Month Expenses
There are many factors to consider before I can give you an estimate on monthly expenses. Some of the factors to think about are:
- Do you want to stay in your own room or share a room with someone
- Will you be staying in the heart of the city (Boston, Georgia, etc.) or will be staying in suburbs. It will always be expensive to stay in a metro city
- Cooking at home or eating out daily
Monthly expenses can be categorized as follows:
- Rent
- Cable
- Internet
- Cellphone
- Food – grocery, restaurants, cafeteria
- Laundry
- Car (if you do get one)
- Electricity
Here is an estimate of expenses based on renting an apartment in a suburb of Boston city and sharing a room with someone in a 1 bedroom apartment:
Rent: $1100 to $1300 (including heat and hot water)
Cable/Internet: $100
Cellphone: $40
Electricity: $60
Laundry: $20
Food: $200
Interesting use of Personas
Here are a few sites where they define the user segments (Personas) which helps a user pick a profile:
Free alternatives to paid software
Here is link to a list of free applications that can be used instead of the proprietary ones:
Audacity – A free tool for editing music
1. Download Audacity and install it
2. Download and install the LAME compression library first. Download the lame_enc.dll file here and put it somewhere permanent on your hard drive. (this step is required if you want to export to MP3)
3. From Audacity’s Edit menu, choose Preferences. On the File Formats tab, under “MP3 Export Setup,” hit the Find Library button and browse to the dll you just downloaded, as shown (click to enlarge.)
Design from IBM
Resources on design concepts and initial experience for designing hardward, software, etc.
