Day In The Life of Baz

Here we have another one of the “Get Paid To Blog” family: Smorty. It is quite similar to most of the rest of these services: they serve to connect Advertisers to Bloggers and make a lil’ bit of commission on the side.

Signing up was a breeze. You enter your blog details and boom, you’re in. Well, not exactly. There is a short period of time that your blog has to go under to be reviewed. Your blog has to meet some minimum requirements, or else everybody would be doing it and soon enough the service would become a joke. Your blog must be indexed by Google and Yahoo, needs to be active for at least three months, etc. If you can’t meet these requirements, frankly you have bigger problems.

After you’re approved, you sign up and start blogging away. That’s it. One thing that is interesting, is that there’s something called a “Smorty Rank”. This consists of your Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, return rate of given tasks, approval/decline ratio of completed tasks and the number of completed tasks. This is interesting, since most of the other blog for money sites go solely off of Google’s Pagerank and we know how Google gets flaky with Page rank every now and then.

Why would Michael Weston get fired from the CIA? In the new USA Network show, Burn Notice, this guy gets fired from the CIA and then gets burned. Everyone is after him and he goes into hiding trying to escape.

But back to the matter at hand, why would one get fired from the CIA? There are real life CIA termination stories ranging from leaking information to blogging. But Michale Weston doesn’t seem like the type to sell secrets; I don’t know, he strikes me as a good guy. And in the ads I’ve seen, he definitely doesn’t look like he’s trying to rush home to get a post off.

But, Michael Weston (Jeffrey Donovan) seems like the type to bend the rules not break them. And seeing Jeffrey Donovan in a few other roles (Hitch is the latest one I can remember) he strikes me as a “sleeping with the enemy” type of guy. Yep, I’d be willing to be that he bedded the wrong woman at the wrong time, and his bosses got involved. Now, we’re talking about the enemy here, so that’s like treason. You can’t just suspend someone for that; so he got burned for sleeping with a woman (pun very intended).

Why I Don’t Use Coupons

Usually, I’d be against the whole coupon thing. I can hear you now, “But Baz, coupons save money. Aren’t you all about saving money?” I can’t use grocery store coupons. The reason is because the coupons are always for the high priced version of what I’m looking for. There are tons of Kellogg’s coupons but none for the Great Value brand that I buy at Walmart. Even with the coupons, the cheaper brands usually work out cheaper.

The Exception

The exception is for electronics. For electronics, people usually buy the name brand versions anyway. This is where coupon codes come in handy. The last ones I remember using where Buy.com coupon codes. I got myself a blue tooth headset for next to nothing.

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Popularity: 11%

Car insurance is a pain. Why do we really need car insurance anyway? I mean, I’ve been driving around for years and have never had a single problem. Well, I have bumped a few bumpers here and there, but that’s what they’re for right? I mean, they call them bumpers.

On a more serious note: Texas law states that insurance is a must. The only optional portion is comprehensive insurance. This basically means that if you get into an accident that is your fault, then the insurance company will pay for damages to your car. In Texas this is a necessity if you have a lien against your car: if you’re financing through a dealership or bank.

I’ve always been against insurance in general. I feel that insurance should be “in case stuff happens”. So if stuff doesn’t happen, I’m of the opinion that you should get your money back. So along those lines you’d be better off putting your money into a high yield savings account. But since everyone isn’t so disciplined, we need insurance companies to guide the masses. Especially since I recently got a new car, I would just die if something happened to it and I couldn’t get it repaired.

Introduction

Once again, we enter the world online backup. Enter iDrive.com. Free online backup. These guys pamper you with a whooping 2GB of online storage to fill your heart’s desire.

Features

The main difference between this and other online backups like EggDisk is that iDrive requires you to download their application, whereas other services have an online interface. This, I take as a slight disadvantage, since my main use for online backup is as an intermediary between where ever I am and my house.

Your backups are encrypted with 128-bit SSL encryption on transfers. This seems to be standard among most online backups that I’ve seen.

One thing I haven’t seen before is the scheduling feature. You can schedule backups to occur in the background with no user interaction.

Virtual Drive

This is one of the advantages of using a standalone program. You can set this up on your system as a virtual drive (e.g. F:). Then you can use it like any other Windows Drive, with one exception, it’s read-only. Huh? Why would they temp users with this feature and then make it read-only? Oh well.