It has been a few years since I graduated college. We all remember each semester we spent over a g on text book. At the end of semester, when we sold the book back, we just enough beer money. The new scene in the area, according to one of our interns, instead of buying a new book, you can save money by 1. buy a used book, 2. buy an ebook, 3.RENT text book.

ECampus is a company support all of these methods. This got to be great. Since we are buying some of classical books in our field, I gave eCampus a try. Wow, they beat Amazon by 15 bucks one the tile I want to buy. Unfortunately, I can’t make the title public here.

A few more links for you if you want to try eCampus as well.

Use code IVANDRAGO to get an additional 5% added to your quote when you sell textbooks to eCampus.com

Enter code BUY380 to receive 3% of $80 Purchase

US Search provides background checks, criminal checks and sex offender searches. This is great for hiring a nanny or baby sitter. Besides these areas, US Search can be used as a private investigator. Online dating is popular now a days. It is a good idea to search the person before you concentrates on any one person.

The price tag for a search is from $10 to $100. I think $40 is a good value. You can find the history of a person this way, at least how the person moving around in the country. Most importantly, any public record exists against the person. You have to pay even if your search produces no results. This makes sense since you want to prove the person has no bad record out there.

I admit that I am a cheap person while my girl is gorgeous. I am a geeky kind of person I don’t deserve her. In terms of buying present, I bought mine from a web site bidz.com.

Bidz.com is an auction site for jewelry. And they have free shopping from 3AM to 6AM every day. What is great about buying there is many of the items comes with a certificate. This is my experience; I got one for $58, which comes with a certificate of $800. These are good sized (0.55) diamonds mounted well in white gold. They’re gorgeous. Now I don’t know about jewelry, but this is great for gift. My girl friend uses it as a Christmas gift to her mom. It looks good as a present, is it?

This is not a site for next day present. Most of time, the goods will arrive in about anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks.

I am getting ready to buy my first home. First I would like to buy security system. The one I like most is ADT.

My dad was an ADT customer for 15 yrs. We never had one incident while I was home. He actually had the alarm scaring off some thieves last year. It seems recession has push up the crime rate a lot in many areas around the country, at least in my area and my dad’s neighborhood. His house was broken into around 12:00 that day, when most people around neighborhood were off at work. The alarm went off, ADT called the house several times they called my dad on his cell phone. Finally, they dispatched the local police. The thieves were scared off by the alarm or the quick response of the phone call from ADT and they left the same way they came empty handed. My dad thinks this is year’s payment finally paid off once. However, he left with his broken patio door.

If I can close out my bargain house deal, as you can guess, this is not the safest community. I certainly will invest in ADT myself.

I am not sure what news paper will be in a few years. Nobody is paying for news paper and nobody is reading them in paper. We read them on line. Amazon is developing Kindle for newspaper. I am not sure if I will buy one.

This is the full letter from Atlanta.com:

Atlanta.com is going local, however, we will still focus heavily on our
visitor and tourism portal. We are offering independent contractor home
based business opportunities for writers, reporters to produce articles
and content for our official Website Atlanta.com and the surrounding
areas. Below is a chart and categories along with our offer for payment
for these services.

You have two opportunities to be paid, one for pure content and the other
sales. You will be paid like we do for all our services based on the Gross
not the net. If the section/category you write for earns $100k in gross
advertising sales and you provide only content, we pay you $20k, if you
also sell all advertisers into the site, you will be paid an additional
30% or $50k. In other words, we pay you 20% for any and all advertising
that ends up in your section, which is sold by our in-house sales team.
Any sales that you make, you will be paid an additional 30% on top of your
20% - total 50%. We will consider exclusive category content, sales and
marketing agreements with everyone depending on their abilities and
motivations. You will be hired as an independent contractor and will be
responsible for your own expenses, which should be very low as a home
based internet business.

Atlanta.com, like many other Internet companies are simply moving in on
the opportunity to fill the gap of the decline of the newspaper industry,
due to high cost, limited circulation and the Internet as the replacement
for this and many other old traditional outdated Local Media. We are
simply eliminating everything that starts with letter “P”, except one
-”PROFIT” to run this successful business model, eliminated are Paper,
Paper Ink, Printing Presses, Postage, Paper Delivery Trucks, Petrol,
People, Paper, Property Communication Towers, Property Taxes, Property and
Buildings, etc, This is why we can share our profits with local
independent writers and reporters and offer this opportunity much more
than many other high overhead local and traditional medias would be able
to do.

Atlanta.com Compensation/Revenue Model based on gross advertising sales
We Offer 4 options

1. 50% gross to writer – If writer sells an ad as well as furnishes all
updated content within category, he / she writes for

2. 20% gross to writer – If our sales team sells an ad and writer just
provides content

3. Trade advertisement on Atlanta.com for writer providing content – If
the writer has a local business we will give them some free exposure on
the site in exchange for articles/blog posts. Example - This could be
weddings services, local fishing guides, high tech companies, including
e-commerce products / home based business of all types and descriptions.

4. Pay for content – $50 – $300 per article – our least favorite option
and will only be done in some cases. Note : All content generated for
Atlanta.com we either will own or have non-exclusive rights to use in
perpetuity. This is so Atlanta.com is fully protected and advertisers are
not harmed or lost.

Topic areas where we are hiring for:
• Cooking/recipes
• Sports / Local and National
• Green living
• Opinion / email to the Editor
• Local news
• Weather
• Politics
• Finance/money
• Entertainment
• Music
• Movies
• Fashion
• Technology/internet
• Health / Fitness

We want everyone to profit from this venture with us and be paid fairly
for their work and dedication. We are looking for long term stability and
high independent contractor satisfaction. The world has changed and we
have changed with it. We are not burying our head in the sand or avoiding
the inevitable and fully understand what opportunities there are for all
of us with embracing this New Internet Media. Thanks, we look forward to
hearing from you on your interest for this great opportunity.

Kent Mitchell the past Outdoor Editor of AJC again has joined us and we
look forward to others joining our team as well.

If you or someone you know might be interested in this great opportunity,
please send a resume and all contact info including phone number to
Contact@Atlanta.com.

Thanks,

Atlanta.com Content & Media Division

This is a true story. I got some Pizza hut certificates over the holiday season. I was travailing to bay area in a weekend in Jan 2009. I found the certificate in the car grove box and decided to use it. This is a new area to me. I search “Pizzahut Fremont” in yahoo.com. This is the screen shot:

YAHOO PIZZAHUT FREMONT

It is my luck as always. I picked the third one. To make it short, it was a Saturday night around 6:30, and it was a high traffic area with at least three good size plazas. I spent nearly an hour there. Finally I called the phone number and ask which plaza they are. At first they didn’t understand me, then they told me the Pizzhut on Mission Blvd was close and the phone number is redirected to second one, the one in Grimmer.

Well, this is not a big deal, I know. It happens to everyone and I should keep it all to myself. Two months later, Just curious, I search “Pizzahut Fremont” in Google, They don’t show the one already closed.

Google search Pizzahut Fremont

Yeah, I know, they get their data from other sources. Yahoo does not compile the data, nothing wrong with Yahoo. If anyone wondering why Yahoo stock tumbling so much, this is sort of the answer.

A little background about me. I work in a Internet firm, we sell membership to our users for accessing our information service. (No, we are not in adult business, we are in financial service business) We have about four thousand paid users now. We also let user try our service for a month free. There are many “repeating” free users. They register for a month and then next month they register with another email. We know this and we don’t require a credit card in sign up process and we let them getting away for using our service for free for very very log time.

What they don’t know is that we only display Adsense ads when the free user logged in. For paid user, we don’t display any Adsense Ads. Paid users are getting more information and fast service. But this is not what this post about. This post is about our Adsense income. We saw our income steadily going down in past few months.

We had some discussion about this and we conclude that Ad-block of Firefox block our Adsense ad is the reason. Our site have been promoting FF for a long time. All our developers use a iBook. We all hate IE. About 45% of our users, includeing free users, use FF. More and more of them are turning on the ABP. I guess if our Adsense income going down too much, We will have to ask free user sign up with a credit card.