Thinking About Pre-Paid Legal Services?

The web is the weirdest thing on our planet… I got a message via my YouTube channel from someone who knows my buddy Scott, and he was asking about Pre-Paid Legal Services because he was thinking of joining.  I wrote him back and then thought, maybe this should go on the blog for others who might want an opinion:

Yes, I have been a PrePaid subscriber for years. Yes, they truly were an MLM, although these days you can go directly to PPL and join without going through an associate, I think.

Pros: Unlimited phone consultations with attornies who practice the law pertinent to your issue and are licensed in the area where you need them (for example, if I am in CO and doing a real estate transaction in AZ, PPL will put me in contact with a real estate attorney in AZ).

They will review up to a certain number of pages (5 or 10) of contract verbiage to advise you on it, and they will write certain types of letters on your behalf. These are “metered” per month depending on your plan.

There are other benefits and riders you can “bolt on” to the $26/mo base price. It is month-to-month, and you can scale up or down. At one time we had the “small business” rider, which helped with LLC/S-Corp type questions for our business.

Cons: There really is no con as long as customers understand that no attorney is going to take them on as a client without them shelling additional cash out of pocket! I have no idea if the rates are truly discounted compared to street rates, but my focus is to use PPL as information for “self-help” and as a way to avoid actual litigation.

Overall I am a happy customer, but even if you don’t like it, you will be out I think $10 to sign up and $26 for the first month – that’s a pretty cheap “pilot program” and I think you will find it is pretty legit.

Hope this info prooves useful. My rep/reseller is Diane Glass. I do not resell but if you don’t have anyone to “give credit to” and if they still need a “name” be my guest to use hers.

Purple & Green

Maybe there are some places where it is not easy to be green. Here doesn’t seem to be one.

Theodore Roosevelt Island

 

Path next to my infamous bus stop

  

Ugly Condos - Pretty Trees

 

 

Even the bus I rode was green (At least today)

Spring Bumper Pollination

 I thought I would take a few shots of Spring greenery from the bus stop because I thought the colors were fun, but as I was taken the second shot, I heard a series of sound effects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It went Honkkk! Shhhh! Crack! Shhhh! Crunch! Crackle! Pop! Pop!  That wasn’t breakfast cereal… it was 5 cars stacking up in the turn lane. 

 

 

 

There was so much traffic I couldn’t get a shot, but then I finally got one of the car most “impacted” by the event.  Just then my bus pulled up.

Funky Rosslyn Sculpture

Look, a double-helix

DDO Gumballs

Dungeons & Dragons Online has gumballs. Usually they hover like giant out-of-reach candies.  But, occassionally, if your Royal Guard Mask fails (or if you fall while fighting in the original dragon raid), you can catch one in your clutches!!

My little halfling was wired for months after this episode

Progress…

I just saw the best advertsiement in the May issue of “The Week” magazine.  It is entitled “Progress is Overrated” and it argues about how progress hasn’t done us any favors, so that’s why Post has kept the recipe for Shredded Wheat the same for 117 years. What sealed the deal was the tag line:
“We put the ‘no’ in innovation”

Simply Brilliant!

Ted
“I put the ‘ill’ in brilliant”

Ronald Jenkees, 2007 CD

Mr. Super Fun

I F***ING DID IT! I caved and bought Jenkees’ CD. It’s Matt’s fault for showing me the “56K RAP,” and then when I saw him plop the camera down and launch into some nice live electronica, it was game over.

I won’t lie… I am bummed that his YouTube electronica tracks aren’t on it.

My tastes come from a freak-blend of Trance, Grunge, and who knows what else, so for me the first track, “Derty,” is the war hammer. It crushed everything in its path – even tho I am not a “synth horn” person, the rest of the layers in that track are so wicked, I played it like 19 times in a row. Heck, I skipped logging into DDO to play it 19 times in a row while writing this!

The rest of the CD is cool – just not my style overall. He has a fabulous blend of musical elements, styles, sounds - he’s not scared to try anything and I wouldn’t be surprised if some other tracks grow on me.  The “Rocky Song Remixed” and “Canon in D Remix” definitely breathed a new spin into those melodies.

“Derty” and the infamous “56K RAP” are worth the $10, but you can buy them separate for a $1 each. I would pay another $10 just to have his YouTube jams in higher quality…not even studio grade, just not YouTube grade!

Musika Inspiration

Ronald Jenkees is the total electronica bomb, man!  I had a crummy day cuz well, Visual Source Safe will do that to a person (rips your code out and walks all over it), and then I left my cell phone in a men’s room and it got hoiked.

I came home, I ate a sandwich, I cranked some DJRJ and kept the pilot light going for when I can afford to buy new gear to replace the stuff I had to blow out on E-Bay.  Like me poor, sniffle, Korg N5! Weep. Sob.

K, I just bought the officialified RJ CD. Oh Yeah!

Down & Dirty .NET PayPal Buttons?

CAN IT BE?
Yes, my friends it is possible… I think.  Bottom line is, you can design buttons all day long in PayPal and there are various ways to get them working.  However, since I am far too dense for GhostForms, I found my own little path.

GO GET YOUR BUTTONS
Now, I am not going to drill into PayPal buttons… their website will generate both hosted and non-hosted buttons for you.  I am opting for non-hosted because then I can actually have my website generate the buttons based on info in my website/database. Handy.

I HAVE BUTTONS, NOW WHAT?
Once you have your buttons, you can do many things.  What I wanted was to have CONTROL! (Sound FX: Maniacal laughter), so I wanted to generate the parameters for my buttons. But there are a couple caveats:
1) I didn’t want the guts of my button in the HTML of the web page for people to examine and hack.
2) I didn’t want the guts of my button on a URL for folks to hack! Hacker: “What’s that price? I think I will just set that to price=-50.00 so Ted owes ME! Hahaha!”

This means, my users will click a button, and my server code will generate an HttpRequest that goes to PayPal, passing it a POST so that PayPal can come back with their shopping page. It goes like this: 

SOURCES
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/698029/invoking-a-post-to-an-external-site-with-c-httpwebrequest
http://www.csharp-station.com/HowTo/HttpWebFetch.aspx

CODE:
//This goes wherever you need it… button click, page load, etc.
//You need System.IO, System.NET, System.Text

//make a button (just for this demo – see PayPal documents)
//NOTE: ampersands used to make a psuedo URL…
            StringBuilder ParamsAsString = new StringBuilder();
            string Url = “https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr“;
            ParamsAsString.Append(”cmd=_xclick-subscriptions”);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&business=your@paypal.email“);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&lc=US”);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&item_name=productname”);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&item_number=productid”);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&no_note=1″);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&no_shipping=1″);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&a3=25.95″);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&currency_code=USD”);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&src=1″);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&p3=1″);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&t3=M”);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&sra=1″);
            ParamsAsString.Append(”&bn=PP-SubscriptionsBF:btn_subscribeCC_LG.gif:NonHosted”);
//convert params to a byte array
            byte[] paramStream = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(ParamsAsString.ToString());

//create a request
            HttpWebRequest ppr = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(Url);
            ppr.Method = “POST”;
            ppr.ContentType = “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”;
            ppr.UserAgent = “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; sv-SE; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2″;
            ppr.ContentLength = paramStream.Length;

//Get request stream and put our parameters there!
            using (var stream = ppr.GetRequestStream())
            {
                stream.Write(paramStream, 0, paramStream.Length);
            }

//Send this to PayPal and get response
            var response = ppr.GetResponse();
            string result;
            using (var sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
            {
                result = sr.ReadToEnd();
            }

//Write this to the user’s browser
            Response.RedirectLocation = “https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr“;
            Response.Write(result);
//Be Done! Don’t process the rest of the page…
            Response.Flush();
            Response.End();

NOTES:
I set the RedirectLocation because I feel guilty.  Also, the Flush() and End() stop the rest of the page from processing.  Since you just wrote a complete HTML page from PayPal, continuing to write more will just be weird!!

Now, you might also notice is that the URL on the web page is still YOUR url, but all the buttons, content and everything else, having been put together on the remote website’s server (PayPal in this case) are all set up to point to the correct place…so you should be good to go.

Happy Coding!

Spring

Flowers. Yup, that's what they be!

Ok, so it is Spring (is it…might still be technically Winter).  But ’tis the time for thoughts of renewal, growth, and all those wonderful things. 

They always get overlooked, but here's to you, bushes!!

Theses bushes got an early start, and I think for once, we should not just stop and admire the flowers.  We should also stop and admire the bushes!! Yes!