gbnotify.com - very cool Amazon.com tool

I already do a bunch of shopping on Amazon.com. If there price is within about 5% of the lowest I can find on the internet, I’ll usually buy from them just because I’ve never EVER had a problem with an order.

If you shop on Amazon, you probably know about their Gold Box deals. These are a series of 10 or so items that are available to you once per day for a discounted price. As you are shown these items you have the ability to say yes or no, but you can’t go back. The deals are usually pretty good, but your timing has to be pretty good also in order to actually need/want the items that they have in the Gold Box.

One better than the Gold Box deals is the Lightning Deals. These are only became available a couple times a day. They are heavily discounted items, but they are only available for purchase for a couple hours. Then, the deal is gone. The trick is, catching these deals when they are available. What to do, what to do.

A friend of mine has been digging in to the Amazon.com programming API and came up with a fantastic solution; GBNotify.com. Go to the site and either enter in your email address or a cell phone number and during the day as these deals become available you’ll be notified. I’ve been getting the updates for a couple days now. I haven’t found an item that I want to buy just yet, but the discounts on the items are staggering. I’ve seen 70%+ discounts on items go by. It’s almost worth buying the item to sell it for a profit on eBay. That’s not something I have time or energy enough to try out, but hey, somebody out there could turn this in to a nice little money maker.

Must have geek gadget: Wireless SD card

Eye-Fi Wireless SD memory cardThis just might be the coolest new product I’ve seen this year. This Wireless 2GB SD Memory card from Eye-Fi is a casual photographers dream. Rather than taking the photo, downloading to your computer, resizing and THEN uploading to your photo sharing service or social networking site, this card cuts out the middle man men. You simply take your photos and upload wirelessly. The built in software will resize the images automatically on the fly based on your preferences. The photos are simultaneously saved to your computer in their original format.

Here are some of the technical details:

Now, if they will just hurry up and make an XD version, I’ll own this in a heart beat!

PayItToMe.com: Crazyness or Genius?

This morning on TechCrunch I read about a site called PayItToMe.com. It’s a new site with an interesting concept: Joe Public sends in photos of items that they want including a price. The items get posted on the “desired items” page. Advertisers select an item that they are willing to buy for the person. Once purchased and confirmed, the photo is moved to the front page of PayItToMe.com and is now linked to the page that the advertiser chooses.

If this idea is genius or insane, I’m not sure. But, I was willing to give it a shot. What do I have to lose? I sent in the following photo this morning at 8:38am:

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At 11:50am I received a Paypal payment for $40.00. Holy crap, it worked! I’m off to Amazon.com to buy Season 1 of Heroes!

Full disclosure forces me to tell you one final piece of the puzzle. My $40.00 payment came from a guy named Renaud in Belgium. Coincidentally, that’s the name and location of the guy running the site. It’s quite possible that this is how he’s handling the transactions, but who knows. My payment may have been a way for him to get a link moved to the front page at a reasonable price. And, heck, he is getting some extra press out of the deal so how bad can that be, right?

Regardless, I’d like to thank payittome.com and Marc Dehareng (the supposed purchaser of my item) for the cash to purchase Heroes.

I’m a bit biased now that I received my payment, so I’m not sure I should weigh in on the crazyness or genius debate. But, feel free to leave your comments and let me know what you think.

Cheers.

New tool, old tool

I spend so much time on the Internet. I’m online at work all day and then I come home and spend a great deal of my evening and late night online as well. While online, I spend a great deal of time chatting with friends, family & co-workers on instant messenger. That boils down to a lot of typing. A LOT!

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Way back when, I had been an early adapter of Skype. Skype is a fantastic little app that lets you video conference with any other Skype user no matter where they are in the world. All for free, I might add. Unfortunately, when I first started using it, hardly anybody else (at least that I knew) was using it, so it was a lot like the sound of one hand clapping.

This past week while watching one of the ThirtyDayChallenge videos, they talked about using Skype to stay in touch with team members. So I went ahead and downloaded the latest version of the software and was even able to access my original account. When I logged in to the service, it informed me that 5,467,999 people are online right now. That is considerably more than were using the software when I used it last. I’ve added a few people to my contact list and I hope to add more as the weeks roll on.

I strongly suggest you give Skype a try. Even if you don’t have a business need for video conferencing, there are dozens of other uses. A friend told me that they use Skype with his parents so that they can watch their grandchild play. What a great, great idea!

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A new tool that I was introduced to through the ThirtyDayChallenge is called Jing Project. This is a tool that provides a service that I never knew I needed until I found the product. But, since finding it, I’ve found so many great uses for it. I’ll be installing this on every computer I come in contact with!

Jing Project has two simple functions. First, you can mark off an area of your screen and capture it as an image. Then, on your image you can add arrows to point out something specific, use the type tool to write a message, draw a rectangle around an area to highlight it. Once you are satisfied with the image, click the “share” button and it automatically uploads the image for you and copies the URL for your new image to the clipboard. Here’s a sample image I created while writing this blog post.

The second function of Jing allows you to create and share video. With voice-overs if you choose. You can view the sample here.

So the next time your friend asks you for help configuring settings in a program, create a quick Jing movie and show him how instead!

EDIT: Not sure how I missed this before, but Jing Project is made by the same folks (TechSmith) that created Camtasia which is another screen capture application that I’ve used at work for creating video demos. Camtasia is a bit more robust software solution than the current version of Jing Project. It will be interesting to see where they take Jing in the coming months.

Who doesn’t like free stuff?

My sister kicks ass when it comes to using coupons. I can’t tell you how many times she’s gone in to a store, filled up her basket with hundreds of dollars worth of products and walked out paying pennies on the dollar. It’s nuts. To coupon at the level she’s at certainly takes hard work. You have to do your homework, read a lot of fine print and sometimes you have to drive to 3 or 4 stores to get the goods. But, the savings can be substantial.

I realize I will NEVER be on the same level as she is when it comes to couponing, but, that doesn’t mean I can’t use a few of the easier ones to save a few bucks here and there. This sorta hit home with me over this past weekend when Chris and I went to a matinee movie and paid $10.00 each to see Harry Potter. Free movie tickets are pretty easy to come by. If you have never used the Entertainment Coupon Book, you don’t know what you are missing. The book has literally hundreds of coupons for discounts at restaurants, local businesses, concert tickets, hotels and yes, free movie tickets. They have specific books for just about every major metro area in the country. They put out a new book each November. I just found out that if you reserve your 2008 book right now, they will send you a 2007 book free. If you do NOTHING but order the free movie tickets, you will have save at least fifty bucks and get both books essentially free.

The only other coupons I use on a regular basis are those from restaurant.com. Sign up with them (free) and then search out restaurants in your area that you want to try out. You can then buy a $25 gift certificate for $10. That’s $15 in free food, no questions asked. Ahh, but that’s not all. The nice folks at restaurant.com send out emails about 2 or 3 times per month. They have promo codes listed that let you get 40%, 50% or up to 60% off the price of the coupon. So we’ve paid as little as $4.00 for a $25 gift certificate. There are, of course, a couple catches. There is typically a minimum on how much you have to spend. It’s usually $50.00. But, with 2 people having dinner and an appetizer, it’s not usually a problem hitting that number. Alcohol and tip do not count towards that $50.00 in most locations. You also can’t use a coupon for the same place more than once in a calendar month. So, no loading up on coupons for your favorite place and hitting them up 5 nights a week. But still, a cool deal.

Yes, I can even geek up running

My wife asks me, “Do you have to geek up everything?” The answer to that should be obvious to her by now, you’d think…

Our marathon training is moving along nicely. This past weekend we ran 60 minutes. Upon returning to the start I was checking out my pedometer and it showed that I had ran just over 4 miles. That didn’t seem right to me. I asked one of the organizers how far it was to the water station. He said it was about 2 miles. I had run WELL past the water station and back again. We estimated that my pedometer was off by roughly .7 miles. That means that all the stats I have been keeping on paper for the past few weeks were totally useless. Time to find new gear.
Enter the Garmin Forerunner 301. This is basically an onboard computer that tracks your heart rate, speed, distance and a ton of other stuff for you while you train. It comes with PC software that lets you import all your workouts and then it will display graphs of your workout including heart rate, speed, etc… It’s got a built in GPS system so it tracks your course as well. So, while you are checking out your speed and what not, you can see where you were at in your course you are. So, if there are hills and valleys, you can see what they do to your speed and heart rate.

It has about 100 other features that I haven’t even got to yet. Alerts, saved courses, preset workouts and a bunch of others that I haven’t yet checked out. All in due time.

Oh, if you are interested in purchasing one, I did my homework before I bought mine. Dicks Sporting Goods - $219, Sports Authority - $219, Best Buy - didn’t carry this model, Target - $179, Amazon.com - $164.

And, if anybody is in need of a slightly used watch with timer and built in heart rate monitor, let me know. Since buying the Garmin, I won’t be using it anymore. :)

Concert, ATV riding & the diet

This has been another busy week. Don’t know when the heck things are going to slow down. It’s really been insane the last couple months. So much stuff going on. Well, to catch you up for the past week:

Thursday evening we went to see Cross Canadian Ragweed at the House of Blues. Once again, they put on a fantastic show. It’s a shame they don’t get more radio airplay. We drug Jake and Diane along for the show this time and they both really enjoyed the show. Not to mention the opening act, who I had never heard of, Micky and the Motorcars. Another great rock band. I’ll definitely be picking up their CDs in the near future.

If you are a fan of good ‘ol fashion southern rock, you should definitely check both of these bands.

Paxton on an ATVOn Tuesday Paxton will turn 16. We wanted to do something really cool for his birthday rather than just getting him a gift that he’d forget about in a few short weeks. Chris came up with the idea of taking him out on an ATV tour. We had originally planned to take him next weekend, but since I’m having surgery on Friday, I didn’t think going ATV riding with stitches in my back would be a good idea. So, we moved it up to this weekend. Holy crap, what a fun time!

This was the first time Paxton had been on an ATV. It was also my first time on an ATV in about 20+ years. They started us out on the skills track. You go pretty slow and get used to the machine and how it handles bumps, dips, rocks and such. Paxton started off fairly tentative and that had me a bit nervous. Next we headed out on the the trail around the base of a mountain. We had our guide out front, then Paxton and then me pulling up the rear. We were told to stay a certain distance behind the guide. Not to get too close and not to drift back to far. Paxton started out fairly well behind the guide to start. But, by the end of the first hour, he was hanging right in there with him. At the end of the second hour on our way back to the hanger where we had started out there was about a quarter mile stretch of wide open flat ground. The guide waved us on to open it up. It was awesome seeing Paxton peg the throttle and just tear down the open stretch. No fear. Just flying!

For as much fun as I had riding, I had 10 times as much fun watching Paxton ride.

And finally, the diet. This has been another pretty good week. I still have yet to wake up and have my morning weigh in be under 200 pounds, but Saturday was pretty close with an exact 200.0. Actually, something really interesting happened on Thursday night at the concert. I had a beer. It was only my second beer in 5 weeks. The first can be seen here. The interesting part being that I did not enjoy the beer at all. I would have so much more enjoyed a bottled water. So this getting in to shape thing has really started making some major changes in me. I am just about certain that I have had my last beer until after I reach my final goal. And even then, I don’t know that I”m going to rush back to drinking beer on a regular basis anyway.

Saturday afternoon Chris and I went to the Village Runner shoe store to sign up for the Las Vegas Road Runners and also the Las Vegas (half) Marathon. It’s official now. We have until December 2nd to get ready to run 13.1 miles. You know I’ll keep you updated!

if you are interested in joining up with the Road Runners, they will be back at the Village Runner and also at some other locations next Saturday, May 19th. The first session running with them will be at 7:00 am on Sunday, May 27th. The scary part is, after the first run, all other Sunday morning runs START at 6:00 am. If there was anybody remotely interested, that last sentence probably killed that, huh?

5K Walk, golf & friends

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve written, so I’ll try to catch you up on a bunch of happenings.

Last week was pretty cool in that some items I had lent out had found their way home. That may not sound like all that big of a deal, but one of the items was actually lent out about 4 years ago. I had lent Rodric my paperback version of the book Fight Club which went missing for years. Thanks to his recent move, he was forced to go through all his stuff. In doing so, he ran across the book. The story almost didn’t end there, though. He found it while packing up for the move. Instead of just putting the book in the car so that he could return it the next day, he placed it in a box of stuff to be moved to the new house. When he told me it had been found, but packed, I was certain it would be another 4 years before the book found it’s way home. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Also, I have to say, for something that had been borrowed so long ago, it was in exactly the same shape when it was returned as when I lent it out. That is amazing. So, if you loan something to Rodric, you may not get it back for a while, but at least he’ll take care of it.

One of my best friends and certainly the friend who I have known the longest Sean McLean recently got hired on at my company. This is such cool news! We haven’t seen each other in 5 years since he’s been living in Northern California and us in Vegas, so it was absolutely awesome to get to see him this weekend. He flew in on Friday to look for a place to live. Since Friday night was poker night here at the house, I gave Sean a quick lesson on how to deal Texas Hold’em. Since he didn’t want to pay to play, this was a great way for him to hang out and be part of the group. With all of the potty mouthes we had at the house on Friday (you know who you are), I was a little surprised we didn’t scare him off. But, we figured that if he moves his entire family to Vegas and this whole “head of QA” thing doesn’t work out, he can always start dealing cards as a back up.

Saturday morning was the 5K “Race for the Cure” event I had written about previously. We got to the parking location around 7:00 am. We were going to take the tram over to the start of the race. While waiting in line for the tram we realized that wearing only shorts and t-shirts may have been a bad idea since it was windy and COLD!! Luckily I had a long sleeve shirt in the car that we gave Blake so she didn’t freeze. We were going to meet up a group of people from our office who were all going to walk, but weren’t able to find most of them. So, our crew was smaller than expected, but we still had a great time. There were more than 20,000 people on the course. This was much more than they were expecting! I don’t know what the final numbers were, but I’m sure they raised a pretty decent amount for Breast Cancer research. We crossed the finish line in about 1 hour. If you haven’t already made a donation, it’s not too late. Click here to donate Now!

This was the first organized walk/run I had ever been to. I’m very excited to do more in the future. Chris, Jessi and I are all planning to train for the Las Vegas half-Marathon on December 2nd. We are likely going to sign up to train with the Las Vegas Roadrunners. They have a 28 week program for getting you ready to run. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

One last thing before I go. Last Thursday our company golf tournament took place. I have to say I’m quite pleased in the fact that I hit only one house! Our team played really well and we had a great time. We took 2nd place. Not bad. The video below is pretty much how it went on every hole all day long.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Can’t wait for next years golf tourney!

Also, here are some photos from the 5k walk. Hope you can make it out to walk with us next year!

Turning Digital Photos in to Prints

I could hardly believe it when I saw that the date on the photos from Zion National Park said 9/1/2003. Almost 4 years ago we went there. Amazing. I remember it like it was only a few months back. That place, if you have never been, is absolutely beautiful!

We took the tram all the way to the top, but we got out and explored at every stop along the way catching the first available tram up the mountain as we went. The only drawback to the day was that we drove from Las Vegas to Zion, did all our exploring and then drove back to Las Vegas the same day. Had to do over again, I would have loved to have rented a cabin and stayed the night. That would have given us 3 or 4 more hours of exploring before calling it a night and then we could have had a leisurely trip getting back the following day. Ahh well, next time…

So, what brought on this post about a trip from 3 years ago, you might ask? Well, I had been looking for an online service for turning some digital photos in to some larger prints. When we got back from Zion I had turned a couple of the photos I had taken in to some 8×10 prints that we got framed and they looked fantastic. I then took one of the shots and turned it in to a 36×48 photo that we got framed and is now hanging in our living room. It came out better than I had expected and makes for a nice show piece above the fireplace.

So, in my searching, I found a place that specializes in doing larger print. I thought I’d pass the info along. The place is called posterXXL.com. You upload a photo, select the size and you are on your way. If you have the need for a large format print of one of your digital photos, you may want to check them out. And, if you use my link, you’ll receive a 10% discount on your first order.

Here are some photos from our trip to Zion. Enjoy.

The Race for the Cure!

Last year, the event coordinator at my office set up a “team” for the Race for the Cure 5K run/walk. I skipped it, of course cause walking 3+ miles was pretty much out of the question… This time around, I don’t really have an excuse to miss it, so I signed up.

If you aren’t familiar with The Race for The Cure, it’s an annual fund raising event put on by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation to support the breast cancer research. I have a cousin who just went through a battle with breast cancer and have a close friend who’s mother also went through it as well. Why not get out and support them, get some sunshine and exercise all at once?

If you are going to be in Las Vegas on Saturday, May 5th, Join Me in the race. I will not be “racing”, per se, but instead taking a nice 3.6 mile walk. If we could get a group of people to all meet up and go, it’ll be a fun time.

If you can’t make it out for the walk, why not Make a Small Donation to help with breast cancer research? I’m have a goal of raising $150 before the May 5th race. You can check out my progress right here.

Hope you can make it out. Sign up Now!

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