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Back to the (Financial) Future

August 1st, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Income, financing, free stuff, websites

For_opportunitiesWith a new house adding to my total assets and net worth, I’ve been looking at my finances rather closely lately. I’ve decided the smart thing to do with my inheritance check (rather than all those things I’d like to have) is to pay off a couple of credit card debts and my closing cost loan from the sellers of my house. That’s a good amount of Debt help that’ll leave me feeling better about my budget.

I’m still going to get my furniture and paint, and a few small things that shouldn’t add up to very much, and the rest is going to giving me a little less headache every month when I pay bills. I think having that breathing room is a gift that is going to keep on giving!

If you’re financially retarded, you may want to take a trip over to Bills.com and take their Bills IQ test. I scored a B, because I’m financially ditzy but at least I know where my problems lie. You may find that Debt consolidation is a route you may need to look into. If you’re struggling to make the bills each month, Bills.com can hook you up with some good Debt relief resources, before you need to file for Bankruptcy, which could really hurt your credit.

Sponsored by Bills.com

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Coming Soon: Logitech Harmony One Full Review

Hey everyone. Just a heads up - I received my Logitech Harmony One universal remote control - and it is completely awesome. The long and short of it is I like it a lot - it found devices no other universal remote has ever found for me before, and it even has provisional support for my Playstation 3 if I can buy the IR-bluetooth adapter.

As I wrote earlier this morning, I’m going out of town this weekend, but I’ll be working on my review and should have something Monday morning to share with all of you.

The reason this is exciting to me is that this will be the first review of a technology gadget that’s been sent to me for free to review. I’ve done reviews of things I already owned before, but this certainly makes me feel good about the reviewing and posting I’ve been doing here so far.

Thanks to my readers - it’s you guys who give me the numbers to show people I’m worth advertising with / sponsoring / sending cool free stuff to review. Don’t forget - if you like my blog and find it interesting, share the URL with your friends and family, add me to your blog roll, and subscribe to my RSS feed!

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Hot Date: Olive Garden and Baby Mama

Last night I had a hot date with my girl. I showed up at her place and I was dressed up to try and look good for her, but it was pretty irrelevant next to the sight I saw when she opened the front door. She was gorgeous! She wore this little black dress she has borrowed from a friend. It’s a little low cut but tasteful, straps, bows, etc. and an open back. She had her hair down but back, and she was glittery (she calls it shimmer). She was also wearing fish nets and combat boots. Yeah, that’s my girl! Be jealous.

We drove out of town, because our small mountain town doesn’t have too many good restaurants, and went to an Olive Garden, which happens to be one of our favorite restaurants. The breadsticks were delicious as usual. I had the potato and sausage soup, which was delicious but I burnt my tongue - my own fault. She had salad. She ordered the Tour of Italy (basically three entrees: lasagna, chicken parmigiana, and fettuccine alfredo) and I had the Steak Gorgonzola over fettuccine alfredo. We followed that up with dessert (and more than half our food in boxes) - tiramisou for me and a black tie chocolate mousse cake for her.

The waiter came by with the check and said “Oh, by the way, don’t tell anyone, but dessert is on me.” That must have been about $12 worth of free dessert he just gave us. Overall, our dining experience was awesome. The waiter gave us excellent service, and I spent the money I would have spent on dessert on his tip.

We left Olive Garden (or the “OG” as I refer to it) and went to Books-a-Million to window shop. Kylara picked up some bargain bin books, and I picked up Cracking the GMAT (2008 with DVD) to help me study and pass the GMAT sometime soon. I think I’m going to have to use my Economic Stimulus Payment to cover the test cost - it’s about $250 to take it, and I don’t intend to have to take it more than once.

We finished up our evening away by seeing “Baby Mama” - the new movie with Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Dax Shepherd, Steve Martin, Sigourney Weaver, and Greg Kinnear - where Tina Fey needs someone to be a surrogate mother, so she hires lower-class white-trash Amy Poehler’s character to do the job. There are some other plot twists that weren’t mentioned in the trailers, but certainly make it slightly more interesting than it looked in commercials. I enjoyed the movie and laughed a lot - but if you’re on the fence about seeing it in theaters or waiting to rent the DVD - wait to rent it.

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Put Your Ugly Mug on Anything

That’s right. You can put your ugly mug on anything, even an ugly mug! Or a t-shirt, or a mouse pad [Note: despite popular opinion, mouse pads are not feminine protection for mice], or a calendar, or just about anything else that can be printed on.

What’s even better is you don’t have to sacrifice quality to get them cheap! The last two or three times I’ve needed business cards for several enterprising ventures of mine, I’ve had them printed up with VistaPrint. If you’re a first time customer, they can give you some basic cards for free (you just pay shipping). You can also get other free stuff as a way to try out their services.

If you’re a regular customer, they send you e-mails with huge discounts on stationary, calendars, business cards, and other cool print items and personalized office accessories. If you haven’t heard of them before, be sure and check them out for just about any of your print needs. You can even order checks with your design on it! Shipping is fast and inexpensive, and their packaging is unique! My cards always come in a white box that can be easily folded back and used as a display holder for my desk. I’ve also purchased a cool metal business card holder, so my cards don’t get all bended in my wallet or pocket.

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What’s So Great About Open Source, Anyway?

Today an article on Slashdot talks about how Sun is (finally) fully open-sourcing Java within this calendar year. For those not familiar, Java is a programming language used by a lot of different programmers and companies. You probably use Java at work or at home in some shape or form and don’t even know it.

Why is it significant that they’re open-sourcing Java? Because for years red tape and bureaucracy kept Java from being free to the world. You could write code in it for free, but you couldn’t just outright include it or make it available with an operating system, for example, because of the licensing. You also couldn’t see the source code behind the language or any of Sun’s proprietary JVM (the run-time environment Java executes it’s code in) to better understand how it works.

So you see, open-sourcing Java removes those barricades and lets coders see how it works by looking at it’s source code, and thus will be able to write better, more efficient Java programs. And better programs means less aggravation for you and me.

Oh, another cool thing about Java? It’s cross-platform, so it can usually run whatever you’ve made in Java on a Mac, a PC, Linux, a hand-held PDA device, cell phones, and even some really cool appliances. It’s only a matter of time until SkyNet launches and we all get rounded up by the Terminators.

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