October 14, 2006

Spoil Your Spouse – My Great Idea

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

I’ve been participating in a community called Cambrian House for the past couple months. The basic idea is that you can submit ideas to the company and then after going through an “Idea Warz” the best idea will get developed by the company and the community. A percentage of the money that is made by that idea is then paid to you. Pretty cool huh? So cool that I of course had to start a Cambrian House blog.

Well, one of my ideas called Spoil Your Spouse (originally called Spoil My Wife) has been sent on to the Idea Warz tournament. Well, I was lucky enough to have made it through the first round of the tournament and now I’m on to the second round.

I’m asking all of my loyal blog readers (both of you) to go and check out Cambrian House and vote for my idea in the Idea Warz tournament. I’d appreciate all your votes since if I win then my idea gets to actually be given a market test.

Also, if you are a fellow postie then I’d love for you to blog about my idea on your blog also. If you do then I promise to send an email to your spouse letting them know they need to sign up for Spoil My Spouse. Think of the benefits you’ll reap.

Post a comment (1)

October 13, 2006

Bush Signs in New Law Crippling Internet Gambling

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

Placing bets over the Internet was effectively criminalized by the federal government yesterday, as lawmakers work to eliminate an activity enjoyed by as many as 23 million Americans who wagered an estimated $6 billion last year.

Today, Bush signed into law a bill that lays a major blow to online gambling as we know it. Here’s more details on the new bill.

Attached to a port-security bill signed by President Bush yesterday was the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits online gamblers from using credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to place and settle bets. The law puts enforcement on the shoulders of banks and other U.S. financial institutions, some of which fought the legislation.

I’m so grateful that Bush and our government put this into effect. There are way too many children that are becoming addicted to online gambling. It’s a sad epidemic that is still going to continue in some other way, but at least this new bill will hopefully prevent many people from wasting their money gambling.

Don’t get me wrong. I love to play poker with friends. I know all the poker rules out there. My wife and I love to play against each other (she always beats me). However, anyone that wastes there money gambling is walking a fine line of addiction. I live in Las Vegas so I know all about it. Yes, I know that many people can control themselves and only spend a few dollars. However, for every story of people controlling themselves there are stories of broken families, lost savings, and addiction that tears people apart.

I think this bill is a great step in the right direction to preventing children from participating in gambling online.

Post a comment (0)

Rare McDonald’s Monopoly Pieces – Only the Important Monopoly Pieces

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

UPDATE: This is the list for 2006 Rare McDonald’s Monopoly pieces. Here’s a link to the 2007 Rare McDonald’s Monopoly pieces.

UPDATE 2: Here’s a link to the 2008 Rare McDonald’s Monopoly Pieces

While in Dallas at the Educause Conference, I decided to run down to McDonald’s to get a little something to eat. I upgraded my 10 piece chicken nugget combo meal to a chocolate shake. Well, that means I got the medium chocolate shake and much to my surprise I had the McDonald’s Monopoly pieces on it. I guess that shows how much I go to McDonald’s that I didn’t even know that their Monopoly promotion is going on.

Well, a while ago my friend ruined the Monopoly game for me because he informed me that really you just need to find the rare piece for each color and then you can find the rest of the pieces. For example, Boardwalk is the rare piece you need to win the big bucks from McDonalds. So, if you find Boardwalk you’ve as good as won. Finding a Park Place will be simple since there are thousands and thousands of them out there. However, there is only one boardwalk in all the world (or is McDonald’s Monopoly only played in the US?)

Well, I decided that someone has probably figured out which of the Monopoly pieces were the rare ones that would let you win. Indeed there is a site that has all the info on McDonald’s Monopoly pieces. I’ve copied them below for your convenience (rare in bold):
#3601 – Mediterranean Avenue
#3602 – Baltic Avenue Rare
Common Purple $50 5,000
#3603 – Oriental Avenue
#3604 – Vermont Avenue
#3605 – Connecticut Avenue Common
Rare
Common Blue Gray $500 500
#3606 – St Charles Place
#3607 – States Avenue
#3608 – Virginia Avenue Common
Common
Rare Maroon $1,000 250
#3609 – St James Place
#3610 – Tennessee Avenue
#3611 – New York Avenue Common
Rare
Common Orange $1,500 100
#3612 – Kentucky Avenue
#3613 – Indiana Avenue
#3614 – Illinois Avenue Rare
Common
Common Red $5,000 50
#3615 – Atlantic Avenue
#3616 – Ventnor Avenue
#3617 – Marvin Gardens Common
Rare
Common Yellow $10,000 10
#3618 – Pacific Avenue
#3619 – North Carolina Avenue
#3620 – Pennsylvania Avenue Common
Common
Rare Green $50,000 2
#3621 – Park Place
#3622 – Boardwalk Common
Rare Blue $1,000,000
($50,000 per year for 20 years) 1
#3623 – Reading Railroad
#3624 – Pennsylvania Railroad
#3625 – B&O Railroad
#3626 – Short Line Common
Common
Common
Rare White $5,000,000
($250,000 per year for 20 years) 1

Post a comment (20)

PayPerPost Puzzle Piece

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

Payperpost is starting another puzzle piece game. I missed the last one, but hopefully I won’t miss this one. I think it will be fun to search all the PPP blogs to see who has what puzzle piece. Fun stuff!!

Here’s the piece I have for everyone to enjoy.

This puzzle contains a sneak peak at a super secret PayPerPost program code named Blue Monster. I like to call it payperpostbluemonster.

I’d love to hear from those that found this piece in my comments.

Post a comment (1)

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist – Vinton G. Cerf Spoke At Educause 2005 in Dallas

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

This past week I’ve been attending a conference called Educause 2006 in Dallas. The first general session speaker was Vinton G. Cerf the Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. I must admit that when I saw that someone from Google was planning on speaking at the conference I was quite excited.

Well, I must admit that overall I was quite disappointed by the experience. I would have expected more. Yes, I do have a high standard.

Despite my personal distaste for his speech, he did say one thing that I found very interesting and enlightening.

He talked about how it is necessary for us to think about not only the data that we are storing, but also how we are going to be able to view that data as technology evolves. Sure, that’s nothing new. He gave a nice example of how we would be able to read a Powerpoint 2003 file with Powerpoint 3003 software. I don’t think backwards compatibility is going to last that far out.

His solution was something I hadn’t realized. He suggested that web applications need to be created to read this old file types. How simple is that? No wonder Google has such a thrust in making web applications. Google will be a very serious player if down the road, they are the ones that own the web applications that are able to read these archived files. Pretty neat.

The sad part is that Microsot amongst others are probably not as interested in making their applications easily readable in some web format. Why would they be interested? That cuts into their bottom line. It should be really interesting to see how this evolves over time.

Post a comment (0)

October 10, 2006

Profitability Analysis Software

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

Acorn Systems is a revolutionary concept in managing a company’s profits. They enable meaningful and sustained profit improvement by providing continuous enterprise-wide visibility into business performance. They do this with their profitability analysis software combined with their proven consulting methodology. It’s a great tool for doing Activity Based Costing (ABC).

Acorn Systems is able to accurately measure, optimize and predict costs, net operating profits, EVA, capacity and resources at any level of granularity such as by customer, supplier, product, facility, transaction and more. Essentially it takes all the data that you have captured and puts it in a usable format for company executives.

This type of technology is great for businesses working on maximizing profits. Of course, that’s EVERY business!!

Post a comment (0)

Coupons from Extreme Halloween, Target, 1800Contacts, Snapfish, Lerner

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

My past posts on coupons and discounts to popular places like Eddie Baurer and Gap have been so popular that I’ve got more online deals, coupons and discounts for you. There are so many out there that soon it’s going to be standard for someone who wants to purchase an item online to do a search for coupons from that company. Today’s coupons and discounts come from Extreme Halloween, Target, 1800Contacts, Snapfish and Lerner.

Extreme Halloween Coupons
Target Coupons
1800Contacts Coupons
Snapfish Coupons
Lerner Coupons

How about that variety? A little seasonal coupons for Halloween, a little department store and some online photo coupons from Snapfish. I wonder how many people are paying full price to use Snapfish.

Post a comment (0)

35 WordPress Plugins on One Blog

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

If you know anything about WordPress then you know that you absolutely have to use a number of WordPress plugins to be able to really enjoy blogging. Of course my top 3 plugins are Akismet, BAStats and WordPress Backup. Those are 3 plugins that shouldn’t even be in question. You need to get rid of spam comments, you need to have stats to enjoy it and you have to back up your wordpress database just in case.

Well, I found someone else who has 35 wordpress plugins on their site. That’s absolutely way to many. Take a look at this list:

# Trackback Validator by Dan Sandler and Andres Thomas-Stivalet Version: 0.7.1
# [JKG] Random Post Banner by Jayant Gandhi Version: 0.1
# [JKG] Search Spelling Suggestion by Jayant Gandhi Version: 0.1
# Dunstan-style Error Page by Andrew Ferguson Version: 1.2
# Akismet by Matt Mullenweg Version: 1.14
# AutoMeta by Rich Boakes Version: 0.7v
# Breadcrumb Navigation XT by Michael Woehrer Version: 1.4
# Code Auto Escape by Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo Version: 2.0
# Comment Quicktags by Owen Winkler Version: 1.0
# Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter by Angsuman Chakraborty Version: 1.0
# Custom Contact by VaamYob Version: 0.1e
# Exec-PHP by Sören Weber Version: 2.0
# Get Recent Comments by Krischan Jodies Version: 1.0
# Link Indication by Michael Woehrer Version: 2.6
# Live Comment Preview by Jeff Minard & Iacovos Constantinou Version: 1.7
# Next/Previous Post in same Category by Jennifer – Scriptygoddess Version: v 0.2
# [JKG] Beautiful Search URLs by Jayant Gandhi Version: 0.1
# No Ping Wait by Robert Deaton Version: 2.0
# Optimal Title by Aaron Schaefer Version: 1.0
# [JKG] Plugins in Use Plugin by Jayant Gandhi Version: 0.1
# Popularity Contest by Alex King Version: 1.1
# Previous Posts by Sadish Balasubramanian Version: 1.0
# Related Posts by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu Version: 2.02
# Search Hilite by Georg Leciejewski Version: 1.7
# Search Meter by Bennett McElwee Version: 1.1
# Search Everything by Dan Cameron Version: 2.2
# Search Reloaded by Denis de Bernardy Version: 2.2
# Google Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold Version: 3.0b1
# SitemapView by Frank Bueltge Version: 0.8
# Smart Update Pinger by Christian Davén Version: 2.0
# Submit It Plugin by Sapiens Bryan Version: 1.0
# WP-UserOnline by GaMerZ Version: 2.03
# wp-cache by Ricardo Galli Granada Version: 2.0.17
# [JKG] Permalink Redirect by Jayant Gandhi Version: 0.1
# Search Excerpt by Scott Yang Version: 1.1 $Revision$

So, some of those are ones that I love too, but 35 just seems over the top. I’ll plan on posting the absolutely essential ones for all to enjoy soon.

Post a comment (2)

October 9, 2006

An Entrepreneur and Discovery Engine Blog

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

Today I came across an entrepreneur and discovery engine blog called The Fish. It’s a pretty interesting blog by Mark Seremet. He’s recently started a company called Repliqa and he’s trying to build a community on his blog that he can leverage for Repliqa when it’s ready.

I especially liked that he put a video of his presentation online. It was a quite poor presentation because it is telling investors a bunch of things that they already know. He should really get to the point much more quickly. He also doesn’t give much details of what Repliqa will actually do. He didn’t show many numbers on how it was more effective than other discovery programs like StumbleUpon.

Also, I’m not sure why one stats person can handle the best minds at Google and even if the technology is better, it doesn’t have the brand name that it needs to really revolutionize the world. It will be fun to watch and see how it goes.

Post a comment (0)

Google Gadgets on Your Blog

Written by:
Filed under: Permalink
add to del.icio.us

Google has made a great announcement about being able to add Google Gadgets to your own personal webpage. This is such a great idea. They are going to come out with so many gadgets that it will be a great feature for so many websites. Here’s an example of a Google Gadget for Pac Man

Post a comment (0)