P-card from Hellenic bank and Flickr Pro

Vladimir told me about this new cool offering from Hellenic BankP-card, so I went to the bank today to see if I can get it.

Basically, P-card is a regular debit card. It is not connected to any of your accounts though, which is a nice thing if you want to use it on the web. The amount debited can be anywhere from 15 CYP and 500 CYP. If you run out of money, you can debit more. The P-card is for electronic use only, which is good enough if you ask me – web, ATMs both local and abroad, and shopping point of sale systems – are all good.

Applying for the card is extremely easy. Any clerk of any branch can issue the card in about 10 minutes. All you have to do is present and ID card or passport and debit either cash or from your account. The good thing is that you can even use P-card to give someone else money, like a gift for example.

I decided to start with a 50 CYP card, debitted from my account. I have received a package that contained the card itself, PIN, the copy of terms and conditions, and a bonus CYTA So-Easy 5 CYP card. Not bad.

I have also tried if the card worked on the web and didn’t have any problems. I have purchased myself a two year Flickr Pro account. By the way, I have a couple of ideas on how I am going to use it extensively in a very near future.

Resume: if you need a quick, simple, and secure way to buy stuff on the web or via other electronic means, get yourself a P-card from Hellenic bank. That’s a really good option.

Updated Google Ads

I have done a few minor changes about the Google Ads that I run on this site.

Firstly, I have added another vertical ad on all pages. It appears below the search field and makes the sidebar look not as lonely as it used to when scrolled further down.

Secondly, I have changed the color scheme of all ads to match the new colors of the site. Luckily, I didn’t have to mess around with CSS and hexadecimal numbers myself. Google Adsense has a theme that closely matches the colors that I wanted – Steely Gaze.

Thirdly, I have separated all ads into three channels – sidebar, comments-above, and comments-below. This will allow me to get better reports from Google. From now on I will see which ads are more effective and also will be able to play around with different color schemes and ad formats.

I hope that all these ads are not too annoying and that you’ll be clicking on those that really match the content of posts. I am less than $10 USD short for my second paycheck from Google and I hope to get it before Christmas.

Tagging calendars

While playing around with Delicious I thought about how useful it would be to have a calendar which could operate with tags. This way, a jazz festival in Cyprus that is going to happen in Cyprus during 16-18 of September this year, for example, could have been tagged as “jazz”, “festivals”, “events”, “music”, “cyprus” as well as “16sep2005”, “17sep2005”, “18sep2005”. And maybe even as “year2005” and “september”.

It is easy to find some format to express dates and times – there is no question about that. After that is done, the set of events can be represented in a variety of forms. The usual calendar table could be filled using the date format. The list of events for a certain month or year could be combined. Or it could even be categorised based on tags.

It would be possible to make queries like “Show me the list of music events that are planned for September 2005 in Cyprus” or “Show me the list of Cyprus festivals”. These could be easily used together with the usual calendaring stuff like “What is planned for September?”.

If there was some calendaring application that could work with Delicious it would awesome! Just think of the possibilities! A combined calendar of events with geographic locations and links to website for more information maintained by a bunch of interested people. And since Delicious provides RSS feeds for everything, it would be really easy to update and monitor such a calendar. That would be partially competing with the service provided by Airset. Purhaps there are even some commercial applications that could be based on this service.

Now all we need is for someone to create it…

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-27