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Buying a New Home with Redfin = Awesome

redfinI’ve been lurking on Redfin for quite some time now. What is Redfin? It’s an online real estate company with an easy-to-use website that lets you search/filter/find real estate for sale. It also provides some cool analytics for looking at market trends. It’s nice and web2.0-like, what with custom RSS feeds and other pretty robust tools to make your real estate hunting super easy.

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Why Warner Bros. Swapping HD DVDs for Blu-ray Discs Won’t Work

HD-DVD vs. Blu-rayWarner Brothers had come up with a slick promotion to get some much needed buzz around Blu-ray. My consensus: great idea but flawed execution. Here’s how it works (and why it won’t work):

You send in the cover art sleeve (keep the disc) and the UPC from your HD DVD movies. And for $4.95 per movie, plus $6.95 S&H per order, you’ll be sent back brand new Blu-ray copies of any movies you have in HD DVD. There are a few restrictions (only 1 copy per movie and only up to 25 movies per household) but nothing really that prohibitive.

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Latest Laptop Hunters Ad Shows Off PCs with Blu-ray & Remote

windowsMeet Lisa and her son Jackson, who’s looking for “speed, big hard drive, and a good gaming computer” for under $1,500. After a quick look at some PCs, Lisa says, “Let’s go see the Macs, they’re kind of popular at this age.” But then, Lisa points out that “…these are way more money, dude” quickly followed by Jackson saying (about a Mac), “It’s a little too small.”

So back to the PCs: We’re shown how you can use a PC with a remote and then we see both Lisa and Jackson get really excited about none other than “Bluuu-ray!” And, of course, Blu-ray is missing from Macs. For me personally, not a huge selling point of the PC. But for others like Lisa and Jackson, it seems pretty cool. And that’s the point being made here: there’s something for everyone.

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New Microsoft Ad: Macs are “so sexy” but…

applelogoMicrosoft just came out with its second Laptop Hunters video. Personally, I think this one is better than the first one, but you decide (embedded below).

We’ve got a guy with a $1,500 budget looking for portability, battery life, and power. And he says he’s “technically savvy” and knows what he wants.

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Mac vs. PC: Some Can Dish It Out & Take It, Others… Not So Much

macvspcSo Microsoft put together an ad (embedded below with more to come apparently) that does what Apple started (comparing PCs and Macs) only from Microsoft’s perspective. That is, when either side plays this game, they focus on the pros of their team while pointing out the cons of the other side all while conveniently forgetting to mention their own cons.

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Hotels Still Charging for Internet But Now There’s No Need to Pay

About a year ago, I was on vacation and annoyed at how much hotels charge for Internet. So I blogged about it. I’m on vacation yet again but this time am blogging about how I’m not annoyed. The difference?

I’m blogging from my G1 phone (just installed a sweet Wordpress blogging app). In fact, I’ve got everything I need on this baby and won’t be giving any hotels $10 per day for awhile.

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HD DVDs are going away. But should you buy Blu-ray?

The first half of my title is taken straight from the title of an email I received from Netflix a couple days ago (see end of post for text of the email). In short, as of December 15, 2008, Netflix will no longer carry HD DVDs. Around the same time I got this email, coincidentally, a friend of mine sent me an email about an online sale offering $2 HD DVD movies.

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My First Time Using Craigslist

Somehow I missed the Craigslist memo. It could have something to do with the fact that I haven’t used even eBay for a while. (I used to be on eBay quite a bit but gave it up a few years ago when Amazon proved to be a worthy replacement with much less hassle.) But we recently moved and found ourselves with a couple of items needing a new home due to space constraints in our new place. Namely: a Yamaha electronic keyboard and a spare fold-a-bed.

So I signed up for Craigslist and posted these items online. Here’s what I found:

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