Links 1/20

  • Chicago Windows User Group
  • V”>Leostream P>V—This is a great physical to virtual machine tool, and the CTO is an awesome guy.
  • Mario Kart in Battlefield 2
  • Cellphone Bed—Huh?!
  • Free Parking for “Green” Vehicles—Wow, this would be awesome for Chicago.  Wonder how it’s enforced though?
  • Herbs in Eggs
  • Taco Town!
  • Biscuit Launcher
  • 85 in a Tractor
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Links 1/19

There really haven’t been many good links to post, but today there’s been a few.

 

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Guitar Hero

I know that Aaron has talked about Guitar Hero already, but I must put in my 2¢.  “It rocks.”  The game is incredibly fun.

Last night Aaron and I ran a few errands which included stopping by Crate and Barrel, and then hitting up the Best Buy.  Binford actually was the one who wanted to head up to Best Buy originally, but I had a $45 gift card I still needed to use there, so I thought it would be a good idea.  This is when Guitar Hero was purchased.  Needless to say, the rest of the evening comprised of jamming out. 

The only downside I see to it?  We don’t have two guitars right now.  Well, and there’s the fact that the controller isn’t wireless, but that’s already been solved.  I’ve been thinking about buying a child’s guitar toy and actually making my own controller, since that’s really all these are, with the potential addition of two buttons and a wammy bar.

Hmm…

Interest Rates on Purchases

Today, somehow, we got on the conversation of the BowFlex.  Don’t ask how, we somehow got to it by means of Chuck Norris.  Anyways, a guy at work here saw an infomercial one night about the new BowFlex Revolution.  Anyways, I was looking at them and noticed the “low low monthly payments”.  However, after seeing the total cost, it seemed awfully strange.

Digging a little deeper revealed that in addition to $2500, you have to spend $200 to have it shipped to you.  Ok, so total is up to $2700, but we’re only paying $37 a month.  A little math later, we get that annual payment is $444.  However, Bowflex isn’t nice enough to give it to us for no interest penalty, oh no.  Instead, they give us an awesome 12 month fixed rate promotion of 16.99%.  Such a deal.  So, the first year’s interest is $458.73.  So, by paying the minimum monthly payment, you actually don’t make back the interest.  You’re, in fact, in the hole the initial purchase plus $14.73, and you’re a year into it, and I’m sure not using the damn thing anymore.

Let’s fast forward to the end of year two.  You’ve payed BowFlex $888. So, if this was an interest free purchase, you would still owe $1812, which isn’t too bad.  But now you figure in the first years interest, which is the above $458.73, plus the second years interest (based on $2714.73 and a standard rate of 21.8%), which is $591.81.  All the sudden, you’re in the hole the initial purchase plus $162.54.  Ok, but lets say you forgot to make a payment, or didn’t pay the “low low low monthly price” one month.  That means your interest rate jumps to 25.8% (WOW!), so now you’re in the hole the initial purchase plus $271.13. 

As you can see, it just spirals out of control, since you have never actually paid back any of the interest AND take a chunk out of the principle.  With these interest rates and the required low monthly payment, you can never actually pay it off.  I guess that’s one way to make money, eh? 

Now, I’m not saying this is the company’s fault, far from it.  And yes, I know my math isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough based on the amount of interest and the monthly payments.  It just shows you how easily it is to get suckered into a “deal”.

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Links 1/13

Not many exciting links today.  Have fun with the one 🙂

  • FCC to auction off inflight airwaves
  • Heiny Light
  • Wow, just wow.
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Downtime Yesterday

So, there were some technical difficulties yesterday.  And by technical difficulties, I mean that I killed the router.  Basically what happened was I attempted to fix my router problem by following the “Linksys WRT54G + Bittorrent Problems?” link from yesterday.  Note to anyone who’s attempting to do this; do not attempt this fix while you are at work on the WAN side of the router.  Yes, I know it wasn’t my brightest moment, but it should have worked fine.

It turns out that it had worked fine, but upon reboot, it didn’t pick up an IP address from Comcast, so it just sat there, all stupid like.

Anyways, the fix appeared to work, but not for long.  The same problems come right back.  I think I know what the problem may be now, so I’m going to attempt to fix it again tonight.