Services I Love

Well, I just inadvertantly deleted my whole post, so I'll start over. Why, when I cut, did I not just copy and then paste. What a dummy.

So, with my rather wordy rant against Comcast in the Olympics post comments, I thought I should offer a refreshing look at some companies whose services I enjoy and use regularly.

1. Netflix-on-Demand. Holy Lord, do I love this. For starters, no one need know how many times I watch Confessions of a Shopaholic* because there's no return trip to the video store. (Do people still call them video stores?) Also, they have every available season of every Law & Order available for me to watch whenever! And, because I bought a little adapter for my laptop, I can hook up my laptop to my TV and watch things on my big TV screen, from the comfort of my sofa, or I can watch movies in bed. I'll leave it to you to figure out which occurs more often.
   
2. Bank of America's "My Portfolio" service. Do you have Bank of America? Do you use this? It's pretty fun. OK, once you get past the front page showing your depressing low net worth, scoot over to the budgeting and reports section. It's like a wonderland of nerd-dom! You can figure out where all your money goes using adorable multi-colored pie charts. Oh, man, I love pie charts. It's not perfect or anything, but you could easily wile away an hour or so flipping between the different breakdowns. AND you can set budget limits. Unfortunately, when you spend past your budget, Bank of America doesn't like text you to say, "no more restaurants this month, Buttercup. We mean it." So, I guess it's kind of up to you to sort it out.
   
   Oh, on this pie chart, I have cropped the actual dollar figures because I didn't want anyone to have a heart attack when they see how much I'm repaying in student loans every month. Every month. For the next 25, nay, 24 years of my life. My, how time does fly! Also, this isn't really an accurate picture because (a) my rent check isn't reflected here (and I could have sworn I paid the rent this month...no matter) and (b) I went to the grocery and bought expensive things nearly every day of snowmaggedon, so it's reflecting a bigger piece of the pie than groceries usually get.

I guess here is where I say that both of these companies could give a crap that I'm promoting their services. Neither knows I exist, but for the presence of my account number on their rolls of "people from whom to extract money."

*I published once and then realized I forgot to put in the footnote about Confessions of a Shopaholic. I wasn't wowed by this movie, but I doubt anyone was completely blown away. I did enjoy it, though, and it's a reasonable stand-in for many other similar movies that I would watch again and again without having to rent it every time (10 Things I Hate About You, anyone? Anyone?). Also, I have no more room to store DVDs, so purchasing is out of the question.