The conversion rate between Time (t) and Money (m)

So the motorcycle safety classes have two ways to pay: a subsidized one ($125, holders of WA drivers licenses only, much harder to find an opening in the classes), and an unsubsidized one ($225, no residency restrictions, much easier to score a chair). I was signed up for a subsidized class at the end of October.

Today, I called to try and snag a much earlier subsidized opening I'd seen on their web app, but no dice -- someone had gotten there within the last hour and snagged it first. So I paid them another hundred bucks to get in on Labor Day Weekend.

$100 to move a limiter on my plans up by two months. I'm still thinking over that, and it still sounds like a fairly good deal. What have you paid lately to buy more time?

Announcing lj2ics

If you use Google Calendars, Apple's iCal, or presumably any weird devices like a Treo or a Blackberry, you can import any calendar information that someone's bothered to format as an .ics file. There's a service that'll do this with your Facebook friends' birthdays, which I've found quite useful, and I thought it'd be nice to get my LJ friends that way so I could have all the birthdays I care about in the same place.

No such luck. Someone suggested this a long time ago, but no progress was made. So I rolled my own! lj2ics is now available at the link and free to use.

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The only problem is that it requires ruby, rubygems, and the icalendar and hpricot gems, and I don't expect a whole lot of you have all that. So check out the next post if you want a hand with that...

LJ Birthdays Conversion Service

I'm screening all comments to this entry, so comment without fear! If you want your LJ friends' birthdays in an .ics file (for use with Google Calendar, iCal, or whatever it is you use), leave a comment with your email address; I'll grab your http://www.livejournal.com/birthdays.bml file and email you the resulting .ics file.