Happy New Year!

Wishing you all a happy, healthy and successful new year.



All the best in 2009!

you make it like i'm see-through...

two cheers for the bum chin...i am becoming addicted to her.
i'm also envious of her make up style..can't rock fake eyelashes
to save my life.

Invest in Gold.

If you're looking for a solid place to invest your money may I suggest gold.

Here are a couple of articles talking about investing in gold.

- Gold funds shine in November - The Globe and Mail
- One Good Idea: Buy gold bullion - The Globe and Mail

In case you're interested. Here's a tool to track the current market price of gold in $US, http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html.

Started shopping and decorating

Today I started shopping for Christmas gifts for my family. It turned out to be very successful. I picked up some gifts for my nephews and niece.

Every year I'm somewhat shell-shocked by the number of people out shopping. Even though I shouldn't be surprised I am. It must have something to do with all of the great sales that are going.

This year my girlfriend and I are trying something new. We're going to pool our cash together and buy a large gift. We're really interesting in the a 46" Sharp Aquos LCD HDTV. When I was out shopping I saw a couple of them in on display. They look fantastic. I'm hoping one of these big box store will hook-up a Blu-ray player so I can see the quality of the video.

When I got home from all the shopping it was time to start Christmas decorating. The Christmas tree is up and all of the ornaments are hung. The other decorations are peppered through out the house. It's starting to look very festive.

Flexing my tech muscle

A few months ago I bought a hard drive and product services plan from Futureshop.

Recently I decided to installed the hard drive because my computer was running low on disk space. That hard drive was a Seagate Barracuda 500Gb SATA drive. It was on sale at the time for $99.99(CND) so I thought it was a good deal.

After a few days of use I started getting a prompt from my bios about the hard drive.

"S.M.A.R.T status of Bad. Back-up and Replace drive."

S.M.A.R.T stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Just to be certain about the status of the drive I download some utilities from Seagate to double check. Sure enough the utilities gave me the same results. The next day I download Darik's Boot And Nuke to properly wipe the drive.

My previous experience with returning items to big box stores like Futureshop have been relatively painless. Especially when you have a product service plan. This time was different. They didn't have a hard drive in stock of the same size or features instock. I told them that I wasn't going to drive to another store and I want at hard drive tonight! But they still couldn't offer me anything but a hard drive at a different location or store credit. That didn't make me happy so I told them to give me my money back. They seemed pretty happy do give me my money back just to get me out of the store.

So I decided to hunt around online to see if I could get the save drive for less money. I was really happy I did because Canadian Computers had quite a few deals for BlackFriday. I got the same hard drive for $62.99(CND) after taxes that's a $20 dollar savings.

You can check out the BlackFriday special at Canadian Computers here.

Thank goodness for poor customer service at Futureshop.

Tonight I'm reinstalling Windows and all of my software. Which should go much faster this time because I save all of the application files.

x-mas shopping

This year my family like many other families is doing a secret Santa gift exchange so each adult in my family gets one gift but the children receive gifts from everyone.

It's a good way to save money and still keep everyone happy.

I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to find the gifts that I have to buy. So I'm not to going to crazy. It's shoppers like this that cause all sorts of shopping panic.

But to put things in perspective. If they're that worried about finding the perfect xmas gift what will happen when the food on our store shelves starts to raise in price and disappear?

How much panic will spread when the food price rises high enough to cause export bans?

Well that could be a reality soon. If you have any doubts have a look at this article, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aC.nz4FiZpkg&refer=home, in my opinion Bloomberg is a creditable source.

Maybe it's time to buy some food.

jQuerty s3slider

http://www.serie3.info/s3slider/
It looks really good. It could come in useful for photo galleries and ads.

Hotlinking

Lately I've been reviewing my traffic.

Even though I haven't been post a lot there is still quite a bit of traffic. But most of it is from hotlinking or inline linking images.

If you don't know what I mean by hotlinking or inline linking then please read up.

Because tonight I'm going to start blocking hotlinked images.

Catching up

Today is the start of my new initiative.

I'm going to follow through with a few of my goals.

• Get fit


• Finish setting up my business


• Put more money into savings


• Finish the new design for this blog

There's quite a few more but those are task that have been pending for awhile now. Like a lot of people I tend to get side track with the changing of priorities but these are the goals that will stick.

For your viewing pleasure..

The latest news video from Epic Fu.



Recently I've been browsing to see if there are any decent "Netshow". There are quite a few out there and Epic Fu is just one of the many news channels that has a different take on tech new.