The Internet is a great money saver.  It’s a great place to find deals.  It’s an engine of the economy.  However, it also hurts companies that are charging too much for their goods if people are wise enough to look for deals.

One of the deals that you can find online is on eyeglasses.  All you need to do is to get your prescription and your Pupillary Distance (PD) and you can make any deal you want to get you the best price.  So what are optometrists doing?  They’re refusing to give you the information, or planning ways to charge you more or give you the wrong value just to keep their business.

I can understand self preservation.  They are making quite a margin on selling glasses frames, and if you can go online and get those same frames for much cheaper, then they aren’t making much money.

As a software developer who sees his trade going overseas at times, I get it.

However, that doesn’t mean that these optometrists should be withholding that information.  If they want to charge a fee to give it to you, fine: be upfront about it.

But the information should be relayed correctly and if they really want the business they should find some way to provide better service of differentiate themselves in other ways.  Like packaging, for instance.

And they should also remember that if they are going to be deceitful, it’s pretty easy to find another optometrist that will provide the information that they request!

I cannot wait.  My father recently purchased a computer to replace my sister’s current pc, and I’m getting her hand-me-down!  Why am I excited?  Because sometime last year I was able to get a 120-day evaluation copy of Windows Home Server, and I’ve been dying to try it out.  I just haven’t had a spare pc that met the minimum requirements.

Every home needs some sort of backup.  Computers will fail, they are subject to “the curse” as much as the rest of the world.  The question is, will you be prepared when they do?

For me, so far I’ve been blessed.  I’ve either upgraded, or have been able to get the stuff I’ve needed to off before a hard disk was unreadable.  I don’t believe I’ve ever lost anything, but with digital photography and more documents being written on computer, I’m now starting to wonder what I’d do in a fire.

Now, the most secure place to store your files in terms of location is to have some kind of Online Backup.  Online backup guarantees that you’ll have access to your files anywhere, and if something were to happen to your pc you’d be able to access the things that were important to you from another pc.

Online backups are great, especially for those of us with fast internet connection speeds—for you can be backed up in the background when you’re not using your computer.

IDrive has a full featured version giving you 2GB of space for free, and they bust that up to 150GB for $4.95/month.  That’s a small price to pay for peace of mind!

How are you backing up your computer?

Many of you are familiar with the standard online auction.  The seller places a item up for auction, he may or may not set a minimum price, and there’s a certain amount of time that the buyer has to place bids.  The highest bid wins the item, and a majority of the time the winning bid is placed within the last few seconds of the auction.

I’ve purchased everything from a MP3 player to borders for bedrooms on sites like this—most of the time you cannot beat the price.

A new player has entered the arena, however.  They’re called Bidray, and though most of the online auction rules are still in play, there are some significant differences.

First, the amounts.

If you’ve ever been in other auctions you know that you pick a maximum amount and then the system will auto bid in increments to up to that maximum bid.  With Bidray that’s different.  Each bid is for 0.01.  Yep—each bid is a penny.  But the trick is that each bid also costs the bidder $1.00.

So, it’s not to your advantage to bid multiple times on an item because of how much it will cost you, but the price of the item on sale will be significantly less than you would get it anywhere else.  That’s why this site is called a “Penny Auction Site.”

Next, shipping.

Shipping is always free!

And then, the time limit.

Sniping is an art-form.  There are programs out there to automatically submit bids at the end of an auction.  There are people that camp out on threads and discuss tactics.  With Bidray, the time is kept in a totally different way.

After each bid, a clock is reset to give someone else a chance to bid again.  The time can be anywhere between 1 and 20 minutes after the last bid, depending on the item, so you don’t have to worry about losing the item at the last second.

Last, charity.

A large portion of the revenue generated from Bidray is sent to the charity of the buyer’s choice.  This is a neat way of giving back.

So, if auctions interest you, or you’d like to see what kinds of things and prices they have, go check out Bidray!

Something you’ll want to think about, if you’re new to blogging or have been doing it for a while, is what you want to get out of blogging. There are many different things that can be rewards for running a good blog:

• Recognition: Yeah! I got my first comment that wasn’t mine!
• Friends: Where did you say you were from again?
• Enemies: Yes, I do believe that God created the earth, why do you ask?
• Money?

Yes, money is one thing that you can get out of a blog, but it’s a lot harder than it looks. For one thing, just about everyone has a book that will tell you how you can be a millionaire on the Internet– if you just get their book.

Another thing is market saturation. There are a lot of blogs out there– a lot that have been going longer than yours– and there are a lot of niches covered.

There are articles out there about the long tail– what it means and whether it’s actually dead. You could spend all your time researching what types of things are right for you.

Fortunately, I’ve done a series on what I’ve tried across my blogs, and though there may be some differences for you, perhaps I can help you find what’s worked for me and what hasn’t.

It starts with talking about Google AdSense, something that many blogs run, but they also don’t realize that they lack control of the ads. It may be something that you want to look into. My biggest money maker right now is PayPerPost, but that comes with its own ethical dilemmas.

Whatever you choose– know why you’re doing it (to pay for my hosting, etc.) and what your boundaries are. Most of all, remember to concentrate on the people that are on the other end of your blog rather than your ads.