Lists of Things: Small Cars

Every once in a while it is nice to just have a go to list of things already compiled and organized. That is all this is for me - a reference point.

I will have to buy a new small commuter car again one day and this list is a compilation of most of the cars that fit in the small and inexpensive commuter category. Obviously, for you this list may not be complete or perfect, but it is a first cut. Prices range mostly between $11k and $14k. There will be many additional determining factors in the final decision to purchase any one of these models including fuel economy, reliability, roominess, price, etc.

Honda Fit
Honda Civic
Ford Focus
Hyundai Accent
Hyundai Elantra
Mitsubishi Lancer
Nissan Versa
Toyota Corolla ($14k+)
Toyota Matrix ($15k+)
Chevy Aveo
Chevy Cobalt
Dodge Caliber

Do you own any of the above mentioned vehicles? What has been your experience?
Do you have any car buying tips? Share them below in the comments.

Wrong Number

We have received a lot of wrong number phone calls to our new home since we just moved and just got our new phone service connected. This happened at our last home, too. We moved in, set up service, and almost immediately we were fielding calls from several collection agencies all trying to find a certain woman. It took a while to convince them that we really were new people to that number before they would quit calling. 

In our new home we have received a number of funny calls as well. Some people immediately recognize that they have dialed a wrong number and hang up. Others just start in on a conversation at you and are surprised when you are not their best friend or whatever.

Funny as those all are - imagine if you received a wrong number call from a bunch of criminals reporting in that their dirty work is done. This is the premise of a new book that is ready to launch March 8th, 2010 aptly titled, Wrong Number written by Rachelle J. Christensen. From the back cover -

“I think you have the wrong number.”

When Aubree Stewart answers her cell phone on the way to work one day, she isn’t prepared for her life to change. Someone dialed a wrong number, a simple mistake. But the call changes everything when Aubree overhears information about the murder of a government official. Now she must run for her life as the caller tries to eliminate her.
Aubree is placed in the witness protection program, but when the FBI’s protection fails, she heads out on her own. She soon realizes she’ll never stop running until she can solve the mystery behind the wrong number. Unable to trust anyone but herself, she’s cautious about accepting the help of a Park Ranger named Wyatt Erickson. As she struggles to keep herself hidden from the enemy, she finds it harder to protect her heart.
Teeming with government plots, a dash of romance, and plenty of intrigue, Rachelle J. Christensen’s Wrong Number will have your heart pounding the next time the phone rings!

I had the unique opportunity of working closely with this emerging author and reviewing her manuscripts and proofreading and other editing help as requested. It was a lot of fun to read a story and be able to work with the author as she shaped the story and brought it to life. It is a great read and will keep you turning pages all the way to the end.

Some of you may have stirring recollections of a similar story. Indeed, I too think that this story plays along a similar plot line found in an old radio show that was later expanded to film in 1948. I also saw a college theater performance a few years ago that was grand. 


What is your editing/authoring story?
Have you received any funny or scary 'wrong number' phone calls?
If you have read the book - let us know in the comments!

Options Symbology Changes Ahead

For the Options investors out there -
You may have heard already, or you may have noticed that your broker has implemented some new changes on their website recently. If you have ever trade options before you will know that finding and remembering the right symbol to track can be a bit difficult. 

For stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange, stocks are limited to three letter symbols. Some companies have been around for a long time and only have one letter -T = AT&T. Some are easy to deduce. AMD = Advanced MicroDevices. The NASDAQ exchange allows up to four letters for their listings.

The corresponding options, however, have always been cryptic at best. TradeKing.com recently sent me a link to help explain the changes.

An example of the old symbology is as follows:

XYZ AB (XYZ represents the underlying security, 'A' represents the expiration date, 'B' represents the strike price)

For those of you that remember, XYZ really could have been the symbol that represented security 'A' even if security 'A' had a much different stock symbol. The option and stock symbol did not have to be a like at all. This meant that you had to be very careful when placing option orders to make sure you were buying/selling what you really wanted.

The new identification of an option security will be based on 4 main components including: the underlying symbol, expiration date, strike price and option type (call or put). In most cases, the following option format will be used:

XYZ Apr 17 2010 35.50 Call

Now, with the proposed changes, the XYZ option symbol will really represent the stock symbol.

For more information on this topic -
Visit 888options.com page on The Options Symbology Initiative.

Have you trade options before? Are you looking forward to the new changes? Let us know in the comments.

Full Disclosure - At the time of this publication, the author did not have any positions in the stocks mentioned above. Yes, I do own a copy of TradeKing's The Options Playbook. I think it is a wonderful guide to explaining all the different types of options trades.

Craigslist Scams and Spam

Wow. I finally created an account on Craigslist.com last week so that I could sell some more stuff. You might think I am a little late to the online classifieds game - but I am not. In fact, before we moved, I used a free classifieds system from the state's largest news station. They had a slick online interface that, in my opinion, was much easier and nicer to work with than the Craigslist option.

I am big proponent of getting rid of Stuff you do not need. I have used local FreeCycle  groups and the classifieds to get rid of lots of stuff and help pay down student loans and other debts. It has been great. 

I was quite displeased when I opened up my inbox this morning and found three spam messages from my one ad that I placed on Craigslist last week. Ugh! Who wants to look at more spam and phishing emails?

How can you reduce your exposure to the unwanted stuff that ends up in your inbox?  One approach that I have always found useful, yet others seem to think is complicated and unnecessary, is to use multiple email accounts.

I have simply taken the principle of not putting all your eggs in one basket to my email. I reserve one account for family and friends, one for business or where I receive electronic statements, and another that I use for dealing with strangers via online selling, or random other sign up and registrations online.

"But then you have to sign into three different accounts!"
  Well, not exactly. See, sometimes I only have a limited time to check my email and I would rather not wade through the numerous offers for Canadian pharmacy meds, the weekly office store ads, random large sums of money waiting for me in Nigeria, and so on just to see what how my family and friends are doing. It makes it simple. Because I have not used the email address to sign up for anything my chances of spam are a lot smaller because no one has sold my address or shared it with third party merchants. This makes for a family and friends account that is fairly clean because the standard filters can screen most of the automated stuff that everybody seems to get anyways.

The next time you are trying to simplify your life - take a radical approach and go for the complicated approach.

Do you have any life hacks, or things that you do to simplify your life that may be counter-intuitive at first glance?  If so, Please share in the comments.

B1G1 Free Dozen Eggs

I just received this promotion in my email. America's Egg Farmers are giving out coupons for B1G1 free dozen eggs via their facebook page on February 5th. I signed up with their site a few months ago and have already redeemed one of their coupons. But hey, we love eggs at our house.

Friday (2/5), we’re offering fans of the Incredible Edible Egg Facebook page a buy-one get-one free coupon for a dozen eggs. Get cracking and become a fan today to lock in your chance for free eggs. This exclusive Facebook fan offer will only be available to the first 30,000 egg lovers who visit our page on Friday and click on the “Free Eggs” tab to download their coupon.

What is your favorite meal with eggs?

Me? Oh, I like eggs and toast, eggs with pancakes, french toast, Monte Cristo sandwiches, quiche, etc. And I like my eggs scrambled and over easy both equally well.

$100 Referral Bonus at TradeKing

$100 Sign Up Referral Bonus at TradeKing
Free money! It is something that we all love. Just stop and think about how many times you have done something or tried something new just for the money. Not a lot?  Well, okay, maybe it is just me, but when someone tosses down a free $100 cash just for signing up - I tend to look twice.

And this offer did make me look twice. It is more geared towards the existing customers taking the initiative in bringing in new friends to TradeKing.com as it does not also award the new customer with $100 as well. They do offer the new customer a $150 refund of transfer fees, but I thought that was standard practice - it may have changed though? I thought this was a bit strange. Usually offers like this award both the new and old customer alike.

Here is the sample email that will be sent to you if decide to send it out to your friends

Hi -
 
I'd love for you to check out my online broker, TradeKing.com. They're growing like gangbusters thanks to word-of-mouth referrals. So to show their gratitude, they're now offering us both a great deal with their “Refer a Friend” program.

Whenever someone I refer funds a new account with $1,000 or more and makes their first trade, TradeKing will automatically deposit a Benjamin - 100 bucks! - into my account. Plus they’ll reimburse up to $150 in account transfer fees for you.

I'm not just in it for the $100. TradeKing has been consistently recognized as one of the best online brokers in the business* and gives you a lot of bang for your buck-just $4.95 per trade. And I'm not the only one who thinks so:

SmartMoney gave TradeKing the maximum 5-star rating for customer service and trading tools in 2008 and 2009

Barron's awarded TradeKing 4 out of 5 stars and singled them out in both the "Best for Option Traders" and "Best for Long-Term Investing" categories

Kiplinger's says "TradeKing reigns" in customer service, awarding them their highest rating of five stars

I'm sure you'll love TradeKing as much as I do. Once you've opened an account, you can earn money for every friend you refer, too. Just make sure you click the link below when you sign up, so they'll know I sent you.

Do not get me wrong. I love TradeKing, but I was hoping the deal would be a bit sweeter of for the new customers as well. If you are still interested in becoming a new investor at TradeKing - I would be more than happy to send you a referral link.

What free money deals in the past have made you sign up or join a new service? Let us know in the comments.

FrankenTech

Success! Finally!
As I sit here writing this I am finally experiencing the relief and joy that only comes as you patiently watch as Ubuntu installs on your newly assembled system.

I have come a long way in building computers and playing around with them. This recent construction project was a ground up approach. I bought the pieces all separately and began assembling them inside a old case that I owned, an eMachines computer that followed the rest to a sudden and unexpected death. Unexpected until I read story after story of the poor quality power supplies, Bestec, that failed and consequently fried your motherboard one day.

I took my time and downloaded the manual for this board as it was slightly used and verified and checked myself at every step. I was being a bit more meticulous than I usually am when tinkering around with my old PII's or PIII's I have cluttering up my basement much to the ire of my wife.

This build was slow and methodical and I was like a kid waiting for Christmas when I pushed the power button for the first time only to have my hopes dashed as nothing appeared on the monitor. The fans were running but nothing was happening.

A note that I think should be made about using a motherboard from someone else - it might be a good idea to clear the CMOS settings back to factory default to prevent the system from running as it shouldn't - overclocked when you weren't expecting it. If you knew how it was ran before and under what setup - then this might not apply.

My system will not boot!
Two possible choices - software failure or hardware failure.
Since I wasn't even making it to POST, power on self test, or even the memory count, I couldn't even enter the BIOS. Software was definitely not my problem.
I actually found this website to be the most helpful in uncovering the root of my problem.
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread27079.html#

As you guessed, I had built the system and wanted it to just run perfectly the first time it powered up. It was not to be. So following the general advice of a trouble shooter I eliminated possibilites and started with a barebones system.
Still, with only the motherboard, one good stick of RAM, and the CPU with heatsink - -nothing was happening. Edit - I was seeing the motherboard graphic appear on the monitor about half of the time.
Since the system was not even entering the BIOS portion of the boot sequence I knew there was a problem with my barebones system. Had I received a bad board?

I tried the advice listed in the website above and swapped out the CMOS battery.
Voila! The motherboard graphic on screen gave way to a RAM count and a system halt on the error of no floppy drive connected. I was in!
This is where I made my next mistake. Thinking I had solved all of my problems I promptly reconnected everything again and triumphantly pressed the power button only to see the motherboard graphic stare me in the face and refuse to proceed on to the normal boot sequence.

Now what? Back to the basics. Try it, yes it works. Okay, back to trouble shooting mode.
One by one I reconnected the floppy, test, the optical drive, test, and the hard drive, test. And I failed.
Now what? Was it the IDE channel, the cable, the drive, or a jumper setting? First, I swapped cables. Test - failed. Cable is not the problem.

Secondly, I swapped drives because I could see the jumper setting and had verified it was set to master. Test - failed. Drive was not the problem.
Finally, I tried a third hard drive that was actually working and not supposed to be an empty drive. Test - successful.

Then I connected my first attempted HDD as the slave. Test - failed.
Why? Oh, yeah, switch the jumper on my drive to slave if I am going to have two hooked up. Test - Successful.
Then I realized that this supposedly empty drive must not have been empty and may have been used previously as a slave and did not like being hooked up as a master.
Next I rechecked that jumper. I switched it to cable select instead of master. Test - successful

I reset up the original configuration, including resetting the jumper pin on the hard drive this time to cable select, knowing the drive worked and popped in my install cd and let the installer tell the drive how to behave.
The result - just as I finished writing this, my installation of Ubuntu is complete and I am smiling once again!

Lessons learned -
That CMOS battery is actually important.
Don't disregard the rules of trouble shooting. Eliminate possibilities and work slowly not skipping ahead cause your excited.
Provide a flow diagram that visually shows the steps and the tests and their outcomes.

Here is something else that might help. What are those POST codes?
http://www.postcodemaster.com/

I am reinstalling windows on an upgraded machine and now my recovery discs don't work!
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-252418.html
-Yes, call Microsoft to get an activation code and download an iso, also slipstream in sata driver support.
Or use a Dell recovery cd with your own coa, certificate of authenticity.