Pete Dudchenko

Got an email recently about some more volunteer opportunities coming up. A couple months ago I blogged about working at a community center as a volunteer to help people with learning computers. So far I’ve only worked with one person a few times but its was a lot of fun and it seemed to help.

Recently, I was asked to help someone with college level math. I hadn’t actually expected to get opportunities outside of computer work but was glad to at least be asked. The only problem is that the last time I did college level math was back in college, and I’m talking about my sophomore year. Once I transferred out of an Engineering major, I had pretty much completed as much math as I would ever need for almost any other major (except for perhaps a Math major but I digress…). So unfortunately I couldn’t be of any help as I now struggle these days with just calculating tips at restaurants. Talk about “use it or lose it.”

Anyway it looks like a few more computer tutoring sessions are coming about including one tomorrow. It should be fun, as I’ll get to teach emailing basics and Instant Messaging. One piece of advice that I give out is that everyone should have at least two active email addresses. One for personal use, to email friends and family, and one for commercial use. The commercial use one is what I use when signing up for services, or newsletters and stuff that I really don’t care if I get or not. Usually when you sign up for something (online or not) you have to give a valid email address so they can send you a password or receipt or something else but the problem is that a lot of the times when you do that, they also send you a bunch of other emails that you don’t want (some let you opt out but then again they may give your info with other companies). Having this second email address allows you to keep the important emails (i.e. friends and family) separate from the spam and other junk mail. Perhaps not an “emailing basic” but still a useful tip.

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Couple of unrelated notes here…

I felt my second earthquake ever last night. It actually woke me up but I wasn’t sure if it was a quake or not. This morning when I turned on the TV I realized that it had in fact happened, and in my area, it registered as a 2.0.

Second, is anyone else a little freaked out by the ad campaign that Burger King is running? They’ve got a guy in a plastic head dressed up like a king that just suddenly appears in bed next to another guy sleeping. When he wakes up, the king offers him a breakfast sandwich and the guy thinks nothing of it. Random strangers dressed in royalty breaking into my place to offer me food just doesn’t work for me. In fact the costume itself would probably keep me up at night if I were still a kid. At least Chucky was no bigger than 3 feet tall. This guy looks to be about full size if not bigger.



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There’s a place just south of Torrey Pines in San Diego that people go for para-gliding and hang-gliding that I checked out this weekend. It was pretty cool to see it up close like that. I think its something I could get into it if I had the chance to try. Looks easy but I know that’s probably not the case.


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Went to the home opener for the Padres last night. They won in extra innings when the Pittsburg pitcher walked a guy home in the 12th.

The seats were great however my only complaint is the lack of beer vendors in the stadium. I’m talking about the ones that walk around and sell beer to people in their seats. Petco Park has received a number of complaints about concessions already and how long the lines are and I think this would be a reasonable solution to reduce the number of people in lines that aren’t buying food. Plus it reduces the need to get up and bother everyone in the same aisle as you and you miss less of the game. It works great at Wrigley so I don’t believe its logistically a bad idea but perhaps there are state or city laws prohibiting it.



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Not sure if its actually true or not but I’ve been hearing rumors that telemarketers will soon be getting lists of cell phone numbers that they will be able to start calling. Personally this is a double hit because now, not only are they interrupting me regardless of where I am, I am actually paying to hear their sales pitch by the minutes that they are taking up on my cell phone.

So I finally signed up for the national “Do Not Call” list, which is supposed to reduce the number of sales calls you get to only those companies you do business with. Up until this point I hadn’t signed up because in my opinion, I’d rather be on no lists then any, regardless of the intentions of the list. All it takes is one law change to allow those lists to be called again and suddenly the telemarketing companies have a ton of new numbers just waiting for them to be used.

I figure though that if this rumor is true I could be in trouble. I usually put down my cell phone number for when I sign up for things specifically because I didn’t want to get calls so it may be best for me to sign up.

BTW, you can sign up as well at:
https://www.donotcall.gov or call (888) 382-1222


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