TradeKing has a $100 bonus where you fund the account with $1000 and make 1 trade within 30 days they will credit you a $100 bonus. Trades are $4.95 each.

Go to www.tradeking.com/Vertster/ and you should see on the page “Get $100…” and “Code: ACCESS 100″. Some people have reported seeing a $50 bonus but used a different browser and then saw the $100 bonus.

I’m starting to get addicted to eBay selling, yesterday I listed five items for sale. I plan to list 2 or 3 more later in the week. I also got the 2 free after rebate items from amazon.com which I’ll eventually fleabay also. Amazon.com rebates are starting to move in the direction of Staples Easy Rebates where you don’t need mail anything in at all… sweet.

Right now my main focus is building up feedback on ebay. I’ve got 36 positives, 100% feedback so far. If you’re curious to what I’m listing, check here. I’m trying to make a slight profit, or break even at worse. Breaking even isn’t too bad, I’ll still be getting the free miles from using my Chase United Mileage Card.

I got 3 checks in the mail from chase. They were checks with bonuses to try out their various services.

• $20 if I try out their credit protector program. Not a free trial, but I get a full refund if I cancel within 30 days.
• Two $15 checks for if I try out their fraud monitor program. Free 30 day trial and then $8.99 afterwards. I got 2 of them because I have 2 Chase cards. I’ll cancel after 30 days too on these.

If you get checks like these in the mail I suggest you take advantage of them. It’s win-win situation even if you forget to cancel after 30 days because you get say $15 for trying it out and the first month’s fee is $8.99.

Besides the permalink changes which I mentioned in an earlier post I’ve added some things to the blog.

First is the popularity statistic at the bottom of every post which is suppose to rank each post’s popularity. Since it’s extremely fresh, the results may be skewed for a week or so. The posts are ranked by points which they each recieve by views, comments, trackbacks, etc.

There’s also a “links” page and “contact” page. If you already know my e-mail, you can skip the contact page. It’s just there so spambots can stop harvesting my e-mail address. I’ve gotten 13,000+ spam mails in the last 30 days. Gmail catches about 85% of these.

I ran across an interesting discussion on FW about credit card issuers that cancel your bill if the amount is small because the cost to them to process the bill would be greater than collecting it so they “forgive” the amount.

Here’s a list of issuers that canceled and what amounts they canceled at:
Advanta canceled at $1.00
Capital One canceled at $0.99/$1.00
Chase canceled at $1.99
Chase Amazon canceled at $1.98
Chase Cash Rewards Plus canceled at $1.97
Chase Plat MC canceled at $1.98
Providian/Wamu canceled at $1.00
Sears MC (by Citi) canceled a $5.00 balance
USAA canceled $0.99
Wells Fargo canceled $1.99

The list above is amounts reported by users of amounts that were canceled on their statement. Note: these amounts are for your entire statement balance, not a single charge (trust me, I had to clarify this, I get a lot of dumb e-mails regularly).

I have the Chase Cash Rewards Plus Card and I haven’t used it once this period so what I did was prepay $1.97 into my eBay account for any future seller fees I might incur.

This isn’t a get rich quick scheme or a huge exploit. This is information I found useful and entertaining so I thought I’d share it. Useful how? If you have cards that you rarely use but want to keep open and they’re one of the select that cancel your bill if it’s small, you get to keep your card active at no additional cost and get a free hamburger or whatnot out of it (possible ever since credit cards penetrated the fast food industry).

Note: This is for people who have in the past have taken advantage of Blockbuster’s free trial and then have deactivated or canceled their plan. I have just tried this morning and it worked perfectly fine for me.

Step 1
Sign into your Blockbuster.com account.

Step 2
Go to http://www.blockbuster.com/signup/s/reg and you should see the offer. If the that link doesn’t work then try this link: http://www.blockbuster.com/signup/rp/regPlan.

Step 3
If you don’t see the offer then you might just be out of luck. The offer page should say something along the lines of “We’re glad you came back… here’s two weeks free trial”. IGNORE the December 2006 expiration date message if there is one. Accept T&A and proceed. You should get a confirmation page detailing your free two weeks.

Step 4
Enjoy your movies. Don’t forget to cancel your trial at the end of two weeks.

Step 5
Leave a comment on this post

I know I’m shooting myself in the foot by changing the way permalinks are structured yet again. In addition to the first permalink changes resulting from my move from blogger this has created a slew of visitors who hit 404 pages. Although I try to list the popular posts on the 404 page and have a search form to remedy this.

I promise this will be the last change to the permalink structure. I just feel that my blog is still in a relatively young stage (this blog turns 1 year old in May) and if I’m going to make those changes, I might as well do them now.

So why did I change the permalink structure?
First let me show you the differences:
Under the old permalink structure, posts would be formatted as such:
endlessgibberish.com/year/month/day/postname/

The newer permalink structure I’ve chosen is simply
endlessgibberish.com/postname/

I feel that endlessgibberish.com, although I love the domain, is relatively long. Shaving off the year, month, and day off permalinks shortens the url a bit. It’s basically a personal preference.