slamboard

With fuel costs breaking new records everyday, lots of people are considering curtailing their driving. For some people, this may involve putting a car into storage for months or longer. I was considering it and I realized that there are probably a few things that I should do to the car if I want it to stay in the condition that it is in. Here are a few links with helpful information:

Mothballing your car

AAA has advice that seems to cater to people with really nice cars.

After moving in 2005, we went carless for a whole year. It can be done. I consider my 1990 Skoda to be a time saving device. It is not a necessity and it is not a part of my identity.

The founder of lifelock has famously displayed his social insurance number on the splash page for his product. Detractors like to say that his identity was stolen (or at least that an attempt was made) shortly after that. I say ‘SO WHAT?’

The service offered to consumers does not involve publishing your information on their homepage. It involves periodically triggering the heightened vigilance that is inherent in the system. Certain large companies are upset because they carry out the heightened security and it costs them money that they cannot legally pass on directly to individuals. That gets another SO WHAT? from me. Lifelock provides more security for its customers and they have a huge guarantee should this security get breached. I would hate to have my identity stolen and I worry about it occasionally.

The above video is best presented without commentary.

I want to make a short post about how I recently found a VISA card that had been left in an ATM. I approached the machine that was outside on a main street. It was beeping frantically and displaying in a language that I cannot read. I pressed a random button and the card came out. I looked at the name and then looked around for possible card owners. I didn’t see any, but I saw a police officer and I showed the card to her. She pointed way up the hill at an old man walking with a cane and told me to run after him. He responded to the name on the card and I gave it to him with a pat on the shoulder. He thanked me.

Tom Cruise was back on an Oprah set. The audience of the taped interview has been sworn to secrecy. I suspect that some of them will anonymously blog about it before the show airs.

Tom is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the movie in which he played a minor living of the avails of (heterosexual) prostitution and occasionally dancing in tighty-whiteys.

VistaPrint is one of the only online printing companies that I ever heard about through legitimate word of mouth. Last year there was a situation where bloggers suddenly realized that with all the IRL situations that were cropping up, we all needed business cards. I can recall seeing VistaPrint recommended in forums about a half dozen times.

I looked into this and I almost ‘bought’ some cards. I think at the time you could get a small number practically free. This is what is called a loss leader, I believe. I am curious about the business model. I want to know how many customers end up reordering more cards.

I do not have a bunch of business cards that relate to my activity as a blogger and I don’t think I ever will. I wasn’t sold on the idea when it was all the rage. I have an actual business and I have cards related to that. I would be happy to make blogging my business, but it seems to be stuck in hobby mode. I even offered to sell one of my blogs recently.

I suspect that beyond cards, customers that have a good experience with the company will be more likely to go for the discount checks and rubber stamps that they also offer. Then free rubber stamp looks exactly like the one that I paid about $15 for recently. I needed to have an ‘official’ stamp for a company that I direct

Take a guess as to where this particular quote came from…

“Credit laws do not provide for a third party to place fraud alerts on behalf of a consumer.”

Using the process of elimination, you can first rule out the third party in question, lifelock. That leaves two parties to consider; everyday consumers and established Credit Reporting Agencies that are accustomed to the revenue that they get from these consumers in relation to combating identity theft. Hmm, have you guessed it yet?

Experian is Goliath suing a David, AKA LifeLock. They provide identity theft protection services for a monthly fee. Ok, I want to remain neutral with this, so forget about how the David and Goliath story goes. Besides, us bloggers know of another very big entity that starts with the letters ‘G’ and ‘O’…

This is a familiar fight, the big boys claim it’s an ethical thing while the obvious truth is they see a chance to stomp on an upstart competitor for one of their revenue streams and they take it. Basically LifeLock acts on the behalf of its subscribers in a preemptive way and Experian bears some of the cost. I am not 100% certain, but it seems that consumer protection laws require that they react to fraud alerts and that they bear the cost.

When it comes to Mortgages, knowledge is power. Making use of the tools and information on a website like Earth.co.uk effectively could make a huge difference in your cost of borrowing over the course of years or decades.

Obviously, they don’t know everything and they don’t connect you to everyone. Trying to find the best mortgage s a lot like dating. Most of the really attractive mortgages don’t want you, and some of the ones that are really easy to get are gonna cost you big in the end. You can’t hurry mortgage comparison, you know, my momma said…

You can make a no obligation enquiry at Earth.co.uk and receive a free quote with having to submit to a credit check.

There are several third parties who are standing up and condemning the actions taken by Anonymous against scientology. Many of them point to the fact that they are giving scientologists the perfect opportunity to claim that they are experiencing religious persecution. I agree with this argument, and I would like to point out that many countries do not recognize scientology’s claim to be a religion, choosing instead to view scientology as a business enterprise.

In some respects, scientology is very much a multi-level marketing scheme. I was hesitant in writing that because I don’t want to give MLMs a bad name.

My site gets search traffic from a few people everyday who are curious about Walmart Prepaid Visa Cards. I assumed that this was because I was one of the few business bloggers that made a point of commenting on their launch last year. I also assumed that the product was popular. I was surprised to learn that when a firm surveyed 800 lower-income consumers, only 1% of them actually got these cards. These are people that go to Wal*Mart almost 5 times per month.

So, the cards aren’t explosively popular. The issuers are still happy with their bottom line, although there are worries that the government may make additional rules about terms and charges that will restrict the potential for profit. General Electric Co.’s GE Money subsidiary is the issuer of the Walmart card.

Source:Digital Transactions

Right now, there is a window of opportunity to become an early adopter and also an affiliate for Net Audio Ads. After February 1st you will not be able to get in on the top tier of this revenue generating idea. When you get free affiliate status you stand to get a cut of the ad revenue from the people that you refer and also the people that they refer. I am going to briefly introduce the concept of these audio ads and how they can generate income. The company has a very long sales letter that you can opt in to receive. I recently saw a blog post of moderate length discussing the effectiveness of long versus short sales letters and I was surprised to learn that the long ones actually work better.

Anyway, the most basic thing I can say to fellow bloggers and webmasters is that these 5 second audio ads earn you money from every single visitor. Most of us have a blog or site with Google ads and we know how paltry the revenue can be sometimes. I place my Google ads on my page in a way that is transparent and unobtrusive. My regular readers probably only notice them when my content has triggered some laughably off base ‘contextual’ advertising. I removed a post reviewing some kind of colon cleanser when I did some extra research on the company and found out that it’s owner was a favorite subject of the quackwatch guy. Even though I removed the post, my sidebar was covered in colon cleanser Google ads for weeks. I wanted to see if anybody had a product that would cleanse my blog of these ads. I listened to the sample audio ads and I was impressed by the quality and tone. I don’t think they would offend my readers. Worries about putting of readers are the main disincentives that bloggers have when it comes to advertising. These audio ads are going to be contextual as well. I hope they attract advertisers that have excellent products and entertaining slogans. I hope the colon cleanser people stick to text ads.