Last week, I wrote about the dismal odds you face when trying to play the lottery. That article included a lottery simulator built by the GRS technical elves, a widget inspired by the lottery simulator over at Cockeyed.
I’ve mentioned Cockeyed several times over the years. It’s awesome. Cockeyed is the home of Rob Cockerham and his crazy projects and pranks. It’s the sort of site you can spend hours exploring — and still go back for more.
Since Rob was a good sport for letting us borrow his lottery simulator idea, I decided to dedicate this edition of Spare Change exclusively to his site. That’s easy to do, too, because over the years, he’s produced plenty of personal-finance related material — and a lot of it’s funny!
For instance, Cockeyed has an ongoing series of “How Much is Inside?” reports, in which Rob tries to figure out how much air is inside Cheetos and how many feet of celery stalk can you fill with one jar of peanut butter. Some of these involve money:
- How much do sandwiches cost? — In which Rob tries to see how much money he saves by bringing his lunch from home.
- How big is a million dollars worth of $100 bills? — In which Rob and his friends try to figure out how much space a million dollars would take up.
- How much is inside a shopping cart? — In which Rob learns how much you can earn from redeeming a shopping cart filled with aluminum cans.
- How many cups of beer can you get out of a keg? — Okay, so this one’s not really money related. But haven’t you always wanted to know?
Or maybe you’d care to browse Cockeyed’s library of how-to guides. Some of these are goofy, but some are actually useful. Here are some examples:
- How to fix a broken fence
- How to paint a room
- How to change your brake pads
- How to fight a speeding ticket in court
Rob’s actually pretty handy. He seems to do a lot of his own home repairs, but he also likes to make stuff — especially costumes. (As a comic nerd, I’m particularly fond of his Dr. Octopus costume. )
I know that’s a lot of links already, but I’ve saved the best for last. Here are my favorite money-related stories from over the years at Cockeyed:
- Want to save gas? Drive slow! In which Rob conducts an experiment to see if reducing his driving speed actually saves money. And it does. After I bought my Mini, I conducted a similar experiment with similar results. (I also found that the biggest drag on my gas dollar was using my brakes. By being smart about how I used my brakes, my gas mileage soared!)
- Eating out vs. Eating in. Rob spent a month only eating home-made food. Then he spent a month only eating in restaurants. Eating at home, he spent $11.55 per day ($8.65 without alcohol). Eating out, he spent $20.08 per day. The biggest surprise, he said, was how much longer it takes to eat in restaurants than it does to make your own food.
- Costco vs. Sam’s Club: Warehouse store price comparison (see also: Wal-mart vs. Target)
- Why buying from Rent-A-Center is like using the worst credit card ever
- The torn-up credit card application — After I first wrote about this article in 2006, I promptly went out and bought a paper shredder. Ever since, I shred anything sensitive.
- How pyramid schemes work
- On a related note, how a Craigslist vehicle scam works
- Your friend didn’t get mugged in London — Analyzing an e-mail money scam.
- Why Cash4Gold is a rip-off — I wish my mother had seen this article before trying to sell her stuff to Cash4Gold…
- Behind the scenes of the Herbalife work-from-home scheme
- How to return your Kirby vacuum cleaner and cancel the sales contract. (I know from experience that this advice applies to most (all?) door-to-door sales contracts.)
Last of all, here’s a recent winner. Rob won $1,000 in a costume contest — only he didn’t win $1,000 in cash. He won $1,000 in slot play at a local casino. So, he decided to make a project out of it. He documented how he played $1,000 on a slot machine — and how he managed to turn that into $1,534.
That should be enough Cockeyed for anyone. If you’re like me, you’ll be obsessed with reading Rob’s site now and won’t be able to get anything done. Sorry if I spoiled anybody’s work day…
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Very neat site! I had totally read the credit card application one before years ago (and think about it often when I check the mail) but had never poked around the rest of the site.
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Why is it that I never thought about most of these things, and yet found them so darn interesting once I started reading?
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this is a good post. Lots of great links.
when I used your lottery simulator, “inspired by” the one at Cockeyed, my thoughts were “this is cool” and “this is _exactly_ like the one at Cockeyed. why would they go to the trouble of making the same thing over again? they basically ripped it off.”
and now, soon after, here is a very, very detailed and positive article about how great Cockeyed is and all the stuff over there.
hypothesis: Cockeyed complained that GRS had duplicated their tool, which probably brings some traffic/links, so GRS apologized and offered to write a post dedicated to Cockeyed and send some more traffic their way.
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Let me shed some light on the mystery!
* I’ve been a huge fan of Cockeyed for nearly a decade, and have linked to it many times in the past.
* We built our own lottery simulator because there was no way to embed the one from Cockeyed.
* I provided ample credit (including links) to Cockeyed, which seemed fair since we weren’t doing anything illegal.
* HOWEVER, after posting the article last week, I realized I should have contacted Rob to let him know what I planned to do. I felt like an ass for not doing so.
* I wrote to Rob. At first, he was cranky. Then not so much. We exchanged a few e-mails, and agreed that it might be interesting to work together in the future. Rob didn’t ask me to do anything, though.
In the end, though, as you surmise, I thought I’d pay penance by highlighting Cockeyed in an afternoon links post. It was easy to do, too! Rob has even more great personal finance articles than I remembered.
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thank you for sharing the back story.
by the way, as a result of this post I have been reading some Cockeyed articles and very much enjoying them and the writing style.
cheers.
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I don’t actually shred credit card offers – I take all their paperwork, write “void” in all the spaces, write “not interested, take me off your list” in big letters elsewhere and mail it back to them in their prepaid envelope. The US Post Office gets their dime and I get off the marketing list.
Well, sometimes it takes a few offers, but I hardly get any direct marketing junk mail after starting to do this.
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The London friend mugging scam happened to me.
I was pretty sure it was a scam because of the poor grammar, but my aunt and uncle were actually in London at the time.
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The filter at work won’t let me view any of those sites because of the naughty word in the title…no Cockeyed for me til I get home.
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This guy is awesome. I want to buy him lunch.
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The series about the work from home/herbalife signs is awesome. I’m hooked.
And good for you J.D. for owning the fact that you goofed, apologizing to Rob and doing something to make ammends.
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Damn you! I was trying to get work done today. I’ve already spent *way* too much time on that site now.
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I love this: “Here are photos of the 141 beers filled by the keg, in order. I asked people to indicate what number beer they were enjoying with a show of fingers. [DISPLAY OF 141 PHOTOS] Only 26% of the beer was consumed by women, so they are underrepresented in this set of photos. Some women avoid beer because of the calories, and at 25,810 calories per keg, who can blame them?”
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I love Cockeyed! I found the site a few years ago (maybe from you) and read just about every article on it. I see there are more now! I love the “science club” and “how much is inside?” articles.
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This leaves me wondering what is and is not okay to shred… especially as USPS and co. like to leave stickers and marker with my address all over my packages, it’s hard to get the label off sometimes and I don’t want to hoard every box that ever enters my home.
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Sorry, but the “how to paint a room” advice is very amateurish. You must use painter’s tape if you want a professional look. It’s a huge pain in the ass, but you’ve got to do it if you want a clean and crisp paint job. I winced at some of his photos.
(Believe me, I HATE the prep work, including taping. But if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right…yes, that’s my Dad talking…)
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Small typo in the following line J.D.
‘By being smart about how I used my breaks, my gas mileage soared!)’
Unless you mean breaks/rests – in that case, cheerfully retracted
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Blark! Me and my homonyms! You folks have no idea how many of these stupid errors don’t see print — because I actually catch them. So many of my homonym mistakes do see print that you probably don’t believe I ever catch any of them.
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I’d never heard of Cockeyed, but it looks like it’s a great site! Thanks for letting us in!
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What a great website! Now I know how much my daily homemade PB&J sammich is costing me – $.53. I’ve always wondered ….
Thanks JD!
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Thanks so much for all the links and the terrific and tempting link descriptions.
The comments are awesome! How did you screen your readers to only get the smart ones?
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He makes everyone fill out this application [PDF]: http://www.cockeyed.com/pranks/job_application/job_Application_2pages.pdf
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I went to read his site on Kirby vaccums because I was interested to see what he had to say.
I agree they are expensive – but my mother bought one when I was very young, and 20 years later that damn thing still runs and works well (sure its been serviced a couple of times). I will be surprised if my $400 plastic dyson lasts for 5 years, so maybe $1200 on a vaccum that lasts your adult lifetime isn’t so bad?
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omg cockeyed!!!! I used to read the “how much is inside” posts a lifetime ago (it feels). The ones I remember are chewing gum, easy cheese, toothpaste.. and yep, they’re a decade+ old. Thanks for the links, I’ll be sure to explore a LOT to see what I’ve been missing.
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