Nerdy Dork

Recently I’ve been on this honesty kick… I’m going through all my software applications I use and either 1. registering them, 2. finding free or cheaper alternatives, or 3. removing them and doing without.

The hardest has been doing without photoshop. I can’t afford to buy such an expensive program. So I’ve recently installed GIMP as a replacement. I understand it can probably do most of the image editing that I would do with photoshop, but in a completely different way.

So far I haven’t gone through any tutorials, but after playing with it for a while I’ve had moderate success. My most recent success is the creation of my new Napoleon Dynamite blog header! What do you think?

Okay here’s the story. I’ve seen these links all over the place with people trying to get free iPods, free game consoles, laptops, cameras, etc, etc. I’ve never taken the time to try it though. But right now I’m working on paying off my credit cards. My friend has moved some of his credit card balances to 0% APR cards while paying them off so he can pay them off without paying interest payments on top of that each month. I figured I would try it as well. Rather than supporting the junk mail I get every day, I decided that if I’m going to sign up for a credit card, I want to get something out of it. So my goal is to find 8 other people that want to do the same.

I’m using Freepay.com which has been around for quite a long time and given away a lot of free stuff. You may wonder how they could possible afford to do this, but it makes perfect sense to me. As an affiliate marketer, I know you can earn from $10 - $110 getting people to sign up or purchase certain services online. Getting 9 people to make you an average of $35 would make you $315 - almost enough to break even on the xbox 360 right. Well, consider all those that sign up and get 1 or 2 referrals. Also, how many sign up for the program without being a referal from someone else (whether on purpose or on accident)?

So in order to make the program work for you, do the following:

1.Make sure you sign up as a referal under someone else. If you are going to sign up anyway, why not help someone out by getting them closer to their goal. It’s just good carma! If you want a free xbox 360, please use my referral link: xbox360s.freepay.com/?r=20076641
If you want something else offered by freepay.com, try doing a search on google to find someone who is looking for referrals, either on a blog or message board.
2.Be patient. I signed up for my offer 2 months ago and just got credit for it on Freepay.com today.
3.Spread the word. Once you have been notified that you’ve completed your offer, start getting referrals. If you have a blog, post it there. If you don’t have a blog, you can spread the word on some forums. I’m really not suggesting you spam message boards, but there are some that you might be active in that you could get away with posting one off-topic post to this effect. If you don’t have a method of getting referrals now, I would recommend spending you time saving money for a free xbox 360 instead as it will be much easier in the long run
4.Share the wealth. If you have a fairly easy time getting your required number of referals, (for the xbox 360, the magic number is 8 ) then start sending traffic to those who helped you earn your referrals. So what I’m saying is that if you sign up under me, send me an email when you get approved. Once I get my referrals, I will start passing them down the line, and I will change my referal links on this site to someone under me.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

So you may have seen from my previous post that I ordered cell phones for my wife and myself over a year ago. We had a T-mobile family plan. Service & everything else was good, but we didn’t seem to NEED them. So we decided we would cancel our plan and live without for a while.

It turns out we couldn’t have picked a worse month to cancel our plan. We had all sorts of issues, like me transfering jobs, our son getting sick and going from ER to ER… Don’t worry, my son is fine and I got a new job, but it sure would have made things a lot easier to have been able to communicate better during that time.

So we’ve decided once again to get cell phones. Having learned what we like and dislike about our phones, we picked out something cooler! We both got these cool new Sony Ericsson Z520a phones. I read a lot of bad revies that the camera button is really annoying and takes a lot of snapshots when you don’t mean to. I don’t know if they updated the firmware or what, but you have the hold the button down for a while just to get to the camera mode to take snaps, so it really hasn’t been an issue.

Of course, I went to LetsTalk.com again to order the phones. They made it easy to compare all plans and phone at a glance. Plus, they tend to save you the hassle of shopping around and speaking with annoying sales people!

Right now, ING Direct is have a “rate sale.” That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of the term, but in essence, what they are doing is offering a higher interest rate from now until April 15th on any money you deposit until that time. They normal rate is currently 3.8% which is well above my credit union’s savings account rate (which stands at about 1.2%).

I’ve been a member of ING Direct for over a year. I initially set it up to automatically withdraw $10 each month. The next thing I know I have over $170 and the rates keep going up. They are FDIC insured so you can feel safe putting your money there. It is simply a savings account (although they have ARM mortgages and a CD account which can earn higher rates).

You link your ING Direct account to your current bank account. It takes about 2-3 business days to send and receive money between accounts. I like it because it is just far enough away to to avoid the temptation of spending savings on something trivial, yeat liquid enough to have when I need for real emergencies.

The Winter Save Up Sale! Earn 4.75% APY on new deposits through April 15th. Apply online.

You can join through the link above. Or, if you have $250 to initially deposit, send me an email (or comment on this blog), and I’ll email you a referral link that will allow you to have $25 deposited in your account when you join (and I’ll get a $10 referal commission;)).

“This is probably the biggest release ever for Office.”

Office 12 has a completely new interface. I know what you’re thinking… “No! Leave it alone!” Well, you may actually like these new changes.

We were all happy to see the death of Clippy - that annoying paper clip telling you what to do. Now we may see the death of classic toolbar File, Edit, View… etc. Now we may be looking at “ribbons”, “galleries”, and “floaties”. Don’t get to used to the terms, because they may just be codenames for now.

If you want to learn more and preview the new features, check out the following links:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114720
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/uioverview.mspx

I do freelance work. Recently I was asked to install some php scripts for someone who had orderd GoDaddy Hosting. Ahhhh the frustrations were endless! Let’s forget the fact that they have their own crappy control panel and that it takes forever to log in and get to the control panel. Let’s forget the fact that your username is assigned and it is a mile long. Here are my two biggest gripes with my limited experience:

1. It takes about 10-15 minutes to see the affects of changing an .htaccess file. This is really frustrating. If you want to write some mod_rewrite stuff you’d better be good because you can’t immediately test it. You must wait for their server to recognize the changes, then come back and test it. If you happened to mistype someting your whole site could go down with a 400 or 500 error.

2. Even though they have PHP 4.3 installed, HTTP authentication with PHP doesn’t work. us2.php.net/features.http-auth . I don’t know if they’ve disabled it for security reasons or what but frustrating none the less.

I’m sure if given the opportunity to work with their servers longer I could produce a greater list, but I hope not to have the opportunity.

Sure they offer lots of storage and lots of bandwidth, but do users really need all that. I tried to explain to my client that I could give him better hosting while not offering such high amounts of storage & transfer. As an example, I used my site, DVD Anthology. That site has over 800 members, over 85,000 movies in the database, thousands of images, and yet I’ve only used less than 75 mg of storage and my transfer has only one moth exceeded 10 gb. I think my client was very optimistic to order a plan with 10,000 mb storage and 500 gb transfer. I think he’ll be lucky to get 100 hits in a month…

Anyway, I really don’t think Godaddy is setting aside all these resources for users like this. As an owner of VPS (Virtual Private Server) I know how easy it is to oversell resources. They’ll simply set all these accounts up on one server and if anyone even gets close to using all this storage and transfer they can move them to a new server.

And that’s my 2 cents for the day.

Today while doing some programming on ZuSHOP, I found a product that upon first glance I thought was creating all these blog spam problems. Well, maybe it is, maybe it’s not. I can’t quite tell.

For $147.00 you can get a product called Blog Submitter Pro 7.0 that will apparently go around posting comments to blogs, then sending pings to spiders that these blogs have been updated. Sounds like spam to me!

Has anyone used this software before? Can you tell me if it is simply another somewhat intelligent blog spammer?

Jim Edwards’ “I Gotta Tell You” Blog: Skype Lets You Make Free Phone Calls Online (article)

Although I have yet to try Skype (I can’t think of anyone I would use it with) it sounds like it is catching on. I do not foresee downloading it in the immediate future either because:

1. I have Google Talk, which essentially does the same thing. I the only people I would ever consider talking with online are those that already have Google Talk installed.
2. I have Vonage. All calls in the US & Canada are free. Even though I rarely ever call out of my own state, it’s nice to know that I can and don’t have to pay extra for it. I use it on all my phones it the house. You can’t even tell it is Vonage and not a “regular” phone service. To learn more about my home set up, see my previous post here. If you ever want to sign up for Vonage, let me know and I’ll send you an invitation so we both can get a month free.

Jim says:

Tip: Get a good headset microphone.

It makes using the service more enjoyable and also eliminates the echo created by your own speakers feeding back into your PC’s microphone.

I agree. As soon as Google Talk came out I went to Wal-Mart and bought a $15 logitech headset for work. The next day I went back and got the $20 model for home. I prefer the $20 model as you can flip the mouthpiece up out of your way. Other than that, the quality of the two seem the same.

Right now, when you commit to a 6 month membership at Audible.com you can get a free iPod Shuffle. Audible.com is an online audio bookstore. The membership is $21.95 a month and allows you to download two books each month. There is a one-time shipping and handling fee of $12.95.

So, doing the math, that’s $144.65 for an iPod Shuffle and 12 audio books. Not too bad…

I have two favorite text editors. I wish I could combine their features together though. I have used TextPad (TP) for about the last 5 years, but for a few months I’ve been using UltraEdit (UE) more for a couple of handy features.

First is the FTP capabilities built in to UE. I can create several FTP accounts and select which one I would like to save to, or open from. You edit the files as you normally would, but when you click the save button or Ctrl+S as most would, it uploads the file to your server!

The second feature I really love is the ability to have a sorted list of functions when you open a PHP file. When I developed Nerdlance.com I created a function file to hold all my commonly used functions. I found UE quite handy when it came to jumping to the function I wanted to modify.

I think UE falls short of TP in a few areas.

First is the regular expressions. They just don’t work as I feel they should. I think they should work more like TP and perl, but they don’t. I can’t remember off what the issues I’ve experienced were, but I think it had something to do with newline characters, end of string characters and the like.

Secondly is the undo feature. UE remembers every keystroke and undoes ( <- is that a word? ) them one at a time. TP seems to have some sort of “smart” undo features that remembers blocks of keystrokes, which is faster and therefore more pleasing to me.

Third, is the macros. While I like how UE gives you the ability to edit macros, what I don’t like again is the undo feature. If you run a macro and it messes up, you can’t Ctrl+Z to get back where you started. There are work-arounds, yes, but I prefer the TP way.

Fourth is the way that they both read files. TP seems to open and fix files that have been messed up by some means or anothers such as wrong encoding or binary FTP. Again, I can’t point to examples, but I’ve seen it more than once, which leads me to bring it up here.

And finally, the clip library. Again, I prefer the TP way as you can organize you clips into categories, sort them by name, etc. UE just has one large template library available to everything.

On all other features that I use in both tools they seem to be fairly equal.