With Transformer being the hottest movie these days, here is one I saw on YouTube regarding a guy who build his own transformer robot. Pretty cool stuff!

Amazon is currently offering 50% off pre-order for both the home and professional edition.

Here is the description from Wikipedia:
Windows 7 Home Premium
This edition contains features aimed at the home market segment, such as Windows Media Center, Windows Aero and touch-screen controls.

Windows 7 Professional
This edition is targeted toward enthusiasts and small business users. It includes all the features of Windows 7 Home Premium, and adds the ability to participate in a Windows Server domain. Additional features include operating as a Remote Desktop server, location aware printing, Encrypting File System, Presentation Mode and Windows XP

You  can also download a RC version of Windows 7 here.  This version will work until March of 2010.   Windows 7 is receiving a much better review than the previous Windows Vista.

Sports Illustrated is currently offering free download version of 2009 Sports Illustrated Calendar on CNN’s website.  The download file is an executable file and after you install the application, it has a pre build default calendar.  However, you can also customize your calendar base on the model of your choosing.  I know we are in June and the year is half over.  Better late than never.

ValueMags is offering free two year subscription to Parents magazine.

Borders is among one of my favorite store. I love seating at the Seattle’s Best coffee whenever I need some quite time to finish up my work. They have been offering free 12 oz drink weekly. If you add seven days to the url you usually can get the next one that come out.

Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads in your life!

I am a firm believer financial knowledge plays a crucial part of a person’s life. With sound financial knowledge, a person can learn to live within his/her means and invest wisely. If everyone does that, we won’t be in the economic situation that we are currently in.

Of the different magazines, I frequently follow three of them: Forbes, Business Week and Economist. Although the stock tips within the magazines seems random at best, the magazines do provide a very good macro economic picture that points to the potential success and failures of industries. E.g. with the passage of Obama’s stimulus plan, one of the item was one billion dollar allocation for electronic health care system. Base on information like this, individuals can research and make better informed investments.

Here is a link to a free subscription to Forbes offered by Rewards Gold. (Rewards Gold requires you to answer a survey prior to receiving the free subscription.)

After coming back from vacation, the first thing I checked was my tax refund as I needed the tax refund to help paying for the vacation expense.  To my surprise, I actually had additional money refunded to me.

Puzzled by the extra money in my account, I decided to contact my accountant and see whether he can track down the reason behind it.  However, I wasn’t able to get a hold of my accountant until I called his office multiple times.  To make the long story short, instead of resolving the issue, my accountant told me that I should call the IRS and figure it out.  I had to suppress my anger at that moment to prevent myself from cussing him out.

As a result, I started contacting IRS regarding my tax return.  Growing up, I have heard many stories regarding how inefficient the IRS is.  However,  to my surprise, I didn’t have too much trouble getting a hold of a very friendly  IRS agent.  Even though she wasn’t able to give me a clear and define answer, she decided to mail me a transcript of all the transactions on my account for me to review.

This is the first year in which I decided I will not be frugal on tax returns and decided to look for an accountant.  Maybe it is a sign that some times it is REALLY better to be frugal and do things yourselves instead of paying someone else to do it for you.

McAfee is currently having a promotion on Amazon in which you can get a copy of McAfee VirusScan Plus 2009 3-User for free after rebate.  Personally I used McAfee a couple times in the past before and I don’t have any complaints.  Although there are better products out there, McAfee was sufficient and having free anti-virus program definitely beats not having anything at all.

Purchase needs to be made by: 6/30/09
Postmark by: 7/30/09

Just as a reminder, Father’s day is right around the corner.  You can also purchase some Amazon gift cards for Father’s day.

Even though I am not really a large fan of Facebook, I do agree that if done right the social networking site provides a tremendous amount of value for individual and company promotion.

Tonight at 9pm PST Facebook is introducing vanity urls.  What are vanity urls?  It means that instead of some random id, you can now have a page similar to facebook.com/yourname.  Just think about the possibility of indexing by the search engine if you can grab one of the more attractive names.

However, the sign up process is first come first serve so make sure you are ready to visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ when the clock strikes 9 pm PST.  (On a negative note, some journalist and Facebook employees already had the first chance to pick the names they like.)