Month: November 2007

eTrade shows some love

After getting some serious cash money from Citadel Investment Group, eTrade is passing on the love by raising their interest rates, yay! While there is no proof these occurrences are anything but a coincidence, I don’t care, I get more money now.

Earlier this month I signed up for a fixed rate 1 year CD @ 5.10% (which was good at the time), then they dropped their rates to 4.70%, so I was pretty happy I got it when I did, and now they’re back up to 5.15% for the year term, I still think I did pretty good though. Anyway, today I signed up for a 6 month fixed rate CD @ 5.25% which is sweet. Assuming I have money left over after paying off my Student Loan I might consider grabbing another 6 month CD.

Also, they raised the rate on their Complete Savings back up to 5.05%.

I just saved hundreds of dollars on car insurance! – Updated x2

… But not with Geico.

When I first got car insurance I went with what my parents had, American Family, I paid like $25 a month for the piece of crap car I drove, then I bought a new car and started forking over $225 a month. Recently I gave Geico a try, had I switched to Geico I would’ve saved $3 a month… yippy! Next I tried NetQuote.com they matched me up with State Farm and Stephen from State Farm mailed me a quote the very next day, a quote which would save me $68 a month, fantastic!

So after checking with Travelers, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, as well as Allstate and getting mixed savings from $5-35 a month, I went with State Farm. Yay!

Switching would’ve saved me $116 a month if it weren’t for the accident on my record from 2 years ago, thankfully that goes away next year and I’ll be able to save even more, but even as it is, I’m saving myself $816 a year.

Update: Who says customer loyalty is dead! American Family gave me a new quote when I called to cancel my policy, they’re offering me better coverage than State Farm for $121 a month… So I sent that quote to State Farm, we’ll see if they can beat that, but if not I’ll be staying with American Family.

Update 2: State Farm got back to me, they upgraded their coverage to match what American Family was offering and quoted me $111.63

I pity the foo’ (who doesn’t play World of Warcraft)

Wait…what?

As if they arn’t making enough money, Blizzard Entertainment has hired the collective coolness of Mr. T and–wait for it–William “Shatnerology” Shatner, to pitch new commercials for the game. I want to meet the marketing guys who thought this one up and shake their hands.

Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion to the ad campaign: Chuck Norris and Jason Alexander!

Hit the link for video goodness.

New Ads Recruit Mr. T and Shatner (Kotaku)

 

17

What significance does the number seventeen have? It’s the number of computers I’ve downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP for my customers.

I ran a benchmark utility (Geekbench) on one of them before downgrading, there was a 250 point difference between Vista and XP (in favor of XP). Ouch.

Leopard Upgrade

I upgraded to Leopard the other day, and overall I’m pretty happy with it. I like all the new features, tabs in Terminal is awesome, Spaces has increased my productivity by 7%, Stacks are so-so, Front Row going all Apple TV on me is amazing, Web Clipping almost makes Dashboard relevant again, iCal finally getting a dynamic icon is minor, but a nice touch, and OS X finally playing nice with my NAS (network attached storage) and the rest of my network is saving me a lot of trouble, however, there are some things that bug me.

Booting is slow, I used to start my computer up and 30-35 seconds later I was good to go, but since I upgraded to Leopard its been booting in 55-70 seconds. It started taking over a minute to boot right after the upgrade, but after resetting my PRAM, and clearing my cache it sped up a bit.

Sluggishness. Randomly, I’ll get beached balled. I’m just sitting there browsing the web and next thing I know, I’m looking at a spinning beach ball… for no apparent reason. This has happened a couple times since the upgrade, might be an issue with Firefox.

Ejecting discs. I was burning a few CDs using Disc Utility, and after ejecting them from within Disk Utility I went back to my desktop to find them still listed… odd, I tried ejecting them from the desktop, that made them disappear, but then I opened Finder and one of them was still listed under devices, but I couldn’t eject it, I had to drag it off to the side and then it poofed out of existence.

The latest build of Joost never quits since the upgrade, it just hangs, you have to Force Quit, then it cries. But that’s a problem with Joost, not Leopard.

As justifcation of my speed complaints, I’m running 10.5.1 on a Macbook Pro, 2.4Ghz dual core and 4GB of RAM, so I think I should be running a bit faster than I am.

Compared to my experience when upgrading to Windows Vista, my complaints with Leopard are minor, Vista caused me to suffer from depression and self loathing… Yeah, I’d rather not relive that time in my life. Back to focusing on the present, Leopard actually offers a worthwhile set of new features that are actually useful, Vista on the other hand, offers eye candy and headaches (Windows XP forever!).

But Vista sucking so bad keeps me employed, so thanks Microsoft!