Useful Little Things

A comment was posted on one of my older posts about leaving GoDaddy for WebFaction.

“I have 100 domains on Godaddy and i can say that this company is very reputable.’~'”

It seemed pretty innocuous, although the domain it pointed to had no content. I was about to approve it when I decided to run a quick Google search. The search showed that this exact quote was posted to various blogs over 300 hundred times and the commenter used a different name on each site.

I’m not sure what the commenter was up to, but I can think of a few theories. First, it could be a naive person thinking they can get a little “Google goodwill” for their site with links from a bunch of comments. Not likely, since their site is missing content. Of course, maybe their going to throw up some questionable content later after the comments get approved. Second, it could be a GoDaddy fanboy, who just loves GoDaddy so much that he/she must refute our tales of woe. But, I doubt it.  Rabid fans are usually more wordy.

Needless to say, I marked it as spam and tossed it in the trash.

What are your thoughts?

In the war between publishers and retailers over control of the e-book channel, the customer is losing.  My letter to Harper-Collins and my email to Amazon explain it all.

My mother-in-law, Ruth, passed away this week.  My brother’s wife, Carla, was generous enough to sing at Ruth’s funeral.  She was amazing.  I heard angels.

A while back I set up rules in Gmail to apply the label Bill to any email notifying me I have a bill due.  I try to do most everything paperless, so I don’t usually get a bill in the regular mail.  The Bill label helped reminder me not to archive it and forget to pay.

I prefer not to pay something the moment it comes in, since it might not be due for another two or three weeks.  In fact, I prefer to maximize the interest my money can earn and paying a bill way early goes against that.  Recently, however, I’ve found myself repeatedly logging into my online accounts to see when something is due.  I may prefer to keep my money as long as possible, but I also prefer not to pay late fees.

This morning, I hit upon a way to “store” the due date of a bill right in Gmail using labels.  I simply create a new label with the month and day the bill is due and assign it to the email.  Google makes this really simple and it requires only a few clicks.  If you’ve never done this before, I’ve given you instructions just below this screenshot.

To create a label in Gmail:
1) Open the email message in Gmail.
2) Click the Labels button to open the Labels drop-down list.
3) Click Create New at the bottom of the list.
4) Enter the due date for the bill (i.e. – Mar 31) and click Ok.

When I graduate in three years, I’ll let you know if this is accurate or not…

Let me tell you why I think HH Gregg is awesome.

A couple of months ago we purchased a 52″ LCD flat panel television from HH Gregg.  It was very nice (notice the past tense).  Two weeks ago, some dirtbags broke into our house and stole it.  The police have a few leads, but I’m not holding my breath.

Since we liked the TV so much — and since State Farm is paying for a new one — we went back to HH Gregg.  I told the manager what happened and said I wanted the exact same TV we had before.  He checked the computer and let us know that they didn’t have the exact same model, but they had the slightly newer version.  I asked him if it was more expensive.  He said, No, it’s about the same price, but I’ll be giving it to you at cost since I refuse to profit off of other’s misfortune.

How friggin cool is that!  Needless to say, we will be going back there again.

Note to Dirtbags: We now have an alarm system and video surveillance, so don’t bother coming around to try and steal the new one.  You’ll just get caught.  And, oh yeah, you suck!

So the first week of school at Auburn as a PhD student has left me with a few new accomplishments under my belt.

1. Six minutes into my first (ever) PhD class, I derailed the professor’s train of thought with my cell phone ringing.  Oh yeah, he’s also the Department Head.
2. I started learning a new programming language: Python.
3. I got the swine flu.

All in all, I’d say things are starting off with a bang!