thoughts.bjsintay.com

Some credit card rewards programs are lame.  Lame, lame, lame.  I found out that my business credit card (which sees a lot of use in monthly server and IT personnel expenses) is no different.  I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get a rebate or a “nice gift” from the massive amount of points I had built up at 1 point per dollar.  The most direct cash I could obtain was about $64 per 10,000 points in the form of a check or debit card.  This is pretty frustrating because high-dollar gifts such as a set of Bose speakers translate to around $100 per 10,000 points.  But cash, no.

So I dug around a little bit until I discovered a little hidden feature that allows one to convert the points into gift cards at the same exchange rate as the gifts.  So I cashed out a crapload of points on a fist full of $50 Williams-Sonoma cards (I figured anything higher would be hard to sell), and I’ve been selling them like hot cakes on eBay.  I chose that particular card because you can use it at Pottery Barn, among many other stores.  After selling/payment fees and profit “loss” on the card, I’m making about $90 per 10,000 points in cash.

Take that credit card companies.

OK - my laziness caught up with me.  I admit it.  Maybe you could call it neglect, I don’t know.  I just did not have updating WordPress, the software the runs this site, up high on my priority list of to-do’s.

I discovered that someone (probably a bot) decided to take-over pieces of the site.  I lost a post or two in the process and I also became the host of a large number of adult links.  This has all been undone (other than the content I lost) and WP has been upgraded to the new version.  Hopefully, I will take some interest in this or take it down in the future.

I’ve been wanting to have a place to put my thoughts, reviews, articles, etc. online without disrupting the flow of my blog on bjsintay.com that many of you visit.  That blog serves more as a journal and an update on my life in general, so here you will find random things much more often.  I hope you start coming here to read what I’m saying and that you start saying stuff back in the comments.  I’m (hush, hush!) not using SiteX for this site as I want to explore using another system and learn things that I like/dislike so I can improve the blogging abilities of SiteX.  So maybe this system will stay, and maybe it will go.