At the end of last month, I decided let my 96′ Golf to retire and get myself a brand new Honda Fit.  Why did I choose a Fit?  The main reason is because the price and fuel consumption.

Since it is replacing a car for daily use, to and from work, and do glossaries etc; I need a car that does not burn a crazy amount of gas everyday like killing a tree on every mile I traveled and it needs to be roomy and most importantly, price needs to be cheap, well relatively cheap.

2008 Honda Fit, equipped with a 1.5L 4 cylinder engine that produce 109HP and 105 lbs/feet torque with burning 7.1 L/100km (city) or 5.7 L/100km (hwy) of gas.  What I like about Fit is the style is pretty and somewhat young looking (since I’m not and old family dude) and the seats can be folded to create amazing huge interior space.  The seats gives you enough leg rooms in order to let your family and friends sit in your Fit comfortably.

Never the less, I had a great experience when I was purchasing the car from Vancouver Honda which I think I should give them a create for that.  When my wife and I walked in to the dealership, I was served almost right the way and everyone there provided an excellent service.

Now with the new fit, I’m spending about 35 bucks for a tank of gas where it would be $50+ to fill up the Golf that I had with the same price for the gas.  Plus when I purchased the Fit, Honda was offering 0.9% finance and 90 days no payment which saved me a lot of money and I’m happy

In my earlier post, I’ve mentioned that Microsoft is gonna compensate the Xbox Live was down during the holiday and made thousands of holiday gamers mad at them.  Here is the newest announcement from Xbox Live support updated on January 18, 2008.

The game doesn’t look that exciting but since it’s free of charge, I might as well download it when it’s available.  Would you?

For the Holiday gamers, you might experised difficulty connecting to Xbox Live during the holiday.  Microsoft has claimed that during this past holiday season we broke a number of Xbox Live record.  Due to the fustration the holiday gamers might have, Microsoft has offer full Xbox Live arcade access free of charge to download.

After a month of wait, I finally got a great due for a copy of Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare at BestBuy on boxing day.

How do I like this game

Unlike previous COD games, which take place during world war II, this game is about modern times.  The game play is a lot better than the previous CODs in my opinion, I like how you are told what to do by the AI soldiers and fight as a team.  The store is told with a satellite images, holographic pictures of military equipment which I think it’s amazing.

In COD 4, you can shoot through thin objects, bullet holds on the wall and objects.  You can shoot and blow up vehicles to do a multiple kills at the same time.  These add a lot to the game and make it so much more fun and realistic.

I just started the game in single player campaign and I haven’t tried the multi-player (xbox live) mode yet and hopefully, they do better on the re-spawning to avoid spawn camping which ruin the multi-player mode of the game like what happened in COD 3.  I can’t wait to try out the multi-player mode after I finish the single player campaign.

I was using Sony Ericsson P910i for about 15 months and I had no problem with it and I didn’t expect to get a new cell phone so soon until I saw all the new cell phones advertisement in Hong Kong while I was traveling.  Nokia N81, N95, HTC Touch, Touch Dual, TyTN II etc….  At last, I picked HTC Touch, not only because it’s one of the cheapest and it is a PDA phone.

HTC Touch equips with a TI’s OMAP 850, 201 MHz processor and operated by Windows Mobile 6 Professional.  It has 128 MB ROM and SD RAM 64 MB DDR.  Most importantly, unlike other PDA phones which are a big block of a phone to carry around, but Touch is very small and light.  It only weight 112g with battery and 99.9mm x 58mm x 13.9mm in dimension.  The device control is kind of neat, as it’s model name “Touch”.  It uses HTC TouchFLO which in other words, similar to iPhone’s control While in PDA mode, it uses the ordinary touch screen control.

I personal like this device very much, although there are a lot of 3G cell phones out there that does the video conversation and stuff, but it’s not that common and I wouldn’t want everyone knows where I’m when I want to keep my little privacy

McDonald’s (Canada) Monopoly has started. It seems that I have McDonald’s more often when they have the Monopoly game every year. I think it is a very smart marketing technique; it’s not the prices that attracted me but it’s fun to peel the game pieces.

Rare Pieces

Each year, I managed to collect all property except the “rare” pieces. This year the rare pieces are:

• Mediterranean Ave. for $50 - odds are 1 in 33,616
• Short Line for $100 - 1 in 2,094,076
• Vermont Ave for $500 - 1 in 33,752,584
• Virginia Ave for $1000 - 1 in 33,752,584
• Tennessee Ave for $5000 - 1 in 168,762,143
• Kentucky Ave for $10000 - 1 in 56,069,351
• Venthnor Ave for $25000 - 1 in 186,829,657
• Pennsylvania Ave for $50000 - 1 in 186,829,657
• And Boardwalk for $1000000 - 1 in 184,698,474.

Let’s see my luck this year if I could win any cash price or a few pounds on weight Good luck guys if you are collecting McDonald’s Game Stamps.

Almost every airlines have their travel reward programs; for instance, Air Canada offers Aeroplan, AAvantage from American Airlines, Asiamiles and Marcopolo Club from Cathay Pacific, etc.

Which travel reward program is the best of all?

In order to answer this question, you will need to answer the following questions: how frequent are you traveling in 2 or 3 years; which cities are you traveling the most; which airline will you travel the most; are you traveling alone or with friends and family.

Most travel reward programs are basically accumulate points by flying with its own airlines or their partnered carriers. There is no single reward program is the best, but there should be a program that is most suitable for you.

In General, most airlines are separated into 2 groups: One World, Star Alliance. If you are a member of a airline’s reward program, you will most likely will eligible to accumulate points by traveling with any carriers within the same group.

Howerver, each program has different rules in regards of points required to redeem tickets, expiry date on points accummulated, points allow to be transfered to another account or not, etc. You should join the reward program offered by the airline that you will travel the most, it is because you should be able to accummulate the most points from the travel; next if you are traveling with family or friends, all travelers should consider joinning the same reward programs that would allow points to be transferred to your friend’s or family’s at no or minimum cost, in this case, you will be able to redeem reward by grouping the points together, JAL Mileage Bank is a great example of this case, they offer Family Club which will allow you to pay USD30/Year to group all the points in the accounts of your direct family members. Last but not the least, if you are not traveling frequently and you predict that you would not be able to accummulate enough points to redeem air tickets; then you should look join the reward programs that would allow you to redeem gifts as well as tickets. There are different factors that you should consider before you decide which reward program you should join.

I would like to put a word of caution before you start. Allowing executable extensions would give you more freedom; however, it is less security on the other hand. I would strongly recommend allowing unsafe attachments just for a specific email, which you are expecting the attachment from the person you know, and undoing it after downloading the attachments.

In this article, I’m going to show you how you can lower the security level and allowing a file from a known source sent you. There’s a article in Microsoft Help and Support about it in more detailed.

1. Quit Outlook if it is running.

2. Click Start, and then click Run.

3. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.

Microsoft Outlook 2000:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Security

Microsoft Outlook 2002:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Security

Microsoft Office Outlook 2003:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

4. Backup before you start

5. Add a New String Value called “Level1Remove”