The Comcast Cable Internet saga continues. First I tried to take advantage of a free 50% speed upgrade and found out I had to buy a new modem. Then I realized I was actually getting an upgrade that more than doubled my download transfer speed for the same price.
Now I’ve received the bill. I expected they’d screw something up, and they didn’t let me down. I’m actually being charged $16 less for internet access now ($30 rather than $46). Combined with my $16 basic cable, I’m saving a good amount of money compared to when I was paying $46 for internet and $70 for television.
Thank you, Comcast!
This has been a good month for my balance sheet, with three paychecks rather than the standard two, some overimte, a bonus, and some side income. I’ll try to have my financial reports posted by the end of the weekend.
I have to share two interesting developments with the Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggregator, pfblogs.org. They kind of let their announcements slip away silently, and perhaps they deserve more attention.
I’ve started using the pfblogs.org Blogroll on Consumerism Commentary, and it’s really easy to implement. Check it out.
If you like pfblogs.org, you may want to read about their annual campaign which is starting in April. They have a modest fundraising goal of $200 for the month. The site will never have advertising, so any help keeps the site running smoothly.
Full disclosure: I’m the pfblogs.org webmaster.
It’s time for some numbers from the government. In February, consumer spending rose 0.1% and personal income grew 0.3%. Even though the income gain was higher than the spending gain as a percentage, we are on average spending more than we have available. Living above our means in the American way, and I don’t see that changing.
Here is the detailed analysis [pdf] from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Take a look if you have nothing else to do this weekend.
Fortune Magazine presents tips for picking out a suit. It’s not exactly advice for those of us on a budget, but I’ve heard that everyone should have at least one great suit. I’ve also heard that one should dress for how your see yourself in the future, not how you see yourself now.
Personally, I’m not a fan of clothing in general.
Here are the tips:
* Make sure the suit is properly made. Hand-stitched is the way to go, not glued. Is there glue in my suits? I have no idea.
* The fabric should fit the role. The tips in Fortune talk about Super 200 vs. Super 100. I had no idea what this means. Luckilly the U.S. Congress was there to help me. The number refers to the diameter of the wool thread used.
* Opt for a very fitted silhouette. Boxy is bad. It’s all about getting high armholes, apparently.
* Wear appropriate trousers. Basically, thinner people do well with lower cut pants and others should have trousers cut higher.
* Get the right size shirt. Get one that fits closely to the body.
* Colors! The article suggest sticking to no more than three different ones. I’m not great with matching colors when it comes to clothing (or web design for that matter), but it’s easy to stay in the realm of “safe.”
* Patterns are wonderful, but don’t get carried away. I’m not a fan of patterns, favoring solids. The article says not to mix patterns, but mix scale of the same type of pattern.
* Accessorize and coordinate. Ties and socks should match, and cufflinks should be of a good quality.
* Get a great tailor. To me, this should probably be the first step. “You can buy off the rack and just worry about the shoulders and torso fitting correctly, because the right tailor can take care of the rest. And the best tailors can do miracles.”
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Bloggers: Effect of Changing URIs on AdSense
by Flexo on March 31, 2006
in Administration
So as many of my readers know, about a week ago I switched Consumerism Commentary from the Movable Type platform to WordPress. There were a number of reasons for the change, including MT’s long rebuild times for example.
Since this migration caused a slight change in the URIs for my entries — namely, the underscore characters became dashes — I had to write a small script to handle the translation so no links from outside would be broken. Even though I was changing software, old link to my blog still needed to work and not produce an error.
Doing the translation wasn’t as easy as doing a “permanent redirect” in .htaccess — I had to write a PHP script that is called from .htaccess whenever underscores are encountered in the URL. The script replaces them with dashes and redirects the browser back to the server, where .htaccess is interpreted again.
Basically, the links weren’t broken, but I lost my Google Pagerank on almost all of my pages.
I saw the effects immediately. My daily AdSense revenue tanked to sometimes less than 50% of what was expected. This has been the case almost all week, but the last few days, it appears as if things are returning to normal. I’ll have to wait another few weeks to determine if there is any more fallout from the change.
The improvements seemed to coincide with when I installed the WordPress plugin that enables a Google Sitemap, so perhaps that was the key.
Today’s earnings are pretty high for a Friday so far.
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