Using a 0% Balance Transfer to fund a CD

 Wednesday August 27, 2008
 
One of my favorite blogs frequently brings up the topic of using 0% Balance Transfers from credit cards to fund other low risk investments. Jonathon, the author of My Money Blog, has written up an entire series of posts on the topic and backs his methods by having borrowed an impressive $30,000 to put to work. He earns $1000+ dollars a year on this investment approach, but also realizes that in doing so his FICO score takes a hit since it lowers his Cash flow to Debt ratio.

Although I mostly likely would never follow this investment approach, I thought it would be fun to crunch the numbers and see what you would end up with if actually took the leap and borrowed against your credit card to stick in a low risk investment, like this 5% 12-Month CD offering by Washington Mutual (WaMu). read more... 
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Google Protocol Buffers

 Monday August 25, 2008
 
Just doing some Sunday reading (yesterday) and I ran across this youTube video of an interview with one of the developers of a recently open sourced project called Protocol Buffers. The project was released by Google sometime back in June and is something that is used in nearly all of their large systems including Map Reduce and Big Table.

Protocol Buffers is a serialization utility, much like AMF and XML are. All have their own transport format (binary in the case of PB) and handle the encoding, decoding, serialization and parsing of that format so it can be used natively by other programming languages (this is where XML differs in that it's not a packaged utility). The concept isn't something new, but in typical Google fashion, it seems to be simple and is purported as being fast and efficient. read more... 
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Various enhancements to jalpino.com

 Friday August 22, 2008
 
Just wanted to list out some recent enhancements that I've made to the site.

Photo Gallery
The most notable enhancement I made to this area was including a dynamic watermark to the images that I pull back from Flickr. I didn't do this for the copyright aspect of my photos (although its an added bonus read more... 
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Hardwood Flooring Cost Estimator

 Sunday August 17, 2008
 
A while back, prior to installing my hardwood floors I created a small simplistic Excel spreadsheet for my cell phone to help crunch estimated cost when I was out looking at samples in the store.

You will need to know the approximate square footage of flooring, and linear footage of any step treads or transition pieces you will need.

You download the spreadsheet by clicking on the Save as Excel link on the top of the document. If your phone supports it you can transfer it onto there like I did.Enjoy.

 
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Google Adsense RollerCoaster

 Saturday August 16, 2008
 
The High
A few weeks back I decided to bite the bullet and throw more advertising onto mp3Salad. I always enjoyed the fact that the site was mostly advertising free, it gave the site a more "open" spirit in that it wasn't just being used as a capital vehicle.   Advertising at times can totally ruin a good service, I didn't want that to happen with mp3Salad.

However, the flip side of me thought about the potential that I could be making in regards to it's popularity, at one point I was getting over 500,000 pages views a month!  I figured I would be stupid in not trying to monetize that in some way, even if it were in a small somewhat invasive way. So that's what I did, I decided to place Google ads on two more areas of the site, the homepage and beneath the search form.  Both additions blended well with the site and in no way took away from the service. This was great, and so was the increase I was seeing in my Adsense account.

I wasn't making enough to quit my day job, but it was providing enough of a passive income to prepay my hosting for several months and cover my domain registration costs. This was working out great, Google had sent me a few checks, I was happy. However as quick as it started, it almost ended.

read more... 
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