I have a lot of free time now that I’ve pretty much given writing anything for this blog, so I’ve been looking for new ways to spend my time and money while amusing myself. For the past six months I’ve been oddly fascinated with the idea of getting a Playstation 3. I’m not a big console gamer, but since the PS3’s recent price drop it’s now at least somewhat in the same spending category as a stand-alone Blu-ray DVD player.

The logical side of me keeps thinking, “But I can buy a blu-ray player for $150!” but the geek side of me always counters with, “And for an additional $150 you can get a kick-ass game system that plays blu-ray movies and has Netflix capabilities and has free network gaming and will probably soon be capable of curing cancer and making the perfect cup of coffee.”

With an argument like that it’s hard not to go out and buy a Playstation 3. Heck, it’s hard not to buy two of them.

But I’m also an American consumer, which means I’ve been taught to NEVER accept the retail price and to ALWAYS look around for the best sale or deal or rebate or gimmick on anything I buy, from a dozen eggs to $299 next generation gaming systems.

There are lots of Playstation 3 sales this Friday. Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and even Gamestop all have PS3 bundle deals where they are selling the Playstation 3 120gb version for $299 (that’s the regular price of the system alone) and they’re all throwing in some games. The problem, of course, is that you have to wait in line for hours or you have to deal with Wal-Mart employees. Both are fates worse than death.

So today, on Black Friday, I finally found the perfect Playstation 3 deal: You get the PS3, plus two great games plus a $10 gift card… And you don’t have to wait in line for hours or try to snipe the package when it’s available online for 30 seconds at 3 AM. Oh, and did I mention you get get this incredible PS3 deal with no sales tax and free shipping?

The merchant who wins the Playstation deal of 2009?

Yep, Amazon.com!

Why is it the best PS3 bundle deal? Here’s what you get, essentially for free:

• Infamous PS3 game ($53 value)
• Kilzone2 PS3 game ($50 value)
• $10 Amazon gift card ($10 value)
• No shipping charges ($9 value)
• No sales tax (approximately $18 value, depending on your residence)
• No dealing with Wal-Mart (priceless!)

Total savings on this PS3 package deal: $140!

Click on the graphic to check it out… I don’t know how much longer this PS3 sale will last… If it’s unavailable, just check back every so often. Amazon.com is famous for having large stock reserves which sometimes “sell out” only to later become available in the upcoming hours and even days.

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About every four or five months it seems that I’m faced with a Mozilla Firefox update that, inevitably, renders one of my favorite plugins, Adsense Notifier, completely useless. It’s a clever and wonderful little plug-in that simply checks your Adsense earnings every 20 minutes or so and displays the results in the status bar of your Firefox browser. It’s a heck of a lot easier than logging into your Adsense account every hour to see how you’re doing for the day, week or even month. I’m kind of surprised Google hasn’t released some of their own Adsense applications, widgets and apps for various smartphones. Logging into a website to check data seems so… old-fashioned

You can still visit the Adsense Notifier plugin home page for information and updates, but it would seem that the developer has found other things to do with his time. This plugin is really only useful if you have a blog that has Adsense advertisements and you want to know your revenue, click through rate, and traffic of your site at every moment of the day. So, in the grand scheme of things, its audience is fairly small.

Anyway, whenever Firefox updates the Adsense Notifier plugin stops working, claiming that it can’t be used with the current version of Firefox (3.5.2 as of writing this). The truth is: the Adsense Notifier plugin will work just fine with the latest version of Firefix, but some manual editing is required. You don’t need to know any programming or have much more than basic PC knowledge. I have found a couple different tutorials on how you fix the Adsense Notifier plugin to get it working again, but they were either designed for the Mac or missed some critical steps. I decided I’d put all the info together into one quick tutorial on how to get your Adsense Notifier working again.

1. Disable and Uninstall Adsense Notifier: I don’t even know if this is entirely necessary, but before I re-install a plugin I always disable it and completely remove it from my Firefox. I just don’t want to chance different file versions floating around. Don’t be afraid… you have nothing to lose, right? Adsense Notifier isn’t working for you, so just get rid of it. You can disable and uninstall it by going to the Tools menu of Firefox and choosing Add-ons. Find Adsense Notifier and uninstall it. Restart Firefox.

2. Download Adsense Notifier again: Now you need to download the latest version of it. Note that I said “download” not install. You can visit the developer’s site at http://code.mincus.com/ and find the link that reads “Adsense Notifier 0.9.8″. Right-click on the link and choose to save the file to your PC. It will save a file called adsense.xpi.

3. Rename Adsense.xpi: Here’s a little secret – .xpi files are really just .zip files with a few special components. Rename adsense.xpi to adsense.zip. If you can’t see your file extensions then you’ll have to go poke around in your folder options to turn them on. The steps are slightly different depending upon which version of Windows you’re using.

4. Open Adsense.zip: Now that you have a .zip file instead of an .xpi file you can just double-click on it and it should open like a regular folder, or at least into your default .zip application.

5. Edit Install.rdf: Inside this adsense.zip file are some folders and files. One of the files you’ll see is called install.rdf. You’ll want to open it with a text editor and take a quick look around. If you can’t open it from your zip program, try dragging the file out of you zip file and dumping it on your Windows desktop. Now you should more easily be able to edit it with a text editor.

That’s the file that gives Firefox some of the plugin install info and, for some reason, the “max” version of Firefox was set to 3.0b5 down at line 33 of the file. There’s probably a very good reason for that, but I’m not a plugin developer so I don’t care. Change it to 3.99 or 4 or even 8. Just make sure the number you change it to his higher than the version of Firefox you have. I set mine to 4. Save and close the file with your text editor. If you were working on the file on your desktop you’ll want to drag this new version back into the zip file, replacing the old version.

6. Edit nsAdsensenotifier.js: Just editing the install.rdf file will allow you to install Adsense notifier, but it has an annoying bug where it doesn’t seem to want to save the password all the time. Here’s how you get around that bug. While you’re still in the adsense.zip file, go into the components folder. See that file called nsAdsensenotifier.js? That’s the next file we’re going to edit with our text editor. Same deal goes here: if you can’t edit within your zip program, just yank it to the desktop and open it with a text file editor.

Now we’re going to make two quick edits on separate lines. At lines 103 and 109 you’ll see something like passwd = “” on both lines (yes, the variables and syntax are slightly different). Just type in your adsense password there. In the image I put in the term mypassword instead of my real password (duh). Yes, you’re basically hardcoding your password into the plugin. You can even hardcode your Adsense username into line 108. I did, but I’m not sure if it really makes any difference. Save and close the file. Again, if you’re editing it outside of the adsense.zip file then you’ll want to copy it back into the components folder, replacing the old version.

7. Rename Adsense.zip to Adsense.xpi: Close all your editor, close the zip file and just rename it back to Adsense.xpi. Now it’s a Firefox extension file again.

8. Double-click on Adsense.xpi: That’s it! Firefox should now try to install Adsense Notifier after a few seconds and once it’s up and running the extension should once again run as it used to!

Now sit back and watch the pennies come rolling in!

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I suspect they are building snowmen in Hell at the moment because I had a really bad Apple Store experience.

You see, I decided to get an iPhone.

I’m not a gadget kind of guy. I have a cell phone that gives me 1000 minutes of talk time every year for $100. I ended last year with 993 minutes left. But I’ve always had this fantasy of going to a yard sale, seeing something interesting and then being able to whip out my phone right there and check eBay for the value. I imagine myself finding extra copies of the US Constitution and previously undiscovered art by Leonard da Vinci with my internet-enable phone. So I went to the Apple Store to make my fortune.

During my first visit to the Apple Store in the middle of workday I was unable to buy an iPhone. I only had a lunch hour to spend and I ended up waiting 45 minutes just to talk to someone who could help me. There was no line, there was just no hurry on anyone’s part. I signed up with two different teeny-bopper “concierges” and eventually was helped by a young overly laid-back guy wearing a large cross around his neck named Dave.

I told Dave I wanted an iPhone but had some questions. He nodded silently. I asked about the cell phone plan, about coverage, about termination fees and other cell phone sort of questions. He couldn’t answer a single one. He kept saying, “Oh, that’s AT&T, not us.” Undaunted I went ahead and agreed to buy an iPhone anyway. He pulled out a little handheld computer that clearly wasn’t made by Apple and started tapping away, asking questions, running my credit card, and generally doing his retail thing. All was going well until he told me the phone number of the new iPhone.

“What? That area code is like 30 miles away from here. I want something local.”

“Oh, sorry, I can’t do anything about it. That’s AT&T.”

“Can the guys at the AT&T store help me? I don’t want to be charged for changing a number I just bought from you.”

Dave didn’t know. My hour was long gone. I told Dave to forget the iPhone, cancel my order and that I was going to go ask my questions at the AT&T store in the mall. When all was said and done I had wasted two hours of my lunch break (it’s good to be a manager) and walked away with no iPhone.

But I still wanted the damn thing. Several days later I went back to the same mall and straight to the AT&T store. I asked my questions and got my answers. Then I went to the Apple store and…waited again.

For a retail store that has a “Genius bar” a “concierge” service and witty ads featuring how cool and easy to use Apple products are it’s pretty stunning at how poorly they’ve learned to manage customers. During my wait time I wandered around the store and started to pay attention to what was going on around me. At the Genius Bar I watched a “genius” insult a customer’s intelligence and talk down to another customer. While walking around I saw several people come into the store, wander around for ten minutes, ask aloud how to get help and then left when they couldn’t figure it out. I watched the Concierge girls spend a lot of time chatting about high school and complaining about their parents.

The more I watched the Apple Store employees the more I realized that being overly enthusiastic about a product does not always make you the best salesperson. A few of the salespeople made snide remarks about Windows and Windows users… to customers who obviously had Windows PCs. Apple needs to realize that Apple enthusiasts do not always make for the best Apple salespeople.

I was the fifth person to walk into the store after it opened and I still ended up waiting a good 30 minutes before I was actually able to talk to someone who could help me. Again, I went through the whole answer and question process and again they gave me a phone number that was several counties away. I immediately took the phone to the AT&T store where they were able to change the number without a charge after a three minute wait.

And so I was done. Or so I thought.

Earlier this week I got not one but TWO AT&T bills. I opened each up and looked them over. One bill had the phone number of my new iPhone. One bill had… a phone number I had never heard of. I called AT&T and they confirmed that it was opened at an A&T store… on my first visit.

It turns out that Dave the laid back christian Apple Store employee had not canceled my order. Instead he had rung it through, giving me a phone number but no phone. AT&T tried to cancel the number but she said they couldn’t because “Apple stores lock their numbers and don’t allow anyone but them to close an account they opened.”

So someone from AT&T had to speak with the manager of the Apple Store and the manager had to close the extra AT&T phone number. Several hours later AT&T called me back and told me they had done this and the matter was resolved.

Apple isn’t a bad company, the Apple Stores aren’t a bad idea and Dave is probably not a bad person. But Apples Stores are just like any other retail establishment: they’re mall stores staffed by teenagers and retail store workers who really don’t care about anything other than the girl in the tight sweater who works at The Gap or the cute guy who makes pizza at the Sbarro.

I’m rather impressed with the iPhone but I won’t be going back to the Apple Store anytime soon.

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