Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

I have bought a couple of SquareTrade Warranties over the years and have never needed to use them. SquareTrade is a third party warranty company that will sell you an extended warranty for practically any electronic item. They generally are dramatically cheaper than the third party warranties sold by the store where you bought the electronic item. As an example, an extended warranty on my Acer Notebook was over $200.00 from Acer and it was $39.00 from SquareTrade. Having a modicum of expertise, when my DVD drive stopped working in my notebook, I did basic trouble shooting to no avail. I then went to Acer technical support and after trying all their ideas, I still had a non-working DVD drive. I did a little web research and discovered that the model drive in my laptop was not held in good regard. There were many complaints about the drive across a wide spectrum of notebook manufactures who had used the Matshita DVD RAM UJ-850S. I initially tried to find a replacement drive with plan...

Read on, there really are some money saving tips and some are even technical in the following post.   I am a self published author. I have self published for a variety of reasons. My primary reason is time. I have no interest in spending my days trying to find an agent, who will then try and find a publisher. I have been told this can take years. Although I have a resilient ego, I have no interest in facing a wealth of rejection. Again, I have been told by published authors and read author interviews that document myriad rejections. Some successful manuscripts were rejected for years before finding a publisher who saw the value of the work. I’m a retired guy who always wanted to write something and have it published. If what I wrote actually appealed to anyone and it sold, then all for the better. Since that is currently occurring I have created a self fulfilling prophecy regarding how brilliant I am for seeing that self publishing would work for me.LOL Now...

In the immortal words of Pink Floyd , “Is there anybody out there?” As contests go, this is a bust so far. Not one comment this week, butkus, zip, zero. NO WINNER. It seemed simple enough, comment on one of my blogs and be entered, the more comments on more blogs the more entries. Alas I have stooped to add the sure fire key word, naked, to the title to see if anyone reads this particular post. It is possible that my prize of a Tripplite Circuit Tester is insufficiently attractive to get someone to read my driveling prose. On the other hand, since this is a geek focused blog, why wouldn’t you want a circuit tester unless, of course, you are sufficiently geeky that you already have one. I guess I should be thankful that I have the occasional reader who accidentally stumbles into the twilight zone of my half-witty rending. If my satisfying self expression is predicated on readership I am doomed to a pathetic page rank. However if satisfying self expression is just the act itself of self ...