Either an eBay scammer or an idiot.

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 082007
 

I was selling a Maxtor 500gb External on eBay and the winning bid was from a person with the buyer ID: sduhaneyjm

When I tried to invoice the guy, I realized the person lived in Jamaica. Here lies the rub, I don’t ship to Jamaica. I listed shipping prices for the United States and this guy therefore is an idiot or a scammer.

Here’s the e-mail he sent me asking for my address so he can send me a money order.

“Hello,

I would like for you to find out from the post office USPS what the regular (Air Mail) or EMS shipping charge will be to send this to me here in JAMAICA. My exact address is below. As soon as you get back to me I can arrange payment. I will also need your name, address and tel# so that I can get a money order from my bank for you.

Thanks in advance,

Name: Simon Duhaney
Address Line 1: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (censored)
Address Line 2: Chancery Hall
City: Kingston
Postal Code: KGN19
Country: Jamaica
Country Code: JM”

Anyone wanna bet the payment will be more than what I ask for and he’ll ask that I wire him the rest back? A simple search on Google shows this guy has been buying on Ebay.ca too. Looks like he’s going for the whole deal with a Sony VAIO micro laptop and a Nintendo Wii. Sigh, I replied with an e-mail stating I don’t accept checks/money orders nor do I ship international for this item.

 Posted by dan at 11:00 am

25,000 or 15,000 miles for Citi AAdvantage Card

 Million Miles Quest  No Responses »
Oct 082007
 

Earn 25,000 miles after $750 in purchases here. You have 4 months to charge $750 which is pretty attainable for most people with no change in regular spending.

Earn 15,000 miles after your first purchase here. Good for people that don’t want to bother with charging $750.

 Posted by dan at 8:00 am

October 5th Friday Unwind

 Friday Unwind  No Responses »
Oct 052007
 

Here’s the October 5th edition of the Friday Unwind. Relax and enjoy the weekend. It’s great to be alive.

Whoever the people are in charge of marketing over at Mars Inc. for m&ms are pure genius. Their commercials generally make me happy. Here’s a bunch of commercials I feel like sharing for the friday unwind.

The Rise of Dark M&Ms

You can see the evolution over time from the “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” ad campaign and into a more “always fun” theme.

This is a classic commercial from the 80s.

From the 70s…

From the 60s.

“for swingers everwhere….”

 Posted by dan at 3:00 pm

Having free trades got me into the habit of trading.

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 042007
 

When I was with Sogoinvest, which charged $3 a trade, I never traded my investments as much as I do now at Zecco. Generally I consider myself a buy and hold kind of person and most of my investments generally are. However, I did a whopping 30 trades for September. Penson (Zecco’s clearing firm) also sent me a confirmation for each trade too so I have a little stack of them too.

On the side note, my portfolio at Zecco started with $6,300 and has grown $1,845 since July 25th. That’s 29%! Yeah, I know I’ll owe short term capital gains tax but since I’m in the lower brackets, however I’ll most likely owe only 10% or 15% (most likely 15% since I’m going to pass the $7,550 bracket this year).

Buy Stocks Online for $0. Trade stocks for free on Zecco.com. The Free Trading Community. www.zecco.com

 Posted by dan at 7:41 am

Uploaded letter of Gap apologizing for losing my name and social security.

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Oct 022007
 

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about Gap Inc. losing my information along with about 800,000 other people.

I don’t have a scanner so I snapped a picture of the letter. Click for the full size image.

Gap Inc. apologizing for losing name and social security information.

 Posted by dan at 10:19 pm

Gap Inc. loses my name and social security number.

 Uncategorized  4 Responses »
Oct 022007
 

Years ago during high school I applied for a job at Old Navy (which is owned by Gap). On the application I supplied various personal information including my name, address, social security number, etc. I received a letter earlier today informing my they lost a couple laptops with that information on it. I now get a measly 12 months of credit monitoring as compensation. I think I should get a couple years worth considering they lost about 800,000 applications… it might take them awhile to get through the list (and figure out who they want to identity theft).

Oh and by the way, I didn’t get hired for whatever reason.

This story has already hit various news publications – PC World, Consumer Affairs, Techspot, etc.

Gap blames this on a “third party vendor”… which begs the question, why was sensitive information being handled by someone else if they couldn’t guarantee the security of the data? Neither Gap nor Taleo (who runs the job site) will name the “third party”. They also found out about this incident September 19th, waited 10 days to announce it, and on a Friday too.

 Posted by dan at 7:55 pm

Zecco changes free trade offer.

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 012007
 

I guess the 40 free trades a month was a little too much. Zecco tweaked their policy a little bit. Use tobe 40 free trades a month/up to 10 per day with no minimum balance required to be eligible.

The new terms are $2500 minimum in net equity balance to get 10 free trades per month. $4.50 each trade thereafter. However, if you opened your account before October 1st (today), this doesn’t go into effect until December 31st 2007.

Link to Zecco notification on changes.

The 10 free trades a month still works for me since I generally don’t trade that much. The $2,500 isn’t a problem either. I guess a lot of people had a couple hundred dollars in there and were trading 1-2 shares at a time costing Zecco a lot of money.

$4.50 per trade is more expensive than Sogoinvest but still cheaper than most other brokerages. So my decision is that I’ll stick with Zecco as 10 free trades a month works out fine for me.

 Posted by dan at 3:54 pm
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