Many of us have been shopping online for more than a decade now without a major loss due to insecure credit card transactions.  But most of us also know someone who has been a vicitm of identity theft.  So why then do we keep using our credit cards online?  Because the convenience has outweighed the risk up to this point.  However, with the economy in a slump and electronic credit card theft on the rise, it may be time to rethink that equation.  Or, avoid the problem all together thanks to the wonderful folx over at Shop Shield.

With the Shop Shield Companion browser plugin you can shop online with zero worries that your credit card or banking information will be stolen by cyber thieves.  How? Simple.  Whenever you would normally make a Credit Card Payment you use the Shop Shield Companion Secure Payment Agent (SPA) instead.  The SPA replaces your real payment and identity information with anonymous data that is useless to thieves and can’t be traced to you. Essentially, Shop Shield creates a virtual credit card on the fly that is only usable for that single transaction.  That way there’s no actual account information to be stolen.

But Shop Shield does more than secure your account information (as if that weren’t enough).  Through their Secure Site Registration they also allows you to create anonymous accounts at any shopping site so hackers and thieves can’t even get your personal information like names and passwords either.  How does that sound?

Well if you think it sounds expensive you couldn’t be further from the truth.  In fact if you sign up to pay for your online transactions through your checking account then there will be absolutely no charge for Shop Shield’s service.  And I’m not just talking about the 60-day free trial.  I’m saying it will be free forever!

So we’re talking 100% guaranteed secure online purchase transactions, anonymous accounts with online merchants so no one gets any of your personal information, all for absolutely no cost to you.  If there’s a downside I sure haven’t found it yet.

Well, sort of.  More accurately stated, the title of this post would read: “Discount Armani Comes To A Computer Near You“, but that includes, Morgan hill, does it not?  That’s right, no more heading south to the Gilroy Outlets in hopes of finding a new Armani Exchange opening up. Now you can access those great Armani deals on designer jeans (and other great Armani clothing) from the comfort of your own home.

For example, check out my favorites, the spotted bleach jeans pictured above.  They’re only $125 through Armani Exchange and that includes postage with their Free Shipping on orders over $100.  They are even offering quite a bit of their Armani Denim for under $100 per pair.  Such as the Light Urban Destruction and New Zenith Boot Cut for only $98 per pair.  These jeans are not only hip and stylish, but you’re know they’re of the highest quality as well or they wouldn’t be sporting that fashionable Armani label.

As if those great prices and free shipping weren’t enough, if you purchase a full price pair of denim from Armani Exchange between 7/7/09 – 7/19/09 (either online or in a brick and mortar store) you will receive an Armani Exchange gift card worth $20 off you next purchase of $100 or more (valid 7/30/09 through 8/15/09).

There’s only one thing better than a sale on Armani Exchange Denim, and that is, of course, free jeans!  Well, we’ve got you covered here as well.  Armani Exchange is giving away a pair of jeans every day in July and you can get your chance to win by texting the keyword “DENIM2″ to ARMANI (276264).  Just click text A|X for full details on this summer denim contest.

ACQUA DI GIO Giorgio Armani 6.7 oz / 6.8 oz ( 200 ml ) EDT NIB

US $68.00 (43 Bids) End Date: Saturday Feb-11-2012 1:14:00 PST Bid now | Add to watch list

ACQUA DI GIO 200ML ARMANI MAN

US $24.90 (0 Bid) End Date: Saturday Feb-11-2012 2:10:58 PST Buy It Now for only: US $48.00 Bid now | Buy it now | Add to watch list

Armani baby Romper! super Cute!

US $24.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Saturday Feb-11-2012 2:46:22 PST Bid now | Add to watch list

Welcome to the premiere edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup!

What Is It?

Weekly WordPress Roundup is a hybrid between a blog carnival and a weblog.  Every Monday morning the editor of that week’s roundup makes a single post linking to the “best” WordPress articles they’ve come across that week.  The choices are made from their own web surfing and from articles submitted via the Roundup’s blogcarnival.com page.  If you’re interested in hosting the Weekly WordPress Roundup, just drop an email to: philaahzophy@gmail.com

On To The Entries…

Due to a combination of factors (this is the first edition, the concept only occurred to me last Thursday, there’s been no promotion thus far) there are only a very few articles in this week’s roundup. I fully expect to see a wider selection of articles in future roundups.

WordPress Plugins-

If you use Lester Chan’s amazing WP-PostRatings plugin to allow visitors to rate your posts, then you’ll probably find Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin, posted at Philaahzophy very useful.

Meanwhile, Ajay from Weblog Tools Collection offers a wonderfully in-depth review of Referrer Detector, which displays a specific greeting message to visitors that come from different urls (aka referrers).  This is perfect for promoting your posts via social bookmarking sites, or advertising your RSS feed or favorite posts to visitors who found you through a search engine.

WordPress Themes-

Gilroy Review, this site’s sister blog, has published the second Thursday Themesday.  This week’s edition offers up a glowing review of Scruffy, a “grunge” theme by South African web designer Cobus Bester.

WordPress Tips-

WordPress For Dummies offers a great overview of several different methods to deal with spammers in Eliminate WordPress Blog Comment Spam.  Starting off with Akismet, the article also covers other ways to prevent spammers from devaluing your blog.

Speaking of comment spammers… If you’re tired of wading through all of the automated spam that shows up in your Akismet folder, check out WPRecipes’ How to: Deny comment posting to no referrer requests.

Quick Online Tips discovered what could be a serious problem for bloggers using WordPress 2.7 and receiving large numbers of comments.  Read all about it in WordPress Comment Pagination Causes Duplicate Content Pages

WordPress Hacks-

One of my favorite WordPress related sites, WP Recipes, came out with a solution to one of my biggest WP pet peeves: tag clouds tend to look horrible in the sidebar.  Check out their simple recipe for How To: Creata A Tag Page On Your WordPress Blog.

Very little is more frustrating than forgetting your WordPress admin password.  However, as long as you still have access to the database there’s a solution posted over at Haggard Hosting: How To Recover Lost WordPress Admin Password Or E-mail.

General WordPress News-

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg turned 25 yesterday!  Happy Birthday Matt!

And finally, Google has decided to set users of its Blogger/Blogspot blogging platform free (at last!), with version 1.0 of Google Blog Converters officially released yesterday as well.  Maybe the rush of Bloggers to WordPress is their birthday present to Matt

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That’s it for this week’s WordPress Roundup!  Look for next week’s edition over at Philaahzophy on Monday, January 19th!  Submit your WordPress-related article (or someone else’s that you find worthwhile!) to the next edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup using our carnival submission form or by emailing it to philaahzophy@gmail.com.  Future hosts can be found on the Weekly WordPress Roundup homepage.  If you’d like to be added to the list, just drop an email!

As always, comments, links and social bookmarks are very much appreciated!

Enough serious stuff (cops, beds, diapers, saving the earth), it’s time to have a little fun!

What you’re looking at on the left is the new MagNext Virtual MMORPG.  My “character” is the black and silver sphere in the witch’s hat (actually called a Sorceress hat in the game).  I’m about to enter the iCoaster arena where I’ll roll along a coaster track and try to complete the missing pieces before I fail and fall to my doom.  The picture below and right is me failing and falling to my doom.  Good thing I packed that parachute!

I was really excited to play with this new, free, MMORPG because I’ve had so much fun playing with my real life iCoaster from MEGA Brands that I got for Christmas (Santa said a full size roller coaster wouldn’t fit in my stocking).  It turns out I actually had much more fun playing the car ‘racing’ game where you have to navigate around barriers and over speed bonuses in order to coast as far as possible in your MagNext racer.

I was actually trying the game out as a favor to one of my regular sponsors,  MEGA Brands, and in hopes of finding an online activity that I can share with Zaira when she’s staying at her mother’s house.  Although I had a blast I don’t think there’s enough social interaction involved here for a 12 year old girl.  Younger players would probably have a grand old time collecting Magz in order to soup up their magnetic sphere and competing in all of the various games available.  The site is kid safe and best of all, it’s free, so what have you got to lose?

A few weeks back I mentioned an ongoing discussion I’ve been having with some small merchants here in Morgan Hill regarding using small business loans from Merchant Advisors to help carry them through the lean economic times we’re all experiencing right now. In that post I mentioned that I’d suggested Merchant Advisors for credit card processing in a previous post. Well, as that same friend recently informed me, it turns out I was wrong. Not about Merhcant Advisors – they do, indeed, offer credit card merchant services for as low as $8.95 per month and 1.59% + $0.19 on face to face transactions.  I just hadn’t ever actually written about it here on Aahz Reviews Morgan Hill.  So, consider this post a remedy to that oversight.

Aside from the simple fact that Merchant Advisors is focused on small businesses, meaning you’re far more likely to be accepted in to their program with favorable terms then through more “traditional” banks and institutions, the packages they offer are absolutely phenomenal:

• Accept All Major Credit Cards
• Free Credit Card Machine
• NO Contract Term – meaning you can cancel anytime without cancellation fees.
• NO Annual Fees
• A free Gift Card Kit (including card supply) so you can issue your own store gift cards.
• Free Terminal Replacement Program

Plus, the first month is free as well.  So what’s keeping you from offering your customers the convenience they want?  We may be cash strapped, but we still know how to use those credit cards.  Shouldn’t we be using them at your shop?

By now, everyone should know that keeping your home closed up tight in the winter can save quite a bit on heating bills. Since winter has finally arrived (with a vengeance) here in Morgan Hill I know that we’re running our heater more and more each day and I assume you are as well. With the economy getting staler and staler few of us can afford to install winter-proof windows, but have you considered simply adding vinyl shutters to your existing windows?  They can go a long way towards better insulating your home and stopping the heat leaks that cause higher gas costs.

I’ve noticed that many Morgan Hill homes already have decorative shutters on the windows.  Well, with exterior shutter hardware from Larson Shutter you can make those decorative shutters functional for even less than buying new shutters and still get the energy savings.  If that savings on top of savings isn’t enough, how about we stack one more bit of savings on top: free shipping through the end of the year!  Are you out of excuses yet?

On Sunday I bought my first ever Christmas Tree and, with Zaira, decorated it with the meager ornaments I could afford after paying for the tree, the stand, the tree skirt, the lights.  It turns out that decorating for Christmas without a single supply is rather expensive.  So we had to go small and leave a few things out.  We both blogged about it of course and our family came to the rescue.  This morning there was a knock on the door.  Upon opening I discovered the most beautiful Poinsettia. I had no idea they came that large! But it definitely helps Christmas-fy the house

I just got off the phone with my mother (who sent the Poinsettia) and asked her where she got it.  “1-800-Flowers of course.”  You see, with family spread around the country we haven’t been able to make use of local florists very often so we’ve all become absolute devotees of 1-800Flowers.  Besides the flowers themselves still come from a local florist so it combines convenience and benefits to local economies.

Then, of course, there’s the great selection that they have, especially for Christmas.  Of course Poinsettias are the most traditional of Christmas flowers (plants?, but there are also Christmas Roses, misteletoe, and all types of holiday-themed arrangements (my favorite is the Candy Cane Christmas Cactus).

I had been considering building a terrarium or vivarium here in The Caverns, but the property management company has nixed the idea of little critters possibly roaming free around the apartment. So now I’m thinking about the possibility of cultivating saltwater fish. I’m aware that their supposed to be much more difficult to maintain than freshwater fish, but I’m looking for something “out of the ordinary” or at least “special” in some way. With the landlord’s strictures they may be my only choice.

The big problem? There really isn’t anywhere in Morgan Hill to buy saltwater fish 

Luckily, I recently discovered Reef Hot Spot.  They’ve been in the saltwater aquarium business online for more than three years now and offer a 14 day “live guarantee” to ensure that not only will your precious pets arrive safe and sound, but also that they’ll acclimate to your tank and not bring any sickness or disease along with them.  They are also a great source for live coral with new, rare corals arriving daily and a selection of discount coral for the beginner (like myself) or those on a budget (also like myself).

Reef Hot Spot is more than just an internet storefront, though.  They’ve also got literally hundreds of useful and educational articles on all aspects of salt water fish, coral and tank maintenance.  Starting a salt water aquarium is not something that should be done withuot plenty of research.  But now that I have a quality source for both information and supplies I’m pretty confident I’m heading down the right path.

It looks like I may be paying for my daughter Zaira’s health insurance next year, so I’ve been asking around on the web for input and heard many great things about Kaiser Permanente Georgia. Unfortunately, I don’t live in Georgia, but back before Z was born I did have coverage from Kaiser Permanente Colorado through my employer there. Of course, now I work in social services caring for other people with greater needs than myself, so not only am I receiving a much lower hourly wage, but my employer doesn’t provide health insurance, either. ::sigh::

My ex has been paying almost $400 per month for health insurance through her employer, so I was pretty fearul when I went to go look at the privately purchased insurance through Kaiser Permanente California, but I couldn’t have been much more pleasantly surprised.  For me alone (a 39 year old male) I can get insurance for as low as $109 per month and they have three different plans for my 12 year old daughter’s solo health insurance for $86/momnth or less!  I’m a little confused as to why when I put us on a plan together the cost goes up to just over $200, but I’m sure that’s just a website glitch that will get worked out when I call a sales rep.

If you have health insurance through your employer you might want to look at the possibility of getting it online through Kaiser instead.  You may find your employer’s not contributing as much as you thought he was.

As y’all know I visit an awful lot of credit related web sites.  Particularly those sites dedicated to bad credit as the only times in my life I’ve ever had a credit report at all, it’s always been bad.  But my favorite site (for going on three years now) has always been Bad Credit Offers.  Do you really have to ask why?  Simply because it has the coolest name, of course.  I remember when I first heard about it I was searching around for bad credit credit cards. I thought that was a humorous turn of phrase. But then I discovered the wealth of useful information at BadCreditOffers.com and knew the irony had come home to roost.

In the current economic climate more and more people are searching for ways to help their personal credit crunch.  Search no more!  Simply follow the irony   If you’ve come across a better name for a credit help website, please fell free to comment and let me know.  Until then, we have a winner!