Ryan Morlok’s Blog

No, not of being married (I’m coming up on three years of that). Today marked the first anniversary of me starting full time employment. One down, 39 more to go…

Today was my six month anniversery.  Not of being married (already passed two years of that), but rather of working full time.  Assuming I work 40 years, that means I’m 1/80th of the way there.  To correlate that to the previous phase of my life (education — preschool through masters), I’ve just finished the first quarter of my first year of preschool…if preschool were to have quarters. *sigh*

I think I’ve sent this around to people via email, but never blogged it.  Here is a version of the first Star Wars movie, done entirely in character art.  This project deserves some props if for nothing else than the sheer amount of effort.  Or insanity.

(what reminded me of this was this digg article about the original Star Wars trilogy done in animated gif)

A couple weekends ago Katy and I attended our first Schadeweiler camping trip. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tradition, it’s an annual camping trip put on by my friends from high school (Matt SCHADEr & Brian schuWEILER, get it?). We had a lot of fun. Did some fishing, water sports and cooking out. I was able to get out on water skis for my normal 1 time per year. Some selected pictures from my collection are below, or for near-professional quality, see Marshall’s pictures.

Katy has been suffering from a bit of age discrimination lately.  It started early this week when she went to purchase The Chronicles of Riddick on DVD from Walmart.  When she got up the checkout, the clerk asked to see her ID.  The movie is rated R, so you have to be 17 to buy it, but Katy is 23, so she just stared at him blankly and asked “Are you serious?”  But sure enough, before he would let her buy the DVD, she had to show her driver’s license.

The second incident came later this week when Katy answered the door for a person selling cleaning supplies.  The first thing he asked was “Is your mom home?”  Katy can at least be thankful that she has a few years to go before she gets to that age where she wishes she was younger.

Here is an interesting diagram that recently showed up on digg that illustrates the relationships between the various disciplines of science.  It was created by analyzing the references of some 800,000 scientific papers to determine which disciplines tended to interact with others.

Flying around the earth at supespeed was the way to go…

I’ve taken a couple month hiatus from blogging. Partly because I’ve been really busy with big changes in my life, partly because I didn’t want to push things to the internet before they were finalized, and partly because I’m just lazy. Regardless of why I’ve been gone, I’ve returned to continue subtracting from the global body of knowledge on the internet.

In the last couple months several big things have happened:

1. I’ve moved back to Minnesota
2. I’ve started a new job
3. I’ve bought a house
4. We’ve bought a new dog for my parents

That last one may seem less substantial than the rest, but Wilbur is a great dog, and my mom has been wanted one since our last dog, Minnie, died a couple years ago.

Anyway, Katy and I moved back to Minnesota in mid-April. Katy did so a week earlier than me because her new job at Land O Lakes started before mine did. She started as a contractor there, but has since moved into a full time position.

I began working at EmergingSoft. It’s a great, small software company that makes a product called MeetingPlanner. It’s a tool that’s used to manage the schedules for meeting rooms and equipment (LCD projectors, VCRs, etc..). It really stands out from the competition in that has exceptional integration with Microsoft Outlook. My job is somewhere between a business analyst and a software engineer, so my work has been a nice variety of technical and non-technical tasks.

Finally, Katy and I have purchased a house in Inver Grove Heights.  Saying that might be slightly premature, as we don’t close on the place until Wednesday, but all the details are pretty much wrapped up.  A few pictures of the new residence can be viewed here.

Well, that brings me up-to-date on all the big things.  Over the next few weeks I’m sure I’ll continue my usual trickle of random tech stuff and mildly entertaining YouTube videos.

I wonder if anyone has done a study regarding the total dollar sales per customer based on the price of complementary objects in vending machines.  I ask this because the vending machine down stairs sells gum for $0.55.  Now if we can overlook the fact that you’re totally getting screwed by that price to begin with (at Sam’s it comes to under $0.25 per pack) you’ll notice something curious.  Assuming that I pay with a dollar bill, I will be left with $0.45 in change.  That’s less than the cost of the smallest item in the machine.  If I’m going to make another purchase in the machine, I have to break another dollar bill.

Everyone is familiar with the idea of keeping prices just below the next big cutoff value.  Psychologically, we perceive things as cheaper because we tend to forget about the digits that aren’t in the most significant place.  That’s why you see prices for $9,999.95 instead of of $10,000.00.  Five cents doesn’t really change the price, but it can change our perception when we look at it.

Anyway, to get back on topic, breaking a dollar is a significant cutoff.  That’s a major purchase decision.  Getting rid of the change in my pocket isn’t.  So if the price of gum was, say $0.50 instead of $0.55, I bet I’d be a lot more likely to buy $1.00 of stuff in the vending machine instead of $0.55.  Kind of makes it silly for the vending machine companies to be greedy for that last $0.05.

First they start an AHA hockey team…then they get custom jerseys…finally they move on to merchandising…

I just wish they could have a found a more attractive model.