Chris’ Blog

So today I decided to try something.  I had heard (particularly from Get Rich Slowly) that if you called your Credit Card you might be able to get your interest rate lowered.  So I called.  The conversation went like this.  (After proving myself and the agent pulling up my account)

Me: Hi, I was wondering what my interest rate is on this card.

Agent: Hang on, I’ll pull it up.  It is 5.XX and 9.99 prime which is 15.9X (I don’t remember it exactly but very close to 16%)

Me: Oh thanks. Now I was wondering, we have been good at paying it, and we have never carried a balance, is there any chance we can get that lowered?

Agent: Well the best I can do is take 2% off prime.

Me: That would be excellent thanks.

Agent: OK, As of now your interest rate is 13.9X - is there anything else I can do for you?…

And there you have it - a lower interest rate in less than 5 minutes!

I am sorry to anyone who has been posting comments on this site. I do not know what happened but somehow my user that is supposed to write to the database lost those permissions. I realized it one day when I was trying to figure out why I was getting all of these email messages that were empty, but asking me to moderate the comment. I also was unable to post messages here on the site. It should be working now. And if you still need to update your rss feed, you can find the new one at the bottom of the page.

So I still have too much on my plate, but I have realized that all I can do is one thing at a time.  Instead of trying to multi-task everything, I have decided that I would just try to do one thing at a time.  I have noticed that once this is done, I can then easily move on to the next thing on my list.  I don’t fell like I constantly have loads of things I am working on, and if I need a short break after finishing one thing, it isn’t like I am in the middle of doing three others.  So, next time you have a bunch of things to do, instead of trying to get them all done at once, pick just one, and work on it.  Pretty soon you will find you have gotten more done than you thought you could.

Well, I accepted a job at Cluster Resources today so it looks like we will be staying here in Provo for the next few years.  Its going to be a great opportunity!  I’m their Business Infrastructure Developer.  Basically I’ll get to work with the different teams to fix some of the problems that they have in the business process.  It will be a great experience, and I am way excited to know what I’ll be doing here for the next few years!  I think it will be a great stepping stone for either going into management (especially if I go back for an MBA) or for having better tools for going out on my own in a few years.   I’m excited.  It will be good.

This site will be going through some changes - You can see some of them on the side now.  I have converted my blog over to wordpress as I figured that would be quicker than creating commentability in my current setup.  Thus, we now have a new blog (although it should look virtually the same) and there will be a new RSS feed you will need to subscribe to.  I first need to make sure it works…

Are your Google Analytics stats messed up because you go to your site all the time? Would you like to fix that? Well Google provides a way you could block the traffic from a certain IP address. But if you are checking it from a range of computers then that doesn’t really do you any good. You can block a range but what if you use your laptop all over town and connect into different wireless access points. Or in my case when I go to school I get an new IP every day if not more. So what I decided to do was to defeat it with cookies.
The first step is to create a page that will store a cookie to the computer. For this site I added it into the submission page for these posts. No one else comes here so I shouldn’t have to worry about people accidentally getting the cookie set on their own computer. (A side benefit of having it on a page that I use a bunch is that if I clear my cookies it comes back without me having to think about it.) To create a cookie on a page using php you put this at the top:

<?PHP
setcookie (”analytics”, “no_analytics”);
?>

This sets a cookie with the name analytics and the value no_analytics set to that cookie.
Next, we put an if statement around where we record the analytics (for me this is in the header so it is called on every page.):

<?

if($_COOKIE["analytics"] != ‘no_analytics’) // if there is a cookie for this site that contains this information then the analytics will not be counted
{

?>

This If statement will check the cookie and if it exists it will not print out the javascript that sends the information to the Google servers. As long as you have the cookie set in the browsers you use, you will be able to visit the site without being counted. And if you visit from somewhere else - if you want you can hit the page, store the cookie and delete it when you are finished!

So the other day I found an article online about gift cards. It was talking about how when you buy a gift card it is actually a loan. I had never thought of this before. The article went on to say that if a store goes bankrupt one of the things they do is stop accepting gift cards. I enjoyed the article and thought I would pass it on to my favorite personal finance site Get Rich Slowly. J.D. decided that he would post a short article on it this afternoon and I got a mention! So GO READ IT!

OK, so maybe I got a little excited over that, but its really cool to feel like you are a part of something, and I found an article, and not only passed the information on to someone, but potentially thousands of others. Kinda cool! I should have a comments section in my site, and I’ve been planning on it but hey if you have comments you can send them over to me through my contact form for now!

Ok, I realize that I posted about this before, and that I was going to exercise and things, but I am starting to really feel a need to get into good shape. It is one thing when you walk up stairs and you are out of breath - not that it is ok, but it is easier to justify. It is quite another to realize how out of shape you are when you are just standing somewhere… My wife looked at me the other day and started laughing and I realized why, and changed the way I was standing but when it happened again just last night it hit home a bit harder. When I am standing there, not paying attention, my gut hangs out. I mean it is really noticeable and suddenly I felt self conscious about it. I realize that it is something that I need to take care of or it is just going to keep getting larger and larger. Previously I started running. I got sick the same week, but I kept pushing it because I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t getting better so I started doing situps and other things to exercise, but then we went on vacation, and then it just fizzled out. Its ok for that to happen for some good reasons but what isn’t ok is that I went for so long before starting back up. I am going to start using my exercise calendar again as well as running. Here goes nothing…