Day In The Life of Baz

I’ve had my Chase rewards card for about four (4) months now, so I decided to call them up to see whether or not they’d be able to reduce my interest rate. It was at a ridiculous 23% At first, I didn’t really mind since I use this card as a rewards card only. That being said, I pay off the balance in full every month.

Now there’s a lil’ catch 22 with whole reward card thing. Since it’s a reward card I want to get the maximum rewards I can. Therefore, I use this card for everything. That makes it a little bit harder to pay off the balance every month. I had to pull some money out of my savings last month to pay it off.

So just in case, I called up Chase and asked for a reduction in my APR. Great news! There was a “promotional reduction available” on my account. So I asked, “What’s the promotion?”. The guy on the phone (Juan I think his name was) told me that today they would be able to reduce the APR on my card to a whopping 21% from 23%.

OK, so I guess I’ve been living under a rock for most of 2007, but I just stumbled onto this guy. I stumbled up Clipperz just this morning from reading a comment on someone’s blog (sorry, the source escapes me).

Here we have a snippet from Clipperz.com

• Clipperz is:

  • a secure and simple password manager
  • an effective single sign-on solution
  • a digital vault for your personal data

• With Clipperz you can:

  • store and manage your passwords and online credentials
  • login to your web services without entering any username or password
  • protect all your sensitive data: codes for burglar alarms, PINs, credit card numbers, …
  • share secrets with family members and associates (coming soon)

• Clipperz benefits:

  • free and completely anonymous
  • access it any time from any computer
  • no software to download and nothing to install
  • avoid keeping secrets on your PC or on paper

Now, in the past, I’ve frowned upon online password management. They seemed like glorified excel list. Yeah, it’s secure, but who cares.

Christmas is a great time of year for most. I’m not usually a Christmas person. Just because people seem to put a lot of emphasis on the wrong things. It seems to be highly commercialized and about material things, but to each his own.

When I was in college, Christmas usually only meant two weeks off of school to sit and chill. It was usually a boring time for me, because 90% of the college body would go visit family and friends. So no one was around to do anything with.

Working would have made this Christmas even less of a celebration, since we would only get the 24th and 25th off from work. But it just so happens that my Mom decided to make the long trip up from Dominica to spend some time and Lava got some time off from school (lucky bastard), so we’re doing the family thing.

Just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

Popularity: 47%

If you are like me then you LOVE to read. Why not get some Audio Books online? You can check out Books On Board to get a wide selection of over 190, 000 eBooks from a variety of publishing houses.

The books are available in Adobe, Palm and Mobisoft formats so you have a number of different ways to access your favorite titles.

I just went over to the site to check on the price of Four Blind Mice by James Patterson and it is a low $4.59. The other prices on the site do not look too bad so this might just be a site that I check out more in the future.

Popularity: 44%

I had never thought about using rope lighting for Christmas before until I realized the savings you could potentially have with them. Face it, most of us are going to have decked out houses for Christmas…but then we will have to face the electric bills in January.

I have previously written about saving money by using solar lights and CFLs so why not pass on that same money saving advice when using Christmas lights.

According to the sellers this lighting consumes only about .47 watts per foot so you can immediately start to calculate how much cheaper it would be to run the LED Christmas lights, as opposed to the traditional lighting.

Traditional lighting consumes about 6 watts per foot, which is about 12 times what the LED lights use. Convert that to the price you pay for electricity and you can figure out the cost for yourself.

These lights last a long time, about 50,000 hours and since they generate a small amount of heat they are generally thought to be safer than traditional lights. Deck your halls this Christmas and save some money on the electric bill in the spring.

Popularity: 35%