Originally posted by Chairboy
I'm in the process of adopting the 'never lend a book' tradition. If I have a book I want someone else to read, I give it to them. If it's a particularily expensive book, like a hardback or something, I try to find a used copy on amazon.com to give to them.
books I really enjoy and want to keep I'll buy in hardbound and loan paperbacks.
Originally posted by LePaul
One rule I've made is I never never lend anyone a video, be it DVD or VHS unless I'm prepared to write it off completely. I've had friends pop over, see the DVD stack and plead to borrow it...and a year later, Im still waiting to get those movies back.
Another...never offer an old PC to a friend. Throw it away or prepare to be free tech support forever.
I never lend the original of DVD's, or music CD's and rarely play them myself. when I get a new CD or DVD, I rip the music onto the hard-drive and put it on CD-r in either audio or mp3 format when those get beat up, lost or stolen I just go burn another.
same thing with DVD's. I'll copy them the first night and just put the original away. DVD-shrink reduce them to a bit more than 40% of original size without any loss of quality that my eye's and ears can detect.
it's something I started back in highschool, when I'd always buy the LP even though I listened to most of my music on the cars tape-deck. when the tape gets worn or stretched (or my cheapassed deck ate it) I'd toss it and buy another dozen blank tapes. it left me with a pristine music collection, with albums I'd owned for 6 or 7 years that had only been played 2 or 3 times. that all ended of course shortly after I was married. I think I might still have 1 or 2 pieces of vinyl left without a scratch on them. nothing to spin them on though.
one of my favorite traditions/tactics is when you get the 'friend of a friend' who starts coming around that you just get that vibe that they are a POS but they haven't yet done anything that would justify you saying anything against them (for me it was mostly people my little brother met or the new boyfriend of one of the wifes friends). I would just look for an opportunity to loan them $10 or if they where particularly annoying $20. if you were wrong about them then it's 'no harm done' and you were the nice guy who loaned them a couple bucks. but for me, more often than not, my impressions are reliable. so you loan them the cash and then they hide from you and don't go to the places you hang out because they don't want to pay the money.
well worth the investment. thinking back to some of the people I've used this with, it's likely the best money I've ever spent.
one of our families holiday traditions (the wife and I not the extended family) is to play "Alice's Restaurant" while working on Thanksgiving dinner.
