The other day someone at the grocery store commented on my kids, visited a bit about how their son had the mister mom experience, they then said they may have a business venture I may be interested in and wanted to e-mail me some videos. I figured I may as well listen in case it was actually a good thing, but the first red flag went up when they wouldn't tell me more. In my experience that means they don't have the salesman skills to make what they are selling sound as good enough. That usually means the product isn't good, if it can only be sold by expert salesmen.
They sent me a link to a video and first thing I noticed is it's a pyramid scheme. You work with "team members" trying to get them to sell for you so you can reap the rewards of their efforts selling something nobody's heard of. Often these products rely on the fact that you haven't heard of them, otherwise people wouldn't pay for them.
I told them I wanted to research it on my own and they sent another video and said they'd call after I watched it. Instead I spent the time asking Google. I couldn't find much that actually told about the product. That says to me there are a lot of marketers working full time on making it look good (like members of a pyramid scheme).
Most of the information I found was people talking about how great the product was, but there were more red flags. Many of these promotions accused people of being closed minded to the evidence about the product. Many more complained about the bogus products giving their legitimate product a bad name. Both of these are what are called logical fallacies. Comments intended to sound logical but have no real meaning.
I finally found a question on www.answers.com asking about the product. A few more interesting facts came forward here. First, it's not tested by the EPA to prove it actually works, just tested to see if it's safe. Also it isn't sold in actual stores. Stores that have to uphold their reputation and can't afford to sell products that don't work.
When I did find numbers that show it didn't work the pro XFT distributors replied saying "The results will be completely different based on driving habits" or "you have to use it for 3,000 miles to get best results." Then they promise a 30 day money back guarantee. How are you going to test it in only 30 days if you have to drive 3000 miles to get the best results?
They also said I will save about $20 per gas tank. I currently spend about $40 a tank, their product costs $5 a treatment, so I'd drop to $15. That's close to a third of the cost. So that means this product is supposed to triple my gas mileage just by adding 1/4 ounce of their product to my tank. I say it isn't possible.
I looked up how it worked and they said it uses an "organo metallic catalyst" to atomize your fuel, making it burn faster and more completely. Organometallic means they have metal in their additive. I can only see metal additives leaving deposits and shortening my engine's life.
About the faster burning fuel they said "XFT makes even low grade fuel behave like high-quality or premium fuels, eliminating the need for higher octane or other more expensive fuel." This is completely false. Higher octane fuel means it burns slower, so they are lowering the octane rating. This is detrimental for an engine! It can cause premature ignition of the fuel and will shorten your engine's life.
You may wonder why I took the time to write all this for a product that doesn't work. First, I wanted to say I gave it a fair chance to prove itself. Second, I'm hoping somebody who is researching Xtreme Fuel Treatment finds this post and realizes that it is yet another scam.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Diesel for all five senses!
Note to self: I need to figure out how to make this thing stop saying my wife is posting everything.
Our 1998 Ford Explorer got it's gas tank filled with diesel. It wasn't me, but I was tasked with fixing it. By time I got it fixed I was very soaked in Diesel.
I was told it had an anti siphon feature so I couldn't siphon the diesel out of the tank, so I first looked into disconnecting the fuel line and using the fuel pump to pump the diesel out. Well the directions I found online didn't fit this Explorer (even though he said he was working on the same model) but it did seem like all you'd need to do is turn the key on. I jacked the vehicle up so I could get to the fuel tank and found there wasn't much room under there. I tried taking off the hose clamps on the back of the tank but they were either too rusted or designed to not be removed easily, so I did some more researching. I found a story online about a guy who was trying to train the fuel tank and somebody commented that you can get a siphon tube in the tank, it would just be a little difficult.
It took a lot of pushing but I did manage to get a piece of garden hose to reach the fuel in the tank. I only got about 14 gallons siphoned out, with maybe a gallon spilled on me. I decided to try filling it up with gas and see if it ran. It didn't at first but after a bit of cranking it started running roughly. After a few more minutes it was idling normal, so I think the problem has been solved.
Our 1998 Ford Explorer got it's gas tank filled with diesel. It wasn't me, but I was tasked with fixing it. By time I got it fixed I was very soaked in Diesel.
I was told it had an anti siphon feature so I couldn't siphon the diesel out of the tank, so I first looked into disconnecting the fuel line and using the fuel pump to pump the diesel out. Well the directions I found online didn't fit this Explorer (even though he said he was working on the same model) but it did seem like all you'd need to do is turn the key on. I jacked the vehicle up so I could get to the fuel tank and found there wasn't much room under there. I tried taking off the hose clamps on the back of the tank but they were either too rusted or designed to not be removed easily, so I did some more researching. I found a story online about a guy who was trying to train the fuel tank and somebody commented that you can get a siphon tube in the tank, it would just be a little difficult.
It took a lot of pushing but I did manage to get a piece of garden hose to reach the fuel in the tank. I only got about 14 gallons siphoned out, with maybe a gallon spilled on me. I decided to try filling it up with gas and see if it ran. It didn't at first but after a bit of cranking it started running roughly. After a few more minutes it was idling normal, so I think the problem has been solved.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Movie Review - Hero
My wife rented Jet Li's movie, Hero the other day from the Library as something to watch. She said she didn't remember much about it except that color played an important part in the movie. (She's a professional illustrator). I vaguely remembered watching part of it many years ago, but it didn't make sense to me at the time.
We finally got to sit down and watch it due to a passing thunderstorm. My initial response is this: It's good but had a few things that should've been left out.
As with many movies these days, directors like to push the line with what is appropriate. This is one of them, part of why the movie earns it's PG-13 rating. For this reason I won't own it, and for this reason it's down in the "Good" category. If it weren't for that it easily jump up to "Better" status.
But besides that, the story was really good and very interesting I think. As with many of the oriental style movies, the story dives deep into ideas such as war, honor, and where true happiness can be found. It definitely gave me subjects to think about and discuss. If you liked it I wouldn't mind hearing your comments on it. Especially how you think the colors influence the feelings in the show.
We finally got to sit down and watch it due to a passing thunderstorm. My initial response is this: It's good but had a few things that should've been left out.
As with many movies these days, directors like to push the line with what is appropriate. This is one of them, part of why the movie earns it's PG-13 rating. For this reason I won't own it, and for this reason it's down in the "Good" category. If it weren't for that it easily jump up to "Better" status.
But besides that, the story was really good and very interesting I think. As with many of the oriental style movies, the story dives deep into ideas such as war, honor, and where true happiness can be found. It definitely gave me subjects to think about and discuss. If you liked it I wouldn't mind hearing your comments on it. Especially how you think the colors influence the feelings in the show.
Free upgrade for my computer!
I was researching my computer's AMD Sempron 140 Sargas processor on Newegg a while back. As I read some comments on the processor I noticed that people have been able to "unlock" a second core on this processor. I purposely bought this processor because it was super cheap even though it only had one core and was thus a little slower. I liked the idea of getting a free second core, so I found out how to do this "unlocking". All you need is a motherboard that had a SB710 or SB750 chip on it and an Advanced Clock Calibration setting in the BIOS.
My super cheap motherboard had the SB710 chip and the setting so I turned it on and found the settings made no sense at all to me. I turned on an "Unleashing Mode" and left it at it's default settings. That sounded like it might unlock something, right? When I restarted my computer it reported that it had an AMD Athalon II X2 4400e processor and it displayed the message "Two Cores Unlocked!!" as it booted. I ran some tests and the processor did indeed seem to have a perfectly fine second core. The only down side I've found is the processor temperatures went up from 38 C to 42 C. Pretty cool to suddenly get double the power for your money.
I wondered what in the world AMD had to gain from this selling more powerful processors but just disabling part of it. I found three reasons that made sense. First, they get tons of free advertising from it. For example I'm blogging about it right now! It might be worth it to spend a little money to get people to talk about your product. Second, they may have just found a obscure problem under extreme conditions with one of the processor cores when they made it so they disabled it and sold it cheaper to cut their losses. Some people have found it doesn't work when they try to unlock extra cores. Third, they may be disabling the processor because people want a cheap single core processor. They could save the costs of building a whole new machine to make this specific processor and just disable one core and sell what people are willing to buy.
The second thing I found out is about NTFS on larger hard drives. I recently erased everything off my computer and reinstalled it to clean things up. I have been sticking to an old file system called FAT32 that came about with Windows 98. When NTFS came out years ago I researched it and everybody said it was terrible, so I stuck with FAT32. It seems now that Microsoft has since improved NTFS and on today's large hard drives it actually runs much faster than the old FAT32. I did some testing and here's what I found.
I have a RAID 0 made with two 40GB SATA hard drives. When it had FAT32 on it it would write at about 45.045 MB/s and read at 57.641 MB/s. I reformatted the drive with NTFS and now it appears to write at 42.024 MB/s and read at 64.776 MB/s. So it takes a little longer to write files but it reads much faster. Since most the waiting on your average computer is for it to read files I'd say it was a nice boost for no cost. Now I'm curious if it would have an effect on my 250GB hard drive, the only problem is my wife uses that hard drive as a networked drive with Mac OS, and I hear that you can't access NTFS with Mac OS. I'll have to look into that further.
My super cheap motherboard had the SB710 chip and the setting so I turned it on and found the settings made no sense at all to me. I turned on an "Unleashing Mode" and left it at it's default settings. That sounded like it might unlock something, right? When I restarted my computer it reported that it had an AMD Athalon II X2 4400e processor and it displayed the message "Two Cores Unlocked!!" as it booted. I ran some tests and the processor did indeed seem to have a perfectly fine second core. The only down side I've found is the processor temperatures went up from 38 C to 42 C. Pretty cool to suddenly get double the power for your money.
I wondered what in the world AMD had to gain from this selling more powerful processors but just disabling part of it. I found three reasons that made sense. First, they get tons of free advertising from it. For example I'm blogging about it right now! It might be worth it to spend a little money to get people to talk about your product. Second, they may have just found a obscure problem under extreme conditions with one of the processor cores when they made it so they disabled it and sold it cheaper to cut their losses. Some people have found it doesn't work when they try to unlock extra cores. Third, they may be disabling the processor because people want a cheap single core processor. They could save the costs of building a whole new machine to make this specific processor and just disable one core and sell what people are willing to buy.
The second thing I found out is about NTFS on larger hard drives. I recently erased everything off my computer and reinstalled it to clean things up. I have been sticking to an old file system called FAT32 that came about with Windows 98. When NTFS came out years ago I researched it and everybody said it was terrible, so I stuck with FAT32. It seems now that Microsoft has since improved NTFS and on today's large hard drives it actually runs much faster than the old FAT32. I did some testing and here's what I found.
I have a RAID 0 made with two 40GB SATA hard drives. When it had FAT32 on it it would write at about 45.045 MB/s and read at 57.641 MB/s. I reformatted the drive with NTFS and now it appears to write at 42.024 MB/s and read at 64.776 MB/s. So it takes a little longer to write files but it reads much faster. Since most the waiting on your average computer is for it to read files I'd say it was a nice boost for no cost. Now I'm curious if it would have an effect on my 250GB hard drive, the only problem is my wife uses that hard drive as a networked drive with Mac OS, and I hear that you can't access NTFS with Mac OS. I'll have to look into that further.
HP Deskjet 3050 All-In-One Printer instructions
We bought an HP Deskjet All-In-One 3050 a while ago and it took me about 8 hours to get the thing to connect wirelessly. The printer seems to work fine once I got it set up but I couldn't find much help at all online, so I'm posting these instructions to hopefully help someone else who might be scouring the internet for help.
Problem:
Printer is connected through wireless to the router, but now the computers won't connect to the printer to install it. You can find an IP address for the printer. Happenes in MacOS 10.5 and Windows XP SP3
For Windows XP:
Problem:
Printer is connected through wireless to the router, but now the computers won't connect to the printer to install it. You can find an IP address for the printer. Happenes in MacOS 10.5 and Windows XP SP3
For Windows XP:
-Download the latest version of the drivers and software from the HP website. (I got version 22.5.0).
-Install them and this time it will give you the option to connect to the printer using its IP address.
-Type in your printer's IP address and the software will tell you it still can't connect to the printer. (You can find the address by printing a diagnostics page from the printer or checking the connected devices on your router. Use Google if you don't know how to do these.)
-Tell the install program to use the IP address you entered and install anyway.
-This was all I had to do to make it work. (Just make sure your printer's IP address doesn't change)
For Mac OS (I was using 10.5)
-Go to System Preferences, then go to Print and Fax.
-Click on the '+' to add a new printer
-Click on the IP icon on the top.
-Make sure that the protocol is "HP Jetdirect - Socket"
-Type in the IP address of the printer. It should recognize the printer, give it a meaningful name and hopefully you will have success! I did.
-Another tidbit I heard: If it doesn't recognize the printer, go to the drop down menu Print Using, chose select printer software, and type in f4500, and it should be the only one on the list. Then click add, and it will think for a second and the printer should get added.
Link to HP's video they recently put up
Link to my forum thread on the topic
Link to HP's video they recently put up
Link to my forum thread on the topic
Movie Review - Voyage of the Dawn Treader
We went to see two matinee movies on Saturday to catch up on the movies we've been wanting to watch. It's awesome we both got to see two movies at the cheap theater for the price of one new movie ticket.
Voyage of the Dawn treader is a movie that I can say I liked more than the book. How often is that said? :) I remember when I first read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe in 5th grade I was really excited about it. Mom told me there was an entire series and I started into them. When I got the the Dawn Treader I remember getting bored quickly and the whole book thinking "Uhg all they're doing is sailing and having troubles and being miserable!" I found the fourth book much more interesting and it picked up for the rest of the series. (Yes, it was the third book in this series, I didn't read the modern version that put the Magician's Nephew first).
The thing I liked the most about the movie was how well they kept the symbolic elements of the story. I'd expect your common director to try to cut those parts out. But in this movie they were there and in my opinion much easier to spot than they were in the book.
Another thing I liked is how well they moved things along and how well they did the effects. It made me consider getting the entire series of movies when they finish them. At least this movie. That way when our kids watch it they'll wonder about the rest of the story and want to read the books. :)
Voyage of the Dawn treader is a movie that I can say I liked more than the book. How often is that said? :) I remember when I first read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe in 5th grade I was really excited about it. Mom told me there was an entire series and I started into them. When I got the the Dawn Treader I remember getting bored quickly and the whole book thinking "Uhg all they're doing is sailing and having troubles and being miserable!" I found the fourth book much more interesting and it picked up for the rest of the series. (Yes, it was the third book in this series, I didn't read the modern version that put the Magician's Nephew first).
The thing I liked the most about the movie was how well they kept the symbolic elements of the story. I'd expect your common director to try to cut those parts out. But in this movie they were there and in my opinion much easier to spot than they were in the book.
Another thing I liked is how well they moved things along and how well they did the effects. It made me consider getting the entire series of movies when they finish them. At least this movie. That way when our kids watch it they'll wonder about the rest of the story and want to read the books. :)
Movie Review - Prince of Persia
So I want to start throwing up reviews about movies and games and such. Here goes my first one:
First of all, I wanted to say it doesn't rely on the games at all. I've heard people say they didn't go see it because they didn't play any of the games. It just borrowed an interesting story idea from one of the games and added some depth to it.
I also think the storyline was interesting. Interesting enough that Shara and I discussed it for a while after the movie. The characters weren't as flat and boring as I expected. Also note that I usually don't like movies that involve messing with time because they are either cliche or go about it all wrong.
The movie surprised us how clean it was. I was totally expecting lots of immodesty in such an action flick but there wasn't. I would say there was only a little, and it was done in a way where it wasn't the focus of the shot, but filled in the setting of the scenes that had it.
So the bottom line (literally). I thought Prince of Persia was a pretty good show! I won't go and buy it but it was fun to see, and we're glad we did see it.
First of all, I wanted to say it doesn't rely on the games at all. I've heard people say they didn't go see it because they didn't play any of the games. It just borrowed an interesting story idea from one of the games and added some depth to it.
I also think the storyline was interesting. Interesting enough that Shara and I discussed it for a while after the movie. The characters weren't as flat and boring as I expected. Also note that I usually don't like movies that involve messing with time because they are either cliche or go about it all wrong.
The movie surprised us how clean it was. I was totally expecting lots of immodesty in such an action flick but there wasn't. I would say there was only a little, and it was done in a way where it wasn't the focus of the shot, but filled in the setting of the scenes that had it.
So the bottom line (literally). I thought Prince of Persia was a pretty good show! I won't go and buy it but it was fun to see, and we're glad we did see it.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Why this blog?
My family started a blog about a hear ago due to popular demand. We didn't update it very often and in an effort to help give more updates I started blogging about things I wanted to share with the general public. The blog started getting visited by people who found it through Google because of some of the things I blogged about so I thought, you know, I really should start another blog for these random thoughts of mine. When thinking of a title for it a speech called Good, Better, Best by a man named Dallin H. Oaks came to mind.
He spoke about how there are many good things in life, but we need to choose what is better or best. Many of my blog posts were about great things that I had discovered and wanted to share with others so I decided the talk would make a good theme, since my goal here is to share my experiences with finding the best things in life.
So, basically this blog is a collection of random things that I think are good and should be shared, or are bad and I'm warning you to avoid it. Either way I hope I posted something of value for you.
He spoke about how there are many good things in life, but we need to choose what is better or best. Many of my blog posts were about great things that I had discovered and wanted to share with others so I decided the talk would make a good theme, since my goal here is to share my experiences with finding the best things in life.
So, basically this blog is a collection of random things that I think are good and should be shared, or are bad and I'm warning you to avoid it. Either way I hope I posted something of value for you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)