Tag: Amazon

My New Virgin Mobile Cell Phone

On By Michel McDonaldIn Cell Phone, Gadgets, TechLeave a comment

Well I finally did it, I bought a new Android based cell phone from Virgin Mobile.  Well, I bought it from Amazon, but it is a Virgin Mobile phone.

We were at the mall today and they have a Best Buy mobile store where you can buy cell phones from all the different mobile companies, and they had the Virgin Mobile phones, but they were more than they are at the Virgin Mobile website.

Like take this phone, the HTC One V that I just bought on Amazon for example.  At the Best Buy store they were selling it for $149.99.  It’s on the Virgin Mobile website on sale for $99.99 and I told the clerk that.  He scanned the barcodes and he said nope, it’s $149.99.  I told him to check the Virgin Mobile website and he said it’s $149.99.  I knew it was a bad investment to buy it from there because I could have saved $50 by buying it online.  When we came home I checked and sure enough I was right, it was on sale for $99.99.

Before I made the commitment to buy it, I wanted to check with Amazon first to make sure I could get a better deal and it was on sale for $93.41.  So not only did I save money by buying it at home, but I saved nearly $60.  That’s good because I still have to buy the phone card to activate it which is another $35.

This isn’t the phone that I wanted, but it was the phone that I could afford to buy and sometimes we have to make sacrifices like this.  The reason I didn’t want this one was because it doesn’t have a front facing camera which means I can never video chat with it, but that’s why I have a webcam on my Netbook and my Desktop computer.  But it would have been nice to have the front facing camera for those times when I don’t have a mirror and I need to check to make sure I don’t have food on my face when I’m eating.  I know, I’m strange, but that does come in handy lol.  I’m sure the front facing camera wouldn’t be great for taking self pictures anyway since it is probably a 1MP camera and the regular camera on it is a 5MP.

Besides the front facing camera issue, I did like this phone in the reviews that I saw.  It doesn’t perform as great as the most expensive phones, but it does perform well, from what I’ve seen.  I will have to find out for myself.

I didn’t opt for the 1-day shipping for $18, instead I got the 2-day shipping for $10 which means I will get it on Monday, December 24th which means I will get it just in time for Christmas lol.  If I had gotten the free 5-day shipping, I’d have to wait until the end of next week.  I guess that would be ok to wait, but I don’t want to wait lol.

So yay, welcome to the year 2012/13 lol.  I have been using an old type of phone for such a long time that I won’t know what to do with myself.  I’ve never had an android phone so I’ve never known the joys of apps like the rest of the world does.

I will be giving my phone away to someone who needs it which means I will be getting a new phone number.  That kinda sucks but I wasn’t married to the one I have now anyway, I still don’t remember what the number is lol.

So until Monday…

DealDash the Fair and Honest Auction Site

On By Michel McDonaldIn AdLeave a comment

DealDash_logo

I have heard of DealDash, but haven’t tried it yet because I am sure I would probably get addicted and go crazy with it, to be honest lol.  If you don’t know what DealDash is, it’s an auction site where you buy bids for .60 cents each and an item starts at $0.00 and every time you place a bid, it goes up by 1 penny.  If you lose the auction, you lose all of your bids, but you can get them all back if you buy the item at it’s full retail price.

It’s not too complicated.  Check out the DealDash Facebook page and read more about the DealDash Wikipedia page.  There are many videos on YouTube, here is one DealDash Review that you can check out.  This woman says she won some Amazon gift cards for sometimes 1 bid and they are worth $10.  That is a huge saving to me.  I think I might give it a try to see if I can get a new phone.  Wish me luck!

My Dell DJ (Again)

On By Michel McDonaldIn Music4 Comments

YAY I got my Dell DJ back!  Darrin bought this for me for Christmas 2004 and I got it in January 2005.  During the summer of 2005, the battery started dying slowly.  The charge is supposed to last 8 or 12 hours, I forgot what it was, but suddenly it went down to like 6 hours, then 5, then 4 and so on until it wouldn’t keep its charge for more than 5 seconds.  I stopped using it when summer was over and I didn’t call Dell to have them replace the battery because I was too lazy and had given up on it.  It wasn’t until the warranty expired when I decided to call and they told me the battery was going to cost $70.  Well, I thought I had a 2 year warranty, but the warranty that I had didn’t cover the battery.  Yeah, thanks Dell for having your loopholes.  It sat in a drawer for many years.

I decide that I wanted to buy a new battery for it in 2009 and so I found a battery on eBay for like $15 (with shipping) and bought it, unfortunately it wasn’t the right battery even though they said it was.  It worked, it just didn’t fit inside of the DJ.  I did research on how to replace the battery and one website said to remove the wheel which is why it looks dented, because I was trying to pry that MFer off.  I couldn’t get it off so I found another website which told me how to do it and so I made a video and put it on YouTube.

That battery didn’t last very long and so the DJ has sat in a drawer for the last 2 years.  I decided that I wanted my DJ back so I bought another battery from eBay, only it was the right battery.  They have an instructional video on there, guess whose video it is?  Mine!  This battery is the correct one and it fits and is charged up and ready to play.  I’m so glad it fits, I hated that the battery was taped to the back LMAO.

I have wanted to buy Jane Badler’s new album called “Mistaken Identity” so I bought it from Amazon.  I recommend buying it because she is such an awesome singer.

The DJ still sounds really good.  It’s not an iPod, but this Dell DJ cost $200 back in the day when Darrin bought it for me.  He also bought me a remote control for $50 and a 2-year warranty for another $50 and I have felt bad all these years that I only got a good 6 months out of it.  So now that I have it back I can start listening to music again.  YAY!

You Tube Video:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svD_W3PCrSc

Reading My Book On An iPhone/iPod

On By Michel McDonaldIn Autobiography, BooksLeave a comment

Want to read my new book “Diary of a Gay Nerd: Life After Child Abuse, It Gets Better!” but don’t have a Nook or a Kindle but have an iPhone or an iPod?  Not to worry, that is why I published my book with RainboweBooks.com.

You actually don’t have to have a Kindle to be able to buy Amazon ebooks, or a Nook to buy Barnes & Noble ebooks.  You can download the app for your phone and create an account and start buying ebooks.  That way if you decide later that you want to buy a Nook or a Kindle, you already have an account and books in your library.  But if that is not what you want then you can also use iBooks from the app store.

What you do is simply download iBooks from the app store and install it.  Now go to RainboweBooks.com on your computer and buy my book.  Now download it in .epub format.  Open iTunes and drag the file from your computer into iTunes and a new item will show up called Books.  Plug your iPhone or iPod into your computer via the USB cable.  When iTunes finds your device, simply drag the book file to the device and it will upload it.  Disconnect from the USB and open the iBooks app and viola it’s in your bookshelf.  Open, read and enjoy.

You may notice that the book is going to be well over 1000 pages, but that is because it only shows one or two paragraphs.  The book is actually only 296 pages in e-book format but the iPhone/iPod cannot show the full page and if it did you would need a microscope to read it.

So there are your simple instructions.  I hope you enjoy my book on your Apple product.

Publishing My Book

On By Michel McDonaldIn Autobiography, BooksLeave a comment

The time has finally come for me to announce that my book is FINALLY FINISHED!

Seven months of hard work has finally paid off.  Not only have I learned how to write, but I have also learned how to grammar… wait no that’s bad grammar!  But seriously, my grammar has greatly improved, compared to when I started writing anyway.

The only thing that is preventing me from publishing my book now is an author picture.  I don’t want to publish it until I can get dressed up in my gay uniform, that being my “Legalize Gay” t-shirt that I got from the Human Rights Campaign from when I volunteered with them a few months ago at the gay pride here in Bakersfield.  Although I am not set on that shirt as being the only thing in the photo, I may bring a dress shirt.  Who knows, I may combine them and wear the dress shirt unbuttoned on top of the Legalize Gay shirt.  We’ll see.

I was going to use my own domain xanapus.com as the hub, but decided to buy a new domain name www.diaryofagaynerd.com with links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Rainbow eBooks, GetGlue, Facebook, Twitter and here.  Of course I’m paying every month for 1 single html page lol.  That doesn’t seem fair since I have a lot of space over here, but whatever.

Oh I mentioned GetGlue, yeah I haven’t really talked to them yet but I sent a tweet to one of the GetGlue people that I know.  I want to offer a sticker for my readers.  I already have the sticker made, I just need to give them the file so they can give it to people when they check-in.  Although I don’t know if a lot of writers offer stickers for books, maybe I’m the first.  Wouldn’t that be awesome if I were?  How cool would that be?  I’m a GetGlue pioneer LMAO.

So I will just focus my energy now on getting that picture so I can publish it.  Hopefully tomorrow, but no promises.

I do have future plans for another book, actually a series of fictional stories about my character Xanapus from the game EverQuest.  Of course I won’t be able to write about Norrath, I will have to make up my own fantasy world.  That will just make it more fun to write if I make things up as I go.  I will probably start the first story with a short story to make sure I know how to write fiction, of course I will be taking a course on writing fiction first.  It was one thing to write an autobiography because I didn’t have to make anything up, a story based on one single character living in a world that doesn’t exist yet is going to be the difficult part.  If I can write a short story with one little tiny quest, then we will see if I have what it takes to write a 200-300 page novel, 8 of them in total to be exact.  Yes, I am aiming high lol.  Don’t hold your breath…

Until tomorrow when I have more news about the book that I already wrote…

My book is almost ready to publish, only one tiny issue left…

On By Michel McDonaldIn Autobiography1 Comment

My book files came back to me a couple of days ago (two beta readers as I like to call them) with highlights of things for me to fix.  I have read my book at least 30 times and I was just getting so sick of reading it and they wanted to read it so I figured they could read it early, but I’d love to have bug reports.

So I went through the highlights which weren’t all that major.  I missed a few capitalizations and punctuation issues.  There were also a few words where I forgot to add a letter, like instead of writing the word “from” I wrote “for”, don’t ask why lol.

As I was getting the paper book put together with all of my corrections made, I noticed a little issue which turned out to be a major issue.  There were grey boxes where spaces were supposed to go.  It wasn’t everywhere, but it was annoying that there were so many.  I was able to delete them as I went, but that didn’t help because it was still messed up.

The paper book got put together and turned in to check for errors, which I’m happy to report weren’t any.  I converted the .odt file to epub and was going to publish to Amazon for the Kindle and Barnes & Noble for the Nook.  It looked great on the Nook, but the Kindle wasn’t doing so good.  Here is what I was seeing…

You see the top paragraph?  It’s not exactly a paragraph is it?  That was what happened because of the square boxes.  Also look at the other paragraphs, they weren’t indented, except for the last one.  I went into Sigil to look at the html code of the chapters and this is what I saw.

That is supposed to be a little paragraph.  Those <.span.> things were out of control.  That is what was causing the text to move down.  So the only way for this to work is to cut all that crap out.  I tried to do find and replace, but unfortunately each one of those lines has its own number so it’s not like I can replace all of them throughout the entire document, they have to be deleted one at a time.  ANNOYING!

I worked for 8 hours to get rid of them and then discovered that if I converted the file to .html, it got rid of all that.  So that was a waste of time, but it was a learning experience.

I fixed all of the capitalization and punctuation issues, but I have a feeling I am still missing something so I’m going to have to read the whole thing again.  It sucks but I don’t want to publish a book that isn’t right.

I said I would get it published by January 1st and here we are nearing February and it still isn’t ready to publish.  I don’t know how long it will take but I will get it out there eventually.

Brand Thunder Holiday Browser Theme Contest Results

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily Blog2 Comments

On November 29th 2011 I wrote a sponsored blog post for Izea’s Social Spark to advertise for Brand Thunder, which is a cool website where you can create browser themes for Internet Explorer and Firefox.  One of the requirements was that I create a holiday browser theme and enter in their contest to win an iPad2.

On December 17th 2011 I found out that my browser theme was good enough to be in the top 5 browser themes eligible to win an iPad2.  I asked for votes here on my blog, and on Facebook and Twitter.  I wasn’t as successful as the 3rd and 4th holiday browser themes because not enough people voted for me, so I lost.

Well, I didn’t really lose, I was still in the top 5 so I consider that to be successful enough.  Because I was in the top 5, I won a $25 gift card for Amazon.com, and tonight I bought a new webcam for my desktop.

The webcam that I have on my desktop is a Flexic@m which at one time was acceptable, but it’s such a horrible webcam that I no longer want to use it.  I would much rather have this Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000 because it is HD 16:9 and it has a mic.  I would like to be able to call my aunts and friends with Skype, but I can’t because I don’t have a mic.  I can use the built-in webcam on my Chromebook, but it doesn’t do Skype.

I would also like to be able to do time-lapse videos to put on YouTube.  I have a time-lapse video of my Scooby Doo Chia Pet, which is not that great because of the horrible webcam.  Tonight I tried making a time-lapse video of my lava lamp, but the webcam is so horrible that you can’t see the beautiful colors of the lava. That was my motivation for choosing to buy a new webcam.

This webcam was only $24 and it was available for free shipping if I paid $25.  In order for me to get the free shipping, I had to buy something else, so I chose to buy a $5 4GB USB memory stick.  I needed a new memory stick anyway so this is perfect.  The USB memory stick I have now is only 1GB and it’s almost full, so I had planned on upgrading anyway. What I’d like to do is take all of my photos off of the 1GB stick, and put them on the 4GB stick.  I can use the 1GB stick for my book as a backup.

I wasn’t expecting to win the iPad2, and frankly I didn’t think my holiday browser theme was as good as the other ones, so I’m happy for the person who did win because they certainly deserved it.  Even though an iPad2 would have been cool, I’m happy to have a new webcam and USB memory stick.  So thank you Brand Thunder for the Amazon $25 gift card, I really do appreciate it.

*This post is not a paid advertisement for Izea‘s Social Spark or Brand Thunder.

Slim-Fast’s Best Tasting Shakes Ever!

On By Michel McDonaldIn AdLeave a comment

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Slim-Fast for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

The New Slim Fast 3*2*1 on the go bottles - Rich Chocolate Royale

We all remember Slim-Fast when it became popular in 1987.  They started with the powder that you mix with skim milk, then they added the ready to drink cans.  Now they have the new on-the-go shake plastic bottles.  I bought an 8-pack today and had one for lunch and I can tell you that they taste amazing.

I have done the Slim-Fast plan many times and I lose weight every time.  I think the most that I have lost was 40lbs while on the Slim-Fast plan and I think that it’s time that I started losing weight again.  I plan on doing the new Slim-Fast 3-2-1 plan.  I will eat 3 snacks a day which is either veggies or the Slim-Fast snack bars, replace 2 meals with the Slim-Fast on-the-go shakes or meal bars and eating 1 sensible 500-calorie dinner with half of the plate being veggies, a quarter being protein and a quarter being grains.  It also helps to drink a full glass of water before eating dinner.

I love the snacks bars because they look and taste like candy bars.  The snack bars are good because they are a delicious calorie controlled snack that will curb your sweet cravings until dinner time.  My favorite snack bar is the chocolate nougat gone nuts.  The meal bars and shakes give you the perfect amount of calories with tons of vitamins and minerals that your body needs.

The new on-the-go shake bottles are perfect for people who don’t have time to mix their shakes.  They are easy to slip into your purse, backpack or gym bag and you can drink them any time you need to.  The shakes give you 4 hours of hunger control, which is what I need because my stomach is always hungry.

You can buy Slim-Fast on-the-go shakes, powder cans, snacks and meals at Wal-Mart, Target, Safeway and Kroger in the pharmacy department and online at Amazon.com.  Become a fan of the Slim-Fast Facebook fan page and enter in the Vow to Wow contest, enter the video contest and get some coupons for $1.50 off your next purchase.

I have heard people tell me that now is not the time to try to lose weight because of the holidays.  This is the perfect time to lose weight.  If you don’t start now then when?  Don’t make excuses and don’t let anyone pressure you into waiting until you have tried Aunt Betty’s homemade fruit cake.  Tell her no thank you, I am eating a Slim-Fast snack bar instead.  There, I have saved you from having to eat fruit cake.  You can thank me later.

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Publishing My Book

On By Michel McDonaldIn Books, eBookLeave a comment

I spent this summer writing my life story into a 289 page e-book.  It took a lot of time to write and it has taken even longer to edit because I am not what most would consider to be a writer.  I barely manage writing a blog, I have a difficult enough time thinking of what to write in a greeting card.

I have already copyrighted (pending) my book (title and unedited contents) so that when I am ready to publish it, I won’t have to worry about waiting for the copyright to kick in.

I have already signed up with Amazon and Barnes & Noble as a self publisher, which was so easy that anyone can do it.  I also wanted to sign up on the Rainbow Ebook website as a self publisher because I want to support them as an e-book store.  It’s nice to give back to my community in any way that I can.

As soon as it is completely edited, I will publish it and start advertising and promoting via here, twitter, Facebook, my space and anywhere else that I can advertise it for free.  I may even pay gay and gay friendly bloggers to advertise it for me.

I am not looking to get rich on this book, in fact I mean to do the opposite.  I can only make so much money per year on top of my disability so I can’t get rich off of it.  I am only going to sell it for $6.99 so that I only profit a few dollars from the sale of each book and 10% of those profits will go to charity.  10% from Amazon, B&N and Rainbow Ebooks combined will be split up to go to the Human Rights Campaign, ChildHelp.org and Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors fund.

My book will hopefully raise awareness to so many issues in our society about the way children are being raised to be as abusive, racist and bigoted as the parents who are raising them.  I feel it’s important not just to tell my story about the trauma I went through, but hope that it will help parents to change their hateful ways and views and know what they are doing to their children when they raise them full of so much hatred.

I wanted to be able to publish it before Christmas but then I got to thinking that it’s not the kind of thing you want to read during a happy time of year.  Instead, I will probably publish it after Christmas or maybe after New Years.  Keep in mind that it is still being edited so it is possible that I won’t have it ready to publish until January.

So until then…

Update: I signed up for the free trial of Grammarly and was shocked to see that they raised the price from $20 to $70.  I thought that I would just go ahead and do the trial and get it done as quick as I could but it was catching too many errors that weren’t even errors.  So screw that, if my grammar checker in Open Office doesn’t show me those errors then they aren’t errors in my opinion.  I will read it one more time and fix any errors I think need to be fixed and then publish it when my copyright goes through or January like I said before.

Create a Holiday Browser Theme and Win an iPad 2.

On By Michel McDonaldIn Ad1 Comment

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of BrandThunder for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Holiday Browser Theme Contest

Would you believe me if I told you that you might win an iPad 2 for 5 minutes of work?  Of course you wouldn’t because it’s crazy.  How could you win something so expensive in 5 minutes?  It’s as simple as creating a browser theme with Brand Thunder, tweeting, emailing then waiting until December 23rd to see if you have won.  It’s 100% free to create your own browser theme with Brand Thunder’s BT: Engage.

I entered the Brand Thunder Holiday Theme Contest by making my own image in Gimp and creating a toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer.  I could have used one of the images that came provided but that was too easy, I wanted to create my own original design.

It wasn’t that long ago when I was searching for a way to create my own toolbar.  I wanted to make something that was personal to me instead of having to settle for what other people have made.  I never thought that I might be able to enter a contest to win an iPad 2.  What are the odds right?

The judges will announce the 5 best themes on December 17th and then I guess people can vote.  The winner will get the iPad 2, the others will win a $25 gift card for Amazon.  Hey, it’s something right?  If I am in the top 5, I will blog about it again so you can vote for me.

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