CK Blog

Checking my email tonight includes a “Important Service Notice” from Peerflix letting me know that they are discontinuing their Marketplace and DVD buy/sell/trade aspects of their website. Peerflix had been a website where you could list DVD’s that you owned for trade with others. If you were buying, you would pay a small transaction fee and the marketplace price set by Peerflix. If you were selling, you could sell for the marketplace price with the postage paid by the buyer.

It was one of those seemingly good ideas that just did not take off in the end. There were complaints from sellers about the marketplace prices being too low. Some movies were priced a lot lower than what you could buy them from places like eBay, Half.com or Amazon.com. Halfway through their existence, Peerflix did a big upgrade and switched from a credit based system to a dollar based system that caused issues within the trading community.

In the end what seemed to kill it was the marketplace though, you had lots of buyers with no trade cash or sellers refusing to sell at the prices set by Peerflix. I know personally I would go through looking for a movie and see lots of haves (people with the movie and willing to send it out) with little wants (people with trade cash (TC) to buy). In my case, I have 38 movies listed in my Peerflix account, only 1 movie (Seabuscuit at 3 dollars) has a “want” with trade cash.

A market economy can only survive if there is a balance in the system of buyers and sellers.
Here is a example from my own account of the problem:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: 51 haves (15 ready to send) vs 4 wants (0 with TC)
Men in Black II: 71 haves (32 ready to send) vs 6 wants (0 with TC)
Lollilove: 1 haves (0 ready to send) vs 7 wants (0 with TC)
The Beatles – A Celebration: 8 haves (2 ready to send) vs 0 wants (0 with TC)
Trapped in Paradise: 32 haves (16 ready to send) vs 0 wants (0 with TC)

Trapped in Paradise is a particular sore spot with me thanks to the Peerflix upgrade. I had built a few credits up in my account. For some reason, I had added this movie somewhere in my account even though its not exactly on my must have right now list. No big deal, I had not recieved any movies from the system anyways. Then Peerflix made the big switchover with their upgrade and suddenly they send me that movie along with a couple other movies that were in some list I had, but not exactly DVDs I were craving. Now I’m stuck with some movies I couldn’t unload if I tried even though its my fault for having not removed them completely from my lists.

Bye Peerflix, you were a nice little experiment into a trade economy, better luck next time.

Warren Buffet has issued his annual report to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. It is always a good read full of information not only about his companies, but also investing and the economy in general. There are archives of his letters going back to 1977, be sure to check them out as well.

For the past couple years the company that I work for has decided against offering a Roth 401k. A bummer for me because it would appear to work nicely in my situation. With the 401k, you make contributions with after tax money and get the money tax free in retirement. It is nice if you have lower rates now or had deductions such as student loans or mortage interest to help offset the difference. Check out this article from Yahoo Finance to get a quick overview or the Roth 401k and if it makes sense for you.

Finally, the company announced that this year, they will be offering…you guessed it, a Roth 401k. This of course is right after they tell me I am losing my job and will not be working there pretty soon anyways.

Since I will be rolling my current 401k over into an IRA soon enough so I don’t think its worth even messing around with the Roth 401k. Just great timing all around…

Okay so I am not from the government, but I am here to help you! Check out the link below with some helpful consumer info from the Federal Citizen Information Center of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

The new Consumer Action Handbook – This guide from the Federal Citizen Information Center can help with your consumer problems and questions. Find help on such topics as buying and leasing cars, shopping from home and protecting your privacy and yourself from fraud.

As I have mentioned, I recently moved into a new place and as part of that got a new phone line. Personally I do not have much of a need for a landline, I use my cell phone for the majority of my calls and I think my parents are about the only people who have my actual landline number, everyone else has my cell number. I got the phone for the DSL connection, I know I could have gotten naked DSL, but I got the landline for the 911 coverage.

I picked the metered option which is $6.50 base plus another $5.50 in extra charges and profit fees. I also got charged $47 for connection charges, which makes me mad because I found out afterwards that I could have gotten that waived if I would have ordered it online instead of over the phone. I know it costs a little more to pay the operator to take my order, but not $47 worth. The nice thing though is they did split the charge over 3 months so it is $15 a month instead of one big chunk.

The big sticker shock part came from the DSL side. I got the charge for the modem which was $49.99, I could have brought it off eBay and saved a little chunk. Then they charged me $12.95 for the shipping and handling of the modem but thats not a biggie. I was impressed with how fast they got the modem to me, it was waiting for me when I got home from the work the day after I initally ordered the phone line, but the DSL was not even scheduled to be activated for another week and a half, so they could have sent it parcel post for all I care instead of charging the extra money. Plus I am sure it did not cost them nearly that much to ship the package given what I know about how much it costs my company to ship out packages. Now my company is a really big Fortune 500 type, but our volume probably is a drop compared to a fulfillment place like this one that will drive the price down.

I guess it was just the overall sticker shock of getting the bill for so much more than I was expecting caused me to just react so negatively. Once I really sat down and looked at it, I understood the various causes of it even if I still was not thrilled with it.

While looking around Amazon.com, I noticed a suggested title from them called The Personality Code by Dr. Travis Bradberry. It seemed interesting and covered topics that I studied as an undergraduate in college so I looked more into it and the book itself was interesting enough but there’s more to this story though.

On the Amazon page for the blog entry by the author promoting a game hosted on his website. It was a Press-Your-Luck game based on the story of Michael Larson, the guy behind the game show scandal which is mentioned in the book. You could win prizes such as a blinkie, autographed copy of the book, a IPod Shuffle or an Nintendo Wii based on how well you scored in the game. I got lucky and got enough points to win a Wii. The game asked me to fill out a form with my information and said the prize would be shipped out within a week. Weeks go by and nothing shows up, I try following up and got nowhere.

Now I see the blog entry mentioning the contest is gone and the game on the website has been changed to a play game. Maybe they meant the contest to be over a long time ago and just dropped the ball by not changing their website or their entry on amazon before someone won a prize, but it seems a little shady to not award the prize and then just erase any mention of the contest like it never existed. There were no posted rules saying the game was over by a certain date or anything like that, I played the game in good faith and guess I really lost in the end. They could have at least sent an email or called and said “Hey, we screwed up, sorry.” At this point, I would not be surprised if the blog entry over at Amazon just got totally erased to get rid of my comment and although I don’t expect anything to come of this, I have to say I’m really disappointed at the outcome from the author of a book I find interesting.

Many moons ago, I had came across Roboform, a program that saves passwords and fills out forms for you on the net. It seemed nifty, but it didn’t excite me enough to want to buy it at the time over utilizing exisiting features within my browser, so I stopped using it. While messing around with Cashduck and the whole GPT scene, I decided to give Roboform another shot though. The more I used it, it seemed handy enough so I plucked down a few bucks and got the full desktop verision, but did not opt for the Pass2go (Roboform for flash drives) verision or additional license for another computer since I didn’t think I would need them.

Some time passes and I picked up an Ativia flash drive on sale at Office Depot. Its one of the new U3 variety and includes a trial of the Pass2go. I sync my data from my main Roboform database and start messing around with it. It does seem handy to have, espically since my main computer has been having problems with its graphics card so I have been using another computer more often or doing stuff at work. I decide to check out purchasing a license for the Pass2go and it turns out the company offers discounts if you have already purchased a license from them. But I cannot from my order id number anywhere. I checked all my emails and I either did not get one with this number or long since deleted it. The software itself nor does their website offer an easy way to get another copy of this number. How hard would it be to make a little form that lets you put in your email address or something like this and have them email you the info or else accept an alternative method of proving your egilibity for the discounts on the extra licenses.

I would gladly pay the few bucks to get the new license if only they would let me!

Edit: On a hunch, I checked my paypal history and started inputting numbers from the order history there from when I brought Roboform orginally. One of the numbers worked so problem solved!

Since I have been on vacation this week, I had a bit more time to mess around with stuff I normally don’t get a chance to. One of the things I decided to try out was the paid to try offers sites such as Cashduck and Deal Barbie that I had read about a bit about on a few blogs. Although the various sites have similar offers I’ve mostly been exploring Cashduck because Kira from Penny Foolish runs it.

It has been said noone hires a stranger, which is why networking is so important in job hunting, but I had similar reasons in choosing Cashduck over the others. With Kira there is a real live person that you can read about and relate to, whereas the others are just websites. They are fine websites, but as dumb as this might sound, the connection isn’t quite the same. True I don’t know Kira any better than reading a few blog entries, but that was enough to make a difference in picking one set of offers over another.

Today I cancelled my Netflix account. Overall, I can’t say I have any real complaints about the service and would recommend it to others. My main reason for canceling was purely a usage vs. cost consideration. Before I got Netflix, I only rented movies every so often from a local video store and the whole hassle of dealing with making an extra trip to return them and late fees.

I signed up with Netflix after seeing an offer from AAA that gave you $12 for joining and keeping it a month. My movie viewing did increase and I got caught up with several movies I had wanted to see. The post office that the movies are shipped back to is right near my work. So that meant if I timed my returns correctly, I had a 3-day turn-around. For instance, if I dropped it in the mail on Tuesday, they would receive it and mail my next movie on Wednesday, and I would receive it on Thursday. Of course, if you return it on Friday or the weekend, you are not getting it until Tuesday at the earliest. Every once in awhile, there would be a hiccup in returns. I would return two at once and one would be processed the next day and the other a day or few later. I cannot say for sure though if that is a Netflix issue or a USPS issue. I know someone who works at the post office that mentioned the Netflix envelopes are trouble for their machines so sometimes they get piled up until someone can manually work them.
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My younger brother really likes to download music. But now days with the legal entanglements of the practice, a search was on for a good source of music that was also reasonable in price. A friend of mine uses the ITunes music shop and really likes it. Every so often, he will connect his IPod and pick out a few new songs to download. Sometimes it will only be a song or two, other times the session will mean twenty songs. Overall, given the $0.99 price, that is not a bad deal since its only a bit more than you would spend if you had a retail CD every week or two habit.

Given his economic status currently, my brother was hoping to find a lower price alternative. What is the first name that comes to mind when you think about music online (besides ITunes)? Napster of course. In particular, I have seen plenty of ads where they proclaim how you can download lots of music that would cost you $10,000 to fill up your IPOD with ITunes for only $15 a month with Napster.

Sounds good right? So we get online and download the software. As far as I can recall, there were no real problems to install it. Once it was setup, the first thing I noticed was it had real ITunes type of interface feel to it. Anyway, we registered and selected the 7-day trial they offer to see what it was like. He downloaded a couple of songs and planned to try later to really search and try it out. In the mean time, I decided to do some more research about it.
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