By now I’m sure everyone realizes that “Free Credit Report dot com” isn’t really free; you have to enroll in their “Triple Advantage” program to get your free report, and if you forget to cancel, you get billed monthly for their credit monitoring service.

For anyone seeking truly free alternatives, I want to share my own choices for credit tools that don’t cost me anything but do a decent job of keeping an eye on my credit reports and credit score.

1. To get your credit reports completely free once per year, you can use AnnualCreditReport.com. There’s no commitment and no cost. You just pick any (or all) of the three credit bureaus, and you can instantly get a free report once a year to see exactly what’s on your file.
2. To check your credit score as often as you like (although I think it’s only really updated once a month), you can use Credit Karma. It only uses one credit bureau, but that should be fine unless you’re conducting a really sensitive transaction like a real estate purchase.
3. To keep an eye out for identity theft, you can use a service that’s included as a free perk for members of the Auto Club: CreditCheck Select, which monitors your credit report and alerts you whenever there’s a change (like a new account or an inquiry). I know that’s not technically free, but it is if you’re already a AAA member.

Using those three services, you can keep a pretty close eye on your credit without having to pay anything extra!

I was looking through old bookmarks in my web browser, and it made me reminisce about useless web pages from yester-decade.

Some pages I enjoyed, which are still around, include:

• The Really Big Button That Doesn’t Do Anything
• Surrealist Compliment Generator (“Your hair is reminiscent of a self-digesting yak in heat.”)
• How to Keep an Idiot in Suspense
• Bert Is Evil!
• 101 Uses for Extra AOL CDs
• The Godot-Cam (“still waiting…”)

I searched and searched for an existing mirror of “The Page That Turns You Into a Chicken,” though, and I can’t find a single one that’s still up. How sad is that?

Is anyone else upset by the removal of the letter e from the names of web sites? It was bad enough when it was just flickr, tumblr, and a few others, but then I heard about a site called toggl today, so I feel it’s worth bringing this up again. I don’t think other vowels are being attacked at this rate, and that’s just not fair. It’s time to mix it up a little with the missing vowels, people. I was going to suggest creating a medical site called doctr, for instance, but apparently that’s already been done. Good job! We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, though. Actors, please make actr, or if that’s already been done, how about ctor? For vitamins, how about vtamns? I could think of others, but that’s your job.

I knew a guy whose blog was so cool…

“How cool was it?”

It was so cool, it would automatically import comments once a day from the Facebook “notes” based on his blog entries.

“That’s not a very funny joke.”

Sorry, it wasn’t really a joke, just bragging about the cool Wordpress plug-in I’m using, called Facebook Comments.

“That’s not a very funny name for a Wordpress plug-in.”

No. No it isn’t.

Warning: Nerd entry.

I finally did away with Movable Type. I never fully recovered from the upgrade to MT4, which forced me to rewrite my comment templates.  I had previously been using Movable Type’s own <$MTCommentFields$> tag to create my comment form, and they ruthlessly abandoned the tag in version 4, so I had to recreate my comment form after upgrading.

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Tonight Ashleigh and I tried the new “Watch Now” service from Netflix. It allows us to watch a movie instantly on our computer screen instead of waiting to receive it in the mail. The service is only available for select titles, and obviously only with a fast internet connection. Anyway, it’s pretty amazing that a movie can be delivered so quickly and reliably, and at a very decent quality, over the internet. Our movie had to pause a few times for just a minute to “catch up” to itself (as a result of hiccups in our internet connection), but that gave us an opportunity to use the restroom; it wasn’t much of a nuisance. This is definitely the future of movie renting, and I highly recommend it for any Netflix users who haven’t tried it yet, provided you have a very fast connection.

I finally switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail last week. So far, I’m pretty happy. I’m just trying to get used to the automatic threading of “conversations” and using “labels” instead of folders. Why did I switch? Yahoo Mail Plus, combined with Yahoo Personal Address for my thenestor.com email address, made my Yahoo Mail kind of pricey. Gmail offered the same service for free, including the use of my domain name. And unlike Yahoo, Google doesn’t take over the whole domain name; just the mail part.

Now I’m on to the challenging task of moving old mail into Gmail. The first step was obvious: To get my mail from Yahoo Mail into Gmail, I just set up Gmail to retrieve from the Yahoo Mail POP server. Done and done. It just takes a while, because Gmail processes only 200 messages at a time, every half hour or so. Gmail is even smart enough to put most of the “Sent” mail into the “Sent” folder.

The harder part is getting my old mail (from before I used Yahoo) from Outlook Express. Basically I followed instructions similar to these. Most of the Gmail import solutions out there involve forwarding all your mail and therefore losing the original dates of the messages. Not interested. Instead, I put my mail on a POP server on my own computer and then had Gmail download it from there.

First, I imported my mail to Mozilla Thunderbird. Then I set up an IMAP/POP server on my own computer. I found a free, easy-to-use mail server called Mercury. I set up an account for myself, and then I went into Thunderbird and hooked it up as an IMAP account. Then I copied the emails from the archive folders into the Inbox of the IMAP account. After that, I went to Gmail and added an external account (to retrieve POP mail) using my IP address. Voila, it started downloading 200 messages at a time.

Now the tricky part is that a lot of my mail is going to the Spam folder, so I have to keep checking it once in a while during the retrieval process. The good thing is, all of the false-positive Spam has really old dates, so it’s easy to spot.

I’m working on a PHP project at work, which makes me really happy because a) it gives me some brain exercise, and b) I think PHP is a very useful language, and using it at work gets me back in the swing of it.

We’re using PHP right now to work with XML output from a web service, and that’s exactly the sort of thing that’s really useful in the web world right now. I haven’t played around much with stuff like Google Maps, but this is really similar, and it might get me in the mood to do some kind of personal project with Google Maps when I’m done.

Earlier today Apple Computer Inc. announced that, with a small software download, the new Intel-based Macs can run Windows XP. I immediately went to the apple.com home page to check it out, because I imagined it was going to look like this.

I tried to upgrade this site from Movable Type 3.17 to Movable Type 3.2 beta 5, and all hell broke loose. First of all, I did back it up, but I didn’t know that the backup of the database was corrupt until it was too late.

Version 3.2 wasn’t working because of memory limitations from my hosting company, but I couldn’t simply downgrade because 3.17 couldn’t read the newly-upgraded data in the database.

When I tried restoring from backup, 3.17 wouldn’t work because the database was corrupt. And I was still using a Berkeley database instead of MySQL (because the Berkeley database previously wasn’t “broke,” so I never fixed it), so I couldn’t look at the data to fix whatever was wrong.

Anyway, I eventually used a combination of some Berkeley tables from the backup and some Berkeley tables that had been upgraded, and I was able to convert this combination to MySQL using Movable Type’s conversion script, and then I could go into MySQL, fix what was wrong, manipulate the upgraded data to the way it was before, and successfully use version 3.17 again.

So now I’m running on 3.17, and it’s working very well, and all of my data is intact except some anti-spam settings and some trackbacks (which I never cared about anyway). And now I’m using MySQL, which is handy because I can fix things that break in the future, and I can easily make changes to all entries at once using SQL.

Tomorrow they’re supposed to announce the official release of version 3.2, and I’ll most likely try it again. But at least this time I have a textual backup (in the form of a SQL script) of the database, so if something goes wrong, I can downgrade again.

Knock on wood.