Dan Grossman | 2007 June

Tuition is getting just a little ridicilous

June 29, 2007

Glad this is my last year as an undergrad at Drexel.

I need an accountant

June 28, 2007

I got some good news on my voice mail this morning – my tax audit is unofficially over. I haven’t mentioned it here before: The “Small Business Self Employed” division of the IRS audited the Schedule C of my 2005 tax return. It took about 2 months of mailing binders of documents back and [...]

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MaxMind minFraud detects fraud more reliably

June 25, 2007

A few months of testing and the verdict is in: MaxMind minFraud flags more transactions made with stolen credit cards as high risk than my own fraud scoring code. minFraud does a lot I can’t: Checking the bank BIN location against the billing address, the location of the customer’s phone number against the billing [...]

4

Reading list for the month

June 22, 2007

It’s time for me to buy a few new books. Currently in my cart at Amazon are Jeremy Wright’s Blog Marketing; as a long-time SitePoint forum member and relatively famous blogger, I’ve always wanted to see what he shared with his book. The 4-Hour Workweek sounds too good to pass up. I’ve seen Word [...]

2

A couple of pictures from Snoqualmie Falls

June 20, 2007

My team at Microsoft celebrated the end of the fiscal year with a trip to a lodge on Snoqualmie Falls. Three limos arrived at the office to pick us up in the morning for a drive through mountain scenery to the lodge on top of the falls. There, we had a 5-course brunch, followed [...]

7

Back from the Gates Estate

June 19, 2007

Bill has an amazing house. It’s built into the side of a hill, so it’s mostly underground. The weather was perfect for a BBQ on the shore of Lake Washington. I am so lucky to have had the chance to meet and talk with one of my idols in person. How could this job [...]

1

Snap.com Previews Get Smart

June 15, 2007

I’ve had Snap.com previews enabled on this blog for a while — it’s what makes a site preview pop up when you mouse over a link to an external site. I just ran across a link to this site on another blog with Snap and was surprised to see something very different appear when [...]

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Monetizing Free W3Counter Users

June 13, 2007

More and more users are signing up every day. Traffic is consistently higher than it’s ever been. Nobody’s upgrading their accounts. I can’t blame the 1% rule for freemium businesses here; that wasn’t far from the actual upgrade rate previously, but since the new release, I’m not seeing even 1%. I can likely conclude [...]

6

Another Badge at SitePoint

June 11, 2007

I recently made my 10,000th post at the SitePoint forums and soon after was asked to join the mentor team. Considering I already spend time at the site every day, it’s not much of a change; just a little more time spent in the Content For Your Site area participating and watching for [...]

4

Safari for Windows

June 11, 2007

It crashed the first time I ran it. It has its own UI; no Aero title bar, menus, buttons or scroll bars. I can’t close it by double clicking in the upper left corner of my screen. It’s too thick with its font antialiasing. But it runs on Windows, which means I don’t need [...]