App-o-Rama – Let the Fun Begin

 App-o-Rama, Personal Finance  No Responses »
Feb 282007
 

I am about to start my first App-o-Rama! My goal is to make some serious money by obtaining a dozen or so new credit cards that are offering 0% balance transfer offers and/or sign-up bonuses. Inspired by steveyniu2004 on FatWallet Finance‘s detailed description of his App-o-Rama, I want to document my first first attempt at doing an App-O-Rama.

What is an App-o-Rama?
An App-o-Rama is simply a strategy of completing multiple credit card applications on the same day. By doing them on the same day you increase your chances of getting multiple cards approved and lessen the impact on your credit. Your chances are increased because an application done 2 minutes after the last one probably will not even know it exists. It is easier on your credit because multiple hard credit pulls on the same day may be treated as a single credit pull by others down the road they will all fall off at the same time rather than drag out forever.

Why do an App-o-Rama?
Because it is free money. If you are able to get $100,000 of balance transfer money and deposit it in an good interest bearing account paying just 4% for 12 months you will earn $4,000 plus the sign-up bonuses that many cards offer.

Step 1 – Gather Current Credit Information

I went to AnnualCreditReport.com and ran one of my free credit reports so that I could line out my current credit cards. I am putting together a table showing my current credit cards and some pertinent information.

To Do

  • Continue reading FatWallet App-o-Rama threads
  • Choose a Credit Reporting Service Free Trial Offer
  • Create Current Credit Card Table to list all my current cards.
  • Collect data for Best New Credit Card Offers
  • Create App-o-Rama Index Page page to document my strategy and its implementation.

Article Series - App-o-Rama

  1. App-o-Rama – Let the Fun Begin
  2. App-o-Rama – Current Cards
  3. App-o-Rama – Long-Term 0% Balance Transfer Strategy
  4. App-o-Rama – 24 New Credit Card Apps
  5. App-o-Rama – First Credit Score Hit
Next in series

Giveaway: You Call the Shots @ Consumerism Commentary

 Books  No Responses »
Feb 252007
 

Each day this week, Flexo over at Consumerism Commentary will be giving away a copy of You Call The Shots by Cameron Johnson.

One lucky commenter will be chosen by Flexo each day to receive a free copy of the book.

To enter for each of the five drawings, simply comment on any post on Consumerism Commentary each day. You can enter more than once each day by writing comments on more than one post. At the end of each day, I’ll announce that day’s winner. Good luck!

Net Worth Journal

 Personal Finance  No Responses »
Feb 252007
 

As I read some other Personal Finance bloggers I have appreciated being able to see their net worth statements each month. Not for the specific numbers, but the history that it provides. Much like a diary or journal, their spreadsheet columns allow them not only see where they are but also where they have been and the progress (hopefully) they have made.

I have just started putting together my own net worth journal. I can pull historical data from my quicken data to fill in past data. At this time I am planning only to go back to January of last year. This should give me a baseline for the year ahead.

My primary reason for wanting to have this journal is that it will allow me to see if I am making progress towards my financial goals. Do I have more money in the bank today than I did last month? Last year? Without hard numbers to look at you can only guess.

Even though I started off saying how much I appreciated seeing the net worth journals of the other personal finance bloggers online, at this time I am not planning on posting mine online. My blog is not anonymous enough for me to feel comfortable having my net worth data out for everyone to see.

If I can figure out a way to show the progress I am making without exposing the actual data, then I would love to be able to keep the journal online. I will hopefully be able to get the data together shortly.

Fishing Kids 2007 – May 5th

 Family  No Responses »
Feb 242007
 

--Photo: kids_fishing.gif--

Just went online and signed my 3 youngest kids up for the ‘Fishing Kids‘ program that is being held in Kennewick on May 5th. I signed up early enough this year that we were able to sign up for the 9:00 slot. It only costs $5 per kid and they are given a ‘Fishing Kids” T-Shirt and get to keep the Zebco rod and reel and any trout they catch.

The program is put on across the state by the Department of Fish and Wildlife between April and June. Its primary goal is to give kids an opportunity to go fishing.

Our Catch

As part of its effort to “Get more kids fishing, more often,” the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and C.A.S.T. for Kids Foundation have teamed with businesses, organizations and volunteers from all over Washington to provide about a dozen fantastic fishing opportunities for children ages 5 to 14.

The kids are really looking forward to go again this year. Last year was our first and the kids had a blast. Kirsten, as you can tell from the photo, was not too comfortable holding her fish, but she was proud that she caught the largest.

Pre-registration is required, and the number of kids per event is limited, so if you have a child between 5 and 14 years old, get them signed up now.

Continue reading »

Error Messages, Dialog Boxes, and Trained Monkeys

 Tech  No Responses »
Feb 242007
 

“How do I make this error message go away? It appears every time I start the computer.”

“What does this error message say?”

“It says, ‘Updates are ready to install.’ I’ve just been clicking the X to make it go away, but it’s really annoying.”

I hear things like the above in the office all the time. I have always wondered why what is patently obvious is lost on the computer users. I catch myself half jokingly refer to it as either a “keyboard to chair interface” problem, or an ID ten T error.

Jeff, over at Coding Horror says it is because they have been trained to just close the dialog box so they can get their work done.

It’s like giving shocks or food pellets to monkeys when they press buttons — primates very quickly learn what gives them the good stuff and avoids the bad.

We get dialogs, prompts, and javascript errors, and users have been trained to just close the things. Eric Lippert is quoted as saying:

It’s not that users are morons or that they “forget” to think. It’s that users are trained to not think.

He goes on to say that most dialog boxes give contextual data but most users only see them as saying:

--Photo: Tech Error--

Most of the time the best thing the user can do is just close the stupid dialog boxes that pop up and get on with their work. When they come across a real problem, one that just clicking the button does not fix, then they holler for tech support, and I get frustrated because they did not read the ‘error message’. But the real problem is the ‘training’ program.


HatTip: AtomSmasher.org for the error message generator.

Poem: Life at Hanford in the 40s

 Tri-Cities  No Responses »
Feb 232007
 

The Tri-City Herald editorial page quoted a poem that caught my attention in this mornings paper. The editorial attributed the poem to the pen name Timequest and said that the poem had been reprinted in the Columbia Basin News (a rival to the Tri-City Herald until 1963). It is suggested that it was written sometime in the 1940s while the Hanford Project was being built.

You’ve heard of the streets of Harlem,
And Chicago’s Pell Mell,
But never before of Hanford
And its dirty paths of Hell
Where men are tough and women rough
And weaklings have to die,
And even dogs are afraid to bite,
And babies are too strong to cry.

It sounds like a much tougher neighborhood than Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon:

Welcome to Lake Wobegon,
where all the women are strong,
all the men are good-looking,
and all the children are above average.

3 Month Emergency Food Supply @ Costco

 Life  19 Responses »
Feb 232007
 

Emergency Food Supply

I was recently in Costco and saw the stacks of these 5 gallon Emergency Food Supply buckets that claim to be a 3-month food supply for one person! Imagine, $109.99 for 3 months worth of food, in one bucket, and weighing in at 25 pounds. Where was this when Y2k was coming?

Von and I talked about buying some of these, they would be great for an emergency at home or on the road.

Each bucket contains 55 separate packets, consisting of 10 different items; (5) Ala King, (6) Potato/Bakon Soup, (5) Sweet Corn Chowder, (5) Western Stew, (5) Rice/Lentil Soup, (5) Barley Vegetable Soup, (5) Cacciatore, (5) Country Noodle Soup, (5) Blueberry Pancakes, (9) Whey Milk. Each packet is stated to make 5 separate servings, with a stated yield of 275 servings per bucket. The directions are to choose 3 servings from any of the various packets per day.

While pulling together the information about these food buckets, I ran across a lawsuit that has been filed against Costco by Richard Pope for fraud and miss representation in selling these buckets. Pope did the math and figured out that the average serving provides less than 500 calories per day.

The USDA recommends a minimum of 2,000 calories per day. 500 calories will not cut it! To make his point he shows that the concentration camp victims were fed almost 1300-1700 calories per day. How long on this diet before you start looking a little ragged?

The summons was filled in June of 2006. I have not been able to find out if anything has happened. Costco is still selling the buckets. Hmmm… Maybe 1 bucket would last a month?

Child Calls 911 For Some Math Help

 Humor  1 Response »
Feb 232007
 

Just heard this on the Tonight Show:

--Photo: 911--


Dispatcher: 911…
Child: Yeah, I need some help.
Dispatcher: What’s the matter?
Child: With my math.
Dispatcher: With your mouth?
Child: No, with my math. I have to do it. Will you help me?
Dispatcher: What kind of math do you have that you need help with?
Child: I have, I have take-aways.
Continue reading »

Idjot Parking

 Rant  No Responses »
Feb 232007
 

Idjot Parking

See the red Pontiac Transport? It is in the middle of the driving lane. But no one is in the vehicle! Yeah, someone thought that they should park out in the middle of the road. Numerous time I have seen other ijots park one space out from the designated parking spots because they are too lazy to park in a designated spot and have to walk, but this is the first time I have seen someone park two spaces out from the designated spots.

Why would they park out in the middle of the drive lane?

  1. They are too lazy to park in a ‘marked’ spot.
  2. Rules do not apply to them.
  3. One car was double parked, why not make it two?
  4. Rules do not apply to them.

I went in and let the information desk inform the owner of the car over the loudspeaker the obvious.

Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service

 Business  No Responses »
Feb 222007
 

Joel Spolsky over at Joel on Software has a great article on how to provide remarkable customer service. He provides seven eight steps that, if you are able to implement them, will ensure you are providing remarkable customer service. And he means remarkable literally — “the goal is to provide customer service so good that people remark.“

The one that really caught my attention was #2, “Suggest blowing out the dust“.

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen tells the story of a customer who complains that the keyboard isn’t working. Of course, it’s unplugged. If you try asking them if it’s plugged in, they will get all insulted and say indignantly, ‘Of course it is! Do I look like an idiot?’ without actually checking.

Instead, Chen suggests, say ‘Okay, sometimes the connection gets a little dusty and the connection gets weak. Could you unplug the connector, blow into it to get the dust out, then plug it back in?’

They will then crawl under the desk, find that they forgot to plug it in (or plugged it into the wrong port), blow out the dust, plug it in, and reply, ‘Um, yeah, that fixed it, thanks.’

And here is the point:

Many requests for a customer to check something can be phrased this way. Instead of telling them to check a setting, tell them to change the setting and then change it back just to make sure that the software writes out its settings.

I have been on both ends of that conversation. But it is easy when I am on the ‘help desk side’ to unconsciously make the folks at the other end of the phone feel like they are idiots for know knowing ‘the obvious’.

The other seven points are just as good or better, #1, “Fix everything two ways“, in other words, fix the immediate problem and also fix it so the problem does not come up again.

WordPress, RSS, and Robots.txt

 Blogging  2 Responses »
Feb 222007
 

I have been playing with my robots.txt file because I notice that I am finding my RSS feeds showing up in the Google search results. RSS feeds are not human-readable and therefore better left out of the search engine and also they duplicate existing content, so provide no benefit.

I did some searching around and found what looks to be a good example WordPress robots.txt file at askApache. But it does not address the RSS feed problem at all so I just added:

Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/

to my robots.txt file. That would take care of the primary RSS feeds for posts and comments but in WordPress each post also has its own feed in the form of “/post-name/feed/” and “/post-name/comments/feed/“. The original 1994 specs for robots.txt do not allow a ‘wild-card’ character but in searching around I found that some search engines will allow them. Google spells out its pattern matching rules pretty well.

So,

Disallow: */feed/

should work, and so I added it too. I left in the two lines mentioned above just in case some other search-bot does not recognize the * as a wild-card. Testing out my new robots.txt file at

Here is my current robots.txt:

Continue reading »

Road of Death – China – not Bolivia

 Cool  No Responses »
Feb 222007
 

I had a post about the amazing road in Bolivia, know as the Highway of Death. Turns out some of the photos, the ones carved into rock, are actually a road in China called the Guoliang Tunnel. The YouTube video above is a slide show of the road.


HatTip: Rick McCharles blog for the discussion figuring out that this really is in China and not Bolivia.

Update: The original YouTube video I put up is no longer available but I found the still photos in the new link above.

Addicted to Porn – Man sues IBM over firing him

 Rant  No Responses »
Feb 222007
 

The Register had a funny story a while back about a guy who was addicted to porn:

“I don’t actually think you CAN fire me for browsing porn..”

“Why not?”

“Well, I think I’m addicted to porn.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Addicted. To porn.”

“You’re joking!”

“Oh no. You see I’m fairly sure that the browsing of porn causes the release of testosterone, endorphins or something like that, which in turn causes a pleasure response in the body – or so my doctor will tell me if I ask. I’m addicted to that pleasure response, in much the same way as a drug addict is addicted to the pleasure they obtain from their drugs.”

Well, reality has caught up with absurdity.

WHITE PLAINS, New York (AP) — A man who was fired by IBM for visiting an adult chat room at work is suing the company for $5 million, claiming he is an Internet addict who deserves treatment and sympathy rather than dismissal.

James Pacenza, 58, of Montgomery, says he visits chat rooms to treat traumatic stress incurred in 1969 when he saw his best friend killed during an Army patrol in Vietnam.

In papers filed in federal court in White Plains, Pacenza said the stress caused him to become “a sex addict, and with the development of the Internet, an Internet addict.” He claimed protection under the American with Disabilities Act.

So he went into a chat room on work time and “self-medicated” himself by participating in sexually explicit talk. Would drinking bourbon at the office be considered “self-medication”? Drugs?

Our company, like most, has a zero tolerance policy for graphic content. If I found someone “indulging” or “self medicating” their “needs” they would be let go.

And, continuing with the story from The Register:

“And you’re aware that the company has a policy regarding acceptable use of computers?”

“Really?”

“YES” the Boss snaps, annoyed. “It’s been in place for at least 18 months!”

“Ah, I see, so it’s not actually a policy I agreed to several years ago when I started.”

“Your contract gives the company the right to vary acceptable behaviour policies.”

“Not my contract,” I say

“I think you’ll find it does,” the HR Guy responds.

“No, mine was sent as an electronic document, so I just cut out the clauses I didn’t like, added a couple of my own, printed two copies and signed them. Then your guy signed them too – probably without checking. Or maybe he liked the idea of clause F.3 that I’m allowed to call Managers… ‘knobface’.”

Paranoid? IRS have your IP Address?

 Rant  No Responses »
Feb 222007
 

I got a kick out of Michelle Singletary’s discussion of tax issues in today’s Tri-City Herald. She poses the question:

I’m very leery of e-filing my tax return because I don’t want to give the government my IP (Internet Protocol) address, what with all the illegal surveillance that has been authorized by the current administration. Do you have any information that would allay my concern?

I am sure she had to chuckle, but her answer was not too worry. Your information is not sent directly to the IRS but instead goes to an intermediate company that then forwards the records to the IRS, and the information they forward does not include the IP address.

So the IRS does not have my IP address, but now some unknown company has all my financial records…

Remember, just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not following you….

StatTraq for WordPress 2.x

 Blogging  No Responses »
Feb 212007
 

StatTraq is a WordPress plugin I use to analyze my blog statistics. It reports on how many unique visitors and how many page hits the site has had, the search terms used to find the site, the web address of sites who are sending visitors, which posts are most popular, and other traffic statistics.

I have been running StatTraq for almost 2 years but with the new version of WordPress I would need a new version of StatTraq. The original author of StatTraq has had to abandon the project, but while searching for what I would have to do to bring the plugin current I found that two new branches of the project have been started.

The first project I found is being developed by Murph at The FunZone. The second project I found is being put together by AdsWorth over at sieker.info. Both authors have left comments on each others blogs about combining the two branches into one but it appears that nothing has come of this yet.

The version of StatTraq I had been running had some tweaks and hacks that I had put together from around the web. Some of these were incorporated into Murph’s version, but not all. I was very glad to find that another user, Evans, had already gone to the trouble of patching Murph’s version to include these fixes.

I have some other hacks that I did to the old version that I will have to look at incorporating, but I am just glad to have my stats up and running.

Free Children’s Dental Clinic on Saturdays in February

 Tri-Cities  No Responses »
Feb 212007
 

Just saw and advertisement in the paper this morning that Shannon Dental Health Center is sponsoring a free dental clinic for children ages 13 & under every Saturday in February from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in support of National Children’s Dental Health Month. They will conduct regular exams, as well as cleanings, sealants, and even fillings. If you have neglected your kid’s teeth, this is a great opportunity.

Their office is located at 800 N. Center Parkway in Kennewick, near the traffic circle behind Kennewick Ranch & Home. You can call the office for more details: (509) 783-0824.

B Reactor — National Historic Landmark Nomination

 Tri-Cities  No Responses »
Feb 212007
 

--Photo: B Reactor Core--

This morning the Tri-City Herald had an article about the nomination of the B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark. I hope that it is made a National Historic Monument and that doing so will encourage the powers-that-be to figure out how to allow public access to the facility. Right now there is no way to get to the old reactor without taking a site tour that is only offered a couple times each year. My wife and I were able to tour the B Reactor last year in one of the few public tours offered.

“The B Reactor provides a tangible link to world-changing events of the final years of World War II and the initial years of the Cold War,” says the recently submitted nomination. “The plutonium produced in the building fueled the first-ever atomic device and the weapon dropped on Nagasaki, which ended World War II. The reactor’s design was the model for all U.S. reactors until 1952.”

Karen Rice: Stories from the Hanford Reach

 Events, Tri-Cities  No Responses »
Feb 192007
 
Karen Rice
Karen Rice, 300 Area, rust, charcoal, and dry pigments on paper, 2003, 34″ x 42″

I just saw on the CBC calendar what appears to be an interesting exhibit of the artwork of Karen Rice.

Influenced by growing up in Richland, WA, next to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Karen Rice uses the mediums of drawing and painting to explore intersections of labor, technology, and natural history in Western landscapes. Rice’s large-scale drawings utilize the subtle palette of rust, dry pigments, and charcoal to evoke the raw beauty of the eastern Washington landscape, and juxtapose images of industrial artifacts with stark horizons and empty space.

The artwork will be on display from February 26 to March 20, 2007 at the Esvelt Gallery. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and then on Monday through Thursday evenings from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m.

The artist will give a presentation on March 1st at 6 p.m. at the CBC Theatre and at 7 p.m. there will be a reception at the Esvelt Gallery.

Unabridged Audio Books – War & Peace Sets a New Record

 Books  No Responses »
Feb 192007
 

I have come to love audio books. I find I don’t have make time to sit down and read, but I have plenty of idle time, while driving, while at the court club, or while doing mindless work on the computer, and so can finish each CD in a day or two. The Washington Post has an article about how unabridged audiobooks, even the long ones like War and Peace (which takes 70 hours to get through), are becoming quite popular.

The article shows that, against the general trend of media consumption becoming more bite-sized, the market for long, unabridged recordings of books is expanding:

Given that pop culture is forever trending toward the condensed and the vapid, a 70-hour audiobook might sound like commercial folly — a Mensa product for an Us Weekly world. And maybe it is. Naxos won’t say how many copies have been downloaded directly from its site or sold in stores, where it retails for about $280.

I also find that I am not alone when I am disappointed when I find that the audiobook is an abridged version of the book.

But if the world has ever been ready for nearly three straight days of recorded Tolstoy it’s ready now. A few years ago, publishers had to beg retailers to stock audiobooks longer than three CDs. Now, that’s considered an ear snack. Unabridged is king. And abridged isn’t just on the wane. It’s basically stigmatized.

“We have readers who will get in touch with an author and express outrage if they see an abridged audio version of their book,” says Ana Maria Allessi, who heads Harper Collins’s audiobook division. “That drives authors insane.”

And you are not forced to swap CDs in and out. I download the files onto my Palm, a Tungsten T3, and listen at my convenience.

Downloadable books make it possible to store a spoken-word rendering of a big fat tome on an iPod, eliminating the need to stuff 25 CDs in a glove compartment. Plus, publishers and retailers figured out that audiobook fans aren’t semi-literates taking a break from “Two and a Half Men”; they are hard-core readers who consider abridgment a kind of cheating.

What does it take to create an audio book? The story in the Post says it took him 23 days in the studio to “carefully enunciating each syllable of Leo Tolstoy’s 560,000-word epic in an audiobook.” Wow! I doubt the library is going to be getting it in any time soon, and am not sure I am ready to tackle 51 CDs.

FYI, according to the ESV Blog, where I heard about this article, the English Standard Version (ESV) audio-bible is 72 hours long.

Public Libraries & ‘Adult’ Internet Use

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 192007
 

--Photo: Women & Guns--

I was reading a reprint of a Spokesman-Review editorial in the Tri-City Herald this morning arguing that public libraries shouldn’t block adults’ internet use. They say that it is a ‘free speech’ issue, that computer filters should be disabled for adults so that they can access “constitutionally protected speech.”

I guess I always thought that free speech applied to the speaker. I did not realize that the listeners had a ‘right’ to hear everything. Instead of free speech would it be called ‘free hearing’?

The other thing that was interesting about the article was that the lead-in was not some guy wanting to view necked ladies on the computer but a gal who wanted to read Women & Guns magazine. The ACLU is definitely trying to not have this come off as some left wing thing — what could be more right wing than access to women & guns magazine! Even though these are probably the same people who forced eBay to disallow the selling of guns on their site. Hey, isn’t that a free speech issue too?

Comments working again!

 Blogging  No Responses »
Feb 182007
 

I found out last week that the comment function was broken on this blog. I was thinking that the spam fighting of 2.1 and Akismet must be superb.

Every time you hit Submit the system would just show a blank screen with …\wp-comments-post.php showing in the address bar. Testing out the $_Post variables showed them all as empty. For some reason the variables from the form were not being passed on to the comment handling form.

Turns out I had put the www as part of the site urls in the WordPress options screens but I had set up my DreamHost account to strip the www. Don’t know why this ‘broke’ the comments, but am sure glad that just going in and removing the www from the urls fixed the problem.

So, if you have a comment that you wanted to post, please try it again. And you spammers out there — oh well, you don’t listen anyway.

Charging for Trackback or Comment ‘Advertising’ – a great idea

 Blogging  No Responses »
Feb 182007
 

I was reading the ‘Disclosures’ made by the Barry over at The Big Picture and they all seemed rather standard until I came to #10 on Advertising:

We happily accept advertising: We charge $10,000 per commercial Trackback or Comment linking back to your site or product or service. Eg., 3 trackbacks = $30,000.

By placing any commercial advertisement on this site, you agree to these terms and conditions: That you will pay the aforementioned fee promptly, that you agree to be governed by the laws of New York State and where appropriate, New York City, that you agree to jurisdiction in the great State of New York. You further agree that you are jointly and severally responsible for what any 3rd party does on your behalf, including but not limited to PR or Advertising or Marketing firms.

We will bill you promptly. Failure to pay will force the balance to be put into collections, where you will also be responsible for costs and legal expenses. You agree to jurisdiction in any small claims court of my choosing, or in the alternative, any court in New York State of my choosing.

I would be very interested to find out what responses they have received from those lame commercial spammers who are constantly trying to post comments and linkbacks on blogs to drive traffic to their sites.

Help Desk. 500 Years Ago…

 Humor, Tech  1 Response »
Feb 172007
 

This hilarious YouTube video shows how difficult it is to adapt to new technology.

The clip is from a show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian, the subs in Danish.

Update: The original video I linked to was removed, but I found this new one.

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