Kirb’s Musings

Kirby Witmer’s ponderings, ruminations, and meditations of… anything.

Update: Google responded to me via email and warns that if you attempt this they may shut down your account. Consider yourself warned.

I’ve thought of the perfect Get Rich Quick recipe.

Ingredients:
1 Google Checkout Account
1 Google Checkout Merchant Account*
1 Credit Card with 0% Interest on Purchases with a CashBack Bonus.
2 E-mail Addresses
A couple minutes

Instructions:
Setup a Google Merchant Checkout Account with one of your email addresses. Once the Merchant account is all set up, log into Google Checkout and select the Settings tab, then click on the Send an Invoice link on the left side. In the To: field enter the email address of your second email account, put in a brief message and enter a dollar amount**. Click the Send Invoice Email button. Now check the email of your second email account, and you should see an invoice from Google Checkout. Click on the link to pay the invoice, log in using a Google Checkout Account name and password (make sure its a different Google Account then the one you used to send the invoice) and pay the invoice using your 0% with CashBack Bonus Credit Card. Wait several days until the money hits your bank account, pay off the credit card, and spend the CashBack Bonus. Repeat.

*Currently Google Checkout Merchant Accounts can process transactions for free until January 1, 2008. So hurry up.
**Amount must be $10,000.00 or less.
** Technically this should work, however results may vary by individual. Kirby Witmer is not responsible for any consequences which may arise, directly or indirectly, from using this recipe.

Sam Sethi over at Vecosys wrote a very interesting post today about some of his frustrations with Google products.

Lately I have been pondering whether to unsubscribe from Google’s products myself. Last year I wrote about why I was switching over to Google from Microsoft and now 6 months later it seems I am heading back to [some of] Microsoft’s products……..
……Maybe if Google’s engineers stopped wasting their 20% time on projects like Google Transit, Mars, Ride Finder etc. and focused on making their products more feature rich and functional then it would help all of us.

I agree. Cheese on the Moon isn’t very useful.

Scott Grieder, Ask.com Group Product Manager, was taking notes on an important conference call when his Google Pen ran out of ink without warning. The lapse in this fundamental Google product/service forced him to switch pens at a critical moment, resulting in considerable inconvenience and loss of data.

You gotta love the humor the guys at Ask have.

Philipp reports that Google Webmaster Tools can now display a list of external websites that link to your website. I’ve tried to use link:kirb.com on Google already but that is almost a joke. This is really a nice feature as I can see how many backlinks I have and when Google last checked the page for the backlink.

I knew for some time that if you entered a phone number into Google, it would display a name and address but I just discovered that you don’t need to know their phone number to find their address. Here is what Google’s Help says:

To find listings for a US residence, type any of the following combinations into the Google search box:

• first name (or first initial), last name, city (state is optional)
• first name (or first initial), last name, state
• first name (or first initial), last name, area code
• first name (or first initial), last name, zip code
• phone number, including area code
• last name, city, state
• last name, zip code

That’s just awesome! On a side note, Microsoft’s Live Local has a similar feature.

I’m trying to rename one of my Google Reader Tags, but I can’t find no place to do that. The only option I have found so far is to delete the tag, and create a new one, but then that means I have to add all my feeds to it again. Anybody have any other ideas?

I was just on the phone with Iomega Support this afternoon, and I was quite impressed. Short hold times, friendly and knowledgeable, no hassle, and they even speak clear English. I wish more companies like Google, HP, Dell, etc would improve their customer and technical support. I tend to not buy from companies that I know have lousy support even if they do have good products.

This is very interesting. If you download Adobe Flash Player, they want to bundle Yahoo Toolbar with it. If you download Adobe Reader 8, they want to bundle Google Toolbar with it. Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t need two toolbars. In fact I don’t need any toolbars.

Google has just released a new Google Talk version which supports Windows Vista. I wonder what really changed, because I ran the old version of Google Talk on Vista and I don’t recall any problems.

I backup my Quickbooks file to Gmail. It’s simple. Simply send a message to yourself with the Quickbooks backup file* attached. I also like to put Quickbooks Backup in the subject line so that you can easily find them later.

*your Quickbooks file has to be less than 10MB.  Now 20MB!