Well, my blog has still very few updates. I will be gone until the end of July. Right now I am sitting in an internet cafe at my hotel in Petra, Jordan.

If you want to read more, go check out neilgalloway.com where I am updating more often with postings for friends and family.

I will, of course, write some more extensive articles on my travel experiences over here when I get back.

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If you are wondering why I haven't posted much recently, I am in Cairo, Egypt right now on a month long tour from cairo and eventually ending up in Istanbul, Turkey.

I wrote about the trip a few months ago in a blog entry (just search for Egypt). It has been pretty good so far, but I just arrived. It is rather hot and the sun is pretty intense, but still enjoyable.

Be prepared to deal with lots of touts (people trying to get your business for their hotel/tour) and baksheesh (tipping for basically everything).

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I am a huge Damien Rice fan, but I recently listened to some music by David Ford that is very similar and sounds awesome. If you like Damien, you will definitely like this guy.

He is coming out with a new album called Songs From the Road. You can check out some of his music on YouTube as well. I have embedded one of his videos below.

I haven't gone through all the songs yet, just the ones I can find online. I will definitely be picking up this album though.

Here is the music video. Notice he plays all 4 parts. Apparently they recorded it on the first take for all 4 parts.

Here is the embedded player for the playlist I found on YouTube.

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I recently had the error "iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode - Use iTunes to restore" whenever I would try to synch my iPod. It was driving me nuts. And even when I would restore it, I would get the same error continually. The message wouldn't go away.

After reading some different articles, including this iPod Recovery Mode on from Apple, I found a solution.

I had a USB card reader for my SD card that was causing some errors. I pulled out the card reader and rebooted my laptop. Afterwards, everything was fine. I still had to recover my iPod, but it synched everything back on and worked just like befoer.

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A friend of mine the other day had their hard drive approaching death. It was grinding away and had a number of errors occurring. It was time to replace it.

After picking up a hard drive that was almost double the size, he gave it to me as I offered to install it.

There are two main things you need to do when upgrading or replacing your hard drive:

• Installing the drive.
• Copy over your data.

Installing the drive is the easy part. Just open up the case, find a spot that is available and the data and power cables can reach the drive from there. Plug everything in, turn on the computer and make sure it can detect the drive.

Duplicating Data From Hard Drive to Hard Drive

I had done this a few times before with Norton Ghost, but I couldn't find a trial copy that would let me do it. It was time to look for something else.

I ended up downloading the basic version of HDClone. A free piece of software that does the trick.

Basically, you just download it and unzip it. There is an executable in the folder that when you run it, lets you create a floppy boot disk with the right programs on it.

I created my boot disk, put it in the PC I wanted to dupe the drive on and started it up. It brings you into the duplication program and after that it is just simple. Pick your source drive, your target drive, select the default options, and let it run.

When you are done, it will have duplicated the drive image onto your new drive.

When I started up the computer again, everything was like it was before. Unfortunately, the drive size was the same, even though the new drive had a much larger capacity. I then went in and created a new partition for the remainder of the drive and gave it a drive letter.

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May 2008 has come and past and another month of earnings is in the books. Another record for Adsense I might add.

Thoughts From My Life Traffic Stats for May 2008

May's numbers and April's numbers are in brackets.

This month was a record for almost every metric. Way more traffic and it was very consistent across the month. Kind of strange as I didn't write as much this month but traffic picked up for my usual articles.

Thoughts From My Life Revenue

Overall, my earnings for May 2008 were $290.09. Here is the breakdown with last month's numbers in brackets.

• PayU2Blog: $95.00 ($65.00)
• Adsense: $168.77 ($135.14)
• Kontera: $26.32 ($29.69)
• LinkWorth: $0 ($10.50)
• Azoogle: $0.00 ($0.00)
• Commission Junction: $0.00 ($0.00)

My Adsense set a new record. It just keeps going up on the increased traffic to my old faithful articles.

It has been an excellent month for traffic and revenues overall. Especially considering my minimal effort in creating new articles. I pushed out a couple a week, but not the normal 5 a week I had been doing. I'm glad to see the passive income of Adsense is picking up.

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Well, the suite is rented so that is exciting! We are going to scramble and try to get a few renos done while we have the opportunity as well. One of the rooms doesn't have a closet and definitely has enough room for it, so I will see if I can get one done. Would also like a more durable coat rack and shelf in the entrance.

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Sorry for not posting in awhile. It has been busy and I have been lazy as well. The most recent turn of events is that our tenants downstairs are leaving so I have posted an ad to rent it out again.

It is actually a pretty sweet little location. Bus stop out front, newly renovated, two bedroom, 1000 square feet, laundry, large backyard, tons of parking, utilities are included, and the internet is included as well. Don't really need to do anything other than hook up the phone.

Hopefully it goes well. We just did some showings today and hopefully do more going into the weekend. Here are a few pics below. We are located in Ogden along a major bus route that goes downtown and we are only a 7 minute drive east of Chinook Centre. If you know anyone interested you can get a hold of me through the Contact Page.

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I have had a few people write me concerning my articles on Aeroplan and Airmiles, asking how I created my formulas for figuring out how much money you would need to put through your credit card to get back the annual fee for the credit card. This only works for cards that have a reward feature like airmiles, aeroplan points, or some other reward points.

I will try and get a baseline value for each type of reward point on each card and keep it in a table on this page (see below). If you want me to look at a card, let me know the name of it and I will look up the details.

This page will have 3 sections.

1. Show how I create my formula for how much money you need to spend on a credit card to pay for the fees.
2. List the formula for major cards.
3. Use one of the reward items available for each card to figure out an exact value for how much money needs to go through the card to pay for itself for that reward item. I'll try to stick to gift cards since the value is fixed (i.e. $20 gift card) and is subject to change like airfare is.

The reason I give you the formula and my estimation is that every reward is different and can give you a different value to your points. Depending on what you use your card for, it can really change how much you are getting out of each point. Movie tickets give you more than a gift card for example. But who is going to want to use all their points on movie tickets.

Creating A Credit Card Formula

There are two pieces of information you need to know when figuring this out.

• The annual fee for the credit card (i.e. $29/year).
• The rate at which reward points are accumulated (i.e. 1 Aeroplan point per every $2 spent).

I will show formulas with the following variables:

• PointsEarned: The number of reward points we can get from spending money.
• MoneySpent: How much money we put through the credit card.
• EarningRate: How quickly we can earn reward points. This should be expressed as points per dollar. If you earn 1 point for every $2 spent, then it is written as 1/2. You could also say 1 divided by 2.
• PerPointValue: How much each point is worth if we used it to buy something. This is a dollar value. If a 2 for 1 movie pass is 25 points and it saves as $10 because that is the cost of a movie ticket, then each point is worth 40 cents. 25 points x 40 cents/cent = $10. So $0.40 would be our PerPointValue.
• CardFee: The annual fee to own the card (i.e. $29/year).

How Many Points Do You Earn Formula

The first concept we need to know is that if we spend a certain amount of money, we receive a certain number of reward points.

PointsEarned = MoneySpent x EarningRate

How Much Do You Need To Spend To Recover the Fee Formula

The second concept is that we want to spend enough money on the card to at least cover the fee we paid to have the card. So we put the CardFee on one side of the formula and the other side of the formula is our calculation for dollar value of our accumulated points.

CardFee = PointsEarned x PerPointValue

Combining Formulas

The next step is to substitute our PointsEarned value in our second formula with the formula for PointsEarned we created in our first formula. Our equation now looks like this:

CardFee = MoneySpent X EarningRate X PerPointValue

What I am interested in is the MoneySpent value so if we divide both sides by EarningRate and PerPointValue, we end up with:

CardFee / (EarningRate X PerPointValue) = MoneySpent

Re-arranged again.

MoneySpent = CardFee / (EarningRate X PerPointValue)

In words: The money you would need to spend is the card's annual fee divided by the point earning rate and then divide that whole number by the value per point.

Example

I have a BMO Gold Mosaik Mastercard. The annual fee is $90 and I will receive 1 Air Mile for every $15 I put on the card. I can get a $20 gift certificate for Shell gas stations for 175 Air Miles. That means each Air Mile is worth 11.4 cents. So my variables are:

CardFee = $90
EarningRate = 1/15 or 0.06666666
PerPointValue = $20/175 or $0.114

The formula is:

MoneySpent = $90 / (0.066666666 x $0.114) = $11,842

Wow, I would have to spend $11,842 on my mastercard just to get back the fee I paid for it if I was going to use the miles for the gift card at Shell.

Keep in mind that this is for the Shell gift card reward. Other rewards give you move value for your points (movies, airfare, theatre tickets, etc).

Since the value of your point can change based on your use, I usually leave this part of the formula as a variable so you can plug in whatever you want:

MoneySpent = CardFee / (EarningRate X PerPointValue) = ($90 / 0.0666666666) / PerPointValue

MoneySpent = $1350 / PerPointValue

Just plug whatever you think it is worth in there and then you can get how much you need to spend to recover your annual fee value in points.

Formulas for Various Credit Cards

Using the same method I did in my above example, I have made formulas for the various cards. Just plug in how much you think a reward point for your card is worth and it should give you a number. As a hint...Airmiles PerPointValues I use are between 13 cents and 45 cents. Aeroplan PerPointValues can be between 1 cent and 3.5 cents. I know the range is big, but it really depends on what you use your points for.

I am also including cards that do cash back or have no fees just to keep the information filled out.

Note: If you want me to add a card, just post a comment and I will add it (and email you if you leave your address).

Is The Credit Card Fee Worth It?

Listed below are some major credits cards and how much money you would need to put through the card if you were going to at least get back the value of the fee you paid for the given reward.

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I unfortunately broke a piece of the tailpiece off on my mandolin the other day. I was restringing it and was putting on some old strings (they hadn't been used) I purchased a few years ago. I don't know if that was the problem or not, but one the little pegs in the tailpiece that the eye of the string holds onto snapped off.

I didn't know what to do, so I phoned around to a number of places in Calgary and no one wanted to deal with it. Replacement tailpieces were selling upwards of $100 on eBay so that didn't look very good either.

I ended up phoning Long & McQuade here in Calgary (Calgary Long & McQuade) and they said to bring it by and they would take a look. Anyhow, I walked in and they have a replacement tailpiece of the exact same shape and size for $20. I couldn't believe my luck. It was the same size as my original so I could use my Kentucky tailpiece cover on it as well. It wasn't even stored in the back. It was a plastic wrapped item on a display shelf.

I own a Kentucky KM200S teardrop style mandolin. I purchased it back around 1995 or so. It is a pretty nice little instrument so I want to keep it in good repair.

Replacing A Mandolin Tailpiece

Replacing it is really simple:

1. Remove the cover of the tailpiece.
2. Remove any strings connected to the tailpiece. Either remove them from the Mandolin completely or loosen them enough that you can slip the string eyelets off of the tailpiece pins.
3. Remove the screw for the knob you connect your strap to.
4. Remove the 3 screws holding the tailpiece onto the bottom of the mandolin.
5. Hold the new tailpiece in place where the old one was. The angle of the mandolin tailpiece might not quite be right, so bend it a little so that it is touching flat on the bottom side of the mandolin and the on the top.
6. My old tailpiece had a piece of felt along the edge that the strings dug into, but the new one didn't have this. I removed the felt and superglued it onto the new tailpiece.
7. Replace the 3 screws to hold the taipiece on.
8. Replace the strap knob and screw.
9. String up your guitar and put your tailpiece cover back on.

Overall, it was super simple, only cost me $20, took half and hour of work including the restringing, and I was able to keep on my original tailpiece cover.

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