Peter's Useful Crap

Brita got into trouble for a TV ad that claimed (correctly) that toilet water and tap water come from the same source. Of course, the incorrect association is that what comes out of your butt somehow affects what comes out of the tap (and toilet).

At any rate, the point is, I had a great deal of trouble locating the commercial on the Internet so now that I finally have it, it’s sharing time:

Download / view the Brita “toilet” commercial in Quicktime format

Local number portability / wireless portability / porting — whatever it’s called — it’s coming to Canada. Soon you’ll be able to switch from crummy provider to crummy provider without having to get a new cell phone number! Be truly mobile (or something)!

The USA has already had this for a while. Originally we were slated to have it on September 12th, 2007, but the major carriers are now “allowing” it starting from March 14th, 2007.

print "

“;
$days_until=ceil((mktime(0,0,0,3,14,2007) – (time() – 3 * 3600)) / 86400);
switch ($days_until) {
case $days_until > 1: print “$days_until days until number portability!”; break;
case $days_until > 0: print “$days_until day until number portability!”; break;
default: print “Number portability has arrived!”; break;
}
print “

\n”;
?>

I’m out of luck — I have a pager, not a cell phone. Pagers aren’t included under this decision. Why not!?!?!?!

Derek was surprised to hear that there are no-fee credit cards that give you points / rewards. He thought that the greatest reward you could get when using a credit card was to have servers say “hey, nice Canucks card!” Unfortunately, sports-themed credit cards usually don’t give you anything aside from the odd free gift upon sign-up.

Here are a few no-fee, reward credit cards (note: these are all for Canadians):

President’s Choice Financial MasterCard: Earn the equivalent of 1% of all purchases made with this credit card to spend at Superstore. I figure, you’re going to have to spend money on groceries, so this is better than getting points towards things you don’t actually need.

RBC Starbucks Duetto Visa: If you’re a coffee drinker, this might be the card for you. Earn the equivalent of 1% of all purchases made with this credit card to spend at Starbucks. If you set up auto-reload on this card, earn a bonus 3% of the reload amount for use at Starbucks. Every once in a while I also get a coupon for a free Starbucks drink or food item (and I rarely use this card!). There are sign-up promotions sometimes as well — at the time of this posting, they’re giving out a $10 Starbucks bonus.

Cash rebate credit cards: I had an eBay credit card that got discontinued, but they automatically switched it to a 1% MBNA cash-back card (no fees either). However, when I look for this cash-back card online, it says there’s an annual fee of $29, so it looks like I lucked out. Not to worry — there’s a Capital One No Hassle Rewards Cash Back Platinum Mastercard (what a mouthful) that offers pretty much the same thing: 1% of all your purchases back to you in cash.

I don’t know what’s going on with copyright issues and such, but with sites such as Youtube, Daily Motion, and Ouou streaming out video after video, it was only a matter of time before all of your favourite TV shows ended up available online.

Someone decided to make a directory of what’s available.

Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, Seinfeld, South Park, Prison Break, Lost, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air… they’ve got it all.

Links to TV shows on video sites

I’d say who sent this link to me, but I’m under a gag order to not discuss it…

October 26th, 2006: the old site (http://tvlinks.50webs.com/index.html) got taken down! But they’re back at a new address.

November 29th, 2006: they keep getting bounced around, and http://tvlinks.voodeedoo.org seems to be dead. Are they back… here?

October 21st, 2007 update: The TV links site has been shut down.

Looking for other similar sites? Check out ovguide.com and www3.alluc.org/alluc/.

Simran, whose blog has introduced me to some cool scripts (such as Gallery and Nice titles), has devised a really handy Excel Flashcard Quizzer. All you need to do is fill in the word and definition columns on any subject, and poof, it’ll generate on-screen flash cards that you can navigate through.

He touts this as being useful when learning any language… really though, it could be useful when learning anything that has definitions (well, anything that you might have made flash cards for).

Update: I’ve also been sent a link to another free flash card program: http://www.add-ins.com/flash-card-assistant.htm