This has happened to me several times at Kohl’s Department Stores. I’ll return something after paying my bill and while I might buy something there I’ve still got a credit with them (i.e. they still owe me money). So they send me a refund check.

This time it was only for $8.37, and after a month or two they mail me a check refunding me the amount. For one thing, it’s a pain, I have to go deposit the check and it’s not not for a very big amount. And (B) it’s not like I won’t be shopping there again. This has happened to me a few times before, I think always for small amounts. It just seems a waste on many levels, time, stamps, billing, etc. (I understand the computer just spits it out, but there is still expenses); not even to mention the non-greenness of it. BTW, Kohl’s is the only credit card that I have that won’t automatically deduct a bill from my checking account.

Better yet, they should mail me the check but tell me I can take it to any Kohl’s store and can redeem it with the attached five dollar coupon or (better yet) one of their 30% off coupons and get me to spend more in the store. In theory I’ve got this ‘found money’ plus whatever bonus they might offer me. They’d have to put limits on this so people don’t scam the system, but it’s not like they don’t pass out similar coupons all the time. It would have cost them nothing to put such a thing in the same envelope.

Another thing, mailing checks to people’s mailboxes when they aren’t expecting them strikes me as a security thing; now this wasn’t a large amount, but I really don’t want large checks sitting in my mailbox when I’m not expecting them (or when I might throw them away).

On a side note: I called a friend today and they were shopping at Kohl’s and I thought “I haven’t been there in a while” and instead of running over there today, I’m sitting here blogging about their weird refund policies

I’m bumping this to the top since I’ve posted some updates below…

So I get an e-mail from iTunes today stating that an episode for my new season pass for “Sophie” has arrived. The first thing I thought was that I accidentally clicked “buy season” when I downloaded the free pilot last week. But when I check the receipt I see six other items (in addition to the season pass) totaling $61.93! Not only that, I see another order for $5.97! Not a chance that I placed these orders (fyi,they were placed at 1 am and 5 am).

Here’s the really strange part: Almost all of the purchase was videos (tv, movies, movie rentals) and I think those kinds of videos still have DRM in them and no additional computers were authorized. What good are these to anyone if they didn’t authorize a computer? Can they even play them? Wouldn’t it have been easier to have just downloaded torrents of these files? These oddities make me think it’s an accounting error.

So I had to “report a problem” to Apple/iTunes for each of the 10 individual items. The e-mails went something like this:

I did not place this order for any of the 3 items on this order. Nor has my computer downloaded these items. It’s order XXXXXXXX I also have another order from today (ZZZZZZZZ) that I did not place.

I’ve changed my password as a precaution. I also tried to play some older protected/DRM’d music and it still plays (so I’m guessing if someone hijacked something they didn’t deauthorize my computers).

Gary LaPointe (phone ###-###-#####)

PS – These purchases don’t even meet my normal purchasing patterns.

My responses appear to be identical other than contact info (and I only got one response for each of the two orders):

Dear Gary,

My name is Jane Doe with the iTunes Store. I’m so sorry to hear of the unauthorized charges made with your iTunes Store account. I can certainly appreciate your concerns, and will do everything I can to assist in having this resolved.

With regards to financial reimbursement for the charges in question, these would have to be removed by a specialized team, designated to handle requests of this nature. I would urge you to contact your credit card company as soon as possible to inquire about canceling the card and removing the unauthorized transactions. A member of your credit card’s fraud department will contact the iTunes Store directly, and this team will resolve the issue. I apologize that I’m unable to remove the charges myself, but all unauthorized transactions must be handled in this manner.

If you suspect you are the victim of identity theft, please consider following these recommendations:

(they then gave 14 lines of tips that I cut out)

I sincerely hope that you are able to resolve this matter with the help of your credit card company, as soon as possible, Gary. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Sincerely,

Jane Doe
iTunes Customer Store Support

Please note that I work, Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 12:30 PM – 9:00 PM this week

The identity theft issues don’t even make sense. Why would someone steal my charge card number and log into my iTunes account? The CC number won’t even get them into my account and if they had a CC number, they could just create their own new account and I wouldn’t have know about it for days. And Apple doesn’t display the account number. I’m thinking, it’s an accounting or some bits on the web got mixed up. And the responses were generic enough where I’m not 100% sure they read the post.

I did notice they they did include their working schedule, which was even evdifferent for the two different people who responded (neither of whom were named “Jane”), it’s a nice touch but they both had the same return address (although the “follow-up” code could possibly redirect it).

I responded with:

Jane,

I will have my charge card company dispute/remove the charges as you said to do below. I have changed my password.

I have four (4) questions below in bold.

Unless I’m mistaken, they only gained access to my iTunes account. They don’t have my charge card number, iTunes doesn’t display the number for them to see, correct? A charge card number will not get them into my iTunes account. If they actually have my charge card number, I’d think they’d charge more than $70 of music/videos and

So this is either someone guessed my password (which was letters, numbers and non-alphanumeric characters) or some data packets got mixed up as someone else was placing their order. Since I have the two authorized computers in my possession and I know no one else was here using them, I’m assuming the latter.

Can someone actually download songs/videos to a non-authorized computer if they guessed my password?
Since videos still have DRM, someone wouldn’t actually be able to play them, correct?

Someone at the iTunes Customer Store Support can’t actually intervene in some way, at least to stop someone from downloading the season pass?
If it’s just an accounting error, it’s still going to download the season pass to my computer the next time I purchase a song.

Without my new password I’m assuming someone cannot download more of the season pass. I don’t even see how they could have in the first place without authorizing a computer.

Thank you,
Gary

And I can’t even dispute these charges yet since they haven’t fully been charge to my credit card company yet.

If anyone from iTunes/Apple is reading this and wants to fix this. You can leave a comment below or contact me directly.

UPDATE:

Wow! Lots of people with similar problems these last few weeks (see comments below), but I’m the only one that didn’t seem to have gift cards purchased on my account.

So it looks like my charge card is refunding the two dollar amounts to my charge card. This is contingent to Apple not disagreeing with my claim. FYI, after I said it was kind of stupid that they weren’t going to cancel the season pass since I was disputing it and they were still delivering the shows, Apple did contact me to say they would refund the rest of the season pass (right around the same time).

PS – It appears the Apple does not allow you to cancel a season pass! This is insane, it’s to their benefit to get you to subscribe, the fact that you can’t cancel is a non-motivator. Obviously if it was a discounted season pass and you canceled it, you’d pay the full price for episodes already received. Just seems like an obvious solution.

I still don’t understand what they are doing with these iTunes protected movies/shows if they can’t play them? Why not just download torrents off the ‘net if they are going to steal?

TGIFriday’s is a sit-down casual restaurant chain in the US, I think they’re all over. They’ve got a deal for penny appetizers and buy an entree get an entree for a dollar.

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it’s that awesome of a deal:
0) Print the coupon and read the fine print on the coupon.
1) Sign up for their “Stripes” (frequent flyer) program and they’ll mail you the coupon within 24 hours.
2) Go to the bar and eat an appetizer for a penny (any except the two big sample plates).
3) You must order a drink (doesn’t no have to be alcoholic).
4) The e-mail says to move to the tables to order the entree, but it seems they don’t care.
5) It’s one coupon per person: So two people can get one appetizer and two entrees for somewhere about $11.01 (1 penny + two $10 appetizers) plus your drinks.
6) Don’t forget to tip your wait staff based on the price before discount.
7) They then generally tell me to proceed to come back again to use the same coupon until April 30, 2009. FYI, the coupon I have does not require the card so you can print more. Come back here and tell me what great deal you got!

You could use this for two people for two one-penny appetizers with two of that coupon. Ask before you try this, but I’ve done it once.

Obviously, if you don’t like TGIFridays, it’s not that great of a deal.

Harper Collins books has a free audio book for download. You can download A Study in Emerald from Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things (one story from a book of short stories). And it’s read by Neil too!

Here is a direct link to the download (right-click to save).

As a followup to my post on saving money for the holidays (over at WeLikeMoney.com) I’m going to talk about managing your utility bills, specifically your gas and electric bills.

Your electricity and natural gas bills fluctuate throughout the year: Air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, filters for the pool in the summer, more lights in the winter and many other factors. Many utility companies offer something some kind of balanced budgeting billing (my company calls it BudgetWise® Billing). What they do is figure out what your average bill is, guesstimate what it will be over the next 12 months and start charging you this amount. Every so often they re-evaluate they amount (6 months) and every 12 they credit or charge you the difference.

This is great for those months where you get some outrageous bills, especially if they haven’t done any meter reading in a while. Mine is usually pretty accurate and I’ve never owed at the end. This is a saving feature I’ve never used before a few years ago, I was helping a friend with some really tight budgeting and we wanted a specific amount to budget to; when we set up his, I added it to mine and I’ve enjoyed having it ever since.

Pros and cons:

• No shocking bills! They are all the same.
• You could get a big bill at the end (this hasn’t happened to me).
• If you can do this with gas but not electric (or vice-versa) and they sway differently it might not be as useful (my gas and electric are the same company).
• If you don’t pay enough attention to your bills you might not conserve enough. Not enough shock might not make you conserve enough, which costs you in the end.

From a budgeting standpoint this makes all my utilities the same every month: cable, cell phone, gas and electric. My water is part of my condo association fees so I’m not sure if anyone offers budgeting on water bills since I’ve always lived in some kind of multi-person dwelling.

Hopefully this works out for you as well as it has for me. If anyone has any experiences on this (good or bad) please leave a comment.

I’m guest posting over at We Like Money today.

My post is about using your bank’s Christmas accounts not only for the holidays but other large yearly bills too. So go over and read my post and also check out how Tiffanie and Dave have been working to get out of debt for the last six months.

If you’re visiting Gary Said… for the first time then let me say “Welcome to my home on the internet” and please leave a comment today and mention how you got here. And don’t miss the free Suze Orman finance book download that I mentioned yesterday.

So I found this web site for Calling America that lets you make free phone calls to the United States. It seems to be fully supported by advertisements on the screen. You just type in the number and then you get a pop-up asking if it can use your microphone. You also have to wait 10-seconds before it dials (time to read the ads).

Not the best quality, but if you’re over your minutes it’ll work. My most likely use is when I’ve misplaced my cell phone, since it’s my only phone I don’t have a way to call it and have it ring…

I’ve tried a few calls on it so go check it out. You’re limited if you don’t sign up for their free service (numbers of calls and time length).

Don’t forget (unless you hadn’t heard already) that you can download Suze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan for free starting today. It’s downloadable in English or Spanish.

Offer expires at 11:59 p.m. CT on Thursday, January 15.

I know I should stop drinking bottled water, but I can’t. It’s too convenient to just grab a bottle on the go. It’s generally less than 17 cents a bottle when I purchase a case (this week it’s way on sale for 11.5 cents a bottle for an odd sized case of 35 at Meijer). I keep a case by the car in the garage and I take grab one to go all the time. I generally refill it as the day goes on. It’s just too easy to grab it and go; if I make it more inconvenient I might end up drinking less water and I probably don’t drink enough as it is (I used to hate drinking water).

And yes, I do understand that much of the bottled water is tap water.

Why am I talking about this today? Because I just read 10 Reasons To Stop Drinking Bottled Water over at The Good Human and I’m feeling a little guilty. The two statistics that really blew my mind were that it can take nearly 7 times the amount of water in the bottle to actually make the bottle itself and that on a weekly basis, 37,800 18-wheelers are driving around the country delivering water.

I will mention that at home I do drink tap water and while I prefer to run it through the Britta Filter first, it’s not a requirement. I do not open bottled water to drink in the house and I’m perfectly fine drinking non-filted ice from my freezer (hmm, I wonder if there is a filter on the freezer that needs changing?).

I just don’t see me washing out some kind of travel bottle to reuse over and over. If I drink two plastic bottles a day (and that would be a lot) we’re only talking about saving $2.50 a week (not counting purchasing and cleaning the reusable bottles and the time); wouldn’t I be better off saving a gallon of gas or two? I see me needing to get out of the house and wanting some water and the bottle isn’t clean or full or the Britta pitcher is empty or some other barrier stopping me; a few times a week I’d probably have to skip it and have to stop somewhere and buy a bottle for $1.50 which is counter productive. Maybe if I had 3 or 4 refillable bottles??

Here’s a free Christmas Album sponsored by Oprah. This is the same album from a few weeks ago.

Don’t miss the cover art links too!

Once again – It says it’s only available for 48 hours, but I don’t know when the clock started ticking…

• Faith Hill, “Joy to the World” from the album Joy to the World
• Tony Bennett, “I’ll be Home for Christmas” from the album A Swingin’ Christmas
• Il Divo, “O Holy Night” from the album The Christmas Collection
• Josh Groban, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” from the album Noel
• Brian McKnight, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” from the album I’ll Be Home for Christmas
• Amy Grant, “O Come All Ye Faithful” from the album The Christms Collection
• Harry Connick Jr., “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” from the album What a Night! A Christmas Album
• Aretha Franklin, “Silent Night” from the album This Christmas

Walgreens Photo offers a Free 8×10 Photo Print with coupon FREEGIFT through December 20, 2008 with free in-store pickup.

Found at SlickDeals.net

I cannot believe how much gas has dropped in the last few months. It’s really insane, but in a good way.

I was talking two years ago about “how low” prices had dropped but it almost peaked at a dollar less these past few weeks.

FYI, when I buy my gas I try to check DetroitGasPrices.com (I think it’s an offshoot of GasBuddy.com). I’m not going to drive way out of my way for a few cents, but if I’m driving through an area that’s cheap, I’ll wait until I get to the cheaper place…

At Flowing Data they posted a great flowchart on the current financial crisis (it’s way to big to reproduce here. Informative and easy to follow.

I think they got it from here.

Here’s a free Christmas Album sponsored by Oprah.

This is trickier than it sounds. Imagine trying to open an account in the US without a Social Security card and without a mailing address…

I got all my paperwork in order:

Just a quick tip on winning: The easy way to remember which pieces are the winning game pieces for this year’s Monopoly game is they are the last piece alphabetically in their set; except in the case of Boardwalk (which is the major winning game piece).

Be sure to keep me in mind if you use this tip to win the big bucks

I believe this is the same system they’ve used in the previous five years (possibly longer).

My problem with this is remembering the other pieces in the sequence to know if it’s the last one alphabetically…

Water Works – $50 – Odds 1 in 639,000
Mediterranean Avenue – $100 – Odds 1 in 5,701,000
Short Line Railroad – $500 – Odds 1 in 311,389,700
Vermont Avenue – $1,000 – Odds 1 in 106,921,400
Virginia Avenue – $2,000 – Odds 1 in 106,921,400
Tennessee Avenue – $5,000 – Odds 1 in 307,947,900
Kentucky Avenue – $10,000 – Odds 1 in 307,947,900
Ventnor Avenue – $25,000 – Odds 1 in 769,869,600
Pennsylvania Avenue – $50,000 – Odds 1 in 769,869,600
Golden Avenue – $100,000 – Odds 1 in 178,065,100
Boardwalk – $1,000,000 – Odds 1 in 591,287,650

Pretty slim odds, even for the low-end prizes.

* FYI – This is what I found out from looking around on-line and is the system I’m using. I don’t have any connection with the official game/rules.

This applies only to amounts above $8,950 (assuming the standard deduction of $5,450 plus one personal exemption of $3,500) for an individual. For example, a single individual without children pays:

Single Filing Status (Tax Rate Schedule X)
10% on income between $0 and $8,025
15% on the income between $8,025 and $32,550; plus $802.50
25% on the income between $32,550 and $78,850; plus $4,481.25
28% on the income between $78,850 and $164,550; plus $16,056.25
33% on the income between $164,550 and $357,700; plus $40,052.25
35% on the income over $357,700; plus $103,791.75

http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_brackets.htm

http://taxes.about.com/od/2008taxes/qt/2008_tax_rates.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_bracket#Tax_brackets_in_the_USA

This applies only to amounts above $8,950 (assuming the standard deduction of $5,450 plus one personal exemption of $3,500) for an individual. For example, a single individual without children pays:

So I stopped at Kinko’s to fax something, unfortunately I had to fax it twice since I forgot a page (duh!). But I was looking at their computer area and I see they want $12 an hour to use a computer. One person here just looks like they are just checking their fantasy football and that’s got to get pricey after a while; others are just surfing and one guy is working on a Word document. They could probably lease/rent a computer for less than $24 a month (that’s the going price for an iBook with Apple’s credit) and subscribe to a T-Mobile WiFi for $30 a month and could sit at the same Kinko’s and recoup their costs in less than 5 hours. Plus, you’d have a laptop for anywhere use and you can use it at free WiFi spots and most other T-Mobile spots.

You’d have to pass a credit check to get the computer but other than that it seems like the way to go to me. It’s a decent neighborhood where I am and none of these folks look homeless so I can’t think of any reasons not to go this route. Any one have any thoughts on this?

Looks like they have some new print on-line service that you can print and ship via FedEx (it’s actually called FedEx Kinko’s now) from home or remote.

Dollar rent-a-car needs some cars moved so they’ll rent you a car for $1 a day (max 10 days) for a one-way delivery. Lots of pickups all over the place with specific destinations all over (especially Florida). Ends October 25th, 2008.

Not so useful if you don’t need it, but if you need to go to one of these places…

So it’s that time for my five year ARM (Adjustable Rate Mortgage) to start adjusting. Was a little nervous because I didn’t know how it would go. It could have go up 2% but it only jumped from 4.25% to 4.875% so I’m pretty happy about 5/8ths of a percent (it’ll stay that rate for the next year). What I couldn’t understand was why my payments dropped if the rates went up? Turns out they recalculated my mortgage based on what I currently owe and since I’ve been paying extra on my mortgage it went down; so even though my interest is going up $45-ish a month it actually dropped my monthly payment.

I’ve had a really great experience with my first mortgage. I set it up with a local company and it was immediately sold to HSBC (it was sold so fast; I signed Friday at 4 pm and Monday I got HSBC paperwork dated from Friday). I purchsed the five year ARM at 6.875 interest (I think I paid a small amount for points to drop it 3/8 of a percent) then a few years later I had them redo my interest rate to 5.25% with just a phone call (and a $750 processing fee on my MasterCard) and then I did it once more (5 years ago) to 4.25% for another $750 phone call. The phone call required no paperwork, just them checking my credit and my payment history. So I managed to stretch this 5 year ARM out to almost 9 years while dropping my interest rate in the mean time.

It’s worked out quite well for me (other than the fact that housing values have dropped) especailly since I never thought I’d live here even 5 years

So the school system in the State of Michigan has an option as part of it’s retirement plan. You can actually “purchase” up to five years of work (called Universal Buy-In) and then then when you have twenty-five years of work into the system it actually counts as thirty so you can retire five years early. Now it’s a convoluted formula based on your age, your maximum salary and how many years you have in the system; so the younger you are and the least you make they cheaper it is. Plus, they’ll take the money out of your check pre-tax dollars so you can get into this deal for as about $35 less every two-weeks (that’s $50 pre-tax). When I got in on the deal the plan was better, now they charge you interest on what you owe, so now you’re better off paying it off fast, before you had to spread it out. (Warning: if you’re bored now, the post really doesn’t get much more interesting. The part in bold near the bottom is the slightly/semi-interesting part that caused me to write this post.)

I recommend this plan* to people who are in the Michigan retirement system and I always mention it to the new teachers at school. The younger you are when you start the cheaper this will be; I don’t want to hear you say you can’t afford it, you can start this at about $17 a week, that’s not that much and it should really pay off in the long run.

In my case, I didn’t hear about it until I had been in the system for a few years so it wasn’t cheap but since I knew I’d get five extra years of retirement payments so it seemed like a deal to me. I had it spread out evenly over the years I had left so it’s been getting paid down slowly.More details: If you leave the system (aren’t employed for a while by this system) they credit the years you’ve paid for and if you come back they’ll redo the above calculation with you being older, making more, having more years in system and factor in interest. This didn’t sound like such a good deal to me. Also, If you don’t actually work the 25 years, you have to wait until you’re sixty years old and it just increases your payment (or I think you can roll it in to some other kind of retirement).

So late last year I decided I wanted this paid off work was way too stressful late last year and I felt as if I could quit at any time, so I increased my contribution quit a bit. It wasn’t going very fast so I stopped contributing to my other IRA/403b retirement-type things and put almost all of my check into paying this off (I lived off of savings in the meantime) and eight paychecks later I was done. Hopefully, putting that much in pre-tax doesn’t goof up my exemptions come tax time.

This allowed me a few different things:

Every day RCA has a free song download. Today it’s Blame is a Killer by Amy Ray (one-half of Indigo Girls fame). Just thought you should know…

Okay, so I’m not a big fan of “I Kissed a Boy” but I’ve seen it so often at the thetop of the iTunes store charts I thought I would mention this sale: Katy Perry’s MP3 album One Of The Boys is only $2 for today only at Amazon in 256kbps MP3 format and it has the “I Kissed a Boy” song on it. So it’s a deal if you like her or this song…

I’m not even sure what else she plays but this seemed like a great deal so I thought I’d mention it. Usually their $2 or $3 deals are much older albums.

THIS DEAL IS NOW OVER AND IS BACK TO IT’S REGULAR PRICE.As of Sunday at noon (EST) it’s still listed as on-sale.

I felt like they were giving it away. That’s really really sad…

Since my local Farmer Jack closed and went out of business I’ve been paying attention to different groceries stores and prices. I didn’t pay as much attention to pricing as I should since my mother worked at a Farmer Jack’s and I wanted to support them (also, I felt they had good prices). Plus, it’s just me and it’s not worth driving around all over to save a little bit when I don’t get that much (I average less than $30 a week but I do pick up some grocery items when on sale at Target).

My nearest FJ was purchased by Kroger. I’m not a big Kroger fan for two reasons: I’ve never been thrilled with their meat section that much and it always seems like their dairy products don’t have very long life for their expiration dates. Also, they never seem to have Orange Juice on sale for very good prices (I drink a lot of it).

So I’ve been checking out the other stores nearby: A Meijer which I like but isn’t very close and a Wal-Mart closer and on the way home from work. The prices are significantly different between the stores, I need to hit these other stores on purpose and more often. I need a grocery web site when I can put in (and have it remember) my most often purchase items: OJ, milk, cantaloupe, bananas, jumbo eggs, etc. and have it tell me where I should shop this week.

When my kitchen gets a lot smarter with RFID this will probably be a breeze. It’ll know what I need and tell me it’s time to go shopping or (better yet) tell me to wait a few days since everything I need goes on sale at one of the stores. And tell me while I’m not low on cereal it’s so cheap this week I should stock up.

Have you used Google’s Free phone information service at 1-800-GOOG-411 or 1-800-4664-411? It’s voice activated directory service! They’ll even connect you for free if you’d like!

If you’re on a cell phone Say “text message” or “map it” and they’ll text you the information with phone, address with web and map links (with driving directions too).

It’s not new but I’ve never gotten around to mentioning it. Here’s direct YouTube link to Google’s Free phone information.

The New York Times did a really cool graphic last week on what Americans spend their money on. It’s a big graphic and you can zoom in (one level) to read the parts you can’t see and the colors indicate change in prices over the last year. I really like the way they did it.

I’ve say it’s very Edward Tufte, except for the odd shapes of all the pieces. He would have put it down differently, something more symmetrical (or square) so that you could have more easily compared milk to dry cleaning.I found this at Get Rich Slowly.

I saw this on SlickDeals.net, get a free Star Wars book “Legacy of the Force: Betrayal”) PDF, MP3, Kindle or Sony eBook through Tuesday, May 13, 2008. (If that link doesn’t work try this link).

It looks like it’s part 1 of a “Legacy of the Force” series that they’re trying to promote, book 9 comes out on the 13th. The series is supposed to cover a “new era in the Star Wars universe and features the beloved characters from the original trilogy, answering the questions of what happened to Han, Luke and Leia after the conclusion of Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi”.

So the Automatic Teller Machines have been when I generally use for ca$h when I travel. Travelers Checks have always been a hassle. Charging always works well too, I never seem to get any related fees (or the little fees I get are pretty minimal). And the exchange rate is usually really good on the charge or ATM cards.

But the only ATMs in the southern Nicoya Peninsula appear to Banco Nacional and they don’t like my card (but they list my network). But it might just be their machines, since those machines are pretty inconsistent: sometimes it asks me for the language, sometimes it still gives me Spanish, sometimes the network just times out and other times it gives me a useless message (like ‘you can only take out between $10 and $200 per day’, but that’s all I was trying to do).

So going inside the banco is a trip, guards with shotguns and you walk into a decompression-type chamber (closed in while they x-ray you, and then they open the second door, imagine walking into an ultra-secure government facility). Then it’s kinda set up like the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) and you wait and try to communicate what you want. They have this neat system that you can phone in for live translation for English/Spanish, and when I say “neat” I mean if it worked. So after several tries, we determined that their ATM system was so crappy no one could say if it did / would / could work with the US.

So we decided to do a cash advance instead, we didn’t know what the fees would be but we needed some more cash; not everyone takes charges and many charge premiums (and I think some discounts are because the money never gets reported somewhere down the line). This still took a while and they do everything in triplicate down there but I think it’d be hard for people to cheat the system since there are so many checks and balances.

Once we got much more north the other ATMs took our cards just fine (I had a problem in Jaco once and I think it was the same bank but I just went to a different companies machine and it worked fine).

Here’s the problem: Being curious of the fees of the Visa cash advance, we got on-line to check and discovered that the advance was done twice on the card, the fee was done twice and since it went over the card limit, tacked on another $39 fee. FYI, the cash advance fee was only $12.58 for $400 (and the back charged a dollar). The bank’s already been e-mailed and it’ll probably be fine from here.

I’m a huge fan of SpamArrest, a mail program that uses challenge/response CAPTCHAs to only allow mail from humans, instead of from spammers. It works great but the price has gone up from $60 for two years to $90, so I’m checking for other options. It’s only an additional $30 but if the price jump is $30 (or worse, 50%) every 2 years, it’s gonna get kinda pricey in the next few renewal cycles. The price jump is kind of large after a few years especially since I know many of their costs should have gone down (disk space, servers and bandwidth); the software is already written and has had minimal user changes over the last two years.

Honestly, I’m sure it saves me more way than $45 a year worth of time. But can something save me more time, I know in the past MailBlocks saved me more time. So I’m looking for suggestions for some other Challenge/Responce mail system.

There is one thing I really dislike about SpamArrest, while I can use any mail client to read my mail, to check and approve spam I have to go to their web site and that takes a lot of time (and this is a feature I miss from the now deceased MailBlocks). The reason I have to check it is for mailings from new companies that I deal with and for people who don’t pay attention to the e-mail that gets mail back to them immediately to ask them to confirm they are human (I even have info about me and a picture of me in the e-mail so they know it’s really me).

In the meantime, I’m using my free gMail account. I want to see how well that works, they give me all sorts of space for free and it’s pretty fast and it works well on cellphones (their client, their web interface and should work with phone clients). They’ve got a fancy web interface and plain web interface so it works pretty well everywhere. Although, with my client I can’t see the spam folder there either. Google lets you create additional addresses for the same account and have decent filters. Plus, they will let you use your own domain if you’d like to; so if it really works out, I’ll attach my GaryLaPointe.com domain to it and use it for my mail (as long as that supports IMAP). And if it works as well for me, it’s free! There’s some weird mapping between GMail and the Mac Mail.app (I think by default you get duplicates of the mailboxes) but there’s some work arounds, or maybe the new Mail.app in Panther fixes it…

Also, I figure after trying it for a few months, SpamArrest might send me a promo to lure me back. If that’s the case I’ll know I’ve done due diligence to try another option and I’ll have possibly saved a few bucks in the mean time.Actually, I have one other minor complaint about SpamArrest, the interface could be faster. There’s something about the web interface that slows things down. I notice when I travel, it’s unbearably slow and I’m not sure why. But it’s a huge minus when I travel…

I do get some referral dollar$ from SpamArrest (maybe $8.75 a year?), so I figure if I’m sending clients to them, so are others (therefore, they’re likely growing).

I can’t believe these prices. I only paid $3.23 yesterday but I paid $3.25 on Friday. I think that’s the highest I’ve ever paid. And “they” say it’s going to keep going up…

I’m so glad I don’t drive far. Generally, less than a tank gets me through the week.

So I found a free offer code for CreditKarma. They’re offering free daily credit scores (from TransUnion). Use code CKFRND as invitation code at https://www.CreditKarma.com/ (I’m not certain I should be giving this code out, so I’m not hot-linking the site address) I found this at SlickDeals.net. The site is appears to besponsored by advertising and you will not be required to enter your credit card information or sign up for trial offers, but you will receive relevant partner offers (i.e. junk mail) based on your profile. This will not affect your credit rating (other than you paying attention to it).

I’ve always wondered how much my credit score fluctuates but even when I’ve had free offers before, but I’ve never bothered to log on every day to check. This looks like that on-line they give you a nice progressive graph from when you started (it’s hard to tell since I’m just on day one), hopefully it keeps a daily tally even when I don’t log in. Plus, they rank you to national stats and other members; their community has a some good credit, I actually score better nationally than with their membership (and I’ve got great credit).

UPDATE: So I’ve done this for a few days and it looks like the graph is just going to get me monthly averages, although it appears to pull the score daily (but it hasn’t changed for me yet).

UPDATE 2: I did ask for a credit increase on Wednesday, I was charging a few vacations so I wanted some wiggle room and I noticed my score went down three points today. I’m not sure if that’s for the credit check or the one vacation I already charged and sine it’s raised my debt level a tiny bit…

At Amazon Unbox they have 4 FREE missing episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’! At least I don’t think I’ve seen them before. You can download these to your Windows based computer or TiVo for free! The 4 missing episodes cover Marshal and Lily’s honeymoon…

You can get the Infamous “Robin Sparkles” video too!

UPDATE (Sunday evening): So I finally watched these “episodes”. They weren’t real episodes, they were just a few minutes long and they were “videos” of they’re honeymoon. They’re pretty bad too, but then again aren’t home movies supposed to be? I’m not sure what kind of promotion they shot these for, but they end with a still frame with an advertisement for the show. It was the fact that these appeared to be “lost” episodes that made me ask if the show was canceled, since these aren’t much more than some kind of odd promo/commercial I retract the original question.

As reported on msnbc.com, United Airlines will charge fliers an extra $25 per bag to check more than one bag starting May 5th, 2008 (”silver” and “premier” frequent-fliers will not be charged).

It’s a bit, but it’s cheaper than paying the overages for the first bag being over the weight limit. If your itinerary includes international flights you will (may?) still be able to check the second bag for free; this will help me, probably more than half my air travel is international.

Found at DealMac.com.

So I was Burger King today and once in a while I’ll see one of the local homeless people in there (usually it’s when it’s really cold out), I think there’s 3 in particular that I recognize. Today, all three were in there (actually one was on the was out as one came in) which I thought was strange since I’ve been at BK a little more than usual lately and today it’s nowhere near as cold as it has been. Two are schizophrenic, not that I’m qualified to judge, and the other is kinda quiet. The one guy just seems to drink his coffee and step outside for a smoke and talks to himself, he seems to be the most well off, I’ve even seen him get a beer or two at the bar before (it’s possible this guy isn’t homeless). The quiet guy seems to have all his stuff with him (3 big bags) and he must have been there for a while, I saw someone ask him to leave after a while. The woman, I’ve seen her pull stuff out of the trash, and she asked me for my left over fries one time and I gave he those and some cash. Today I intentionally left my uneaten onion rings and my half-eaten Whopper on my tray at the table and she had grabbed it before I got out the door; I’m not sure why it’s a problem for me to just offer her a few dollars.

When I’m out of town if someone asks nice (even semi-nice) for some money, I’m easy to cough up a buck or two; and in some places, that’s every block or so. I always make sure I have some cash on me for that reason. But the local homeless, I never know how to deal with them, actually they’ve never asked for money at the Burger King but I’d be glad to give them some money, but I hate to offer and for some reason I’d hate them expect it from then on (not that it’d really be a problem).If I’m somewhere around town and someone asks for cash, I’m more likely to buy them a meal if there’s an opportunity, I’d rather spend $5-10 on a meal then hand them a few dollars cash if I can (especially if I can smell alcohol or see bloodshot eyes).

It’s when it’s the locals that I see often when it throws me. And I’m not sure why this keeps me so off balance…?

It all makes me sad and feel pretty ungrateful when I complain about stuff in the wonderful life that I have. I’ve got a nice paying job, no debt (other than my house) and I’ve been doing pretty good at saving for my retirement someday. I give money to the shelter when they are doing fund raisers and to school when they’re having auctions and other things when they are happening around town; I could do more I’m sure, but I could certainly doing less too.

So I went to the Social Security Office with my Mom today. There are just so many (too many) scenerios with all of it! It’s interesting how they talk about it, they think of everything as the number of checks you get, not so much as the money you get (months, not dollars). If you work more after you retire, they hold back checks, not dollars. It’s odd, but I guess every job has it’s own language.

My Mother did make a decision today. As a bonus, it’s the same one I would have told her to do if she had asked me to make the decision so that worked out well. Without getting into too much of my mother’s details:

I know everyone keeps their eyes open for good gas prices and will hit one gas station over another since it’s a few pennies different. I’m sure some people sometimes waste gas by driving a little farther. I know I’m always happy when I can save a few pennies per gallon (I usually fill up on Tuesdays since I’m usually over by some cheap stations). Here’s something to keep in mind, 6 cents more a gallon (if it’s around $3) is only a 2% difference (12 cents more a gallon is only 4%).

Normally, when I eat at McDonald’s I get a number 3 meal (Quarter Pounder – no pickle, no mustard which includes a 20 oz soda and medium fry). At the McDonald’s by work (Plymouth/Beech, Redford, MI) it’s $4.77 (tax included); at the McD’s by my house (Michigan/Greenfield in Dearborn) it’s $5.36 (tax included). That’s a 59 cent difference! That’s 12% more at the more expensive McDonald’s. FYI, both the McD’s I’m referring to have been renovated in the last few years and the cheaper one has a playland.

So keep in mind if your $3 gallon of gas was 12% more at a nearby location it would 36 cents more per gallon! Now it’s not cost effective for me to take the time (and gas) to drive home to save 60 cents, but maybe I should check out the other two nearby McDonald’s to see what they charge. Plus Kelly always refers to the Redoford one as an expensive one (that’s the one I say is cheap).

When they talk about fuel price gouging, maybe we should consider all types of fuel…

So I’ve always liked Skype it’s a great backup for my phone and it’s great for calling home when I’m on vacation. At 2.1 cents per minute, it’s hard to beat the price as long as you’ve got a semi-decent internet connection. Not that I talk a lot when I travel but I always feel like I’m being initiated when trying to figure out long distance calling when in a foreign country. They 2.1 cents is just for calls to the US, other countries have different rates.

The goofy^* thing is that it’s 2.1 cents to call the US wherever I am, from next door, Egypt or Costa Rica it’s all 2.1 cents! But with the same reasoning it’s 6.4 cents to call Costa Rica, that’s if I’m here in Michigan or down there. Of course if I’m calling someone else’s Skype computer it’s free from anywhere to anywhere.

I just upgraded to the new Mac version, I was 1.1 versions behind. I think the call quality is significantly better and I noticed the touch tones work better, so now I can call my (misplaced) cell phone and listen to my messages.* – It’s not really goofy, it’s what they pay for phone calls at the destination, the Internet probably doesn’t cost Skype any more regardless of where I’m calling from.

So the exchange rates are pretty good for people from the US traveling to Costa Rica these days. You can see from the graph it’s been going up ever since my first trip in 1999, prices have gone up there too, especially costs for tourist type things, but it’s still been a decent value. Especially when you compare it to Britain or Canadian exchange rates, where the dollar has considerably dropped in value lately. It hasn’t really changed much since my last trip but it should be pretty good for my next one, it’s about 520 to $1.00 today.

More info on The exchange rate, some from Wikipedia (currency photos) and from Vacation City (currency photos).

Get a free magazine subscription to Details, Lucky or Teen Vogue from Amazon.

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And get a free digital subscription to MacWorld (from Zinio digital Magazines).

So MacWorld reports that ‘a U.S. jury found her guilty of copyright infringement and fined her a total of $222,000′.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota could have fined Jammie Thomas as much as $3.6 million, but opted not to. The mother of two was found guilty of stealing and giving away via Internet peer-to-peer Internet file-sharing service Kazaa a total of 24 songs from companies including Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Bros. Records.- Macworld Oct. 5, 2007

Did you see the important part? It was only 24 songs!!! Ouch! I assumed it was thousands of songs when I saw the fine…

I’d really like to comment that all of that is pretty harsh. But she was breaking the law so I guess there isn’t much to say. Actually, I will make a comment, file-sharing is bad, but she’d have to share an awful lot for the record companies to lose that much money. Although, 24 songs is probably what they specifically proved, she may have done thousands of others that they just didn’t have the details on (but that would probably be inadmissible too). How would you even pay a fine like that?

Update: Turns out there were 1,700-ish songs, they just focused on a smaller amount for the case. Scott (over at Dean’s World) has some more info and a few more links.

So you have to spend 47 consecutive days and nights living at the hospital in your own room but it does pay you $9557. I thought it might be interesting, especially if out of a job (or really bored). But here’s the downside:

You will not know what time it is during the 47-day study, and the room has no windows, clocks, TV, and you will not be allowed to bring devices that tell time. You will also not have access to a telephone during the 47-day study.

Holy cow! I think it’s really a suicide study. Or some kind of reality TV show. I’ve got to assume that means no ‘net access either!!!

You will be told when to go to sleep and when to wake up, when to shower, and when to eat your meals. You will also have to take performance tests on a computer in your room many times each day. In between these study activities you will have free time, but your free time will be interrupted frequently.

Actually, it does say “at no time are you being recorded on video or audiotape” so I guess it’s not a reality show. All the info is in the SlickDeals post if you’re interested…

So Amazon opened the Amazon MP3 store which has been getting some good reviews and (most importantly) it semi-integrates by pushing your purchases into your iTunes which is great for automatic syncing with your iPod. They’ve had tracks for download for ages, but this is their big jump into the market (you do need their downloader for this).

I actually spotting it yesterday when searching for some music but I didn’t realize the format change of my search results indicated a whole new service. I did notice that the tracks were only 89 cents though!

Keep in might for 89 cents they are a dime less than the iTunes music store for regular tracks but since there is no encryption (DRM) and it’s encoded at a higher quality (even than Apple I believe) these are 40 cents less than Apple’s $1.29 a song. That’s about 1/3 less if you’ve been getting the DRM-free higher quality songs (and that’s what I’ve been getting lately). And they are MP3s, so they play on just about anything (but higher quality does mean larger songs). Buying whole albums will generally discount the price.There are exceptions to the 89 cent price for the individual songs, but I can’t figure out the rules to tell you. And like the iTunes store I believe there are tracks that can’t be purchased separately from the album, I thought I saw that yesterday but I can’t find an example of that today.

And to be fair to Apple, their DRM free $1.29 songs are generally much cheaper if you buy the whole album (the 14 track One Cell in the Sea – by A Fine Frenzy is only $7.99 (which I think is the same as the iTunes DRM version) which is the same price as the Amazon mp3 store, except Amazon doesn’t appear to give you the booklet.

So the end result, IMHO, it’ll never beat the seamlessness of the iTunes Music Store but but with it’s downloader (which does give you a free song), Amazon mp3 might be a good alternative or at least a second place to check when shopping for songs. If you’re not an iPod user it’s probably a great place to consider for your mp3 shopping (I think the downloader will push the tracks to other players but since I don’t have any I”m not certain). The downloader does work pretty good, I did try it. It would be nice if it were smart enough to add it to an “Amazon Playlist”.

I fully expect to see them selling movies, television, music videos, audio books or distributing podcasts via the same mechanism in the future….

These deals probably won’t last (especially the cables) but I thought I’d mention them:

So I mentioned the other day that as an assignment I made the students in the Tech Leadership class I taught write a grant (submitting was optional) and three students won. I just found out there was a fourth winner!!!! That’s brings the class total up to about $5,300. I think only seven applied so that’s awesome (at most ten applied since that’s all I had in the class).

I’m so geeked!!!

So someone mentioned AdPerk as a way to get free magazines. As of today the only have Dwell and Popular Science. I sat down and watched a few videos (10-15 minutes?) while eating breakfast and earned a free subscription to Popular Science. If they had a little more selection of videos it’d be more interesting. They did make me answer a very easy CAPTCHA at the end of each one (no swirly colors, just tilted letters). It was really easy and painless and it worked on my Apple Macintosh with Safari (you can’t always count on that).

The downside is the magazines they have (and plan to offer) aren’t particularly expensive or anything. I’m not interested in Dwell so I have no reason to go back to their site anytime soon. I don’t think I can earn and save points for the future or at least I could watch for now…

I have a few suggestions for them:

Uh oh! I just bid a maximum of 50 dollars instead of 50 cents on an eBay item! I sure hope not many other people bid on this item. At first I freaked since I thought that was my bid, and then I remembered it’d bid up to that amount. There’s only a little bit of time left so cross your fingers for me!

LATER: Whew! No one bid higher than the 50 cents!!! It was just for a Beowulf (Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery) movie tie-in advance six page comic that I thought might be interesting. This guy was charging a little more for shipping ($4) than the others so no one even beat my 50 cent bid….

So I teach a Leadership in Technology graduate class at a local university in the summer. One of the assignments is to write a grant; there is a $1,500 grant due at that time, so the timing is perfect. We review them in class, make suggestions, and we evaluate each other’s grants using the actual grant rubric. And then I grade it based on the same criteria of the grant.

I think about seven of them applied, not everyone could apply, you needed to be an employed K-12 educator and you need to be a member of the organization we applied to (which costs $40-ish). You probably see where this story is going…The other day I got an e-mail telling me that one of the students was awarded one of the grants. I was pretty excited, I wanted to write the rest of the class but I was too busy at that moment. When I looked at my mail later I had a message that one of the other students had also won a grant! So I sat down to write the rest of the class, while I was writing I got a third message telling me another student had won!!! I was floored. I’d guess they only awarded 25-35 of these grants and we got three of them! I think the three of them totaled about $3,800, that’s all equipment they’ll be able to buy for their school classrooms and use for the project they wrote and any other uses they’ll come up with.

As a result of winning they’ll also have to present at the next conference (which they get to go for free) and maybe write a short article for the newsletter. Very exciting!

If you use PayPal, this suggestion is for you as an individual (not for the PayPal company itself). PayPal lets you add several e-mail addresses to your account to send/receive money. My suggestion is to add a few other addresses that you use to your account. If someone sends you money to one of these other addresses it’s way easier to claim it!

And I also think it might be better for you if your current e-mail account ever goes under, the other e-mail will already be on file.

I just had the first problem, and PayPal phone support resolved it for me pretty quick (if I would have shut up and stopped asking questions they probably would have resolved it even faster).

I can’t promise long this offer will last, but I personally have done it before. They really gave me the 15,000 points!

This gets you $110-$150 in free gift cards (Target, Macy’s, Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, Home Depot and many more) after applying for a card from CitiBank (and after making one purchase). Really the only way you get $150 is with a few certain stores, but you can mix and match and probably get $125+ pretty easily from the stores above. I got this offer from SlickDeals.net

Step 1 – Turn off your pop up blockers (or use Internet Explorer)
Step 2 – Go to this link
Step 3 – Click on “Apply Now”
Step 4 – Follow step 5 very carefully.
Step 5 – Then close the application window, a popup with a new $150 gift card offer will appear. (If you don’t follow these instructions it’s only for $80-$100 in gift cards).