Save Money- Canceling Credit Cards

With the average American having eight credit cards in their wallets at a time, you might think it’s OK to have stacks of plastic. Also, you’ll always hear people saying that canceling unused cards will lower your FICO, but they’re not giving the full story. Thirty percent of your FICO is calculated using a ratio of your total statement balances divided by all your credit limits. If too high (you’re near maxed-out on all cards), your FICO drops because you’re at risk of going bankrupt. Still more, having an excess of unused credit cards lowers your FICO, too. The happy medium is to have sufficient credit limit to have a statement you can pay off in total every month that gives you a good ratio of “≤30%”:http://credit.about.com/b/a/000019.htm. These four articles give the skinny on “what to watch out for”:http://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2004/08/30/beware-of-canceling-credit-cards.aspx, “good reasons to cancel”:http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/credit/2004/05/18/dump-your-duds.aspx, “how to cancel”:http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/20020102a.asp, and “getting that FICO up”:http://biz.yahoo.com/pfg/e35score/art021.html.
Check out “other ways”:http://duenos.net/category/money/ to save money –a topic I am madly in love with.

The First Website Ever

I was reading up on “CERN”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN and found out that they had developed the “World Wide Web”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web (then abbreviated W3). CERN translated, by the way, is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and is most famous for its particle accelerators that encircle part of the France-Switzerland border. They’ve also made “anti-matter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, though the “first internet site ever”:http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html isn’t as exciting as, say “duenos.net”:www.duenos.net, it does provide a nostalgic glimpse into the past.

Powdered Alcohol

Dutch students over at “Helicon Vocational Institute”:http://www.helicon.nl/content.jsp?objectid=12290 have invented a powdered alcoholic drink mix for a final school project. Since it’s in powdered form, it circumvents prohibitive tax and age-limit laws and therefore can be lawfully sold to minors. These Dutch students are quite the entrepreneurs, I guess. In case you’re curious, this powered mix is most likely an “anhydrous”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhydrous mix with a touch of lime. Yummy! I found this article through the “oddly enough blog”:http://blogs.reuters.com/category/themes/oddly-enough/ through “Reuters.com”:http://www.reuters.com. Read “this article”:http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSPAR64994620070606 for more specific information.

X-rated Illinois Towns

Earlier I eagerly cataloged all of the “X-rated Kentucky Towns”:http://duenos.net/article/280/XRatedKentuckyTowns using “Piddleport.com”:www.piddleport.com, I think it’s time to be fair and detail Illinois’ towns. This time, I plan to include any funny name, but with a focus on perversion since we all know how nice it is to snicker. And the list for IL is: 3 Beaver Creeks and a few Beavervilles, Bush, Hicks Corner (sorry, really struggling here), Kickapoo (thanks Melissa), Licking, Moonshine, Reddick, Roaches, Round Knob, Utopia, Woody, and Yellow Creek. Well, we can all agree that that was a helluva lot more boring than Kentucky’s pervy towns, but at least we now know and can go back to our normal lives. Keep an eye out for more, hopefully it’ll be a lot better.

Save Money – AmEx Mortgage Rewards


For the first time ever, credit card mogul “American Express”:www.americanexpress.com offers a card that can be used to pay a mortgage while earning points. However, this credit card can only be used with mortgages through “American Home Mortgage”:https://www.americanhm.com/ or “IndyMac Bank”:http://www.indymac.com/, at least for now. With a start-up/membership fee of $395, you’re on your way to start earning, if you’re super careful, I suppose. I caught wind of this news from the “Wall Street Journal’s”:ttp://online.wsj.com/public/us “podcast”:http://feeds.wsjonline.com/wsj/podcast_wall_street_journal_this_morning, but there is also a great “CNNMoney.com”:http://money.cnn.com/index.html “article”:http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/23/pf/amex_mortgage_charge/index.htm?postversion=2007052314 on it as well. Wanna start racking up those points? Unfortunately, this is by invitation only for now and’ll probably be for a while until or if it’s proven successful. Having trouble with credit card debt? “Start here”:http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/creditcarddebt/Credit_Card_Debt.htm for a butt load of useful information.
Check other “duenos”:www.duenos.net ways to “save money”:http://duenos.net/category/money/.

Threadless T-Shirt design

Hey everyone. I’m still traveling around Europe, mostly without internet access. Still, I’d like to ask anyone who reads this website to go to my friend’s submission at “Threadless.com”:http://www.threadless.com/submission/120749/Avian_Flew and vote for it. If you didn’t know, Threadless is a t-shirt site that prints and sells more artsy t-shirts that are über-popular. I’m in Germany now so the keyboard actually has an “ü” button! Threadless tees have been featured everywhere, most famously on Zach Braff in “Scrubs”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0285403/.
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Wheel of Time Series Encyclopedia

Though this is not an imitation site of “Wikipedia”:www.wikipedia.org like “Wookieepedia”:http://duenos.net/article/267/WookieepediatheStarWarswiki or “Conservapedia”:http://duenos.net/article/261/MoveOverWikipedia, the “Wheel of Time Encyclopedia”:http://encyclopaedia-wot.org is an equally vast cornecopia of information in a similar format. As I am a fan of “Robert Jordan’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jordan “Wheel of Time”:http://www.tor.com/jordan/ series, I understand how hard it is to keep up with everything. This crafty site has assembled information on all of the “characters”:http://encyclopaedia-wot.org:8008/characters/index.html, “chapter-by-chapter summaries”:http://encyclopaedia-wot.org:8008/books/index.html, and even an “inventory on all items”:http://encyclopaedia-wot.org:8008/items/index.html in the books. Though this site isn’t really that useful to you if you haven’t started the series, it’s a good resource for all those out there who have. I highly recommend reading these books, but fair warning, Robert Jordan has been diagnosed with “cardiac amyloidosis”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_amyloidosis which might not give him enough time to finish the 12 book series that began in 1990. However, he is posting encouraging monthly status reports at his “official blog”:http://www.dragonmount.com/RobertJordan/ that everything is on schedule.

Last.fm sold to CBS

I absolutely love when ingenious yet simple ideas garner mega-millions from big corporations. Today’s news brought another such story: CBS purchased Last.fm, the musical social networking megasite, for a sweet sum of $240 million dollars. Fortunately for everyone who loves the site, Last.fm will retain its autonomy, and the creators argue that being owned by CBS will allow them additional resources to improve the site.

Hopefully, we will see some better results with this transaction than we did with the “sale”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameFAQs#CNET_acquisition of the best video game site on the internet, “GameFAQs”:http://www.gamefaqs.com, to “C|Net”:http://www.cnet.com.

Puppy War


Move over “cuteoverload”:http://cuteoverload.com, this site might just have you beat. In the spirit of “ratemyeverything.com”:http://ratemyeverything.com, “Puppy War”:http://puppywar.com/ pits puppy against puppy in a battle for overall cuteness. It really is amazing that people have this much time on their hands. Come to think of it, I’ve already given this entry too much thought. Go to the “site”:http://puppywar.com/ and enjoy.