All things relevant and interesting
While stumbling around on Stumble! I came across an interesting little straw that claims it can filter out 7 Nines of bacteria from your drinking water, using micro-filtration technology.
Very cool and a must for any traveler, hiker or backpacker. Its easy to carry in your pocket and can mean the difference between a horrible or enjoyable travel experience.
Price: 39.99 ThinkGeek.com
Many people think they need to reduce or even stop spending all together just to save money. Changing your thinking about the way you spend your money is the real key to keeping more green in your pockets from month to month.
Improve your credit score
Many of you think that this is an impossible act but its not, its even easier than you think! The amount of money you can save by having a semi-decent credit score is amazing when you think that most people with a a FICO of 4-500 can only get interest rates of 17% or worse on car loans, and might not even be able to get one at all. Many of the negative items on your credit can easily be removed within 4-6 months. I did it and so can you, check out DSI Solutions for more information.
More than 70% of the people out there have some negative items on their credit from the past 7 years, most of which are items like late payments and over drafts. All of which can be removed from you credit score with little or no work from you. The best part is DSI provides a money back garuntee for their services. If you are not satisfied with their efforts you can easily get a refund of service!
Consolidate your credit cards
This seems like a simple thing but many people have multiple credit cards and store specific charge cards, even lines of credit from that computer or furniture purchase. I bet you can not tell me what each credit lines interest rate is right now. If you can’t then thats a definite sign that you need to first find out and second get all those items consolidated into one such as a low introductory rate credit card or a low interest consolidation loan from the bank. Try to stear clear from credit card consolidation companies and work with someone like your bank. Consolidation companies are created by the credit card companies Read the rest of this entry »
Google does it again, purchasing a startup Grand Central. At this point its a free service that allows you to centralize all your phone numbers into one, allowing you to give out one number that can be routed to any number you may have.
Currently its has been put into a beta state, presumably because its been pruchased by google, but without much wait I was able to obtain an invite into the service. If any of you would like an invite just comment in this post with your email address and I will pass it along.
Noteable features include the ability to dial as your grand central number, from your address book online (currently unlimited but will become a paid service when beta is over). Switch numbers in the middle of the call, this is great if your cell phone is dieing or you are not getting good service inside your home. Listening in on people leaving a voice mail, even answer the call in the middle of the voice mail too! Others include call blocking, forwarding, voicemail and more…
Check it out for yourself over at
Grand Central for more information and if you are interested, dont forget to drop me a comment and I will send you an invite.
?, originally uploaded by Chitra Aiyer.
Flickr has a great feature that allows you to post directly to your blog from their site! Its quite amazing and easier than you think.
First you will need to actually have a flickr.com account, which will store your blogging account information.
Once you are logged into your flickr account browse to a photo that you would like to blog about and take a look at the top of the image. Click the link that says: “Blog This” If you haven’t yet setup a blog, you will be able to walk through the process from the options in the drop down menu.
Once you blog type is configured and your user credentials are entered, you can easily post any image to your blog just by clicking the “Blog This” icon! Don’t worry Flickr gives you the option of saving your password or entering it every time if you are one who doesn’t like storing your passwords.
One great thing about posting directly from flickr.com is the ability to set the style and type the body of your message without ever having to leave flickr.com!
Enjoy and happy posting!
I love winter!
I have been on a quest to get as many friends possible on myspace, which has been fairly successful. Over the past few weeks, I have accumulated over 1100 friends. This has been accomplished using a few sites, which I will list below. Overall the process is manual, and the quality of people that are added to your profile are about half decent the other half bots or spam. If you are trying to market a product on myspace using this technique, the best way would be to spam friends, put up a picture of a hot girl, and target your product directly to myspace users. Such as a friend spammer, profile tool or any other type of myspace tool.
You can also be sure that the site that your using to spam isnt going to spam you with additional spam because any good site only requires your friend ID without any other form of registration. This makes it quick and easy to start spamming for friends.
Below are the list of sites used to spam friends to my profile:
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The other night I went to see “ Meet the Spartans“, all I can say is that it was a horrible disappointment. It was more like watching a bad high school play than a movie. How is it possible that people even went to see this movie? The overly gay connotation, bad writing, and horrible use of internet media as cameo appearances.
I would not recommend anyone to pay to see this movie. If you want, download the first 5 minutes off the internet so you can get an idea of what im talking about. Its not even worth downloading the whole thing. The era of the spoof movies has to stop!
Check out this myspace artist sharing tool at,
sharemyspaceplaylist.com. Its designed to take an artist’s Myspace page, grab their artist playlist and make it easy to share to your Myspace page, without having to know how to get the code from their site.
Clearspring is providing the distribution platform, check it out and push your favorite artist play list to your Myspace page or any other social network supported by
Clearspring’s sharing tools.
If you have any questions or comments about the myspace sharing tool, feel free to post them here!
After reading the post by author Timothy Ferris on his blog
4hourworkweek.com, I decided to take the plunge and try the world of virtual assistants. I knew nothing about virtual assistants until I read his book entitled “The 4 hour work week”. The title is what caught my attention and everything within its pages described exactly what I thought impossible. Ever since then I wanted to apply his principals of lifestyle design but just never got around to it. I don’t know what it was about his post that made me feel more comfortable with the notion, but here I am.
At first I tried looking at a few web pages that specialized in Virtual assistants, which seemed way to complicated and I didn’t feel there was enough recourse if the company tried to screw me! I decided to check out elance, its one of the sites Tim recommends looking at if you needed someone to do your evil bidding :). The process was as simple as posting my request for service and verifying my credit card account. They need to verify this to make sure you are going to pay of course.
Within an hour I had bids and messages to read and approve. Each stating their level of service and expectations as well as providing links back to their profiles and portfolios, which I took some time to read over. Since this was my first VA, I decided that my deciding factor would be cost as I have never even worked with a real assistant before let alone someone on the web. We settled on a trial period of 15 hours to see if they were a good fit and would go with 4 per hour there after.
I felt pretty secure in my transaction because of the escrow service provided by Elance. At least I will have some recourse if they decide not to provide the level of service that I expect.
Yesterday I sent them their first task. Its a very basic research assignment, the ones that you HATED to do in school. I gave them some specific constraints and time requirements to see if they were able to follow directions even if it didn’t seem logical. Since it is a trial period, I don’t think they have assigned me a dedicated VA yet. Im hoping that one will be provided after my trial because this person is going to need to know my habits and moods if they expect to work well with me. The next day, much to my surprise, a nice cheery message was awaiting for me in my inbox.
I was very happy with their research on the required topic, they followed directions exactly as I had directed, and I was excited because I believe this is going to be the start of something quite fun and interesting. At first glance I thought that they had done somethings wrong, but after looking over my directions it was me who made the mistake. I will be a bit more careful to review my directions next time.
Follow up with my next post to see how tonight’s tasks unfold. I will also fill you in on my recent experience hiring programmers on Elance. Ive also noticed, having an assistant, i’m actually starting to think of more tasks for them to do. Where as in the beginning I had no clue what sort of tasks I would assign an assistant. Its not until you actually start, that you realise how much of your life can be outsourced to someone else.
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