Diary of a Network Geek

By now, I bet you’ve spent most of your “Christmas money”.

And, if you’re like me, that came in the form of a gift card, not actual cash. Honestly, I kind of prefer it to actual cash for the most part. It’s easier to spend online, for one thing, which is almost certainly where I’m going to spend that “free” money. The only problem is, virtually nothing comes to an even dollar amount when you include tax and shipping. So, then you end up with all these gift cards with just a couple bucks on them and no idea how to deal with them.
Well, here’s two ideas.
First, save those cards to use on the “free, no-obiligation” trials that still want to collect credit card information from you. Pop in that gift card, let their website validate it and then, when you use up your free month or whatever, they can’t “accidentally” charge your card. It keeps all sorts of annoying and persistent charges from making their way to your credit card. And, yes, I’ve done it and it absoultely works like a charm.
The other thing is a cool, little website called CheapFiller.com. This beauty finds stuff on Amazon that’s under $25 and has free shipping, usually via Prime. Now that Prime will ship most things that are under a dollar, you can finally use up that last sixty-seven cents on your gift card from Christmas! Honestly, this is awesome. I did it just recently to get two super cheap fresnel lenses that fit in my wallet for about $2, which finished out a gift card for me. It was great! The thing to do is search for items well under your target amount, so you can see all the cheapie, cheap options. The two things I’d warn you about is that; a) grocery items have a minimum dollar requirement and b)items may have changed price slightly between the time the site collected the info and when you go to buy it, so double-check the pricing and shipping. But, again, it worked great for me and there’s no charge to search, though I’m sure they benefit from the link. It’s pretty genius. Give it a try!

And, welcome to the new year of weird, fun links on Use Your Words!  (That’s where this post originally appeared.)

I love leftovers.

I typically have a small group at my house for Thanksgiving and yet still cook an enormous amount of food.  I’ll generally munch those leftovers through Christmas.  People tell me that it’s probably not good for me and that I’ll get food poisoning or whatever.  So, you know, I started to wonder; how long are leftovers good?

Well, if you’ve wondered that very thing along with me, wonder no more.
Instead, go to this article at StillTasty.com about how to store your Thanksgiving leftovers.  (Hopefully, you haven’t made an terrible errors already and refrigerated anything you weren’t sure about.)
So, now you know how long you can enjoy that leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast!
Also, I hope all my readers had a fantastic Thanksgiving!