Day In The Life of Baz

Here’s another classic example of how Bank of America needs to get some people with brains to programming their Online Banking website.

As you know, I have a Bank of America credit card. This isn’t by choice, by the way. I started out fine with the MBNA guys. Everything was good, then they got bought by BoA and here I am.

I recently stumbled onto Bankaholic’s website and saw a promotion for the Bank of America checking account for their current credit card customers. Now since I’ve moved, I haven’t gotten a local checking account yet, so I figure why not get $75.00 for free? It’s a free checking account, there’s no monthly maintenance fee when you sing up online, so it’s a win win. Once again, I was dead wrong.

This morning I tried to log into my credit card account. It’s the beginning of the month so I’m trying to organize finances and pay some bills. I was greeted by the screen above. They need me to enter my new ATM/Check card number and my PIN. Well, there’s only one problem, I filled out this form online and I haven’t received anything in the mail yet.

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I must say, I’m impressed. I truly am. I’d never imagine that Microsoft would have made such a stride to create such a generic blogging application. The power of this program surpasses everything that I’ve seen before in a desktop blogging client. Windows Live Writer is definitely a winner in my book, but…

Why I Like It

First of all, there’s nothing that can beat the speed of offline editing. There’s not waiting for www.myblog.com/wp-admin. There’s no clicking and waiting for the post page to load. It’s just pure editing, quick and easy. It’s great.

One of the best features I’ve seen is that it has the ability to pull over your blogs CSS style so that you can see exactly what the post looks like like. Hit F12 and there’s a live preview of what the post looks like, as if posted on your blog. That’s cool.

Images Are Awesome

Inserting images into a post is the most insane thing I’ve seen. Of course you can drag an image into your post from your desktop and there you go. There’s a built in drop shadow feature that I’ve come to love. It actually edits the image and sets the drop shadow on the image itself. It’s not an after-market style that’s applied; I guess there are pros and cons to this, but all I can see are pros.

Popularity: 58%

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One thing that I’ve found especially hard since I’ve move up here is keeping in touch with friends and family back home in Dominica. Yes, there’s always email and there’s alway instant messaging, but sometimes you just need to hear there person’s voice on the other line.

The best solution that I’ve found, so far, was Skype. When I went home on vacation for Christmas of 2005, I decided to hook my Mom up with Skype on her computer. I purchased some credits and even subscribed to a SkypeIN account for her so that I could call her whenever I needed to. This has worked great until yesterday.

I got a call from my mother saying that she’s lost her internet connection for an indefinite amount of time. As such, it’s time to resort back to the old faithful phone cards. The one thing you need to remember about phone cards is that there is always a connection fee when calling internationally. The cards that do say no connection fee simply mean that the card does not charge an additional connection fee. The number of minutes on these cards assume that you use the entire card in one shot. Making multiple calls in the easiest way to kill your card quicker than you intended.

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I guess I should have known better. Girl gets into car wreck, girl almost dies, they put a bunch of bionic parts into girl, now girl is a killing machine. How could that kind of plot fail?

I haven’t seen something as corny as this in a long while. Why do I watch it? I don’t know, it’s television; I like television. They could have at least tried to make it not suck so much, but I guess it was too much for them.

Oh well. Don’t worry NBC, you guys still have some great shows on.

Popularity: 30%

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Saving Money On Your Oil Change

An oil change is a relatively simple thing to perform, or so they say. They supplies are usually the least expensive of what you pay for if you go to your dealership or another auto shop. The bulk of the cost comes from labor and the oil disposal fees. So a lot of people save tons of money by simply doing their own oil changes. To those I say, more power to you.

For the rest of us, like those who live in apartment complexes, and those who aren’t very mechanically inclined. We need to take our car to the shop.

Ditch The Dealership

Dealerships are notoriously overpriced when it comes to basic auto maintenance. Don’t get me wrong, for those 15K, 30K, 45K, etc. maintenance schedules, I won’t hesitate to bring my car to the appropriate dealership. Now when I say appropriate, I don’t necessarily mean where you bought your car from. I’m talking about the dealer that corresponds to your car model. They know your car inside and out.

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