Month: February 2007

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5% Cash Back on American Express SimplyCash Business Card

I also saw this on Ben’s Bargains: American Express SimplyCashSM Business Card – Earn 5% cash back on gas, office supplies, and wireless services. Earn 1% cash back on virtually all other purchases. Cash back is automatically credited to the statement each month. There’s also a thread on SD about this, though people don’t seem to receive it that well. However, it still sounds like an awesome rewards card. 5% back on gas, office supplies and wireless services.

I personally won’t be getting this card because I already have an Advanta Mastercard which already gives me 5% back on gasoline, office supplies, utilities, computer equipment, cell phones and Internet services. Mastercard is also more widely accepted. Both require you to have a “small business”, but an easily overcomable obstacle.

There is one good thing about this cash back is that it’s automatically deducted from your next statement. No more saving up to $50 before you can request your cash back.

Got this email a few days ago:

Your HSBC Direct Online Savings Account gives New Money 6.00% APY* until April 30. So if you have money elsewhere, it’s time to move it and make the most of your savings.

During the New Money promotion, deposits from outside of HSBC earn a market-leading 6.00% APY*. That’s 11 times what traditional savings accounts offer.** And checking accounts obviously can’t compare.

There’s no reason to leave your cash lying around anywhere else. Log on to move your money into your HSBC Direct account now, and earn 6.00% APY* for as many days as you can until April 30.

Your HSBC Direct Customer Service Team

Sigh… This was exactly what ING Direct pulled which made me decide to switch to HSBC Direct. Then again, at that time, ING Direct wasn’t the one with the highest interest rate. Guess I could stick with HSBC Direct awhile longer, though unfortunately I won’t be able to take advantage of the 6.00% interest as I’m planning some big purchases this month and will be pulling money out of there.

Including:
My 1080p HDTV:
Vizio 1080P 47″ LCD HDTV for $1650
OR
Samsung 67″ 1080P DLP® HDTV w/ Stand for $2500

Dryer: (my current one takes like 4hrs to dry a load)
Whirlpool Electric Dryer Super Capacity 6.5 CuFt 6 Cycles for $360

Exercise bike: (thought I’d exercise while watching my brand new HDTV)
Everlast Recumbent Bike for $350
OR
Everlast Upright Exercise Bike for $350

Media Center PC – I’m looking at about $1,000. I’m slowly getting parts. Plus my main box is also due for an upgrade, so maybe $2,000 here? Sigh… I’m going broke. Guess this is my belated Christmas and birthday presents to myself.

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Random Crap

First I want to wish Lsiymle a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

100 FREE Downloads from eMusic (from Decathanerd) – appears to be for people who purchased a COWON product, but I don’t believe the registration requires any sort of proof. I haven’t done this myself, but eMusic is famous for no DRM on their music and that their songs work on any digital music playing device. The default account gets 25 FREE songs and signing up from this link bumps it to 100. Let me know what your experience is with this service. You have 30 days to choose 100 songs from 1 million.

Tooth chipped on cookie ruled work-related – A salesman who chipped a tooth on a cookie while visiting a customer is entitled to compensation for his dental work after a court ruled it a work-related injury. I just found this to be awfully silly. It seems to make work reliable for everything you do on their clock, including “any” accidents that may happen outside of the work area.

Jeremy Wai – Cap Through Coke Bottle (from Artemyst) – A coke cap penetrates a coke bottle. Jeremy Wai is a pretty neat magician which has a ton more magic tricks on YouTube.

listpic – Craigslist Pic Viewer (from The Consumerist) – as the title goes, it’s a picture viewer of all craigslist listings and sorts them by date and price. For example, you can do a query, set a min/max price and the results will come back as images instead of just text and links where people generally have aren’t good at filling out. For example, here are all the furniture listings for Seattle.

VG Cats – Detergent – BAN… KAI!!! It’s a reference anime watchers will get. This is based of a anime/manga called Bleach. Now does the title of the comic make more sense? I’m not sure if this kitties have names, but the the pink female one is representing Kuchiki Byakuya and the gray male one is representing Kurosaki Ichigo. I’m not sure what the reference of the “rat” or “morning-star” is. Maybe someone can explain that to me.

After look up morning-star on Wikipedia, it apparently was a medieval weapon in the form of a spiked club resembling a mace, usually with a long spike extending straight from the top in addition to a number of smaller spikes around the circumference of the head. I guess the “rat” comes from the part where they’re cats and cats eat rats. Maybe?

According to ElBandMonkey and Nekobo: I think it’s from Dungeons and Dragons, where people joke about the ultimate weapon being a rat on a flail, an allusion to back in the day when people use to catapult dead rats during sieges over castle walls to poison the populace. According to their Bleach entry, Leo’s Bankai form and the Rat Morning-star (build up on the Rat Flail) were tough.

Student wants to ‘rent’ a girlfriend – A desperate Chinese university student wants to “rent” a girlfriend for 10 days so he can show her off to his parents over the Lunar New Year holiday, state media reported Wednesday. … Wang Jisheng, a professor with the Psychology Institution of the Chinese Academy Sciences, was quoted as saying Zhu was trying to show filial piety to his parents but was only cheating them.

Bellevue scores high again in water quality report (from MS newsgroup) – Drinking water in Bellevue remains safe for consumption. According to the 2006 Water Quality Report, prepared in accordance with the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, Bellevue’s drinking water meets or exceeds all state and federal drinking water standards.

Apple UK: “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC.” Smashing, isn’t it? (from Digg) – Here’s the UK version I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ad.

Top 5: Piggy Banks, Stylish Savings (from The Consumerist) – these piggy banks are rather cute!

Windows Vista in pictures (from Digg) – Look at all the pretty pictures ;p

Fan made Star Wars Wii video (from Digg) – One reader’s idea of how a Star Wars game might work on the Wii. Now if we could just get Lucasarts to actually make one! The other day I was just talking to StanMan about a Star Wars Wii game where the Wiimote would act as the light saber holder. This guy takes it to the next level.

Uncle Sam spoils dream trip to space (from MS newsgroup) – Brian Emmett’s childhood fantasy came true when he won a free trip to outer space. But the 31-year-old was crushed when he had to cancel his reservation because of Uncle Sam. … Then reality hit. After some number-crunching, Emmett realized he would have to report the $138,000 galactic joy ride as income and owe $25,000 in taxes. Unwilling to sink into debt, the software consultant from the San Francisco Bay area gave up his seat. There was a discussion thread on paying taxes on the actual value of gift and not the MSRP. For example, if you get a free copy of Windows, although the MSRP is like $300, the actual value is closer to $100-$150, so you only have to pay taxes on the actual value. I forgot what the term was.

Famous quotes on Sex (from Digg) (NSFW) – some pretty funny quotes by famous people. Worth the read and laugh.

Casino Changes Tune; Retiree Gets Jackpot After All (from Digg) – Stephen Wilkinson is a happy man this weekend — $102,000 happier. Wilkinson thought he struck it rich Monday while playing slots at a new parlor at Philadelphia Park. But the parlor then said it was all a mistake and refused to pay him the jackpot, offering two free meals instead. On Friday night, the operators of the parlor at the Bensalem racetrack had a change of heart and phoned Wilkinson, saying they wanted to do the right thing. An update to the previous posted story of him getting ripped off because of a “software glitch”.

If Women Acted Like Men (from Deadlock) (NSFW!) – This beautiful girl acts in this hilarious underwear commercial as a guy in the morning Caught on Video. The way this girl acts she can be passed as a guy.

The Fancy Pants Adventure (from Digg) – a really fun flash game that seems to have a mix of Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog in this side-scroller.

Keifer Admits to Abusing Bauer Action Figure (from Digg) –

“We took the doll out for a night to have some fun and we’d had some drinks. We sat it on the corner of the table. We started torturing him around 11 o’clock at night, and, by two o’clock in the morning, we had set him on fire in the parking lot.

“We got up the next day and there was just this puddle of wax. His clothes didn’t burn, which I thought was pretty cool…and then I got a call the next day saying, ‘Did you like the doll?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it was great.’ And they said, ‘Well, OK, good, you gotta send it back to us because that was the prototype…It took that guy a year to make it.’ I said, ‘Well, let me look for it, I think I left it in the trailer.’ This went on for about a week and then I had to just kinda come clean.”

Google TV – An Elaborate Hoax (from Digg) – A heavily produced YouTube video from Mark Erickson at “Infinite Solutions” shows users how to get in on the super-secret (and non existent) Google TV beta. It’s rather amazing if this was true.

USAA Lets You Remotely Deposit Checks – We got a flier in our recent USAA bill announcing they’re now letting customers deposit checks from. Just sign and scan your checks and send it in through the USAA website. As far as we know, USAA is the only bank to offer this service to consumers. I always wished that such a service existed. I mean I can do all my banking electronically. The only thing I can’t do is get cash and deposit checks. 1 of the 2 problems are solved, now we just need some way to print cash ;p

Paint.NET v3.0 is OUT! (from Digg) – I’ve been using Paint.NET v2.0 as a replacement to Photoshop as it basically does all that I need to do inside Photoshop. The best part is it’s free. It does have 1 slight problem where it only supports WMI scanners and mine I’m guessing isn’t WMI compatible.

NES Nintendo – EVERY GAME EVER MADE – 670 LOT Licensed (from Digg) – I remember my friend Jeff Tori in Jr. High who told me he’d give up all his games and future games if he could just have an NES console with all the games. At that time I recall Playstation was the popular console and FFVII was the popular game at that time.

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Old Site

My 3 year free hosting at 1&1 expired a few days ago and originally I wasn’t planning on extending the service. I already have my own paid domain and web hosting service at Dreamhost and didn’t think it was necessary to have 2. Plus if I recall correctly, 1&1 was charging $10/mo for a pretty cheap service (1gb of space and 5gb of bandwidth/month). However, the 1&1 thread in B$ became active again as people began to ask what to do now that their 1&1 account was expiring.

For those who wanted a cheap service, I suggested E-RICE which is $10/yr and I heard the service is good and reliable. For those who can’t afford to have any downtime, I suggested to just stay with 1&1 because the price was actually $3.99/mo and that’s not too bad. For $48/yr and reliable service, it’s a decent deal.

I’ve been meaning to port over my old site’s blog entries into WordPress, but never really got the time. If you look at my archives, you can tell that I’ve started as there’s a few months of 2002 in there. Initially I was hoping to port all my entries before my account expires, but then I got lazy. I do have everything backed up (all my files, my databases, etc). Now that I find out it’s not $10/mo, but just $3.99/mo, I thought why not just extend my contract.

Someone on the thread mention about the $2.99/month Hosting Beginner plan. I had seen this plan initially, but thought it wasn’t that great. The space and bandwidth were more than my current plan, but I must’ve misread it because I thought this plan had no databases (i.e. MySQL) and even my old blog ran on a database. But apparently it comes with 10 databases and has 10GB of space and 300GB of bandwith/month (vs 1GB and 5GB respectively), and for $1 cheaper, it seemed like the obvious choice.

I began searching around their FAQ to find out how to downgrade, if possible. I found this:

DOWNGRADES
You can downgrade a package by contacting support at support@1and1.com
or call support at 1 877 435 7281

I shot them a email and they approved my downgrade. Apparently, it’s the same process as canceling where you goto https://cancel.1and1.com and began a cancellation process. After you select the plan you want to cancel, it gives you a choice of cancellation or switch to another plan. I tried to switch to another plan but was given an error that I’m not allowed to switch plans within 30 days of switching (which I’m guessing they’re counting my FREE to $3.99/mo switch). I shot another email to support asking what to do and within a couple hours, I was able to switch. It actually gave me a whole bunch of choices, but I had already decided which plan I wanted a long time ago. Do note, they have to approve your downgrade/upgrade before you can do this process. I know because I canceled another account earlier and the choice of downgrading/upgrading wasn’t available.

Another cool thing about the $2.99/month plan is that it comes with a free domain. I have finally completed my TRIO:

krunk4ever.com
krunk4ever.net
krunk4ever.org

http://www.krunk4ever.net currently just points to my old blog. I no longer have to remember this awful URL: http://s86952823.onlinehome.us. I’ve also decided it was a good time to add some ads to it. I don’t really know how much traffic my old site gets, but why not make some money off of it while I’m in there mucking around.

One thing I did noticed was I no longer had shell access. My 1&1 was my first web hosting company that provided shell access which was really neat and really useful if you know what you’re doing. However, with the downgraded plan, I noticed shell access is now disabled. Not really a big deal for me since I don’t plan to do much more development on this site, but if my main site was located on this server, I would definitely need shell access.

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Free International Phone Calls

You’ve probably heard of AllFreeCalls and Future Phone where you call some number in Iowa and make free long distance calls. They make their money with a new law that all incoming calls are charged a few cents and then just pipe you over the VoIP network. It’s been brought to my notice that Future Phone is no longer available. I also found it funny that they have a big red sign across their homepage saying: THIS SERVICE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE. However AllFreeCalls is still going strong and getting more people everyday.

I was thinking… with Google Maps’ Click to Call feature Windows Live’s Call for free feature, we can have free calls and not pay long distance to Iowa. I’m assuming that AllFreeCalls will still get paid since it’s still considered an incoming call and even more people will start to use this service.

I’ve always considered these features to sort of be like Jajah, where Jajah initiates the call to both ends and therefore is the one paying the toll. Google and Windows Live just supports it for businesses, and well, AllFreeCalls is considered a business. If they decide to add their listing to Google Maps or Windows Live, it’s basically free calls for everyone.

Random Crap:

I’m thinking, given that I tend to write multiple entries in one sitting and not write anything for a few days, I’m going to start queuing them up. Meaning, I’ll still be writing multiple entries in one setting, but I’ll change the publish date instead of immediate to a day or 2 later. That way it won’t be like reading 5 posts of random crap in 1 day vs reading 5 random crap posts over period of 5 days.

Also wanted to wish GwaGwaSan and Mister0124 a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Product Placement (from Digg) – news article headline shows: Teacher hit by car outside Queens school and then there’s a pop up ad for Toyota. ;p

The Best Homework Ever? (from Digg) – Cassidy Curtis’s marvelous surface drawings Those drawings are rather neat. Reminds me of Mechy.

Iowa students get laundry e-mail alerts – Ding! Time to throw your drawers in the dryer. That’s the message University of Iowa students can now receive by e-mail. Thanks to software installed along with new high-efficiency washers last fall, the school’s dormitory residents can receive e-mail alerts when their laundry cycles have finished. I wished this was available back when I was in college. Usually I remember to go down to get my clothes, but once in awhile, I don’t remember until the next day.

Artist to honour Wii heroes with statuettes – In the old days, heroes were commemorated with stone statues in public squares. In today’s video game obsessed society, players can get a Mii. U.S. artist Paul Thiel is crafting figurines that are replicas of the virtual characters users of Nintendo’s popular console Wii play games with. Neat! If you have a Mii that really resembles you, I can see this being a totally awesome gift.

Web site helps name that tune in your head – You know that annoying tune that you can’t place or get out of your head? A U.S. company has recently launched a Web site, www.midomi.com, that names most tunes that you can hum, sing or whistle a tune into your computer microphone. If you give this a try, do let me know if it works.

Man bets wife in card game, loses – A Russian man lost his wife in a game of cards after putting her up as a stake instead of cash. … When he lost the game and his opponent Sergey Brodov turned up to claim his winnings his wife Tatiana was so angry she decided to divorce her husband and started a relationship with Brodov. Haha! Awesome way to get rid of your wife. 😉

One Year Later, Quadruple Amputee Still Wants Answers (from Digg) – A local woman went to the hospital to have a baby, and while she was there, she contracted a flesh-eating bacteria, WESH 2 News reported. Doctors had to amputate both her arms and both her legs to save her. That was one year ago, and she’s still searching for answers. Such a sad story… If I was her, I’d like some answers too!

Pink milk puzzles farmer – A farmer whose cows produced pink milk after eating carrots solved the problem by feeding them white carrots instead. Pink milk reminds me of strawberry milk.

Why can’t a person tickle himself? (from Digg) – . Our studies at University College London have shown that the cerebellum can predict sensations when your own movement causes them but not when someone else does. When you try to tickle yourself, the cerebellum predicts the sensation and this prediction is used to cancel the response of other brain areas to the tickle. Ahhh! So that’s the key to not being ticklish!

That’s an ad on your egg – Which came first — the chicken or the ad? In a month-long campaign that began in Japan on Thursday, 1.8-cm (0.8-inch) advertising stickers touting chicken ramen instant noodles will be stuck on the shells of ordinary eggs, sold in packs of 10. Updated the link that has an image of it.