How I'm Getting a DS Lite For 75% Off

well, it's not *really* a % off, it's more like a "i found $100 in my pocket" trick. the trick: a mere 1% cash back credit card and some (actually A LOT of) financial discipline.

most people look at 1% and really don't think much of it, i know i didn't. it just so happened that when i switched credit cards last year, i kinda just picked this one. i've had no credit card debt for the past year and along with the financial benefits of not having any credit card debt comes the mental benefit of being in the clear (which speaks volumes). anyways, how'd i juice $100 off this thing?

- pay daily things with it, namely food. for reals, who of us actually cook? we're more likely to go out for lunch and dinner and for about $5-15 bucks a pop also. let's say you spend $10/day on food (which is really cheap). that's $300/month = $3/month made from the credit card.

- pay bills you are going to pay anyways with your card. cellphone, cable, car insurance, gym membership, and online games (which we all put on a card anyway). this is stuff you will pay no matter what so *hopefully* you've already budgeted for it. all that stuff for me adds up to about $500/month = $5/month made from credit card.

- use it at the gas pump. i typically look at $40/tank and have to fill up about 4 times a month. $160/month = $1.60/month made from credit card.

and that's it.

notice i didn't even include "fun" items like games/dvds/movie tickets and the sort. the POINT is: just by paying things i HAVE to pay anyways, i'm looking at $9.60/month. so now you may be saying "jay, i make $10 in 15 minutes to surf the internet". yeah, i know, i know, but add that shit up for a whole year: $115.20. add $40 to that and i get a DS Lite, not too shabby (i'll be getting $.40 from that $40 on the DS, make no mistake about that).

now i'm not advocating crazy credit card spending, i'm saying as long as you keep it under control you can harness the power of the little 1%. i also know there might be better cards out there, but i haven't come across any worth the switch (yet). i think Discover is like 5%, but many places don't take that card and it's 5% if you spend at certain retailers, the one i have is 1% on all purchases. about 2 months ago, i got a HSBC mastercard that gives 5% on gas purchases (which ups my $1.60/month in gas to $8/month). i DID find this card though: chase freedom card, will do more research and number crunching before i choose to apply.

even if it's like $100 for a whole year of this, as saddistic as it sounds, i think most of the *fun* comes from nickel and diming the thing. kinda like opening up the entire sphere grid in ff10 for each character. i've cashed in on the points i've accumulated in the past year ($100)...now only if i could find a DS Lite in stock somewhere...ANYWHERE!!!


WHERE ARE YOU?!?!?!?!


There's a New Game In Town

and although initially it's the most expensive game i've played, when it's all said and done it will be the cheapest game i've played. and the name of the game? Stock Market. i'm not putting all my money into "playing stocks", that would be called gambling. what i AM doing is putting leftover money into my online brokerage account at Scottrade. $100 here, $500 there, another $200 when i feel like it, $150 when a chick pisses me off, and without really noticing i have put a total of $3000 into the account. i already do a lot of other longer term investing (403b, Roth IRA, a couple index funds, high yield savings account) so any money in my Scottrade account i basically see as play money. as of today, the assets in the account are about $3172. i'm gonna use this blahg to track my progress as i go through this crazy game.

only own 3 stocks at the moment:
NTDOY - Nintendo, 30 shares. the wii is gonna make a profit on each sale? that's totally opposite all other consoles. microsoft and sony are losing lots with their consoles. Nintendo will be pulling in cash like crazy over the holiday season through wii and DS sales. i bought it for $26/share. it's at $28.55 today....and the wii hasn't even come out yet.

GMKT - Gmarket, 40 shares. bought this today @$21.07. i figure this is kinda like the amazon.com of south korea. south korean online shopping has started to catch on and from what i've read, this is the main place you'd buy anything online from.

HMIN - Home Inns & Hotels Management Inc, 40 shares. bought this today @$30.70. this IPO'd fairly recently and the chinese market has been crazy hot lately. this one is more of a risk then the other ones.

what i've sold so far:
Danky - Danka Business, my first exposure to stocks that i bought years ago when i had no idea what i was doing. spent $500 to buy, sold it at $350 for a loss of $150. i bought it cause i read a "tip" that said it would double...ummm...i know what you're thinking and NO i will not just give you $150 also.

CTRP - Ctrip, the expedia.com of china. i love this stock and it was hard for me to part with it, but it has grown too much lately that it's growing is going to get slower and slower. i feel by selling this, i can take the money and find faster stocks and afford faster women. if you're looking for buy and hold, this one is a good one. bought 20 shares @$48.58 sold it for $59.30.

we'll see what happens a couple weeks from now to see what message i get: "congratulations! you are winner!" or "you are loser"


charts are my friends now, they give me money

Elly's Hallway

i've done something lately that i haven't done in a long time: beat a game. God of War is one of the best games i've played, and i was totally hooked the moment i fired it up. although there was one particular room in the game that had me thinking of hoss lying down in front of toma's tv with that one pillow saying, "it's elly's hallway, gotta beat elly's hallway, gotta save elly".

in Xenogears there is a very tough stretch where you have to fight a couple bosses in a row without the opportunity to save. during one of the cutscenes during that stretch, you see Elly running through a hallway. many people had to replay this part over and over, watching Elly in her hallway multiple times. thus the term "Elly's Hallway" to refer to a part of a game where you are too pissed to give up, usually giving the screen the finger after you beat it.

other famous "Elly's Hallway" moments:

Super Mario Bros - the Ice World on star road
Final Fantasy 4 - the cave where you can't cast magic
Final Fantasy 6 (has 2) - climbing up the tower and that one raining town with the clock
Final Fantasy 10 - Tidus' Chocobo race to get Excalibur
Final Fantasy 11 - CoP mission against the 3 Mammets
NBA2K7 - playing against the Miami Heat (if you even LOOK at dwayne wade's sprites they call a foul)
Hoyle Casino 2004 - any poker table
Contra Shattered Soldier - the ENTIRE game
Monkey Spank - any time you have to play against hoss

there are many more games with "Elly's Hallway" moments in them but these are the only ones that come to mind at the moment.

which brings us to back God of War. thank you God of War for bringing me "the room with the spikes". see that gate? it looks like death. hear that clicking sound? it's the sound of death. see that box? it won't stop death. see those spikes? you're dead. "room with the spikes" you win the "Elly's Hallway" award.


the blood is not graphics, it's blood from my eyes

Negative Money, the REVENGE!!!

i wanted revenge on getting Negative Monied last week playing madden, so i did some research. apparently 1024 yards is the magic number, and it affects recieving yards and rushing yards, but doesn't affect passing yards. so i came up with a mission to use it's own power against it. the mission is to rush for less then -1023 yards, REVERSING the Negative Money glitch, and thus ending up getting 1023 rushing. i also wanted to pass for more then 1000 yards and also gain 1000+ yards recieving with 1 player, ALL IN THE SAME GAME.

the original plan was to get to the 1 yard line via passing, then run all the way back with vick and step out of bounds to get -98 yards. this would be tough since i'd have to do this some 10-11 or so times. so i came up with another plan:

1) starting at own 1, get just past the 11 via passing to jenkins to get a 1st down
2) on first down, take vick, run back to the 1 to lose yards (which would lose about 10 yards)
3) spend the next 3 downs passing to jenkins to try to get another 1st down (which would now be on the 21)
4) on first down, take vick, run back to the 1 to lose yards (which would now lose about 20 yards)
5) rinse and repeat

eventually things got pretty tough cause i'd end up with something like 2nd down and 80 yards to go. plus i still wanted to win the game, AND i had to avoid getting Negative Monied recieving for 1023+ yards. at the end, i got my REVENGE!

(click for larger evidence!)

i got jenkins over 1000 yards recieving, then i ran another play, got negative monied, and then ran a play where i made him lose yards so he ended up in the positive.

 

i rushed for -1023, then rushed for another -2 yards and flipped it yo. i also got my 1276 passing yards.

take THAT EA and your LAME integer storing ways!

Negative Money

"Negative Money" is the term i use when you do so well in a game (or anything else), your stats go full circle from infinitely good to infinitely bad. i'm sure many games have this kind of a glitch, but for me, the origin of the term comes from a little PC game called Baseball Mogul.

in Baseball Mogul you manage a baseball team's finances/players/draft/etc for as many years as you want. after playing the game for a while, i built a huge fortune, around $2.1 billion dollars by year 70-ish. the off-season came, i sold off a couple players for profit, and noticed that my money went from $2.1 billion to -$2.1 billion. i had SOOOOO much money that it crossed some crazy space/time-continuum and became "Negative Money". *if you want to know the programatic reason of this glitch, read the bottom.

when it comes to sports games, the fun for me is not beating the computer on All-Star mode. my fun comes from keeping it on Rookie and trying to rack up crazy stats. yeah, it's kinda lame as i probably can't beat anyone...but having kobe average 100 points a game for a full season is just too cool. anyways, i'm playing madden '07 for the 360 and i wanted Michael Vick to be the first person to rush for over 1000 yards in 1 game. with 35 seconds left, i had 997 yards and had to gain at least 3 more yards to accomplish my goal. i ended breaking a 50-yard run for a TD with 2 seconds left in the game. i went through the kick-off and the game ended. afterwards i excitedly went to the "stats" menu and found this (click for larger picture):

what the fuck, -955 yards? man, i got Negative Monied BIG TIME! on top of that, as i tried to save the game i got a "disc read error" and the 360 crashed (which now that i think of it, is actually good since it didn't jack up Vick's season stats). you really CAN be so good, that you become so bad.


*being the programmers that we are, toma and i knew this Baseball Mogul glitch had to do with a variable in the program being declared as Integer instead of Long Integer. toma eventually tracked down the exact answer and found that largest representable plain integer is 2,147,483,647 when using 32-bit arithmetic. when the money got that high, the program didn't know how to handle it.

Surgery Sucks!

ok, i'm starting up on week 3 of ACL surgery rehab and my position on surgery still stands: it sucks and blows, hardest thing i've ever had to do in my life. and it's far from the *good* suck and blow, but more like you're getting head from another DUDE. that's how much you dread it. when i finally recover from this thing it would be a crime for me not to reward myself.

on a side note, the stocking kobe wears when he plays, is NOT just a fashion statement. they stuck one on me after the surgery and that thing is actually quite useful as they keep your leg feeling nice and solid.


these stockings are actually quite useful

 

so let's hear it for stockings! they have other uses as well:


stockings...useful indeed.

Testing TheBlahg

iiiiiiit'sssss woooorrrrrrkiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnng!!!