Show Me The Money

Microsoft will pay you to use their search engine. I’m not kidding.

I know it sounds like that “Bill Gates Is Sharing His Fortune!” e-mail hoax many years ago that said that AOL and Microsoft were going to pay you money to forward this message, but it’s not like that at all.

I was casually shopping around on EBay to see what lenses were out for my camera. I was particularly interested in something along the lines of the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 or the Sigma 18-50 f2/.8 for a little versatility on the wide side in low light situations. As I was reading up on one auction the seller mentioned that the current promotion from Microsoft Live would enable the winner of his auction to save 25% if they were to use the Buy It Now option and pay through Paypal as part of the Microsoft Live Search Cashback Program.

This sounded interesting. I was pretty sure that I would, at some point, purchase the lens once I could justify the cost and the idea of saving 25% pushed the acquisition further into the realm of feasibility for a more immediate purchase.

I did my research and the cash back program is real, as are the discounts.

Basically, once I determined which lens I wanted (I decided upon the Tamron SP AF17-50mm F/2.8 Di II LD) and looked around on EBay to see if I could find one at a competitive price being sold by an EBay member that could be trusted.

The lens retails anywhere from $428 to $475 on average. After hunting a bit I found one for $440 which was in the right price range BEFORE the discount and about what a reasonable person would expect to pay for this hardware.

Once I located the lens I wanted I put it on my watch list in EBay and then browsed over to live.com to execute my search. I used the word Tamron and looked for the cashback option in the results. This is what that looks like:

Note that this one says 10%. When I did it the search result came back with a 25% link to EBay and when this promotion started the discounts were as high as 35%.

I clicked the link and once I was on the EBay site via that link I was basically locked in to the cashback option so I went to my watch list and clicked on the lens I had found earlier and bought it with the Buy It Now option and checked out via Paypal earning myself a $110 discount. On top of that, the auction I won included FREE shipping and a FREE UV filter so that saved me some additional moolah.

The catch is that you pay the seller the full amount and then you get a message in your EBay mailbox telling you that you’ve earned cash back. You click the link and sign up with Microsoft to receive your cash rewards. There’s a delay of about a week before the funds come available to make sure you don’t get the money and then return the item.

The limit is three item purchases per account and a maximum discount of $250 per item. That means if you had $3000 to spend on stuff you already planned on buying, Microsoft would pay you $750 to do it via their search engine. Not a bad deal. They paid me $110 to purchase a lens I was already planning to buy.

Sadly, the largest discount I have seen since I made this purchase is a paltry 10%, but you never know what tomorrow (or later this evening) might bring.

100 Years Ago Today

Today is the 100th anniversary of the explosion that flattened some 500,000 acres of Siberian forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River on June 30, 1908

Commonly referred to as the “Tunguska Event” it is widely accepted that the explosion was the result of an air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 3″“6 miles above Earth’s surface.

I remain unconvinced.

I Can Has Video (in my pocket)

I remember getting access to a super 8mm camera back in high school and shooting some film of a field trip. I also remember the pain of getting the film developed and then having to arrange to borrow a projector just so I could show the film to my classmates.

Ever since then I have been nothing more than a spectator as video production has become more and more accessible to the common man via video tape recorder, mini disk and now digital cameras.

On our last vacation I considered taking a small handheld video DV camera with us just to have, but even the newest palm sized devices were going to be too unwieldy and I opted to forgo the video in favor of my preferred medium of digital still photography.

Now it appears that Pure Digital Technologies has come up with a device to lure me to the dark side. Meet my new friend, the Flip Mino.

Very impressive specs. It runs about 4 hours on a charge and records up to 60 minutes of video.

Internal Memory: 2GB (60 minutes)
Screen Size: 1.46″ (transflective TFT)
Screen Resolution: 528 x 132 pixels
Video Resolution: 640 x 480

And the size is right. 3.94″ x 1.97″ x 0.63″ (H x W x D) it fits easily into your pocket making it as readily available as a small camera phone.

It’s also very easy to use. Out of the box all I had to do was charge it up and go.

The software for managing and editing your videos installs right from the device and it make sharing and uploading of your videos quite simple.

Día del orgullo friki

It’s Nerd Pride Day.
Shouldn’t there be a parade or something? I want a parade….

Basic rights and responsibilities of nerds

Rights:
1. The right to be even nerdier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not have a significant other and be a virgin.
4. The right to not like soccer or any other sport.
5. The right to associate with other nerds.
6. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
7. The right to have all the nerdy friends that you want.
8. The right to not be “in-style.”
9. The right to be overweight and have poor eyesight.
10. The right to show off your nerdiness.
11. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:
1. Be a nerd, no matter what.
2. Try and be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something nerdy, you must give your opinion.
4. Save any and all nerdy things you have.
5. Do everything you can to show off your nerdy stuff as though it were a “museum of nerdiness.”
6. Don’t be a generalized nerd. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every nerdy book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related t-shirt, all the better.
9. Don’t waste your time on anything not related to nerddom.
10. Try to take over the world!