Picked up Mario Kart for the wii. No real impressions yet since I’ve only done 1 50cc circuit so far. Only thing I’ve noticed so far is that I’ve missed the first turn of every race. I keep hitting the directional pad instead of turning the wheel. Need to get rid of some old habits.
My friend code is 0087-2707-0051
I started using E-Junkie for my shopping cart at the beginning of August when Cyndicate was released. For the most part it has been a pretty good experience. I think my customers get a better buying experience and I get some new nice features for little cost.
Set-up was super easy for me since I was already accepting IPN notifications from PayPal on purchases. E-Junkie send out the sales info in the same format. All that it took was a slight modification to the check for valid transaction method. This also ends up being really convenient if you add other payment processors. They translate the notifications from google checkout or whoever into the same IPN like notifications. So you only have to support one system for use with multiple processors.
Another feature I really like about E-Junkie is that you can use it with PayPal Pro. Turning on the option lets you take credit cards without you’re customers having to see PayPal. Some people still have an aversion to PayPal over their early years and this can help easy their anxiety. When a customer pays with a credit card, they’re taken to a secure page with a form for all of the info. Everything is then taken care of for you. You don’t have to worry about setting up the certificate, the form, or the communication with PayPal. Once the card clears, you’re server is pinged just like any other transaction.
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, it’s well worth the $5/month that it costs for the service. I might consider going with something like the Potion Store sometime in the future to have more control. But for now, the easy set-up and configuration of E-Junkie wins out.
Update: One more Pro to add. Customer service has been quick to respond and helpful when emailing them. Today was a good example. I ran into an issue that appeared to be a fairly decent bug. I thought there was a loss of sales data when a sku was deleted. The Cyndicate-EagleFiler bundle no longer showed up in my sales logs. I emailed emailed support and heard back from Robin heard back from Robin an hour or two later saying that it was fixed. Fortunately, it appears that it was simply a display error and not a loss of data. The issue was handles right away and all of the bundle sales showed up when I checked the log later in the night.
Full disclosure: The above ejunkie links are affiliates links. If you follow these links and sign up with e-junkie I will get a commission. The commissions aren’t huge, but a few of them would cover my monthly cost. Free e-junkie would be even better then $5/month e-junkie. =)
Best. Political. Ad. Ever.
You gotta love the utility companies for being so nice and giving helpful warnings. Today I awoke to a flyer on my door from APS (the electric company here) with a notice that they’re upgrading some equipment and the we can expect to have a quick power outage of about 5 minutes. They advise that we should have computers and other equipment turned off for when it happens. Very nice of them and it’s good advice.
Only one huge problem. It’s scheduled to happen on either Tuesday or Wednesday any where between 8 am and 5 pm. Great. Thanks for narrowing the window down to only 18 hours. It makes it really easy to have everything off for the 5 minute outage. I’d be really pissed if I didn’t have all of my equipment on larger size UPS units. Might be time to get a the house on a back-up generator.
It appears that the Democratic leaders have decided to block the permanent ban on taxing internet-access according to Captains Quarters and Congressional Quarterly. The permanent ban appears to have the support of the of the majority of congressmen from both sides of the aisle, but for some reason the leadership won’t let it come to the floor. It’s time for the geeks to get loud and let our legislators know that we don’t want them to cripple what we’re still building.
It’s been estimated that if a ban isn’t kept in place, that states are looking at taxing access in the 17-20% range. This could cripple availability to poor and lower income people giving a further disadvantage when it comes to information, education, lower pricing, and income opportunities. The internet is also our best example of interstate commerce on an individual level. Almost everything done on it crosses state lines in one way or the other. It’s really one of the few types of issues that should be controlled by the feds and not the state governments.
UPDATE: Congressional Quarterly is now reporting that the house passed a watered down, 4 year version of the the tax ban. The Senate has yet to pass anything. If we can get the Senate to pass the permanent ban, the conference committee may have the opportunity to favor the Senate version of the bill. So there’s still hope. Passing the 4 year ban will probably be more difficult in it due to the number of Senators pushing for the permanent ban. Hopefully Harry Reed will cave in on this issue like he has on so many other (and more important) issues since becoming president pro tempore of the Senate.
I’ve moved my blog to it’s own domain, http://crookedspin.com. Please update your links and feeds. I’m working on getting 301s set up properly so that hopefully do don’t have to do anything and the feed links will update automatically for you.
Update: The site is moved now and redirects set up. The end the result should look seamless to you. I’ve also upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 and as such now have valid Atom 1.0 feeds. You can get the atom feed from http://crookedspin.com/feed/atom/. I’d encourage everyone to use it since the atom spec is a lot nicer then the RSS spec.
Finally!!!!
I got my hands on my very own Wii today after 2 months of everyone being sold out around me. Wii Code is 5139 7829 8111 5558.
Here’s a little tip I’m learning the hard way. If you ever want to have the entire interior of your house painted, don’t. It is a major nightmare and something I’ll never do again. Have the place painted before you move in and then only do one room at a time after you move in.
Over the last 3 days I’ve had to move everything that isn’t a couch, desk, or large entertainment center into my garage or jam it into a closet. Now all of the remaining furniture has been piled into the center of each room and everything that isn’t a wall is covered in plastic. If they had covered up the walls I’d be bubble boy.
The best part (so far) of all of this was when I came home today. They were supposed to paint the bedrooms first so that I could set up my bed and sit in my office tonight. Well, they didn’t. They painted all of the baseboards first and won’t be doing the bedroom walls until tomorrow now. He swears will be done tomorrow, we’ll see.
MarioKart DS finally came out today. It’s the game I’ve been waiting for since I bought my DS last christmas. So far it hasn’t disappointed. I’ve played through all 8 cups (all that I have at this point) at the 50cc level. The cups are broken into 2 Grand Prix, the Nitro and Retro. Nitro is all new courses for the DS with a couple familiar themes. The Retro Grand Prix cups are made up of courses from the SNES, N64, GBA, and NGC MarioKarts. Each cup has one race from each of them which makes for a nice mix.
MarioKart DS is also the first game that has WiFi play built in. Set up was simple and hooked right into my existing network with no issues. I haven’t had a chance to try it out though. The Nintendo servers have been getting slammed and are having issues. Not really surprising for the first day. I did get my friend code set up. It is:
116023
594595
Time to get more stuff unlocked. Hopefully the online play with be running smoother in a bit.
Finally there is a reason to own a Nintendo DS, Meteos
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