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Value of Sweat Capital Calculator

May 16th, 2012
by M.E.B..
No comments yet. 34 views

One way to think about income you earn from projects like blogs is as the interest earned on ‘sweat capital’. Assuming that you have an estimate of your net income per day on a given ‘sweat asset’ like a website, what is the value of the underlying sweat capital assuming a given return on investment (ROI)? I quickly created the following calculator to help figure this out.

If you receive $2.50 net per day, your sweat capital is worth $22812.50 assuming a ROI of 0.04 per year.

Net Per Day (e.g., 2.5):

ROI (e.g., 0.04):

At the end of the day, this calculator is simply a way to frame your investment into a project like a blog in terms of money. There are other benefits to creating ‘sweat assets’. This brings us to our…

QUESTION: What kind of value do you receive from the ‘sweat assets’ you’ve created? Please share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

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Posted in: calulator, investing, tools, Uncategorized, wealth.
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Drupal Development – Links and Resources

May 8th, 2012
by M.E.B..
No comments yet. 59 views

Drupal (Drupal.org) is an open source content management platform. Recently, I’ve had to reacquaint myself with Drupal website development for several projects. Below is a list of resources that I’ve found helpful related to Drupal website development.

(N.B.: I will add to this list as I come across other useful links and resources.)

General Drupal Development

Drupal Modules to Help Developers

  • Devel – “A suite of modules containing fun for module developers and themers …”
  • Coder Review (part of the Coder project): “[...] utilizes regular expressions to review source code files for code that 1) needs to change due to Drupal API changes and 2) does not satisfy Drupal coding standards.”

Drupal Website Case Studies

You can view my Drupal User Profile (M.E.B.) on the Drupal.org website.

QUESTION: What are some of your favorite Drupal links or resources and why? Please share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

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Posted in: Drupal, links, programming, resources, Uncategorized.
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Quote: Celine Dion on Competition

Apr 26th, 2012
by M.E.B..
No comments yet. 124 views

I came across the following quote on competition attributed to Canadian singer Celine Dion:

“I’m not in competition with anybody but myself. My goal is to beat my last performance.”
~ Celine Dion

Why I like Celine Dion’s take on competition:
  1. You will always be your toughest competition.
  2. Should you find yourself as “the best” at something, you will still have someone to compete against. Hence, you will still have the opportunity to grow and advance.
  3. The baseline on which you compete against yourself is your last performance, not necessarily your all-time best performance. This takes into account the inevitable unplanned setbacks in life. The aim, is for you to do your best whatever your current situation.

QUESTION: What are your thoughts on Celine Dion’s take on competition? Please share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

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Posted in: favourites, life quotes, positive quotes, psychology quotes, quotes, thinking quotes, Uncategorized, work quotes.
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Cassette Tape Counter to Time Utility

Apr 10th, 2012
by M.E.B..
No comments yet. 236 views

The purpose of this utility is to convert cassette tape counter numbers to time elapsed. For example, you may have an index of an audio cassette that uses tape counters and after converting the audio tape to a digital format, would like to rewrite the index using time.

Unfortunately, tape counters have always been unreliable & vary tremendously from cassette player to cassette player. As a result, this utility can only provide approximations. Additionally, it depends on two data points for the given cassette & player. Even among a given cassette design & a given player model, there is a lot of variation. Regardless, it’s hoped that this tool will be useful for some people.

Here, we employ the model developed in this paper:

Arnold J. Insel: “Cassette Tape: Predicting Recording Time,” The UMAP Journal, Vol. V, No. 2, 1984, pp. 200–214.

To get it to work, you will need to supply two readings from the tape and tape counter. You can do this by popping the tape into a cassette player with a counter and then noting the elapsed time (in minutes) and the counter number (all starting from 0 on the tape and 000 on the tape counter).

An example from Insel’s paper, we have two data points for a cassette and player he owned:

  • The counter reads 60 at 2 minutes
  • The counter reads 369 at 15 minutes

If you put these into the calculator

(n1,T1) = (60, 2)
(n2, T2) = (369, 15)

…and wonder how much time will have elapsed when the counter reads 556, you will ll get an answer of T = 25 minutes. This is the time one finds from the Insel’s empirical table of data.

Data Points:

(n_{1}, T_{1}) = (
,
)

(n_{2}, T_{2}) = (
,
)

n (Tape Counter Number) =

A = \frac{T_{2}/n_{2} - T_{1}/n_{1}}{n_{2} - n_{1}} = [There was a problem: Please check that there are proper values for your data points.]
B = T_{2}/n_{2} - An_{2} = [There was a problem: Please check that there are proper values for your data points and that parameter A was calculated.]
T = An^{2} + Bn = [There was a problem: Please check the parameters A and B were calculated and the value of the Counter Number.] min.

The latest version of this calculator can be found on the GitHub project code repository for the Tape Counter to Time Utility. If you would like to add the utility to your website, you can hire me to help you add it to your site.

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Posted in: calulator, electronics, tools, Uncategorized.
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Quote: Voltaire on Appreciation

Apr 10th, 2012
by M.E.B..
No comments yet. 181 views

Below is a thoughtful quote attributed to François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), a “French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher”:1

“Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”

If you have an exact citation for this quote, please share in the comments section of this post.

References
  1. Voltaire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire Accessed April 10, 2012.

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Leo Tolstoy on Changing Humanity

Mar 28th, 2012
by M.E.B..
No comments yet. 219 views

The following is a powerful quote about change attributed to Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910):

“Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”
~ Leo Tolstoy

If you have an exact citation for this quote, please share in the comments section of this post.

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Posted in: life quotes, quotes, thinking quotes, Uncategorized.
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Quote: Marcel Proust on the Real Voyage of Discovery

Mar 27th, 2012
by M.E.B..
No comments yet. 188 views

The following nice quote is attributed to French novelist, critic, and essayist Marcel Proust (1871-1922):

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
~ Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

If you have an exact citation for this quote, please share in the comments section of this post. Thank you!

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Posted in: imagination quotes, learning quotes, life quotes, psychology quotes, quotes, thinking quotes, Uncategorized.
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