wangarific

Can you guess what would happen if a tablet of Alka Seltzer were “dropped” in a ball of water on the International Space Station?

Unless you’re a fan of science, you probably didn’t guess what actually happened.

I think the play-by-play is really fun… then again I’m a huge nerd.

I play a lot of video games and I can say with near absolute certainty, that Electronic Arts is the king of monetizing downloadable content (DLC).

Just today I learned, via Kotaku, that Madden 11 will offer the ability to scout your online opponents. Are you kidding me? I don’t play much Madden anymore, not since Madden 2009 where you’d just have Randy Moss run a fly route every play, but the idea of online scouting reports is really cool.

Until you realize it’ll cost you “coins.” You can earn coins for playing and completing online games or you can buy them. While it’s not known how much each report is (there are 50) or how much they cost, you can be sure die-hard players will be willing to pay for these coins.

Say what you will about EA and their DLCs (people were pissed at how expensive the first Modern Warfare 2 DLC was… then 11.1 million people paid for it), but they have figured it out and are making bank.

Oh and the best part about the scouting? You know when your opponent has scouted you.

‘Madden 11′ introduces online scouting [ESPN]

About two years ago I changed the name of my personal finance blog from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity to Bargaineering. Don’t ask me why it was named Blueprint for Financial Prosperity but I really felt that having the name match the domain was better than having such a descriptive title. In the last two years, pretty much everything has been changed to reflect the name change… except one thing – my PayPal account.

I don’t accept any payments related to Bargaineering/Blueprint anymore but the Paypal account still retained that name. I wanted to change it but despite my best efforts to find the menu option, I was out of luck. Fortunately, through the power of the internet, I learned that I only needed to load up this url:
https://www.paypal.com/us/wf/f=ap_namechg

Copy and paste that into your browser, log in, and you will be presented with a series of screens that will help you change your business name. Be sure to select “Business Name Change (business name)”, then enter the new one, click “Continue,” and you’re done. There’s no verification or any other confirmation needed, the change is instant.

Well, your IP address is:
38.107.179.206

(Don’t worry, I’m not spying on you, it’s information passed from your browser to my site’s server)

You can bookmark this page next time you want to find your IP or you can use some tools available on your computer to find out.

Windows

On any Windows machine, click the Start Menu and choose Run. Type “cmd” into the prompt, that will open up the command prompt. Type “ipconfig” and it’ll show you your computer’s internet details including IP Address, Subnet Mask, and Default Gateway. The IP address is what you’ll want. If you want more details, like your Physical Address, DNS Servers, etc, you can type “ipconfig /all” to show all the information available.

Mac

Use the Finder to locate the application folders, then locate the Utilities folder. Inside Utilities you’ll see the Terminal application, load that. In that prompt, type “ipconfig” and it’ll display a whole bunch of information, including the X.X.X.X number that is your IP address.

There you go, your IP address in a jiffy.

Don’t ever sign up for a survey company if they demand that you pay them a membership or subscription fee. It’s absurd and completely unnecessary. If a company demands payment, it’s probably a scam.

That being said, Opinion Outpost is one of the survey networks I’m a member of and they are 100% free. Opinion Outpost is owned by Western Wats, a market research company that uses a variety of methods, including surveys, to gather information. Online surveys, telephone interviews, as well as in person interviews are all done.

Opinion Outpost is simply their online survey division. You choose which surveys you want to answer and you can cancel your free membership anytime you want. You can look up surveys in their Members Area or wait for the emails to come to you, your choice. It’ll take a month before you start getting email invites to surveys. When you answer surveys, you’re paid within 4-6 weeks.

Do you use Opinion Outpost? If so, what do you think of it?

An absolutely fascinating report has been produced by the Security Council on Somalian pirate operations and Undispatch pulls out a particularly intriguing bit on basic operations.

I’m always surprised to learn how organized and streamlined criminal operations are. I think having been exposed, in various forms including sensationalized movies, to organized crime like the mafia makes this less surprising, but it’s still an interesting story to read. There are class-A shareholders, financiers, local elders, supplies, and class-B shareholders – a nice hierarchy of who gets paid when.

In business, there are some well known, often repeated mantras that always seem to draw the ire of critics. One of the more recent idea, at least to me in the last few years, is the idea that you should fail often or fail completely. Most recently, I read a post by the founder of Fooala, a Pittsburgh web startup that provides restaurant e-commerce services. He’s 22 years old, went to my alma mater (Carnegie Mellon), and his failure was with a web hosting company when he was 13.

David seemed to overemphasize the need to fail, which I don’t think was his original, or at least his most important, point. The key point is this one:

What’s one thing that stops inexperienced wannabe entrepreneurs from getting started? The fear of failure. The thought that your best idea is going to be wasted because you made some stupid mistakes. But if you think like this, I promise you you’ll always be that “entrepreneur” who is always talking about a business idea but hasn’t done anything yet. And you don’t want to be like that forever.

There’s discussion on Hacker News about how failure as a pre-requisite is overrated and I agree. David’s point wasn’t that a successful entrepreneur needs to fail, it’s that in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to be an entrepreneur in the first place. The only way you can have a successful business is by creating a business in the first place. If you let the fear of failure stop you from starting anything, I guarantee you will never have a successful business… it’s simply logic.

Do you need to fail completely? No, of course not. But you have to accept the fact that you could fail and that in failure you will learn something about yourself, your business, and how to do better next time.

Don’t be afraid to fail, not because it’s your job, but because when you succeed, and you will if you are persistent, no one will notice or remember your failures.

On my personal finance blog, I shared my friend’s pleasant and frugal experience buying a house through Redfin. In that post, I mentioned that even if you weren’t comfortable with the more DIY experience (and not comfortable enough that splitting the buyer’s agent commission didn’t make you more comfortable), you could at least leverage their wonderful home search capabilities in your own hunt.

We aren’t in home buying mode, we probably won’t be for a little while, but with mortgage rates at historic lows, even if not absolute lows, and the housing market soft in our area, we’re always keeping our eyes open. So we both have

Here are a few things that Redfin does that I don’t know why others don’t:

• Leverage Google maps. If you go on almost any other real estate company site to look for a home, you get little more than the MLS results. There is a map but oftentimes it’s to a crappy Mapquest map (who still uses Mapquest?). Redfin gives you an integrated map on the page with an outline, in red, of the property and its neighbors. In an instant you know where it is and what it is. The real question is why doesn’t anyone else do this?
• Ability to save favorites and get updates. You usually can’t even register on another website so saving favorites is a moot point (so is sending updates). I think part of this is because they assume an agent will do this for you so they have little incentive for you to register and mark your own favorites. I’m waiting for the day that you get to mark down what you like (or they tease it out from your searches and your marked favorites) and Redfin tells you when new properties fitting that description are entered into MLS.
• Keeps limited historical data on past sales. Here’s a house I marked as a favorite when I was first played with the system (it was put on the market in late 2009 and just recently delisted). Thank you for keeping some of the data around, even if they are from public records.
• Posting a listing history & other important information. Go to any live, or historical, listing and you will see data pulled from sources other than MLS. I like the property history underneath the map. That’s useful information and thank you for not forcing me to go to the Maryland Real Property tax search (or your equivalent in your home state) to find out what it sold for last time around.

There are about a million other things I like about Redfin and I have yet to find a reason why I’d go to a real estate company’s website over their.

Almost all of the images on Bargaineering are stored in a local directory. My experience with Flickr has taught me that it’s all too uncommon for a photographer to remove a photo and have things look silly on my site. To Flickr’s credit, they replace it with a nice “This photo is no longer available” image, rather than an ugly broken 404 image. So in response to this, I search for CC-licensed images and I download them locally. I put them through Yahoo! Yslow’s Smush.it and upload them to the site.

Storing images locally is a trade off. You get that control but there’s increased server load, the risk that someone hotlinks an image thus creating more load (though you can stop this easily), but you get one less lookup. I think it’s worth it.

I didn’t always do this and my directory had tons of files that were un-smushed, so I was pumped when the recent update to Smush.it included an uploader tool. This lets me download all of my image files, smush them in batches, rewrite some filenames, and upload them back to my server.

The “rewrite some filenames” piece is the result of Smush.it converting GIFs to PNGs, PNGs are better because they’re more efficient, and you can do that by running this file renaming .JS script file in the directory.

I was able to trip a good 20% off the size of my image directory using Smush.it for about thirty minutes.

Paul at Providentplan.com emailed me the other day because he had a vexing problem. It appears that all of his links in his RSS feed are a redirect through feedproxy.google.com. He has his feed hosted through Feedburner, now owned by Google, and wanted them “back to normal.”

…for some feeds in my Google Reader the link to the post is feedproxy.google.com followed by a bunch of junk. (It still takes you to the website.) But other feeds go straight to the post on the website.

I’m wondering why this is and how you can fix it because I’ve noticed it for my own website.

Fortunately there is a simple solution. If you have feedburner’s click tracking feature turned on, it’ll turn all those links to the “gibberish” feedproxy links. They’re redirects for tracking purposes and you need to remove tracking to get the links back to normal.

To turn it off, log into your Feedburner account and click on the Analyze tab. In the left sidebar you’ll see under “Services” a link that says “Configure Stats.” Click it and you’ll see a screen where you can modify tracking. Uncheck the boxes and you’ll see your links return to normal.