Breaking Sleep

I have been working on setting up the refurbished Ipad 2 to be used for running club transactions at the store.  Part of that has been establishing a dedicated Square account that is connected to the club bank account.  It will be used to allow people to pay with a credit card, even if they are handing over a paper application for a race.  Up until now if someone was paying for a race they had to use a check or cash.

Square is a great little package.  The fees are cheap, only 2.75% of the transaction if you swipe a card using their reader or 3.5% +15 cents if you punch in card information manually.  The Iphone/Ipad app allows you to create a functional, simple yet powerful point of sale system with no up front costs (minus the Ipad).    I am excited to see how we integrate it with our other club technology.

Speaking of technology, we are using some of it to help a local high school student runner.  Her mom sadly has developed cancer and has become unable to work, causing much hardship to this single parent family.  This girl contacted the club asking for us to help in some way if possible.

At first the idea was holding a race to help raise money but after some online brainstorming, someone suggested to make the club social run tonight a fundraiser where participants would be encouraged to donate to the cause. I took it a step further, suggesting an online venue to allow people far and wide to donate with their credit card.  I did this via our normal race registrar.

Response online has been great so far, much more than I expected.  It helped drive home that if you make giving easier for people, they are more likely to do so.  When we add in whatever we raise on site this evening it should add up to a nice shot in the arm for Elizabeth’s mom.  If you want to check out the donation page go here.

Yesterday in the mail I received the two new battery packs that were supposed to be for my flying wing that I smashed into the ground the day prior.

I am hoping I can still utilize them in my Sky Scooter, although that thing is pretty shaky n the air as is.  Oh well.

My plan last night was to watch the new Breaking Bad episode.  Unfortunately I was so damn sleepy I only got about a half hour into it before heavy eyelids took over.  I shut the Xbox off and fell asleep, figuring I would try to finish it tonight.

Well I woke up for some reason this morning early, a little after 4AM.  I got the bright idea to finish off the episode.  Well although it was a good idea, AMC did not make it easy on me.

The way the Xfinity streaming app works on the 360, it doesn’t always save your spot when you exit a show and go back to it later, unlike the HBO and Netflix app that do this very well.  Ok so I relaunch the show and figure I will just fast forward to the half hour mark and resume.  Wrong.

Certain channels don’t like the idea of letting you fast forward through the show and the embedded commercials.  They have the ability to disable fast forwarding altogether.  Well evidently AMC follows this practice.  So in order to get to where I stopped I just had to let the show play along at regular speed.

I didn’t just sit there and Dufner it, I used the time to go out and prepare my normal breakfast of egg beaters, peanut butter wheat toast and OJ.  By the time I brought the plate back to the bedroom to eat we were getting to the point of the show where I was nodding off last night so it worked out well.

The episode was epic, although I would expect nothing less.  I am still planning to watch all 8 episodes leading up to this point just to get everything fresh in my head.  I have 4 of them under my belt so far.