still have to get the rabies shot from the vet, but we don’t have to pay full price for the Heartguard anymore.

While at the mall I saw some cool NHL gear at the Reebok store. But instead of paying full retail price at the mall, I went online at the coupon site and found some great discount deals on Reebok for both online orders and a coupon if you want to go back to their retail store. But since I can order online and have it delivered with free shipping, it doesn’t make sense to spend the gas money to go to the mall and fight through all the crowds anymore. I would rather just order from home and have it delivered, then spend the extra time and money on other things.