by Mike B. on January 31, 2009
In my personal portfolio post I spoke briefly about the projects that I was currently working on. Towards the end I mentioned some web development projects that I have but had not left the planning stages. Well today they did! I finally began early design of the site per the owners’ request. He really is giving me a lot of freedom in what I do with it which helps a lot.
Wordpress
But what I have also stumbled upon with this project is a little blogging service called Wordpress. Now yes all of you must be saying, “How could he just find out about Wordpress? Have you been living under a rock? ”. Well to straighten things out, I have always KNOWN about Wordpress. I emphasize KNOWN because that’s about as far as it went. I understood from research that it is one of if not the BEST blogging service available. Yet, as a new blogger I decided to start out on the BLOGGER platform until I gained a good grasp of the concepts.
Wordpress is SIMPLY Bliss
Well today I felt I it was time to check out Wordpress and use it for my clients site. All I have to say is WOW! Things are SOOOO much easier in Wordpress than they are with Blogger. Things that require lines and lines of code in Blogger have been simplified down to simple widgets and plugins in Wordpress. I accomplished so much more today with Wordpress than I would have with Blogger.
Needless to say, but I am in LOVE with Wordpress at the moment. My (personal) project will be to begin the process of porting my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and checking out this “Thesis” theme that I have been hearing so much about. If any of you have any tips for somebody new to the Wordpress platform please leave them in the comments. I also would like to hear of your blog porting experience (if you have one) as well as any other helpful “Thesis/Wordpress” information.
Picture Courtesy: http://dreamweaver7.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/halo_wordpress.jpg
by Mike B. on January 29, 2009
Since I was able to remove the HOLD on my funds that Paypal had placed, I was now able to buy my Touch Pro. The phone came yesterday and I have been playing with it ever since. Now the term “iPhone Killer” gets thrown around so loosely nowadays I will refrain from using it. But this phone in my opinion may actually be better if not the same. It does everything you could possibly want and… wait…before this turns into a Touch Pro vs. iPhone debate I will stop.
I will let you know though that if you have Sprint and have a Mogul then you may have a good chance at getting a Touch Pro for $50. Apparently Sprint has run out of replacement Moguls for their insurance claims. So as a replacement they have been giving out Touch Pro’s in their place. This actually does work (but I am not sure for how much longer) and I have a few friends that have done it themselves.
There is a link you can follow to place your order at and I guess if somebody needs it I could give it to them. Just leave your name and address where you want the link sent to in my COMMENTS if you are interested. Like I said above though, there is no idea how much longer this will work because tricks like this only have a small window of opportunity kind of like their SERO trick which I also took advantage of.
I will leave you with a couple of pictures of my Touch Pro. Enjoy and if you want the link, just drop a message and I can walk you through the process. Follow me on twitter @bookerx3.
by Mike B. on January 27, 2009
For all of you that deal with PayPal, more specifically PayPal and eBay then this will be some helpful information. For those not familiar, eBay and PayPal have formed a small partnership to help protect they users (both buyers and sellers). What they do is place a HOLD on all funds received on eBay until: they confirm the item has been delivered, the buyer leaves positive feedback, or 21 days passes without a dispute. To be honest I am not even sure if they place a HOLD on all funds received just the larger transactions (about $50 and up is what I have had trouble with).
Well this seems like a great idea on paper but in practice it can be quite annoying. For the problem I ran into was after I would have the item shipped and confirmed the delivery with UPS, but my funds would still be unavailable. So I thought if I waited a couple days the HOLD would be released and everything would be fine. But apparently I was asking for too much with that thought.
Past Issues
Now this has happened about three separate times for me with different items and the last time is when I got fed up! I had been tracking an item I has shipped and it said it was delivered on last Friday. So after reading the Guidelines within PayPal, I expected to have the HOLD on my funds released on Friday. Of course that does not happen so I wait…and wait… and WAIT!!!
Screw it, Monday hits and I am pissed! I check one more time to see if my money is there (and you know it was not) so I took the initiative and called PayPal directly. After navigating through the automated answering system I finally reached a customer service rep to talk to. My experience with these people show to really get what you want you either need to be extremely pissed or extremely tolerant while talking to them. If extremely pissed they tend to break their back to serve you because all it takes is one bad call and people have been known to lose their jobs. If extremely tolerant they seem to work more with you but it may take a while to listen to all of their pre-written company banter they are required to say. But I digress; I took the tolerant way and went ahead with the call.
The Call
I told her what my situation was and she put me on hold to look over my account. As I sat and waited I wondered would I actually get this resolved on the first try or would this be one of the infamous PayPal cases I heard so much about. Well low behold, as soon as the rep took me off hold she informed me that the HOLD on my funds had been released (THANK THE MATRIX)! I thanked the woman and fittingly hung up the phone.
So now we know that all it takes is a simple phone call to get funds released. Well in the situation all it takes is a phone call. I was not trying to scam her I just wanted what was rightfully mine. So if any of you that read this have this issue or know somebody that does, pass this little tid bit of information on to them so they can to get their money.
Picture Courtesy: http://www.specialtytoolsusa.com/content/images/paypal_verified.jpg
