There’s a Citi (formerly known as Citibank) commercial on television right now in which people are talking about ways to save money, like biking to work. One woman shares, “[I] take hotel shampoo bottles when I travel. Haven’t paid for that stuff in years!”

Now, here’s where I’m concerned: Those bottles have maybe an ounce of shampoo in them. Either this woman travels very frequently, or she washes her hair very infrequently.

My new plan for getting through the recession is to enter a lot of sweepstakes in the hope of winning free stuff and thus saving money. Today I entered (or re-entered) two contests for free mobile phones, one for free household appliances, one for a vacation to New York, and three for free computers. Granted, in the time I spent entering those contests just now, I might have had just as much luck walking outside and waiting for a free phone, computer, or household appliance to fall out of the sky.

I’m sort of annoyed with Chevron and sort of not.

The first time I went into the ExtraMile (that’s the convenience store at Chevron gas stations) to buy a cup of coffee, they gave me a punch card. Buy six coffees, get the seventh free. So here we are, a month or two later, and I recently acquired my sixth punch.

I went into the ExtraMile tonight and poured my seventh cup, and I brought it up to the cashier with my fully-punched card. “We don’t take those,” he informed me.

“But I got the card here,” I pointed out. “You’ve punched most of these yourself.”

“Yeah, we punch them, but we don’t give the free one. Any other ExtraMile will though,” he claimed.

Thoroughly annoyed with this suspicious lack of full participation, I reluctantly handed over my Chevron gift card to pay. The cashier went through the motions, printed out my receipt, and then stood there looking at it for a while. The card was pre-authorized, but then it charged me $0.00 for no apparent reason (even though the gift card has well over fifty dollars left on it). I offered to try paying again, but he told me to just take the coffee and not to worry about it.

So although I’m annoyed with their questionable “participation” in their own loyalty program, I did come away with a free coffee after all was said and done. And on top of that, I still have my fully-punched card, which means I still get another free coffee… if I can find an ExtraMile that participates in the redemption part of the punch card.

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?

I started thinking about the bands that I’ve seen live in concert, thanks to a LivingSocial meme on Facebook (called “Bands I’ve seen live in concert”). Until I tried to list them, I didn’t realize how many I’d seen! Here’s the list, as far as I can remember:

Barenaked Ladies (many times), Guster, DEVO, David Bowie, Reel Big Fish, Kool & the Gang, the Offspring, Lit (were awful), Save Ferris, Offwhite (fronted by a friend of Ashleigh’s), Nothing Special (fronted by my friend Amanda), Cake, Alanis Morissette, the White Stripes, Hot Hot Heat, Hot Tuna, the Other Ones, Semisonic, Moby, Violent Femmes, Counting Crows, the Pixies, They Might Be Giants, the Aquabats, and Busta Rhymes.

My uncle wrote a reflective essay today about his 51st birthday (today). It seems he’s wearing the same black sweater today that he was wearing on his eighteenth birthday, immortalized in a photo from Yosemite. Apparently that black sweater had an even longer history: it had been passed down to him from my father, who also had it as a teenager. My mother commented that “they don’t make sweaters like they used to.” I disagree whole-heartedly. I think they do make sweaters like they used to; they just don’t make consumers like they used to.

Ilse wishes you a "hoppy" Easter! This photo is from her Cadbury audition, naturally.

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.

If you’re in the market for a camera, you should consider buying my used Canon PowerShot SD450. It’s cheaper than buying a new camera, not to mention you’ll be getting a top-of-the-line camera that’s been road-tested for less than you’d pay for a brand new, bottom-of-the-line camera.

Here’s a link to CNET’s review of the camera, so you can see how they like it, and watch a video of it in action.

Also check out my photos that I’ve taken with the SD450.

I’m selling mine on eBay, so it’ll be gone by Friday night at 8:30pm PDT. If you’re a Windows Live Cashback member, be sure to link from the eBay ad on live.com and use BuyItNow for 11% cash back (as of this morning).

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.