Many people will grab a pen or other item while in a store if it is free. It usually will have the store’s name, phone number, address and some kind of advertisement printed on it. There are other items you often see in stores that are free, too. These are all promotional products that the company is using to promote their business, products, or some type of advertising about their company. I don’t feel as though people should be taking the products if they truly aren’t going to be using them. Some people don’t realize that these items costs the company money, but they do. It is one of the best types of advertising. Sometimes they are lower in price, per piece, for a higher quantity that you buy.

About three months ago I began dieting and I was looking for a healthier alternative to butter and margarine. I started browsing through the butter selection at my local grocery store and those bottles of liquid spray butters caught my attention. Initially I just assumed that they were very high in fat, cholesterol and calories, but after checking them out (“Parkay” and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” to be specific) both products claimed to be fat free, calorie free and cholesterol free. Could this be true?, I thought to myself. Surely if they are indeed fat free and have no calories, they won’t compare to the taste that you get out of regular solid butter and margarine. I decided that I would give them a try, as both brands were on sale for a dollar per bottle.

The next day I was hungry for a little mid-day snack, so I decided to fix a can of green beans. Normally, I would just eat the green beans plain, to keep the calories to a minimal amount. I decided that today I would try putting a little liquid butter spray on the green beans to give them a little flavor for a change. I gave the bottle a few pumps and lightly coated the bowl of green beans with the butter spray. After taking the first bite, I loved it. I had finally found the perfect fat free topping to transform the taste of my dull, plain diet foods.

After trying the butter spray for that first time, I was hooked. I was using the stuff on nearly everything that I fixed, and I was using quite a bit more than just a few pumps. You can’t even imagine the taste of green beans smothered in butter if you haven’t tried it. Every time I fixed green beans, I was actually removing the spray cap and pouring the liquid butter over the green beans, coating the entire bowl with a thick layer of buttery goodness.

This went on for about two months. I was using the butter at least two or three times a week, and not in moderation. My main snack since starting the diet was always green beans. Green beans contain about 60 calories per can, making it the perfect snack. You can eat about as many as you want and still lose weight. I was very content eating green beans with my new-found, great-tasting fat free addition. Until about 3 weeks ago.

I had a doctors appointment on March 12th. The appointment was just to get some blood work ordered, to check my cholesterol and that sort of thing. While I was talking to my doctor, I mentioned that I had been using the great tasting butter spray and how it’s fat free and contains no calories. My doctor was very quick to tell me that he has seen several patients fall for this “fat free” butter spray scam. He began to inform me that a regular size bottle of the spray butter actually contains around 90 grams of fat and that it was anything but low in calories. He told me that the serving size listed on the bottle was about one spray worth of the butter, which might indeed contain no fat or calories, due to the minuscule amount of the butter that you’re actually using in 1 spray. This is why the product is so misleading. People look at the nutritional facts of the butter sprays and see that everything has a value of zero. Zero fat, zero calories, zero cholesterol, zero everything.

Everyone assumes that it truly is a fat free alternative to using butter and margarine, when in fact, it’s just as bad or even worse, considering that people really over use it and think that it’s going to help with weight loss. I’m just glad that I stopped using it when I did. I probably consumed around four to five bottles of it over the span of 2 months time. Someone’s health could really be affected by not knowing that it’s just as bad as eating regular butter or margarine. I personally recommended it to several friends and members of my family after I tried it.

I don’t believe that they should be allowed to advertise these products as containing zero fat and zero calories. They say very bold right on the front of the bottle, “0 Calories”. This would be like a beer company marketing their product as being safe to constantly over-indulge in, without having to worry about the adverse health affects associated with it. It would be no different than a cigarette company telling people that their cigarette is safer than other cigarettes, because they only expect you to take one puff, rather than smoking the entire cigarette.

I hope this will reach a few people who have been duped into using these so-called fat free butter sprays. If you know someone who uses products like these, thinking they contain zero fat or calories, please be sure that they actually research the products before using them. I am sure that other companies try and get by with the same kind of trickery.

If you know of another product that is advertised as being healthy or fat free, don’t hesitate to post a comment and let me know about it. I will check it out if I am able to and write something about it.

Many people shop online to purchase their auto insurance, and often find the cheapest price there. The main problem purchasing online auto insurance is you usually never end up getting all the complete facts and coverage information about the quoted policy before purchasing. Many times you never even end up getting to talk to a personal insurance agent in person. You have to take care of all your business over the telephone. It is best to see all the facts in person, on paper, before deciding.

For those of you who didn’t know about it, DeepDiscount’s buy 1 get 1 free DVD sale on Fox movies and TV box sets ends tomorrow. There are lots of TV show box sets included in the sale. If you’re into collecting movies and TV box sets (as I am), you should check it out: Fox DVDs - Buy 1 Get 1 Free (sale is over). Just enter the code BOGOFOXMGM during checkout.

They’re also having another buy one get one free DVD sale on Anchor Bay DVDs, which include television shows like Roseanne, Grounded For Life, Three’s Company and others. This sale doesn’t have as much as the Fox sale, but it has a few goodies. The Anchor Bay sale ends December 19th, so don’t forget to browse through the titles listed on that one as well: Anchor Bay DVDs - Buy One Get One Free (sale is over). For this sale, enter the code BOGOANCBAY during checkout.

If you try and purchase too many items on 1 order, the buy one get one free prices wont go through, so place a few seperate orders if you have to. Standard shipping is free so multiple orders wont cost you any extra money.

I ordered every King of The Hill season and a few other box sets. You can’t really beat some of the prices, even on eBay. They originally had the 61 disc X-Files Complete Collectors Set on the Fox dvd sale for $230, so you could get two of them for that price. It retails for about $270 so I tried to order 6 of them, but they ran out too fast and said that they couldn’t get anymore. I wanted to keep one of them, give another one to someone for Christmas and sell the rest, but I guess I didn’t find the sale soon enough.

Everyone is doing some major shopping this holiday season and most people will almost certainly charge everything onto one or more credit cards. Anyone who uses a credit card knows that if you don’t get the balance paid off, you get some nasty finance charges. Depending on your interest rate, those finanace charges can really add up. There is a simple way to temporarily avoid finance charges if you can’t afford to pay off your balance as soon as you had hoped.

Go to the store and buy a money order for the full balance (assuming the balance isn’t something like ten grand). Instead of paying for the money order with cash or writing a check, just charge the money order with the same credit card that the money order is going to pay off. This will get the balance paid off, and then re-add the balance right back to the credit card, leaving you with a paid-in-full statement and no finance charges. This comes in pretty handy if you don’t have a ridiculously huge balance and it allows you to save and put money back until you can really afford to pay the balance off.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. After a few requests for the options to have posts from multiple categories or all categories included in the Old Post Links plugin, I have added both options. You can now choose between 1 category, 5 categories, or ALL categories.

You can download the updated version of the plugin here: Old Post Links v1.1

A short time ago nearly every blogger I know suffered a substantial Google PageRank drop. Some of them were at PR5 and dropped to PR2, PR1 and even down to zero. This of course was speculated to be due to paid links or at least what appeared to be paid links within the posts on their blogs. Some bloggers went as far as going through every old post on their blogs to remove links from posts, even if they werent paid or “sponsored” links. That’s when I thought a little plugin to do this automatically might be kind of handy to have. I searched and could not find any plugin to do exactly what I needed. So, I put one together. Paid blogging has become very popular in the last year or so and I figured alot of people might benefit from using this plugin. This plugin was developed mainly for use by all of you paid bloggers, but others may find it useful as well.

What does the “Old Post Links” plugin do, exactly?

In a nutshell, the plugin allows you to specify a category and choose the ammount of days in which you would like the posts from that category to be considered “old posts”. The plugin can either add a rel=”nofollow” tag to all external links (links pointing to other websites) from the posts in that category, or it can completely disable those links so that your readers and search engines no longer see them while keeping the keyword or anchor text (no longer hyperlinked) still in place.

Still not quite sure what the benefits of using this plugin would be? Well, Google doesn’t seem to like websites to have a ton of external links. If youre into paid blogging (which seems to be popular these days), your external links can really pile up. Even if you’re not into paid blogging, after you’ve blogged for so long, you are bound to have quite a bit of external links from talking about various products or websites. This plugin just helps keep your external links to a minimum.

Information Added: This plugin also works with the TLA InLinks plugin. All you have to do is change one line to your TLA InLinks plugin and all of your TLA links will be immune to the Old Post Links plugin. If you are using the standard TLA plugin that just adds links to your sidebar and such, you do not have to change anything. Those links will not be effected by this plugin. This plugin only effects links within posts. Download the plugin and check out README.txt for more info.

Download it here: Old Post Links v1.0 Old Post Links v1.1

You can also visit my Wordpress Plugins page for this plugin and others.

*December 7, 2007 - This plugin has been updated to use 1 category, 5 categories or ALL categories.

*December 10,2007 - I’ve been asked multiple times if this plugin violates Google’s TOS. This doesn’t in any way violate Google’s rules. What the search engines see is the exact same thing as what your readers see. This is no different than going in and manually changing or removing the links. The plugin just saves you time by doing it automatically.

A friend of mine online saw an advertisement for PimpMyRide.com about 6 months ago. He went to the website and found a place to sign up and apply to get his car “pimped”. After about 6 months he received the following email:

Subject: Congratulations! You’ve been selected from PimpMyRide.com

Congratulations!! You’re application has been reviewed and you have been selected!! Please follow the link provided with details on how to complete your application process and Get Pimped!

http://www.pimpmyride.com/finalistapplication.html

NOTE: If you do not follow through the final application process your spot will be given to the next most qualified applicant. Due to the large volume of requests we require a small application/processing fee.

He was excited at the mere possibility of having his car customized by the popular MTV television show. He forwarded the email to me and asked if I thought it was legitimate. When I read the email and saw that they were asking for an “application/processing fee”, it got me pretty suspicious. I checked around and apparently several people have been duped into sending money to them, in hopes of having their car fixed up and being on the MTV show. I came across a post on the consumer blog at ABC13.com titled “Houston woman finds Pimp My Ride web site has nothing to do with MTV” which can be found here: http://consumerblog.abc13.com/2007/09/houston-woman-f.html

The report explains how the PimpMyRide.com website actually works. The website is run by a company which is based out of the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. The website also admits that it is in no way affiliated with MTV and claims the application/processing fee just makes the person eligible to receive discounts on auto parts and accessories.

Who knows how many people have been scammed into sending these people money. Do your friends and family a favor and pass this message on so that these scammers do not continue to make money by misleading unsuspecting people.

Last night I came across a nice little Wordpress plugin on SmackFoo.com. It’s called RSS Signature (previously known as sig2feed). Basically what it does is allow you to include a “signature” at the end of your posts when viewed from an RSS reader.

Here’s an example of the plugin in action: FeedBurner - FromWhatIHeard.com

Obviously the “Source: FromWhatIHeard.com…” line is not included in my posts when you view them from my blog. The plugin allows you to specify what you want to appear at the end of your posts when viewed in RSS readers.

I have taken the liberty to add some new options to the plugin, allowing you to easily include links pointing to your blog home page and even to each invidividual blog post.

Here’s an example of the code I created and added to my RSS signature:

<strong>Source:</strong> <a href=”%BLOGHOME%” target=”_blank”>%BLOGNAME%</a> | <a href=”%POSTLINK%” target=”blank”>%TITLE%</a>

As you can see from the FeedBurner example I posted above, every post contains a link back to the home page of my blog as well as a link to the individual post on my blog. This comes in very handy for when someone feels the need to scrape or “syndicate” your posts via RSS. Alot of spam blogs (a.k.a. Splogs) will load their blogs full of other blogs’ posts just to make it seem like they have a real blog with real content so they can use ads and other money making services on them.

You can download my modified version of this plugin here: Wordpress Plugins

I will post updates if I make any further changes.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them.

A friend of mine has no medical insurance and his doctor wanted him to have some expensive blood tests. He really didn’t want to have to pay for it out of his own pocket so he got to looking around online to see if there was anyplace that offers online lab tests. He came across a website called PrivateMDLabs.com. They offer confidential lab testing and they email you the results. This seems like a pretty unique service. Usually when you have blood tests, the results go on your permanent medical record. This can lead to higher insurance premiums and alot more. All of the results from Private MD stay confidential. The only people who will ever see the results are you and Private MD. Visit their website at www.PrivateMDLabs.com and check out the services they offer.