Home Improvement Tool and Toy Reviews

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My name is Dan Masters and this is my personal blog to talk about anything and everything that I want.

Topics may range from the World Cup to what I ate for breakfast - you never know. I believe that everyone should have an outlet like this.

I have several other blogs that you may or may not be interested in that are more topic specific. They are -

• idano.net - Dan Masters on Blogging with WordPress
• The Masters Family - My family blog
• The Masters House - Blog about the home improvement projects done to my house
• The Abundant Life - Blog about a Christian prospective on life
• 30 Something Student - My Blog about going back to school for my degree at 30 Something

Anyway, thanks for stopping buy and drop me note if you would like.

P.S. If you use WordPress and like the theme of my web site you can pick up a free copy of it here. Cheers!

Well my subscription is officially canceled with a refund of $14.95 back to my PayPal account.

I have to say that the Valleyschag people are cool, real cool, this is why - they refunded my cash but they also responded to my previous post - Canceling My Subscription to Valleyschwag.

In their comment they apologized for my disappointment and emphasized their commitment to hard work for the customer. They also addressed my comment about getting a lot of Rubyred schwag - I was wrong. I guess their logo looks very similar to the Web 2.0 logo - Sorry guys.

I think their customer service is good and I think that it is important to any Web 2.0 company that they daily scan the blog scene to see what is being said about their company. Rubyred is doing that.

If they can keep the schwag following I have no doubt that they will be very successful.

Rubyred - I hope I am kicking myself a year from now for canceling my subscription.

Technorati : Internet Startup, Schwag, Silicone Valley, Valleyschwag, Valleyschwag Care Package

My many prayers have finally been answered in the form of Google Browser Sync.

Google has released a Firefox browser plug-in that allows you to sync your favorites, history, and other browser goodies between multiple computers.

This is for people like me that have a computer for work and one at home. No I can sync all of those cool research web sites (cough cough) that I find while at work with my computer at home.

Before this I was using toread to send myself an e-mail of the the link. Unfortunately though none of those links from e-mails have made it into my favorites.

But now I can just add it to my favorites and when I open the browser on the other computer it automatically adds it to that computer’s favorites. Cool.

Technorati : Firefox, Google, Google Browser Sync, toread

Over the weekend I checked back to see if EA games had posted a fix for the 1.3 patch that they released lately (See my post - EA Games and the Infamous 1.3 Update). Yet after 2 weeks still nothing from EA Games.

As a recap, the 1.3 update rendered the majority of paying customers in capable of playing Battlefield 2 online. The reason was terrible server performance resulting in a lot of lag. Because of the inability to play online I decided to explorer the single player portion of the game.

I had found a cool web site that several single player maps to download and install to make single player play bearable.

(more…)

As cool as of an idea as it is I was disappointed with my first Valleyschwag Care Package. The cause of my disappoint I think is based on the fact that Valleyschwag has become so successful so quick.

When I signed up I was expecting to get to get schwag from “The Companies” from around the valley but my package mostly consisted of schwag from Rubyred Labs. Now don’t get me wrong, the stuff was cool, but I just do not see how these guys are going to be able to pull it off month after month when they are relying on getting free schwag from companies to distribute.

The other thing that kind of irked me is that they want you to be come a Valleyschwag Deputy if you want to get the good stuff. Basically a deputy is a person that they feel stands out and so gets on the “the good list”. I think it would have been better to just send out the rare stuff randomly and let the “look what I got” posts come in naturally.

So for now I have fired off an e-mail on how to cancel. I have been charged for the the second month already so we will see how they handle that.

P.S. It seems that I am not the only one that was disappointed -

• Valleyschwag Review
• The ValleySchwag came…
• Valleyschwag - thoughts

P.P.S. - It really did not take long to find the posts above. There are more out there, I just wanted to have a good reference.

Technorati : Internet Startup, Schwag, Silicone Valley, Valleyschwag, Valleyschwag Care Package

I was awoken this morning at 6am by the constant barking of my neighbor’s dog. Trust me, this is not the first time this dog has gone on it’s lonely quest of the constant bark. No, this is a daily quest.

The worst part about this is that my neighbors are immune to the bark because they never tell the dog to shut up.

This puts my in an awkward place as a neighbor. Do I be a jerk and call the association or the police? Do I hose the dog down at will?

Not if I want to be at piece with my neighbor and their dog.

I have dealt with this issue effectively before at another house and will implement it again here. I will go to Walmart and by a $2 box of the Ol’Roy dog treats. Then every time he starts barking I tell will ssshhhhhh then when he does, through a treat or 2 over the fence.

Works like a charm.

Within a week their should be minimum barking.

Technorati : Barking Dog, Dog, Dog Treats, Dogs, Neighbor, Neighbor’s Dog

I came across this over on Google video and had to share.

Note - the voices can be a little annoying but it is still funny.

Battlefield 2 - The Pwned Life

Technorati : BF2, Battlefield 2, Google Video

I was really excited when Google Calendar came out until I tried using the notification feature. I was never able to get it to send the notification on time if at all to my Sprint phone even though I could get them from my BackPackit account.

With my switching to Netvibes they have a iCal function that can read the Google Calendar so I decided to try it again. Again I was not getting notifications so i did a search and found this post - Google Calendar reminders with Verizon phones.

Basically it allows you to send an e-mail through your GMail account to your phone instead of the SMS service. Nice.

So I set it up and all of a sudden I was getting 2 messages on my phone - 1 via email from my GMail account and the other via SMS from Google Calendar. For some reason Google Calendar decided to let SMS work for me.

I then tried disabling the e-mail notification and the SMS still worked - weird but cool.

What is even cooler is that you can add events to your calendar now via SMS. All you have to is text your event to 78368 - Dinner at 6:30pm on Saturday - and it will add it to your calendar and send you a confirmation.

I am happy now. I now have centralized calendar that I can use from my phone and computer that I can even see on my start page .

Technorati : Google, Google Calendar, SMS, Sprint

I really like this blog. The reason why is that I am not restricted to what I am to blog about.

That was the original intend of my idano.net blog but it has now been narrowed down to Blogging with WordPress. I also have 3 other blogs that are topic specific so I am restricted there to.

I think that if you blog you need to have at least one blog where you are just talking about whatever. That is what this blog is for.

Also, I have not put this blog on my hosting because I do not want to be bothered with plug-ins, performance, whatever. I just want to blog about anything that passes into my head.

So another words - Do not expect this Blog to be about anything in particular .

Technorati : Blog, Blogging, Movable Type, Personal Blog, WordPress