PayPal And Credit Cards: They’re Lying To Us

I’m generally a big fan of PayPal, but I don’t like being lied to: PayPal advertises that you can pay with a credit card using PayPal. I swear you used to be able to do exactly that, but you can’t any more: you only get the option to pay with a credit card if your PayPal balance is zero dollars. If you get a PayPal invoice from someone for $100, and you have $20 in your PayPal account, you can’t use your credit card to pay the $100…you can only use it to pay $80, and the remaining $20 comes from your PayPal balance. This is doubly irritating when you try to not pay via your PayPal account, and instead just pay with your credit card – if you’re using a credit card that’s attached to your PayPal account, PayPal won’t let you use that card, it forces you to sign into your account and pay it that way. Frustrating!

I Bought Into a Myth about Car Idling


[image found on Carbon Offset Solutions]

Don’t ask me where I heard this, but for my entire life I believed that starting a car used up the same amount of fuel as an idling car used in five minutes. So for as long as I’ve been driving (which is inching up on two decades now), I thought the “smart” thing was to leave the car idling for a few minutes rather than turning it off. Turns out I was completely and totally wrong according to this article. Idling for 10 seconds uses the same amount of fuel as starting a car in the first place. Idling a car for 10 minutes can use as much fuel as it takes to travel 5 miles. And even on the coldest days, idling your car for 30 seconds is all you need before driving away – the car will warm up faster on the move rather than idling (though the article says not to accelerate hard or drive at high speeds for the first 3-5 miles…which isn’t exactly practical advice in all situations).

I’m generally one of those types of people that thinks he’s right most of the time, but I try to keep myself open to correction and further learning…and I’ve just been schooled on the issue of idling.

Doesn’t Anyone Care About Video Quality?

I was watching a few videos on MSN Video, and it seems that Gillette Venus (women’s razor) was the only sponsor – they played the same ad every three videos of so. Beyond the obvious bad targeting of showing me a woman’s razor, and the redundancy of the same video over and over (which tends to breed brand dislike in my opinion), I was shocked at how completely crappy the video looked. Flash isn’t a great medium for high-quality video (though the new h.264 codec in Flash 9 rocks!) but this video reached new lows in terms of quality. Check out this screen shot (saved as a PNG file, so the poor quality is from the video):

If you were an advertising executive working for Gillette, how would you feel about your product being portrayed in such a low-quality manner? The video was truly atrocious in quality. Perhaps MSN Video has some ridiculous limits on the bit rates of submitted advertising videos, but if I were working for Gillette I’d say “This is the video quality we want, if you want our advertising dollars, you’ll run this.”

Direct Linking to Images Blocked

I’ve noticed that a number of people, pretty much on a weekly basis, are deciding to link directly to images on this blog rather than copying the image to their own server. I’ve watched it happen for quite some time, but after seeing a few spam blogs do it, I decided it was worth putting a stop to: so, from now on, if you want to use an image on this site, please copy it to your own server or blog. Thanks!

If Modern Business Designed a Stop Sign

That video pretty much speaks for itself – it’s amazing how so many businesses can screw up something so simple. I see it day after day with technology products. I might not like Apple on a dozen different levels, but I respect their singular vision for trying to get things right.

Dell’s Premium Panel Guarantee

I was browsing through Dell’s monitors, checking out what their latest 24″ displays had to offer (I was curious if they had SDHC support; their tech specs don’t actually mention that point – irritating!) and I happened to notice something that made me chuckle:

So why would I find that amusing? Because it took me 12 monitors to get three flawless 24″ monitors, and if Dell had this policy in place last year I would have had much less stress. Good to see Dell improving their system, albeit fairly late in the game. One of my 24″ Dell monitors has a nasty flickering problem that comes and goes, and I was very wary of returning it and getting sent a replacement that has a dead/stuck pixel – I wonder if Dell honours this policy on older Ultrasharp monitors that are still under warranty? I guess I’ll find out soon enough…

Making a USB Flash Drive Boot Disk Under Windows Vista

I’m fighting with a trashed install of Windows Vista on a laptop and it’s a complete nightmare – one of the things I needed to do on the road to getting it working again was to update the BIOS. Since Windows Vista wasn’t booting, however, I was left with a quandry: how do I update the BIOS? Booting from a floppy disk to update the BIOS was a common thing a few years ago, but I haven’t done it that way in a long time. I found the solution in this forum thread: the only thing different that I had to do was right-click on the “RunThis” file and run it as an administrator. It worked great, and I’ve now updated the BIOS. Now if I could just get the Vista repair function to run (it keeps locking up – and I’ve used the Dell hardware testing software to confirm that the laptop has no defective parts).

Japan Day 2008: Day 10

Our tenth day in Japan has us leaving Hiroshima behind, along with Honshu (the main island of Japan), and travelling by plane to the island of Okinawa. We didn’t do much our first day in Okinawa, and were disappointed with how windy and cool it was – we were hoping for warmer weather! The photo gallery is now live.