I received my email newsletter from Good Experience this morning and wanted to share.

Catalog Choice is, in short, a really good website experience. It has a simple design, comfortable colors and an elegance of purpose - the point of the site is to remove you from catalog mailing lists. That’s it. Sign up, find the catalogs you regular receive, and mark the ones you’d rather not see anymore.

A clear focus, an interface that doesn’t get in one’s way, and an easy to understand series of actions to get to the results. That’s a really well-designed website in my book.
I signed up, we’ll see in 8-10 weeks whether it’s working.

This morning I tried to cancel my Yahoo Search Marketing account, but I couldn’t figure out how. Nothing in the help section about it… I had to leave for a meeting so I sent them an email and just sat back down here.

No answer from email yet, so I Googled ‘close my yahoo search marketing account’ and the first page I came to was on the YSM site and it actually did lead me to a page with information on how to close the account.

I made the call. I went through three levels of menus and then was routed to my ‘customer solutions advocate’ (I like that). He had my account closed in about two minutes and it was very pleasant. He didn’t try to convince me to stay (I was closing the account because we sold the business to which it was connected) and was polite and fast. I couldn’t ask for more.

If anyone’s interested, read more here about closing a YSM account (not that I’m advocating this!)…

I just got my first order from Overnight Prints (www.overnightprints.com) and I’m extremely pleased - they are better than my old cards, for which I paid about twice the price. These have a nice matte finish and rounded corners, and they just look fantastic.

I haven’t written in detail about my 5-day ordeal rebuilding my computer last week, after my old Dell 2400’s system board finally bit it. Suffice it to say, I ordered a new system board, Core 2 Duo processor and 2gB of DDR2 memory for a bit over the price the local computer repair shop wanted to try to fix my 4-year-old Dell. So basically I have a brand new, screaming fast machine.

And it’s in a shiny black case from NZXT. I got that from Newegg on sale for about $49. It’s black, nice open side window with blue fans. It fits ATX, baby AT and micro-ATX boards.

This was my first computer build, and this case was extremely easy to work with. I didn’t have any problems with connections, there’s loads of space, and everything went in nicely. It’s sitting here by my desk and I can’t hear anything, despite the four fans running. Very quiet at all times.

The only negative thing I have to say about it is that it scratches easily - I found that out taking off the side panel, and got a nick at the top corner but was careful afterwards so no more scratches to date. The case looks good and seems to be well-built otherwise and I have nothing but good recommendations about it - especially for the great price.

Got a link today from Good Experience to this neat little video about the breakup of a consumer/advertiser couple.

Yesterday I got my t-shirt from Vistaprint (after they sent me an XL one for some mortgage company by mistake).

It looks really good. The shirt is 100% cotton but very translucent, so my other half will likely be wearing it to advertise for me, but it looks really cool and the printing was done well. I might have to think about buying t-shirts for my business (thicker ones though).

I don’t often do product reviews but in this case one is deserved.

I started using a business number on Skype several months ago and bought a pair of headphones with a microphone. Admittedly I didn’t buy top-of-line but what I purchased was about mid-range in price and with a fair number of decent recommendations online.

I discovered that Skype can be good for gaming.

Suddenly the headphones started getting a lot more use and after a month I couldn’t stand them anymore. My ears hurt while I was wearing them and I couldn’t wait to get them off…

I bought another pair, a smaller, lighter and behind the neck style. Those lasted about two months, but again, they lacked enough adjustability to make them comfortable for long-term use.

My husband bought me a third pair for Christmas - and they are wonderful. They’re also cheap - about $20 at Best Buy.

They’re Altec Lansing AHS322’s. They are by far the most comfortable headset I’ve ever owned. Like many excellent products, when they’re doing their job you don’t even notice them. My ears never hurt. They’re extremely lightweight and very adjustable and the boom mic is just a twisty wire, easy to position.

Again, they’re cheap. They’re wired. The sound quality is IMHO very good, but not blow-your-head-off outstanding. Their literature says that these are very popular for call centers - and that implies a high degree of comfort, which by this point was my main concern.

Highly recommended if you want lightweight and decent sound quality for very little cash.

I wrote earlier about purchasing WHMCS for my hosting reseller site. Well, I finished my integration, my hosting site launched on Sunday and I thought I would share my final thoughts about this first experience with WHMCS.

Nothing’s changed - I still love it. I learned that there about 30 template files that have to be edited for CSS to make it fit in nicely with the rest of the site, but the edits are easy and in most cases it’s very obvious what needs to be done.

I’m pretty happy with the way the whole thing turned out except for the icons that came with the package - I think they look a little cartoonish for my site and I plan to replace them at some point when I find something I like better. My WHMCS section is under Support on the top menu bar.

The control panel for running this thing is easy to understand. We ran about six test orders through the system looking for bugs and errors and I think we found most of them. I still won’t be too surprised if someone runs across something when they try to sign up, but for the most part it’s done.

I’m really happy with WHMCS and will purchase it in a few days when the trial license runs out. On second thought maybe I should go do that right now in case I forget…