Something about Level Up from Cartoon Network just drew me and my kids in to watching the movie last fall and looking forward to the new series which starts tonight.
The premise behind Level Up is some high school MMO gamers accidentally open a portal which allows an evil sorcerer to send monsters into our world. There are all the gamer stereotypes and even in some cases the kids who make fun of gamers, but the show is light hearted and really fun. It is about people who have similar interests putting aside differences and teaming up to help send the monsters back into the game world.
My 8 year old and 5 year old must have watched the movie premiere 25 times since it aired and I did enjoy watching it with them. I hope the show continues to be creative and fun and look forward to it being one of our Tuesday night traditions that we watch together, Huzzah!
We needed to replace Star Wars: The Clone Wars which is ending soon and was another one of our shows we traditionally watched together.
I have been a member of the e-Rewards system for several years now and one thing that hasn’t changed much is the type of rewards you can apply for once you take enough survey’s to collect.
I particularly enjoyed some magazine subscriptions but several of them were no longer offered. I also exchanged my rewards for local Blockbuster store movie rentals but they removed that and put a $10 coupon for Blockbuster Express kiosks instead where there isn’t one close to my house.
e-Rewards has to be more like Swagbucks which had a vast partnership and offers rewards for everything from shopping to gift cards. Particularly Amazon.com gift cards or certificates would be of value to me because I can translate them into giveaways for my blog readers.
As far as I know, e-Rewards is still an invite only service and you have to be a member of a company which partners through them to get invited to partake in doing surveys for e-Rewards. You get far more dollars from e-Rewards surveys than anything else I have seen like Inbox Dollars, Swagbucks or any other I have tested.
But the rewards are only as good as the items you can cash them in for, and e-Rewards has frequent flier miles up the wazoo, but very few tangible rewards that interest me as a person.
Hopefully they will offer more valuable rewards too, I have been rejecting surveys lately only because there aren’t awards worth saving up for.
-Justin Germino
Swagbucks looks to be pretty interesting however and I know several people who already signed up and earned some Amazon gift cards as rewards. It does take a lot of points to get a gift card though and you don’t own them fast without making purchases. I do like however they have coupons where you can simply print out coupons for items you buy at the grocery store, not only do you get that .30 – $3.00 of the product you purchase but you also get an equal amount in Swagbucks as well. This is probably one of the most valuable category of rewards.
This is no false report, this 57,000 carat Emerald was found in Brazil and then sent to India to be cut. The emerald is to be auctioned off in British Columbia, Canada on January 28th where it is expected to fetch a 1.15 million dollar price.
We are talking about an emerald the size of a turtle shell, and this is just something you don’t see everyday. Though you couldn’t make any wearable jewelry out of this thing, imagine owning the largest emerald in the world? This would be one collector’s piece as rare as they come.
I love that I ordered my Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 6950 from Amazon on Wednesday and it arrived the next day with my free shipping from Amazon Prime. Seriously 1 day shipping for free as part of the Prime membership rocks.
The card was much longer than my GTX560 but fortunately I have a full size computer case, here are the two cards side by side.
When I put the new Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 6950 inside my case pretty much the video card (which has 3 fans on it) took up the entire slot and spanned all the way to my hard drive bays.
It booted up fine, drivers found and installed and Starcraft 2 loaded fine with Ultra settings and everything maxed out. It played flawlessly with no graphical glitches at all the moment I loaded it. This confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that my GTX 560 issues were specific to Starcraft 2 only.
It is a shame that I had to buy a replacement video card for 1 game, but in the end playing Starcraft 2 with my son was worth vesting in a replacement video card. Does this make me an ATI/AMD fan over Nvidia in the graphic card space? Maybe.
This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Walgreens for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
There is always room to save money in the prescription drug department where non-generic medicines can really put a dent in your budget or worse in some cases. Walgreens is now offering their Walgreens Prescription Savings Club which allows members to save with discounts off of prescriptions filled at the Walgreens pharmacy.
I did some test examples of some common prescriptions, like Proair which is used periodically for Asthma attacks for example.
On the Walgreens drug pricing page you can compare the prices of various drugs and it shows you what the price would be without and with the prescription plan. For PROAIR the price is around $6 less and if you fill it 3 times per year it would save you $22.80 for this single prescription.
Note, that the Walgreens Prescription Savings Club costs only $10 per year for families or $5 per year for individuals. So by filling just 1 or 2 prescriptions the plan pays for itself, in most cases within the first month of joining the plan.
Here is something else, not only do you cover your spouse and kids, but pet prescriptions are covered by the plan as well. If you have a sick pet or a pet that needs prescription medication this plan can save you quite a bit of money. Even if you have group based health insurance from a company you may not have prescription coverage for pets, so this could be worth joining.
More than 8,000 brand name and generic drugs are covered by the Walgreens Prescription Savings Club and you can start saving on your next refill or new prescription fill by joining today.
Foam playgrounds for children can be very beneficial. Usually when an accident happens outdoors it happens on the playground. Children are going to be children and that means rough housing and playing hard. Close to 31% of children’s injuries each year occur in public parks; almost 10% occur in commercial children care centers while 15% occur in other public play areas. A foam playground not only guarantees that the number of skinned knees will be diminished but also that the chances of children playing indoors can also be higher.
Foam playgrounds can be more than a mat which lays over the topsoil or the asphalt. There are many types of safety foam which can help secure a safe environment for your children’s playtime. There are 45 degree edge padding, self supporting edge foam, basic edge padding, and space filling foam padding, corner padding, post foam, sharp edge padding, heavy duty padding and solid round foam padding. With most of your accidents happening on the end of a slide, padding makes landing safe for children as they slide down the classic metal ramp.
Another heavy accident area is around the swings and the monkey bars. Anytime a child climbs or swings they run the chance of injuring themselves. Safety foam decreases these chances drastically. It is also not an expensive material to install in your public parks and places of recreation. The argument has always been that children just require more supervision but that seriously cannot be the only case. If anything, safety foam helps adults with their supervision of children when they know that if they don’t land on their two feet that their knees will be just fine.
Foam playgrounds can be more than just the base of a playground, there is also foam equipment. Huge jungle gyms made of foam or large indoor or outdoor mazes for children to climb through. Most day cares, preschools as well as public fast food restaurants utilize this material in their playpens. It has fast become a cheap and easy way to replace expensive equipment while still maintaining the occupying fun which children’s playgrounds should have.
Safety foam is also better than most hard or soft plastics and safer than metal. It doesn’t heat in the summer or grow cold in the winter. Safety foam maintains a standard temperature year round. It is also easy to install along the ground as well construct if you are using the foam based equipment. In today’s age can you really place a price on your children’s safety anyway?
Mark Gregory recommends Smith Brothers, who have been providing services to the manufacturing and engineering industries for over 24 years. They offer a number of services, including Playground Mats and Safety Mats.
I was incredibly dismayed when I finally went to play Starcraft 2 with my boy last night only to find that my graphics drivers were completely unstable on Starcraft 2. I don’t remember if I had played SC2 before on my new PC but there were graphical glitches and my screen would fade to black almost instantly after the game loaded.
I tried reducing video settings in between screen crashes, but it failed to resolve anything. I updated to the latest stable drivers 285.58 and this still failed to resolve anything. I then updated to the latest beta drivers 290.53 and nothing, nothing makes Starcraft 2 work with the Nvidia Geforce 560 graphics card I have in my system.
I then decided to roll back to the earliest drivers, v275.33 was the oldest drivers it would let me install for the Geforce 560 video card in my system. I tried 266.58 which was mentioned in a Starcraft 2 forum but these drivers wouldn’t recognize my card and therefore I couldn’t install them.
This issue apparently is documented in the forums and there is no resolution or suggestion that I found works.
No other game has given me trouble with my Nvidia Geforce 560 but apparently this is just one game with an issue. I am left with 2 options at this point, never playing Starcraft 2 again until magically Blizzard or Nvidia releases a fix or buying an ATI 6950 card to replace my Geforce 560, this card I have read has 0 issues with Starcraft 2 and was around the same price.
The odd thing is on Nvidia’s own page to show which games work with the Video Card they list the following:
The show that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 was tested and working with Starcraft 2 with Driver version 266.58. However when I tried to download and back out to this driver version, the drivers said my video card was not supported, I was unable to back out to this driver version.
A few weeks ago my wife and I watched the movie Fat, Sick and Nearly dead and the movie has inspired me to purchase a new juicer after my old one had to be tossed. (It had 11 years of use before having to be discarded).
The movie is about a man who has so many health problems after becoming obese that he decides to go on a 60 day juice fast to get his health back and document his journey while traveling across America. It is an inspiring movie and shows that all it takes is some serious dedication to health to get it under control, it also shows how most people are well aware of what they need to do to be healthy but admit that we don’t have the willpower to do what it takes to be fit and avoid the bad foods we crave so much.
Here is the trailer from the film Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.
So I have been inspired and am saving up for a Juicer, but not just any juicer I did some research and this is the Juicer I have decided to buy when I save up.
[easyazon-link asin=”B000QBFFU8″]Breville BJE510XL Ikon 900-Watt Variable-Speed Juice Extractor[/easyazon-link]
This juicer has an overwhelming majority of 5 star ratings (330) and leaves less wet pulp and is quieter than most other juices. My old juicer was a Juiceman Jr. from way back in the day and it worked but a lot of moisture was left in the pulp and it was a pain to clean.
I don’t intend to get as intense as Joe Cross did in Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. Instead of doing a 60 day juice fast as he did which is extreme, I plan on doing a 1 week 7 day juice fast to start with. Then I plan on replacing 1 meal a day (lunch mostly) with a fruit/vegetable juice. I am looking to improve my own health and lose about 10-15 pounds and hoping I will gain more energy and feel better.
Also in the film, Joe eliminated all coffee and caffeine for the 60 days, I won’t be able to do this and still intend to drink coffee, just doing away with solid foods for 7 days while I am on this liquid diet.
I intend to chronicle it here on my personal blog day by day to share my experiences with the fast. Probably will be done sometime in February, maybe starting the 26th.
I am finding good value in leveraging JustRetweet for sharing key articles on Twitter lately. The service which you join and earn credits by sharing other’s articles (or buying them) let’s you create specific tweets that you want others to share and pay them credits to share.
So with JustRetweet you create a tweet that you want others to share, you then set a value of how much you will pay others (in credits) to share that Tweet and the maximum budget you allocate to that message.
You can also set the minimum number of followers a user must have in order to share your message, this prevents you from losing credits to Twitter accounts with such small networks they provide little value. I usually use 100 members as a good rule of thumb, when JustRetweet has a much larger user base I may increase this some.
Now, JustRetweet does get me traffic I can honestly tell you I have confirmed at least 2 sales of the WordPress Formidable Pro plugin as a direct result of JustRetweet shares. This was $22.20 in earnings from not paying anything just building a message for others to share and I am barely tapping the system to it’s potential.
We are all looking at getting a little extra promotion for some of our top articles, contests and maybe some affiliate links. JustRetweet is an ideal way to tap into some extra traffic and attention for your top articles.
I found it so valuable I put money into the system to buy credits and earned my money back within just a few weeks.
My recommendation for pricing your messages:
75+ credits if you want everyone in the system to notice it and promote it (as long as it is a good quality message or landing page)
50+ credits if you want a lot of people to take it and promote it.
25+ credits if you want a larger audience share but spaces out about 2-3 shares per day average from what I see
10+ credits if you want an occasional share.
Have you tried JustRetweet yet? I like it better than the former Retweet.it service I was using.
Tonight Razer one of my favorite local Arizona rock bands will be playing at the Roxy Lounge in Scottsdale, AZ.
My wife and I will be there and we rarely ever miss a Razer show, their music is great and I am partial to songs like Do You Want It and Cold War, but their cover of When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin is better than the original in my opinion.
If you live in AZ and don’t have plans tonight, find a sitter and head over to the Roxy Lounge to see Razer live. Feel free to check in with Foursquare as I will and I will chat if any of my blogging fans show up.
