So Microsoft has introduced a new product search feature on live to compete with PriceGrabber, PriceWatch, etc… they call it Cashback.
And the reason they call it Cashback is because they pay you a small amount as a ”rebate” when you purchase some items through the service.
Check it out; obviously the engine with the lowest price (overall) wins.
For years I’ve used bill payment services to manage my finances; you log on when you get your bills (or once a week or so) and schedule the payment to arrive a few days before it’s due (you don’t want to cut it too close).
The exception to my using bill payment has been vendors that accept credit cards — I’d much rather pay them direct using a virtual credit card number and get the points; and most of them don’t allow you to schedule the payment, you have to do it now (which is why we have calendar alerts).
So in general what happens is I end up only paying my credit cards with bill pay…
Well, a screw up by one of the bill pay services I used forced me to make a CitiCards payment using their on line system. I was a little more than annoyed, but I discovered something. CitiBank immediately posted my payment, and of course the money didn’t disappear from my account for three days — the exact reverse of what happens with bill payment!
Chase just sent me a “special offer” of 500 bonus points to enroll my Amazon VISA in their payment program… so I did. They didn’t require that I use it, just enroll a bank account (and of course, they already have all the bank account information anyway, and large credit card companies are probably okay to trust with a little more financial information).
I haven’t decided if I will use their payment services or not, but I’m thinking that I can keep the money in my account longer, and get an immediate confirmation for credit card payment (never having to deal with any of the unfortunate incidents that can occur when your bill payment service screws up and tell you you’ll have to resolve it).
Anyway, the bottom line is using your credit card company’s payment system may actually make your life easier, and will definitely allow you to keep your money longer.
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I’ve used this for a couple months now with Citibank, and I just started paying my Chase bill this way. It’s great, when the statement comes in and I reconcile it against my records I just go ahead and schedule the payment for the business day before it’s due (you could push it until the day it’s due). Then it just happens; you card is paid instantly on the date you specify and the money is removed from your cash account (savings, checking, or money market) several days later. If it’s like my Chase due date, you actually can get a few extra pennies interest since it pushed the date the money is deducted from my account until after the monthly close (and with many credit cards you can select the closing date, so you can always pay before the end of the month and still get the benefits for it).
If you think in the box you see only six faces; and if you think outside the box you see only six faces (though from the other side) — it’s those who don’t limit their vision to the box that are unhindered, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of it….
From my perspective, what box?
If you have a 1and1 hosted domain with email (like my domains are), you can use the following settings for your email client:
POP:
host: pop.1and1.com
port: 110
port: 995, SSL
IMAP:
host: imap.1and1.com
port: 143
port: 993, SSL
SMTP:
host: smtp.1and1.com (requires authentication)
port: 25
port: 587, SSL
You can access 1and1 web mail via:
http://webmail.1and1.com/
If you have a GMail account or a GMail hosted mail service you can use the information below to setup your local mail client after you enable access via the web interface.
POP:
host: pop.gmail.com
port: 995, use SSL
IMAP:
host: imap.gmail.com
port: 993, use SSL
SMTP:
host: smtp.gmail.com (requires authentication)
port: 465, use SSL
port: 587, use TLS
If you have a GMail hosted email server, you’ll need to sign in via:
http://mail.google.com/a/<domain name>
or the URL provided by your administrator to make the changes, if you just have a regular GMail account sign in via
http://www.gmail.com/
ASUS has release a series of “thin client” devices that they call the Eee PC, it comes in three basic models (the Eee PC Surf and Eee PC look identical, but the Surf versions apparently aren’t easily upgraded; and then there’s the Eee PC 900 which has a larger display).
The Eee PC Surf is available with either 2GB or 4GB; the Eee PC is available with either 4GB or 8GB — both have a 7″ screen.
The Eee 900 is available with either 12GB (Linux) or 20GB (Windows) and has a 8.9″ screen.
All of the use Intel processors… for more information just go to ASUS, and I’ll save you the pain of going through their cute presentation:
Eee PC Surf & Eee PC
Eee PC 900
You know those annoying SPAM text messages you get from the five digit telephone numbers?
Those are called premium text message services, and it actually may be illegal from them to send a text message to your phone unless you subscribe to them (text messages may cost cellular subscribers money for each message sent or received).
Anyway, if you want to litigate to get your $0.50 back you can contact your cellular carrier and get the name of the company that has registered the number, though they’ll probably only have an 800 number for them (remember, calling an 800 number exposes your telephone number — you cannot block it); but while you’re on the phone with the cellular company you might want to request that they block all premium text messages sent to your phone.
There was a time when SPAM email almost crippled the Internet, and TEXT message may go the same way so I’d recommend you take action sooner rather than later to prevent marketers from forcing you to spend your money so that they have cost effective ways to reach you.
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VeriSign owns mCube which is one of the larger premium text message service providers, so many companies use them to actually send their messages (both VeriSign and the company contracting there services may be liable; feel free to call up VeriSign and have a talk with their legal department)
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Here is a list of some of the Premimum Text Message Providers
When in the Mission and looking for some tasty Mexican food, try these:
Also, for fun, read up on the history of the San Francisco Burrito.
Keeping a Windows virtual machine running well using a Microsoft virtualization system is fairly simple, and here are the best practices that I’ve come up with (through trial and error and reading).
First, if you use Virtual Server rather than Virtual PC make sure you’re using SCSI disks, and regardless, always try to use the most current virtual tools in your guest.
Second, if you use dynamically expanding disks you need to compact them occasionally to decrease the size; you might as well defrag them in the guest before doing the compact and clean off unnecessary files as well; and if you have the time, defragment the host as well. The reason for keeping the dynamically expanding disks as small as possible is caching and head travel — small is good.
Third, if you’re running something like SQL server inside a virtual machine, or software that tends to grow and shrink the store, consider using a pre-allocated disk rather than a dynamic one, it will probably be much better in the long run.
Now, here are a few of the “tools” I use to make my life easy. first, I create a batch file that contains:
I use O&O Software’s OODefrag to defragment my disks; some of my machines have the professional version installed, and some have the server version installed; so lines 1 & 2 just figures out which of the versions is installed.
Line 4 setups up for calling the disk cleaner manager, because Microsoft really didn’t create a very good command line interface to it, you have to write a job detail into the registry. You actually only need do it once, but rather than see if it’s there, I just write the “current” version to it. 666 is an arbitrary choice of labels. I put a copy of what’s in the reg file at the end of the post, use MSDN to decipher it.
Line 5 invokes the disk cleaner manager with the job that was setup in line 4.
Line 7 defragments all the drives.
Line 9 invokes the precompactor (comes with virtual server, but works for virtual pc as well).
Line 11 shutsdown the system.
After the system is shut down, you need to run the compactor from the host, you can invoke that with Virtual Server with a script, or through the web interface (inspect disk); with Virtual PC you’ll need to do that with the virtual disk wizard.
After the compactor is finished, consider defragmenting your host disk (at least occassionally).
I actually have permutations of this procedure for use with Parallels and VMware. Both Parallels and VMware have an interface for this, but it really doesn’t do that great of a job in the guest, so you can definitely improve on it by doing the same procedures I do for the Microsoft products before calling their “built in” functions.
If you use UNDO disks and always throw away your changes, you only need to do this procedure once (with UNDO turned off), degragment the host files, then enable UNDO. Since the base disks never change (until you need to apply service packs, patches, etc), you never need to worry about cleanup. But don’t let UNDO disk change sets grow extremely large or your performance will suffer.
One more word of advice, if you copy your virtual machines (and this is true of any of the virtualization systems), make sure you allow the virtualization software to create a new descriptor file (to avoid MAC address duplication, though Virtual Server can handle this), and make sure you run NewSid.exe (or a similar program) in a Windows host to change it’s name and security identifier.
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cleanmgr-0666-reg
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Active Setup Temp Folders]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress old files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Content Indexer Cleaner]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Downloaded Program Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Internet Cache Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Memory Dump Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Microsoft_Event_Reporting_2.0_Temp_Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Old ChkDsk Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Recycle Bin]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Remote Desktop Cache Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Setup Log Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\WebClient and WebPublisher Cache]
“StateFlags0666″=dword:00000002
On windows there’s basically three commercial solutions for virtualization, and several free solutions… wait one of the commercial solutions is free (well when you buy the operating system), and the other is partially free…
For Intel based Mac you have commercial solutions
And for Linux you have the following commercial solutions, and many free solutions (Xen being one of the leaders)
And for bare metal you have
I’m not going to go into details on any of these, I just wanted to give at least a partial list with a few thoughts.
If you’re new to virtualization, use one of the free virtualization solutions. You can try several of them, and many of them can convert a virtual machine from another vendor’s format to it’s own, but learn what the strengths and weaknesses are of each before you spend money on a solution that might not be the best for you.
Microsoft Virtual Server has some definite performance advantages over Microsoft Virtual PC… there are some things you might lose with Virtual Server that you might want (the local interface); but Virtual Server installs on both desktop and workstation platforms, so try it.
For Mac I definitely like Parallels Desktop better than VMware Fusion; but you may not share my opinion. VMware claims to be faster, though I certainly don’t see it. And I might add, that if you have a decent machine you’re running virtualization software on, fast isn’t going to be the number one concern — correctness is far more important.
Also, with each of the virtualization systems, hosts, and guests there are best practices for optimizing the installation and performance. I’ll try and write up some information I’ve put together that keep my virtual machines running well.
For the record, I run Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (64 bit) on Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 SP2, and on Windows Vista Ultimate and Business x64 SP1; works well. And I run Parallels Desktop v3 on my Macs.
For the most part my guests are Windows XP Pro (x86) and Windows Server 2003 (x86); I don’t really need 64-bit guests (at the moment), but I do also run Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Free Spire, etc linux…
Like I said, figure out your requirements, play with several of the virtualization systems and spend your money on more memory, perhaps a better processor, and stick with the free virtualization software!
