Aside from knowing where to look for deals online, the biggest factor in getting a great price seems to be patience. Since I knew I would be purchasing a TV early this year, I started looking about 3 months ago. Prices have gone up and down, but I got a good feel for what is a good price and what isn’t. The easiest way of doing this is to find a product on Amazon.com, add it to your cart (or “save for later”), and check your cart every now and then. If a price has increased or decreased, you will be notified at the top of the cart page.

As for knowing where to shop, I used to rely on Froogle or PriceGrabber. However, just this week, I discovered a site that found a price that was $100 lower than any price I had seen for this TV: Bountii.com. Bountii only lists prices from reputable sellers and it lets you track price changes by RSS or email. But the real genius of the site is that it pays people to find the best deal. You can go to the “price hunt” page and if you find a better deal, they will pay you a small reward, or I suppose I should say “bounty” (between $4 and $8). While I haven’t been able to find any prices that beat theirs, it definitely gives people with time on their hands incentive to find the best deal which can be shared with others.

In the end, I got my Sharp Aquos TV from Dell and a 6′ 24AWG HDMI cable for less than $10 from Monoprice. In the coming weeks, I’ll be using Bountii to get the best deal on a Tivo HD.

This got me thinking about starting the habit of writing a daily (or at least semi-daily) journal again. Since I can type much faster than I can write longhand, I looked around for a program that would do this for me. In the end, I decided to go with something I already use every day: Gmail.

Gmail allows me to search and label every entry for easy access in the future. This also means that your personal musings are stored on Google’s servers, but that is up to you to decide if you are comfortable with it.

To set this up, I used Gmail plus-addressing, which lets you create unlimited personal email addresses by adding a plus sign (+) and text after your email username. Here is how I set it up in my Gmail account:

1. Create a new label called “Journal” (or whatever you’d like to call it)
2. Create a new Contact using a plus-address. I named the new contact “Journal” and set the email as username+journal@gmail.com.
3. Create a new filter. When To = username+journal@gmail.com then Archive it, Mark as read, and apply the label “Journal”

Now you’re ready to start journaling. Just compose a new message, set the “To” address to the “Journal” contact you created and type away. When you click “Send” it will not show up as new email but it will be listed under your “Journal” label. For the subject line, I’ve been using the journal entry date, but other suggestions are welcome (I’ve also added short descriptions in the subject like “Europe Trip” after the journal date).

Another great thing about Gmail labels is you can apply multiple labels to each journal entry. So if you are writing a vacation journal entry, you can apply another label, like “Travel,” and you can now easily search for just vacation journal entries by viewing those two tags.

The only thing left to do is to make journaling a habit.

1. Give in and take the DirecTV DVR (I refused this as a matter of principle)
2. Buy another DirecTV TiVo at Weaknees or eBay (over $150 to get what I have now)
3. Give up DirecTV entirely and get a standalone TiVo

After much contemplation, I went with a refurbished standalone TiVo for $50 and $13/month TiVo service. Paired with the basic, basic cable package from Comcast, I would be paying $40 less each month than I was with DirecTV. Sure, I’ll miss the excellent picture quality and the huge storage upgrade I had with my DirecTV TiVo, but now I’ll finally get to try some of the features that are only available on standalone TiVos, such as the Home Media Option and hopefully in the near future, Amazon Unbox on TiVo.

If you do not see a link on your account page, it seems like just viewing this link while signed in will activate the service on your account:
http://www.netflix.com/WatchNow

I had always heard disappointing reviews for both Comcast’s and DirecTV’s non-TiVo DVRs. After convincing my parents on the merits of a (free) DVR, I had the opportunity to try one out myself.

It should come as no surprise that it is quite inferior to TiVo. As I was using it, I kept saying to myself, “have the designers of this system ever USED a TiVo?” However, there are a few welcome features provided with the DirecTV DVR:

• A bar graph shows you what percentage of disk space you are using
• 100 hours of storage comes standard and like the DirecTV TiVo, it has dual tuners, s-video output and optical audio output
• Unwatched programs are marked as “new”

When using the DVR, the negative aspects stuck out more clearly:

• While in menus, the top half of the screen shows live TV or the currently-playing program–a waste of space.
• The remote: The “left” navigation button takes you back, sometimes. Other times you need to use the “back” button or the “exit” button. Ambiguous, multi-function color buttons.
• Non-intuitive interface: it took quite some time to figure out how to set up a “Series Link” (Season Pass). Tasks that should be simple take several steps to accomplish.
• Bugs abound: during the one week I used the system, it locked up twice and when trying to record a program, it simply told me that “the prioritizer is full.” Huh?

Any DVR is better than no DVR, but if you’ve ever owned, or used, a TiVo, it will be an exercise in frustration. So I will be sticking with my DirecTV TiVo until the Series3 drops below $800. Read a full comparison of the two systems.

The Internet is a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

It is a bit disturbing that these are the people writing legislation for the Internet.

Farecast’s price history chart: