Only The Hottest Deals And Free Stuff!
It seemed that this day might just coincide with the site’s 3 year anniversary-but it happened over a month early!
2,632 posts. 33,763 comments. Countless chance encounters around the world with site readers.
Thanks for your help in making this site a continued success!
(Rabbi) Daniel Eleff
Post Stickied:
Light posting period from now through the end of the Jewish holiday season-10/06
Indians-Yankees ALDS ESPN Page Linky
7 out of 10 experts picked the Indians over the Yankees to advance to the ALCS.
8 out of 10 said it will be a 5 game series…
Accuscore Baseball forecasting gives the Tribe a slight 52%-48% advantage to take the series.
I better stop there before I alienate the 45% of my reader base that hails from New York…
AA is the only remaining airline that still counts all mileage activity towards lifetime elite status.
United and Delta used to count all miles, but currently only count actual flown mileage for lifetime elite status.
Continental used to have a program that if you were a top-tier elite for 5 consecutive years you got lifetime top-tier status, alas Continental no longer offers any chance at becoming a lifetime elite today.
On AA every mile earned, even those from credit cards, is counted.
At 1,000,000 miles you get lifetime Gold Elite status and at 2,000,000 miles you get lifetime Platinum Elite status.
In addition you also get other nice goodies when you cross each million marker.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve redeemed miles, the only thing that matters is the “program to date miles.”
Today I finally entered the home stretch…I just hope they don’t pull the program before I cross the finish line!
From my AA account:
Firefox’s live bookmarks are amazing-I have 20 of them set up in my browser!
To set up a live bookmark to keep track of new posts on this site click:
To set up a live bookmark to keep track of comments, in order of time of posting click:
http://www.dansdeals.com/comments/feed
These RSS links are always available in the bottom of the sidebar.
Firefox live bookmarks can be set up from any website that has the orange RSS logo displaying in the right-side of the address bar!
Still using IE?
Switch to Firefox and besides for being more secure, having built-in antiphishing protection, and being less vulnerable to spyware you can:
-Reopen closed tabs.
-Restore your browser session in case of a browser/computer crash.
-Have in-line spell checking.
-Have live bookmarks
You guys will just have to bear with me.
Believe it or not, I am a sports fan as well as a technology geek and a frequent flyer miles hoarder.
I’m a die-hard Tribe fan, and I realize that this is the first time that the Indians will be playing October baseball since I started ctownbochur.com, so you’ll still have to get used to skipping over these posts instead of commenting “stick to the deals.”
At any rate, I just love what the internet has done to buying tickets.
In 1995 when the Indians made their first playoff birth in 41 years, they raffled off the right to buy postseason tickets by postcards only. As a baseball-crazed 10 year old I stayed up day and night sending out literally hundreds of postcards at 20 cents apiece to have the chance to buy face-value tickets. It paid off-I had tickets to all 3 home World Series games, and then some. Unfortunately there was no Ebay yet, so I had to make do with selling my excess to local brokers to cover the costs of my own tickets and the postcards!
Flash forward 12 years, the Indians sell their tickets online only to those with a pre-sale code. Let me tell you, getting 8 tickets to all 3 possible ALDS home games online via pre-sale codes are a lot easier to handle than hand-writing all of those postcards! (Plus I still had the $35 Ticketmaster GC to use)
So, now only one question remains: Is “TBD” the BoSox or the Bronx Bombers?
Who cares? Bring ‘em on!
Denverites-You rock! Thanks for all of the offers to help me out, and expect a full review in the near-future…
Google tells me that there are a number of regular Denver residents that visit this site, so I figure that this is worth a shot!
If any Denver readers (or anyone who will be in Denver in the near future) can help me out with getting a sweet piece of technology only currently available in Denver (who knows maybe you’ll want one for yourself as well) please send me an email!
Thanks!
Just fyi: I took care of an annoying problem with the search/archive/category function that was disabling the links on the search page ever since I switched to dansdeals.
If you notice any other bugs with the new site please let me know!
Wishing all of my readers a happy, healthy, and sweet new year!
K’siva V’Chasima Tovah-May you all be inscribed for a good year!
P.S. Posting will be sporadic throughout the Jewish holiday season, from now through October 6th.
No, you haven’t mistyped the URL-this is the same old ctownbochur.com with a fresh new look, and an easier to spell address.
Ctownbochur.com and Ctowndeals.com will continue to forward to Dansdeals.com without interruption.
-There is an easy to use search button at the top of the sidebar
-You can rank any post from a scale of 1-5 by clicking on the stars.
-You can browse past deals via sorting by category or by month posted.
-The home page currently displays the 40 most recent deals, at the bottom of the page is a button for previous entries that will take you to the previous 40 deals.
-There is an RSS feed/Firefox Live Bookmark link, so that you can keep up with recent comments as well as recent posts, at the bottom of the sidebar. The feeds are fully compatible with iGoogle.
I just realized an annoying function of this site, and I will try to work on it when I have the time.
When you search for past deals it automatically disables all of the links in the post!
You have to actually click on the title of the deal in order to activate the links in the post…
Arieh Raichman, a good friend of mine, got engaged today (Mazal Tov!!!) and had his L’Chaim (engagement party) in New York.
So, I did what any 18-22 year old from Cleveland that wants to travel at the last-minute to NYC would do, I checked availability with Airtran U.
The Airtran U program (formerly known as X-fares) allows any 18-22 year old to fly standby without a ticket for just $69 each way as long as there is a seat on the plane.
So, I confirmed that there were plenty of seats to La Guardia(LGA) tonight and back tomorrow morning, checked that the flight was on-time, and took off on the 50 mile drive to Akron-Canton Airport. (Being a LCC (low-cost carrier) Airtran keeps costs down by flying from secondary airports, like Akron-Canton(CAK) instead of Cleveland(CLE). Mind you, being able to park 10 feet from the terminal and the free wi-fi make up for part of the hassle)
Unfortunately, when I arrived at the airport the check-in agent informed me that the flight was delayed.
“How delayed are we talking about-When will I actually arrive at LGA?”
“Well, the arriving flight hasn’t yet left Atlanta due to thunderstorms, so it’ll be however long it takes for them to get cleared for takeoff, and then a couple hours for that flight to get here, plus about half an hour to turn the flight around, and then another hour and a half to get to LGA, barring any holding patterns from air traffic control there…”
Great, so by the time I actually do make it to LGA, it will be about time to fly back to CAK.
Taking the cue from above that it just wasn’t meant to be, I decided to cut my losses and drive home.
My question here is twofold, and it does not only apply to Airtran, it applies to all carriers. (Just read this USAToday article on the state of USeless Airways’ performance)
1. Why couldn’t Airtran have updated the flight status for CAK-LGA as soon as they knew about the storms in ATL?
2. Considering that many delays are due to late-arriving aircraft, why can’t every airline’s website tell you the flight number for the arriving aircraft, so that you can have a better idea of what the real situation is? I do not know of a single airline website that has that capability.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the heated debate on whether or not I should post about my trip. In the end of the day I think that one of the advantages of this site over other deal sites is that there is a live person finding and posting the best deals, and working through the problems together with everyone else, so it only makes sense for me to write down my own experiences and share the lessons I learned with my readers.
Guidebook:
As any friend that I’ve ever traveled with will attest to, the first thing that I do before going anywhere is buy a guidebook, and read as much as possible in advance in order to plan the trip.
While planning a trip down to every minute detail was much more critical for past 48 hour trips to Hawaii and Florionopolis, Brazil, or even 1 week jumps to Japan, it is still very helpful when trying to squeeze everything possible out of 23 days in Israel.
In general my favorite guidebook’s are the ones published by Lonely Planet, as they are easy to read, and have really great info.
For this trip, being that I had 2 of my brothers as trip planners to help out, I went all out and bought 5 guidebooks.
Lonely Planet ($14.95 from Amazon, published March 2007): I was extremely disappointed to read the blatant and repetitive anti-Israel rhetoric spread throughout this book. However this book does deliver on its usual great suggestions, and is a must-have if you plan to do some hiking in Israel.
Frommers ($14.95 from Amazon, published November 2006) A good compliment to Lonely Planet.
Fodors ($14.93 from Amazon, published July 2006)
Let’s Go ($14.03 from Amazon, published December 2002) Intended for low-budget travelers
Israguide ($5 with rental of Amigo cell phone) Was very helpful with finding restaurants and kivrei tzadikim (graves of righteous people)
Short of hiring tour guides for hundreds of dollars a day, there is no way I could’ve accomplished all that I did without buying at least a few of the guidebooks, so they were a great investment.
Cell Phone:
I rented 3 cell-phones from Amigo US (MIRS in Israel) They run on IDEN, the same technology that powers Nextel in the US. Under the “short-term student” plan that I chose the phones were $20/month each including insurance, and included unlimited walkie-talkie minutes between each other. Minutes to the US were a hefty 25.9 cents/minute, and minutes to Israel were 15.9 cents/minute. Incoming calls were free. Internet usage is shockingly usurious at a whopping 9 cents/kilobyte (over $90 per megabyte!!!!!!) so stay far, far away from browsing the web on your phone. Shipping for the 3 phones to me was a flat $7.50 each direction. The main reason I rented from Amigo was for the free walkie-talkie feature, which we used extensively, and came in handy on many an occasion.
Calling Card:
Being that incoming calls to our phones would be free, it only made sense to find a good way for my parents to be able to call us from the US.
The most convenient, gimmick free international calling card that I have found is the Sonico Green card from Cloncom.
It offers no connection/maintenance/monthly fees, it never expires, and it has 1 minute rounding. Best of all it can be set up for pinless dialing, so you can just dial an access number from your home/cell phone, and then dial straight to your international number, without entering in any kind of pin/password! Additionally, the card can be recharged easily online, and they even accept payment via Google Checkout, so they won’t even have any of your credit card info! To find the card just type in Israel, and it is on the 2nd page of cards (click “view more cards”)
Rates to Israel via local access numbers are 3.4 cents/minute to landlines and 10 cents/minute to cell phones.
To be continued…
My time in the holy land is coming to an end all too soon…
Regular posting will resume as soon as I recover from the jet-lag.
Here’s a quick timeline of what’s been going on with the shifting of this site off of Blogger.
The way that the site has been set up since November of 2004 is that Google has hosted all of the content at ctownbochur.blogspot.com while ctownbochur.com simply forwarded you over to the content of ctownbochur.blogspot.com.
This past Friday, Google’s robots decided that ctownbochur.blogspot.com was a spam blog, with just a robot running it. (I wish I had a robot running the site-then I’d be able to take a true vacation!) They locked the site, and I was unable to make or change any posts.
I immediately decided to flip the switch and have ctownbochur.com forward over to dansdeals.com and to migrate all of the posts and comments over to dansdeals.com.
Additionally, I also filed a challenge to Google about their blacklisting of my site, and asked them to remove it asap.
By Saturday Google deleted ctownbochur.blogspot.com. Anyone who went to that address received a “page not found” error.
The really scary thing is that from Saturday until today, ANYONE COULD HAVE TAKEN ctownbochur.blogspot.com AND MADE THEIR OWN SITE WITH THE NAME.
After spending a small fortune calling Google from my cell phone in Israel to get them to fix the problem, they finally restored ctownbochur.blogspot.com today.
What would have happened if someone had taken over the name during the duration that the site was deleted?
Who knows!
GOOGLE-FIX THIS ISSUE BEFORE SOMEONE’S SITE DOES GET HIJACKED!!!
I’m going to sticky this as the top post until the end of August as a reminder that updates will be sporadic for the next month.
Please scroll down for new posts.
Will I be forgiven if I don’t make 5 posts a day for the next month?
07/27-Drive to Pittsburgh for Shabbos.
07/29-Earning Jetblue tickets for flying PIT-JFK flights. Overnight at the Tudor hotel (Thanks Nadiv K.!)
07/30-Fly back to PIT, Drive back to Cleveland.
07/30-08/01-Take summer semester finals and hand in essays due for my grad school courses.
08/02-Fly to Israel!
08/26-Return to Cleveland.
08/27-First MBA class of the fall semester.
We’ve finally made it onto our own servers and off of Google’s Blogger platform!
Ctownbochur.com and Ctowndeals.com will continue to forward to Dansdeals.com without interruption.
-There is an easy to use search button at the top of the sidebar
-You can rank any post from a scale of 1-5 by clicking on the stars.
-You can browse past deals via sorting by category or by month posted.
-The home page currently displays the 40 most recent deals, at the bottom of the page is a button for previous entries that will take you to the previous 40 deals.
-There is an RSS feed/Firefox Live Bookmarks links for recent comments as well as posts in the sidebar.
Please post any bugs as a comment on this post.
My grandfather often reminds us that the weather that you see in forecasts is measured in the shade.
We had a reinforcement of this lesson while hiking down waterfalls and natural pools of water in the Yehudiyah nature reserve in the Golan Heights.
And yes, that does say 120.1 Degrees Fahrenheit!
I’ve never blogged about any of the trips that I have taken in the past. However because it seems that Israel is always a topic of interest in the comments here I was debating whether to write anything about it here.
Is there anything specific you would like to read about?
Reviews of the 5 Starwood hotels that I am staying at?
Or should I just stick to finding deals?
On another note, it’s been a lot of fun bumping into some fans in NYC and here in Israel.
At the Tudor Hotel in Manhattan, where I stayed last Sunday night, I bumped into quite a few people who were there only because they saw the $19 deal on this site!
One couple even told me where to nab a free parking spot for the night!
Free parking in Manhattan? Who knew!
I will be going to Israel with 2 of my brothers for the first time next Thursday-We will be there for 3.5 weeks!
If anyone has any helpful travel hints or any past itineraries that have worked out well, please send me an email!
Thanks!
3 logo designers have sent in 5 revisions on popular logos based on reader feedback.
Please go to dansdeals.com now and rate them!
There are now 43 logos posted on dansdeals.com
Thanks to all of the designers for their contributions!!!
Please go to dansdeals.com now and rate them!
Also please post constructive feedback so that the authors can have the chance to improve their designs!
A big thanks goes out to all of the logo designers who participated in this contest.
Logo creators-If you would like to send me an improved version of any logo based on feedback posted, please do so asap!
A runoff between the best logos will occur next week, along with the announcement of the winner of this contest, as well as the winners of the 500,000th hit promo (I haven’t forgotten about you guys!)
Today is the last chance to send me your new or updated logos for dansdeals.com!
Thanks to everyone who participated in this contest!!!!!
The best logo will win a free Samsung portable XM Satellite Radio+MP3 Player with a 3 month paid subscription!
Great for the baseball season!
This is truly bizarre…
On Friday I wrote a negative article on the iPhone hype.
The pictures of the iPhone in the article had embedded affiliate links with which people could use to buy the iPhone (if the article didn’t already convince them otherwise.)
Last night I noticed that the links stopped working. Upon going into my affiliate account I saw that Apple had ended our affiliate relationship sometime after I had written the article!
There was no message or any communication from Apple to me at all.
If this is really how it seems and it doesn’t turn out to be some sort of very strangely timed coincidence, that means that someone at Apple will be reading this message as well.
That being said, who’s up for an iPhone boycott?
The first 11 months (11/26/04-10/16/05) of this site saw 15,000 hits.
The next 9 months (10/16/05-07/20/06) saw 185,000 hits.
The past 11 months (07/20/06-06/29/07) saw 550,000 hits!
Have I really been posting stuff on a daily basis to this website for 31 months now?!?
Here’s hoping for a smooth upcoming transition to DansDeals.com!
Please go to dansdeals.com now and rate them!
Special thanks to Yossi W. of Yosstek.com, and Menachem Krinsky for their new contributions!
Like them? Hate them?
Sound off!
Think you come up with a better logo? Send me an email!
The best logo will win a free Samsung portable XM Satellite Radio+MP3 Player with a 3 month paid subscription!
Great for the baseball season!
Please go to dansdeals.com now and rate them!
Special thanks to Laibel Berkowitz, DJ and JJ, Eli Z., Yossi W. of Yosstek.com, and Braintoaster Interactive for their new contributions!
Like them? Hate them?
Sound off!
Think you come up with a better logo? Send me an email!
The best logo will win a free Samsung portable XM Satellite Radio+MP3 Player with a 3 month paid subscription!
Great for the baseball season!
Yossi W. of Yosstek.com has kindly donated his 2nd logo for Dansdeals.com!
Please go to dansdeals.com now and give it a rating!
Like it? Hate it?
Sound off!
Think you come up with a better logo? Send me an email!
The best logo will win a free Samsung portable XM Satellite Radio+MP3 Player with a 3 month paid subscription!
Great for the baseball season!
I’ve been preoccupied trying to figure out how to recover important files from 2 of my WD passport hard drives.
They were working just fine 2 days ago, but today I discovered that one of them has what appears to be a dead motor, and the other has bad sectors!
Lesson learned-Avoid the ultra-portable WD passport hard drives like the plague! (and maybe all WD hard drives in general?)
At least I bought them from Costco, from where they’ll be sent right back to WD where they can keep the garbage they sell…
At any rate if anyone has used any good data-recovery companies please let me know!
Yossi W. of Yosstek.com has kindly donated another logo for Dansdeals.com!
Please go to dansdeals.com and give it a rating!
Like it? Hate it?
Sound off!
Think you come up with a better logo? Send me an email!
The best logo will win a free Samsung portable XM Satellite Radio+MP3 Player with a 3 month paid subscription for free after rebate!
Great for the baseball season!
(I’m just kidding about the rebate part…)
Braintoaster Interactive has kindly donated a logo for Dansdeals.com
Please go to dansdeals.com and give it a rating!
Like it? Hate it?
Sound off!
Think you come up with a better logo? Send me an email!
Please post your thoughts and vote now!!!
The best news is that this new version should be fully compliant with all screen resolutions!
Dansdeals.com Beta 1.3 Linky
Should I switch over to Dansdeals.com?
I would reroute traffic to ctownbochur.com and ctowndeals.com over there, while ctownbochur.blogspot.com will continue to serve this site.
If you vote to ditch the proposed dansdeals site-Please explain why!
Also if the post lines are very short you probably have a screen resolution of 800×600.
Just go to into control panel and to display options to bump up your screen resolution!
VOTE NOW!
The more time I spend on trying to migrate to the Wordpress platform-the more I wish I had never started to leave Blogger…
Just the screen resolution bug in which some people see long post lines and others see short post lines is enough to make me want to stay put.
At any rate, some of the changes in Beta 1.3 include:
-Elimination of the much maligned third rail, er, third column for a cleaner look.
-A feeble attempt at separating out the knowledgebase into distinct pages, located at the top of the site.
Let’s hear your thoughts…
Dansdeals.com Beta 1.2 Linky
Check it out and sound-off!
If you are having display issues please comment on your screen resolution and browser type.
If I had a dollar for each person telling me to hire a professional web-site builder (a.k.a. stick with finding deals instead of messing with CSS Coding) then I’d be able to build the nicest site on earth!
Some of the changes in Beta 1.2 include:
-Change in font type
-Increase of font size
-Posts moved to the left, while both sidebars move to the right.
-Background border changed to gray.
-Posts located below where the sidebars end no longer invade the “under the sidebar” space.
Known Issues:
-The site is optimized for the 45% of visitors who have a screen resolution of 1024×768.
-For the 23% of visitors who have 1280×800 screen resolution the posts are a little longer than I’d like them to be.
-No other screen resolution has more than 10%-if you dont use one of the above resolutions please comment on how the site looks.
-The site needs a better header/logo (Anyone here up for the job?)
-All posts and comments imported from this site display the time 4 hours later than they should.
Dansdeals.com Beta 1.1 Linky
(Dansdeals.com Beta 1.0 is no longer available for viewing.)
Please continue to vote and post specific comments on what you like, or on what you would like to see changed!
Some of the changes to the original design based on your suggestions so far:
-More “color” added
-Search box raised to the top
-More white space “between things” added
-Post lines shortened (Note: If you have a higher resolution screen then the post lines will be longer, if you have a lower resolution screen then the post lines will be shorter. Please be sure to include your screen resolution in any comments about the length ot the posts lines!)
-Knowledgebase added
-Font size slightly increased
-Main page only displays the 50 most recent posts, down from 100
-Separate pages added for specific popular categories
-Every individual post’s title is now clickable and has an individual URL
-Separate RSS feeds are now available for Posts and for Comments!
Voters and Commenters: I’m listening! The new site is an evolving work in progress, so keep up the comments and check out the latest changes!
Whether you love it or hate-Now is the time to sound off!
I am finally going to make the move off of the Blogger platform and onto my own host!
As part of the move I am considering a rebranding of the site.
I bought the domain name Dansdeals.com to be the main name of the new site.
Even if I go forward with the rebranding, Ctownbochur.com and Ctowndeals.com will continue to seamlessly take you over to Dansdeals.com
Before I do anything drastic I would like to hear your opinions!
So, first of all go check out the basic layout of Dansdeals.com
Please realize that it is far from the finished product. There will be a lot of improvements in the sidebars and there are some bugs that I’m working on, but it will give you an idea of what it will look like.
Then please vote in these polls, and leave comments with any suggestions that you have!
Dansdeals.com Beta 1 Voting Closed:
I’ll be flying to NYC (where 1 out of every 3 ctownvisitors hail from) in the morning and spending shabbos in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Unfortunately however I won’t be in NYC for the day of Gimmel Tammuz for the first time in a decade or so…
I may post a few deals, dependent on whether or not I can hack my new (and quite frankly, awesome) Treo 755p into letting me use it as a modem…
Maybe I’ll even put together a post (if people want) on hacking the Treo 700p and 755p to allow them to be used as a modem…
Sorry for my exuberance, but this is the first time the Cavs have ever made it to the NBA finals.
No Cleveland sports team has won a world championship in my lifetime (or for the 20 years before my lifetime for that matter) so here’s hoping we can change that now!
Go Cavs!
(Photo: Brazilian Anderson Varejão hugging Cleveland native and superstar Lebron James)
Regular posting resumes after the holiday…
The Ultimate Miles/Points Card: 
Hits Since 11/26/04!
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