Dish Network is running two great promotions for current customers who sign up for paperless billing and enroll in credit card auto-pay.

Login to your account online, click over to ‘Offers’, and with one mouse click you’ll get 8 channels of HBO and 6 channels of Starz free for three months. You have to cancel them online when your three months are up, otherwise you’ll be charged full price. Hey look, you just saved $86.94 and it took you all of thirty seconds to do it!

Start an online chat with Dish Network and tell them you want to enroll in the “Cinemax One Year for a Penny” promotion. You’ll be charged $0.01 and will get five channels of Cinemax free for the next 12 months. When those 12 months are up Cinemax will disappear from your account – you won’t need to cancel anything. That’s a savings of $155.88!

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Meet The Bullet.

Two Bullets and a pair of cheap antennas is enough to extend a line-of-sight WiFi connection up to 3 miles (or more).

The Bullet is only $39, and an antenna’s $55.

I can’t think of any time I would ever need to use this personally, but it’s cool!

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CFLs are mostly wonderful. They have a few huge problems, but for the most part they’re a good replacement for incandescents.

Manufacturers use terms like “cool white,” “soft white,” and “daylight” on the packaging to tell you what color their lights produce, but different companies use different terms and they often mean completely different things!

The key to buying a CFL is to pay attention to color temperature. Temperature is measured in Kelvins and is usually buried somewhere in the fine print on the back of the package.

2700K is about as close as you can get to the color of an incandescent bulb and it is definitely not blueish white! You can put a lampshade on a 2700K CFL and never know it’s not an incandescent. Anything higher than 2700K and you start to get light that looks less and less like an old-school lightbulb.

Just hope that you never have to find a dimmable CFL. They’re nearly impossible to find at retail and have their own set of problems.

Yay earth!

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Spoilers will be everywhere, so starting at 6pm tonight I’m going on a full media blackout – no Internet usage or watching of live television for 24 hours. I may not pick up the phone if it rings, either, so don’t take it personally.

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When I first read about the upcoming Battlestar Galactica panel discussion at the United Nations, I thought it was a joke.

But no, it really happened. Last night. Whoopi Goldberg was the moderator.

In the most provocative moment of the evening, Olmos angrily declared to the audience that race and racism are illusory concepts, created by oppressors to encourage hostility toward other cultures. “There is only one race, and that is the human race!” he shouted, before inciting the crowd to chant along with him, “So say we all!” over and over, in a moment that paralleled Commander Adama’s inspirational speech at the end of the BSG pilot.

The two-hour series finale is this Friday. I wish it would just go on forever.

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Most soda in America is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, not cane sugar. Soda companies insist that nobody can tell the difference. They may be right, I dunno. I’ve never done a side-by-side taste test.

Pepsi Throwback is coming this spring. It’s Pepsi made with real sugar. Mountain Dew is getting the same treatment.

Over the weekend I spotted Pepsi Natural at Target. It’s a new flavor – definitely not the classic Pepsi taste – but it’s made from all-natural ingredients. It also gave me mild cramps and hot farts that smelled like compost. Drink with caution!

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When Kate was first born I spent a lot of time at home in front of the TV. There’s really not much else to do when you’re taking care of a wee tiny baby at that age.

When you’re home all day and your DVR runs dry you start doing the unthinkable – watching daytime TV and all of the commercials that come with it.

And that’s why I now know the words to the first FreeCreditReport.com song by heart.

Well I was shopping for a new car
Which one’s me?
A new convertible
Or an SUV?

Too bad I didn’t know
my credit was wack
Cause now I’m driving off the lot
In a used sub-compact

F-R-E-E that spells free
Credit Report Dot Com, Baby
Saw their ads on my TV
Thought about goin’ but was too lazy

Now instead of lookin’ fly
and rollin’ phat
My legs are stickin’ to the vinyl
and my posse’s gettin’ laughed at

F-R-E-E that spells free
Credit Report Dot Com, Baby!

Even now, more than a year later, whenever I hear that catchy little number I have flashbacks of mixing baby formula in tiny glass baby bottles. They played it so much there was absolutely no escape in early 2008.

They’ve since made four other commercials that are every bit as infectious but that first one is the one I’ll remember forever.

The FreeCreditReport “guy” is a Canadian actor named Eric Violette. He has a fake French accent (aka: “French Canadian”) so he didn’t do the actual singing himself.

FreeCreditReport is a deceptively-named paid subscription service from Experian. Don’t use it.

If you want the free credit report that you’re entitled to every year by federal law, you need to go to AnnualCreditReport.com. It amazes me how many people don’t know this.

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Today’s the day when Peggle hits Xbox Live Arcade. It’s a mere $10 and is the first version of Peggle to include online multiplayer.

Be sure to read The Making of Peggle for the story behind PopCap’s most profitable hit, and check out the strategy guide if you’re a Peggle noob.

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RadioReference got a facelift recently. It looks nice!

RR’s frequency database has basically become the Wikipedia of regional frequency listings over the last year or so. It’s a great starting point if you’ve got a scanner and have no idea what to do with it!

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Yesterday when I was at work Tammy taught Kate a new trick. She now gives KISSES and they are the BEST.

All you have to do is say “Can I have a kiss?” and she’ll walk over to you and push her lips up to your lips and hold it there for about two seconds. She’s still working on her aim, though…sometimes you’ll end up kissing her nose. Sometimes she’ll kiss your cheek too if that’s closer.

During those two seconds you can feel her breathing on your face and the sound of it is so cute that all you want to do is – you guessed it – EAT HER FACE.

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