A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had joined Jackpot Rewards, the online lottery and cash-back shopping site with a weekly $1 million sweepstakes. It's still the best odds anywhere for winning a million dollars, and you get extra tickets when any of your friends have two matching numbers in the jackpot drawing that week (so if you're going to join, use a referral link — the larger network of friends you join, the better your odds). Now they're also paying a $10 bounty on referred friends and have grandfathered in past referrals — I just got paid $50, more than paying for my membership.

As of this week, I've been accepted to masters programs to study computer science at University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, Lehigh University and Drexel University. Now I have to decide where I want to go. Continued »

A new company backed by investors Peter Lynch, Chuck Clough (the former chief global investment strategist of Merrill Lynch) and other big names from the Boston area offers a $1 million weekly lottery with a guaranteed winner. The site claims the best odds ever of winning a million dollars, and also runs a drawing for a jackpot prize that increases each week nobody's numbers match those drawn — currently at $105 million. Continued »

Apparently the people I asked for letters of recommendation are worse procrastinators than me. I gave them all at least a month's advance notice, and two reminders, and got them all back exactly two days before the March 1st application deadline for some of the graduate schools I'm applying to. 26 envelopes, $8.49 in postage, $240 in application fees, $280 in testing fees, and $90 in transcript fees later, all the applications are in the mail.

It's now been just over 6 months since I made PayPal the primary payment method on my ecommerce sites in an effort to reduce losses to fraud (see Will 53% of customers switch to PayPal and Betting on Igor). It takes a long time to see the effects of something like this, since chargebacks tend to occur weeks or months after the fraudulent transaction takes place. That was part of the problem — by the time someone realizes their credit card was used by someone else, the service has already been rendered, so the loss is not just the original payment but also the costs of the service sold. I've now been able to take a closer look at the long term effects of sending all new customers to PayPal rather than accepting credit cards directly. Continued »

Last time I subscribed to cable TV service, the bill for basic service and cable internet was nearly $100 per month. Even with the short-term bundle pricing, all the taxes and fees the cable companies tack on make it an expensive service. I decided it's not worth it. I don't subscribe to cable TV. But what are my alternatives?

Apple just announced the addition of movie rentals to iTunes for $3.99 a day. I don't know why anyone would pay that. With a Netflix subscription at just $8.99 a month, you get physical DVDs in the mail, plus unlimited movie streaming on your PC. There are over 6,000 movies available to stream so far, far more than iTunes has available to rent, and you can watch them whenever and as many times as you'd like.

Especially with the major networks starting to cancel prime time TV series due to the writer's strike, dropping a huge bill in favor of streaming video makes a lot more sense to me. I watched a movie between classes on my laptop today, streamed in very high quality from Netflix, and have a new DVD coming tomorrow. Not a bad deal.

I need a new website for W3Counter, and I can't design it. I need to reorganize the site and there are going to be lots of new service plans and features to show off.

I'm thinking of holding a contest at SitePoint, but I don't know if I'll get good results from this. I'm not 100% sure what content should be on the homepage yet, and designers entering a contest they may not win won't take a lot of time to think through the functional/marketing aspects of the design for me if I can't pin it down in the brief. Even though I'd offer at least $700-1000, which would bring in some of the better designers in the contest area, I'm still unsure if this will result in locking me into buying a design I don't really want.

On the other hand, hiring a designer/agency with a decent portfolio is probably going to run at least 3 times that much to start. W3Counter doesn't turn much of a profit right now, so that's a lot of my own money to invest in the design.

What do you think? Contest or designer? Any recommended designers you've worked with?

With room to grow once again, I've been working on the other features I planned for W3Counter back in the fall. The main task, which I hope will allow me to sell to bigger customers than my normal $5/month individual webmaster, is providing private instances of the entire service. The plan is to have three distinct products in the next six months — the hosted, individual service; a white-label private instance for designers, service providers, and networks of many websites; and a white-label version of the entire service for resale. Continued »

I've had a number of people come to me looking for a W3Counter plan that can handle more than the "Pro" plan. More websites, more pageviews, or sometimes both. If people are knocking on the door asking to buy, I need to figure out a way to sell what they want. I decided against letting people download and run W3Counter themselves — it's complicated to set up, with a complex database, a slew of cron jobs, and requires pretty recent versions of PHP and MySQL many hosts still don't offer. It's also unlikely to perform well on shared hosting, and I'm sure some would try to run it there anyway. Continued »

$3,000 disappeared because I didn't notice the pattern for 4 days. Some fraudster attempted to place orders using 69 different credit cards before I closed all the accounts and refunded all the charges. Looks like this person had a large list of credit cards about to expire he was running through, since a few couldn't be refunded. That might explain the two strange, nasty voice mails left on my phone by people who left no name or number. Amazing how fast so much money can be lost — in 4 days, a lot of advertising can be delivered, which I of course paid for. Continued »