Kai, The Informologist

(via my photostream)

With the continuous rise in tuition cost, it is no wonder some college students are ordering $10 pizzas to save them a few days of food cost. And as we slowly moves away from the umbrella of adolescence, buying gifts for others on Christmas has became more conscious over just receiving them. However, with limited funding, expensive purchases, even if you’d love to give them, are almost always out of the question. So what can us college students do to share a little Christmas with very little green bills involved?

Well, first off, don’t get too fancy with your gift list. You might want to buy an iPod for your cute little niece who just turned eleven or maybe a North Face jacket for your brother who is studying in Minneapolis. But with a budget of possibly just a little over a hundred dollars, any of them could make a dent in your shallow pocket. So the first step is to plan your budget – carefully, and accordingly. Also, try not count on your future earning to pay for your purchases, you don’t want to be paying overdraft charges during holiday season, it won’t be fun, I promise.

So what do you do after you have made a budget? The only thing left to do – shopping, or rather, finding deals to shop for! It is a lot of fun (at least for me) to look through online deal-searching sources and find your favorite item at … any discounted price! So, here are a couple of deal sources that I’d use to search for deals:

• Woot.com – This should be one of the most popular discounted deal site online, however, it only offer up to one deal per day, although there are occasional woot-offs, where new deals are introduced whenever one is sold out. Woot also offer daily shirt and wine deals.
• Dealsea – Dealsea provides a list view of deals offered by online retailers. It is also accompanied by comments from moderators and sellers that gives more information about the deals.
• Deal Plus – Here you can see items displayed in ‘thumbnail’ view. The extra bonus for this site is the ‘Freebies’, where moderators and users contribute freebies online in various forms – couples and samples are some of the ones I have tried before.

Sounds good?
No? You are asking what if you like customized and non-generic products? Well, as long as there is demand, there’s always supply. Here is a list of non-generic products that I had used before:

• Threadless – this online community based tee-shirt company accepts and prints polled shirt design submission. Unlike the many others you might have seen online, most of the content here are actually G if not PG-rated. Making it a really positive environment for consumers
• Snapfish.com – yes, this is one of the many online photo-printing services that has been thriving in recent years. My preference for this site over the rest is most because of its generosity. Yes, generosity towards new customers. Of course its high-quality and rather cheap (12 cents per print) are its distinguish qualities, but I am certainly attracted towards Snapfish because of the 20 free prints it offered to any new customers based on email. And 20 prints per recommendation that you make. Comparing that to my experience with dotPhoto, which denied my print because one of the print has been printed by my friend previously (meaning you can’t print one photo twice with two accounts).

AND, if that’s not enough guide from a personal blog, feel free to visit the MSN’s guide to holiday shopping – 20 easy gifts — that aren’t gift cards.

Happy Holidays!

(via NY Times Review)

Following the footsteps of several mega-box-office-hit animations, we can now expect at least 2 to 3 animations per year. And no, not all of them are as fun or memorable as stories like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, or Cars, most of them are just animations. And that’s the problem – after a series of animation craze years, just like how Atari-owned Warner Bros caused a near collapse to the video games industry, consumers including myself are starting to feel numb towards the cutesy animations. Even though I have been a fan of Pixar’s animations, the thought of a rat being funny or the movie being of any profound value didn’t hit me.

So I didn’t watch it in the theaters, and even when my roommate’s girlfriend got a copy of it from Netflix, I wasn’t too crazy over it and didn’t bother to ask them for it. But to demonstrate the use of $1 per day DVD rental at Kroger, I checked out Ratatouille. And last night, I watched it.

I know my words are not those of Ego in the movie, but I still want to say that, it is a great movie.

I was impressed by the way it was started, then the way the water was animated. Every detail of Remy was paid specific attention. I like how the artist gave him emotion that can be related to that f real-life rats. While there wasn’t a profound meaning behind the movie (such as stop over-fishing with ‘Happy Feet’), the DVD does include a short animation with some history of rats and how we (human) should stop poaching them, because they didn’t cause the Black Death. Finally, the music totally topped it off. And there’s no way for a music illiteracy to describe it, you just have to watch it and let yourself be immersed in it.