I’m spending pretty conservatively at school. I’m aided in this endeavour by the fact that a great deal of food on campus is either overpriced or tasteless or both. In fact, 90% of expenditures have been at Sobey’s around the corner buying more chicken and lettuce and stuff.

But I have got my Mastercard, and therefore, I’ve got Paypal. Having Paypal opens a lot of doors.

Like when my trusty Handsprint met with the unfortunate fate depicted on the right, I dropped by eBay and nabbed another one. Conveniently, the auction ended right between two lectures last Friday morning, so I was able to slip into a lab and just outbid the other fellow in the last few moments. I may have paid more than necessary, but the Visor Deluxe is a great legacy unit — big bright screen, nice stylus, expansion slot (thanks for the GPS, CTW!). I was a little wary of shipping charges, but I sent the guy an addition US$6 to ship from Virginia and assured him I’d cover whatever that didn’t. Turns out that for six bucks, he could have it airmailed here. That surprised me. When I was shipped a handful of Lego pieces from a suburb of Toronto, it was over $5. I guess that’s what a little healthy competition does for a system.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to hit a few sites I’ve enjoyed in the past with small donations. If, for some reason, you haven’t already, do check the Flame Warrior Database for a hilarious ilustrated guide to personalities you’ll likely meet on the internet. Also ActsOfGord.com for the highly amusing antics of a game shop owner and his madcap clientele.

Related to scamming online, if you have a net connection with unlimited bandwidth, do consider parking your browser for a while at the Lad Vampire. It’s a page that leeches large image files off of servers hosting fraudulent bank sites. Many hosting services provide a way to report abuse, but for those that don’t, this is a great way to get those pages offline — eat up all their bandwidth. You just leave it sitting there and the javascript continually reloads the same images over and over again. They so far claim to havetaken down a whopping 96 fake banks.

I pay for a slice of cable TV here, but I’ve only watched about an hour of it in the last two weeks. In that time, however, I managed to catch one of the Axe ads with its incredibly catchy tune. When I looked into it, it turns out that it’s not some 80s classic like I expected, but a recent offering from a UK indie group called Reactor.

They’ve got a video of the song, ‘Feeling The Love’, posted on their front page. It’s a bit PG-13, but the tune is very infectious if you have a moment and a brisk connection. If you haven’t installed RealPlayer for a while, I highly recommend the Real Alternative instead of the whole bloated package.

In spite of the warning from a trusted source, I succumbed to the Force and ordered the DVD set the other day. I couldn’t resist — it was like an online special at FutureShop with a discount and free shipping for one day only.

In the spirit of Star Wars, be sure to check the highly entertaining Double Take scambait where Shiver poses as a representative for Dark Side Industries, pushing THE FORCE super glue.

Mike

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