Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Singing Her Praises

OK, so I haven't been able to find many negative experiences to put on My List lately (believe me, I have tried!). So I have to put another GREAT product up here! It is Leslie Sansone's Walk Away the Pounds walking programs. Buffalo Wings (aka Super Mario) was in the market for some workout vidoes around Christmastime. He went to Best Buy and picked up a Leslie Sansone DVD with a one-mile and a two-mile walk on it. We'd never heard of her, but he said that the DVD caught his eye and that it looked easy. He started using it right away and told me that it was easy and really good. He worked his way up to the two-mile portion of the DVD pretty quickly. It took me awhile to warm up to wanting to use the DVD, but after spring break I gave it a try, and absolutely enjoyed doing the program. It is easy, low impact, no difficult moves, something that I think everyone can do, and truly a great calorie burn. I'm watching the pounds drop as I've been using the DVD consistently. I've put a bunch of Leslie Sansone DVDs on Netflix and am awaiting for the first one to arrive.
So, in my opinion, Leslie Sansone is one to put on your good list!!!!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Yummy Stuff

Scott and I have discovered many yummy, lo-cal treats lately. A couple of my favorites are:

The 100 Calorie Packs. Specifically, the Hershey's, Chips Ahoy, and Oreo Cookie bar ones.

Life Chocolate Oat Crunch cereal.

Special K Red Berries.

Fat free, sugar free chocolate pudding with fat free, sugar free Cool Whip.

Dark chocolate M-n-M's - not specifically lo-cal, but healthier for you than milk chocolate
M-n-M's.

Quaker rice cakes - caramel and chocolate peanut butter flavors. Scott likes the apple cinnamon flavor.

Kashi bars - the GoLean Crunch bars to be exact. The chocolate peanut crunch and the caramel ones are my favorites. YUM YUM YUM!!!!!!!!!!!!

All of the above treats are worth a gander.

Got any suggestions for this consumer?

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Taxes again

As a follow up to my rant in Feb about taxes, I just wanted to point out that you can use online tax preparation software for free at irs.gov. Most of them make you pay to file your state return, so the state price is a factor to consider when choosing a vendor. Many states have their own online return system, which just means that you can do both federal and state for free if you don't mind entering in all the data twice. Could be worth it, depending on how complicated your info is.

Microsoft: hate hate hate

There are plenty of ways to disparage Microsoft. The most recent things they've done to annoy me include such things as paying corporations to force their employees to use Windows Live Search rather than their personal preference, bribing influential bloggers with free laptops, and most egregiously: wasting a generous amount of my time.

This latter offence was in the form of xbox 360 support. When our xbox broke and we sent it in to be repaired, we weren't in any frantic need of getting it back immediately. Microsoft thought that it would be better to send us a replacement machine than to make us wait for them to fix ours. Nice thought, but completely ridiculous in execution. Their security for online accounts restricts the games you play to the xbox you initially downloaded them to, which means none of the games worked on the new machine--the games we had paid cold hard cash for. What's worse, they knew all about this issue but waited for me to figure it out on my own and make a phone call to technical support, wait through the cheery automated menu diabolically hellbent on obstructing my access to anyone who could help me, speak to a tech who took all my details through an extended and painfully slow interview, and be escalated to the highest ranking technician available only to find that the billing people (the only ones who can help) are at a different calling center, use a different customer support database, and are completely inaccessible to me, the customer. All I could do is wait for these mysterious higher support beings to get around to reviewing my case. When I called back, I got to wait, wait, and wait again talking respectively to the machine, the tech, and the escalation tech only to be told the people who can really accomplish what I needed are inaccessible even to them... perhaps magically in Oz. The icing on the cake was when I had to fax them my packing slip to prove that THEY had shipped this xbox back to me and that the previous week's service issue had even happened. This company designs the world's databases? We are in serious trouble, folks.

Okay, the real reason for this anti-Microsoft rant is "automatic updates". I didn't hesitate to enable my Windows computers to go ahead and download critical updates and install them automatically. Unfortunately, the people who designed this system are seriously lacking in common sense. Recently my computer interrupted me repeatedly with an urgent message that my computer had to be immediately restarted so that a CRITICAL update could be installed. My work--my reason for a having a computer--is so completely inconsequential to my operating system. It doesn't care, apparently, whether restarting automatically in my absence will lose my saved work. It doesn't care, apparently, whether I'm actively working on my computer--it needs to save me from myself by pestering me with nagging messages that come up every 5 minutes and can't be dismissed indefinitely. You must restart NOW NOW NOW--it's for your own good!!!

When I finally opened the dialog to see what was being installed so urgently, it was none other than the Microsoft authentication tool--one designed to verify that my copy of Windows is legitimate and not ripped off.

WHAT?

They have repeatedly interrupted me, rebooted me, pestered me so that THEY can know that I'm not ripping off their product? ...Their product that I have legitimately and legally acquired? And that I have been forced to prove is authentic on multiple prior occasions?

It's just too much. I'm buying an Apple next, even if it costs twice as much. End of story.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Taxes

We didn't file our taxes in 2005 because we didn't make any money... or so we thought. I was a student and we were living off loans, so we thought we'd save ourselves the trouble. Well, after filing for 2006 taxes and getting a hefty refund thanks to the earned income credit, I wondered if we might have qualified for a refund for 2005 without realizing it. We headed over to H&R Block to figure it out.

The final numbers for 2005 are not in yet, but it turns out that we did have a tax liability for that year thanks to... free stuff. That's right. I got a couple thousand dollars worth of free stuff out of my Internet offer searching and it is taxable income. But it's not your garden variety of income, the kind that would easily be wiped out by a standard deduction for a three person family. No, it's taxed specially and separately and no deduction applies (according the HR Block dude).

So, all that fun free stuff is going to cost me after all. What a rip off!