Marilyn"Ferdy" F.'s Profile
Reviewer level: 2
19 Reviews
55 Votes
55 Very Helpful
0 Funny
0 Fraud Buster
0 Great Find
0 Well Said
17 Comments/Posts
14 Fans
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14 Firsts to Review
Member since: April 2010
ferdyonfilms.com
19 Reviews by Marilyn
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This is the government portal that was part of the passage of healthcare reform, and it is all I hoped it would be. As Move On says, it's "a new online portal where anyone can go to find insurance options in their state, went live. It's a very handy resource for information that used to be difficult to find. It's available to help millions who need insurance find it, and as a resource for those who want to shop around for new options or find out their new benefits under the new law." Check out Hospital Compare on the site to check the quality and safety records of U.S hospitals.
I believe in unfair advantages, at least when it comes to buying stuff on ebay. The competition for some items can be stiff, and esnipe gives me an edge on those things I really, really want or need. You copy the item number from ebay into esnipe and set your maximum bid amount and how many seconds before the end of the auction you want esnipe to place the bid for you. I usually choose 4 seconds. I've only lost a couple of auctions using esnipe, and I suspect the people who won were also on esnipe! And the cost is extremely reasonable! I don't think I've put in more than $10 in years of use, but the amount of bidding you do will determine that.
I just used this program thanks to you to bid on a very rare unicorn beanie baby ( don't ask...) and I got it for a steal...well at least if you call paying $45 for thread and cotton a steal.... but thanks :)
I'm so glad it worked out for you. Enjoy your collection!
this is really interesting.. thanks for the review!
Hearts of Space: Slow Music for Fast Times started life as a syndicated radio show that I used to have to wake up at 5:30 to listen to on Sunday morning back in the olden days before the Internet. It's still broadcast that way, but now is also on the Internet, where I listen to it whenever I feel like it. It has several pay options, depending on how much you like space/electronic music, but it's free on Sunday. A relic from my past, I still enjoy being a Space Fan. Maybe you would, too.
I used to think this site was lousy, compared with RueLaLa, but lately, they've been having better merchandisers and sales. I don't mind the longer wait time (RueLaLa has been getting longer, too), and I have gotten some really good bargains. You can also search clothing by size, which is a time saver. Overall, my impression and experience has improved a lot.
Really hot clothing on this site, better than gilt group I think and the brands are just as good. Do they have decent return policy?
I believe it's still credit with free shipping back. A number of items, like sunglasses, watches, etc., are final sale, so watch that before you buy.
HauteLook return policy - My experience is that they do not stand behind defective products. Just have a bunch of rules to recite about why they really do not care that they shipped a defective product. SO, I'd say unless you are totally prepared to accept whatever they ship and be happy that your money is gone, gone, gone - not a good place to shop. Not to mention the pathetic customer service - or lack of customer service more aptly describes it. Not worth it.
I've ordered tons of stuff, for example, leather boots, watches, sports clothes, and dress clothes from the website and I have no real complaints except the delivery time. However, looking at how much I save (i check the retail price online as well) - the wait time doesn't really matter to me.
cons: I've heard the customer service is a bit iffy, but I haven't had to call them about anything and I've ordered like 20 items from them.
Conclusion: I really like the hautelook.com and the site has good stuff that comes up, so keep your eyes out for em!
HAUTELOOK is the only site I feel comfortable using. I find them prompt, and accurate and I really enjoy their merchandise. When i called customer service, they were funny and understanding and attended to business immediately. In return for their good service, I am posting a well deserved RECOMMENDATION.
I've ordered quite a bit from hautelook and have been very satisfied every time. once i forgot to place two items into an order before checking out and i called customer service. They refunded me my shipping charge on the second order which was place, literaly 1 minutes later. They were very nice and pleasant.
IMDb is indispensable, there's no question about it, but it's not very complete. Adding or correcting information can be a real bother, so I've stopped trying. Nonetheless, I get the largest amount of traffic to my film blog from IMDb, so it's been a personal help to me. And, yes, it's kind of a mess.
I agree. It's useful, but sometimes things are missing so you have to sift and research some on your own. I use a combination between wikipedia and IMDB because sometimes both incomplete together help me piece everything I need to know! That way I can get the most information out of everything.
By the way...film blog? Do tell!
Ferdy on Films (www.ferdyonfilms.com). I've been publishing it with my Aussie blog partner for five years, and we've gotten some pretty nice recognition. We cohosted a fundraising blogathon for the National Film Preservation Foundation that raised nearly $30,000.
It's not my habit to rave about a restaurant website, but I've never seen one like this before. California Pizza Kitchen has great food, but that's just the half of it. When I decided to get some carryout, I went to CPK's site to order online. There wasn't one need I had that it didn't anticipate, including offering to bring my order to curbside, a big plus in my big city where there is a parking ban during rush hour at the restaurant. Everything was ready for me when I arrived, and I was served with a smile. Really, this is above and beyond for a restaurant chain!
Ok Ok....you have decided my dinner for tonight :)
Cool!
I used to work at Amici's Pizzeria and we used waiter.com. This sounds similar... or even better! CPK is one of my favorite restaurants and I didn't know they had this site! Thank you so much for informing me! YUM
I've only used the site once, to buy two blades for my Cuisinart, but the transaction was flawless. They had what I needed at the best price I could find on the net, ordering was easy, and the blades arrived quickly.
thanks I was looking for an additional shredding disc for my cuisinart but never even thought of buying it online.
Very helpful review. This is just the type of site I would not have found otherwise in a million years!
We all suspect politicians lie from time to time - ok, maybe most of the time. Now there's documented proof! PolitiFact is dedicated to "sorting out the truth in politics." The editors of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning website fact check statements politicians make and rate them as to their truthfulness or whether a politician has changed his or her position. They rated John McCain's statement "I never considered myself a maverick" as PANTS ON FIRE. They have an Obameter on the promises the President has made. It's a great tool for sorting through the rhetoric and keeping track of what is actually being done in government.
Love the obameter idea...it would be great if sites like this became very popular and they were all held accountable for what they said in the past.
I really love this idea. Everyone always talks about how modern news media has led to greater partisanship in politics. If this site were to become widely used, it might be a great way for the media to redeem itself and actually force politicians to own up the promises and perhaps [gasp!] reduce partisanship. If politicians knew they would be held accountable (both punished for being misleading and rewarded for being honest) for all their statements they may actually tone down their rhetoric and actually ratchet up their real work. I realize this might be a long-shot, but I still love the principle.
Random idea - when politicians speak on TV, or on the radio, other media outlets, there could be a real-time "truth-o-meter" that would be displayed and people could actually see whether the person is lying. Subjectivity of certain topics might be an issue, but just the pressure of being fact-checked on a real time basis may be a real deterrent to many prevarications.
I love the real-time truth-o-meter idea, but it might not be that easy to do. Fact checking can't happen that quickly most of the time. Still, if they could do it in a partial way, it could be the deterrent you suggest and the misinformation that has been more common than it should be might recede.
You're right that the real-time fact checking might be difficult, but maybe the TV shows could run the interviews at a slight delay to give the fact checkers time to do their work. I want to do this!
Here's a way to do it. Give each member of the TV audience "truth" and "lie" buttons that they can press whilst watching an interview with a politician, and display the results in real time. In politics, it's how the public perceive the honesty of a politician that counts, not the objective truth. We don't expect them to be honest, that's a given, so there's not that much point in proving what we already know, and if they're caught they'll just claim to have been misinformed by the CIA. The media plays on the perceptions of the electorate; it would be interesting to see if they responded to the data collected by spinning their stories accordingly, and by how much people's perceptions had changed, before and after a major news story.
Chris, I think, however flippant you're being here, that that is a bad idea. It's more important to know the truth that to continue the damaging trend of perception equaling reality. Several good candidates have been destroyed by a bit a planted misinformation or image assassination (wooden Al Gore anyone?). I don't support anything that encourages it.
Fair enough. I'm being quite serious, though I made a poor job of conveying the idea I had in mind. We can rarely if ever determine what is truth, absolutely, even if we are Politifact, and falsehood is not always, by definition, a bad thing. It's nonsense to suggest that the truth of any political statement could be established in real time, in a matter of seconds or minutes, with accuracy, every time. And even in cases where the truth appeared to be accessible, how often would it be so sharply defined that we could claim for certain that we understood what it meant?
What we might do, though, is show a politician and the rest of his audience whether we believe his statements or not. In an ideal world he would then make a far greater effort to produce supporting evidence, instead of hoping the audience would simply accept his words as the undisputed truth. The technology to report an audience's responses in real time exists, and it will be a lot more refined and accessible in the future as TV emigrates to the internet. I think it's almost certain that the opportunity to provide real-time feedback will be exploited, and politicians will have to deal with that level of audience scrutiny by telling more of the truth than they do now.
I maintain that you can't be sure of judging anyone by trying to establish the truth in their words. Even if you were able to scan a politician's speech and have it automatically analysed for falsehoods by some sort of super-Google device, you would still be relying on documentation that you had not personally verified and which, in most cases, would have been produced by the very media that you suspect of bias. How often have you seen the same figures used for opposing arguments? Statistics, as we know, are easily manipulated. How often is opinion presented as truth, and how often is it practically impossible to separate the two? If a person said he believed in one thing last year but now claims to support the opposite, which time was he lying? Then or now? Or did he believe he was telling the truth both times? Good luck in finding what's true and what's not, in any field. The history I learned at school didn't happen; the science I learned turned out to be wrong; much of what we believe is untrue.
We could, however, show politicians and political commentators what we think of them and not just at the ballot box, which as we've often seen is an unsatisfactory solution. Wouldn't it be fun to have, say, Rush Limbaugh come on to David Letterman and watch the Audience Interest needle drop off the bottom of the scale?
By the way, although Politifact is quite a good read, I am disappointed to see no coverage at all of either leading candidate in the upcoming election for Governor of California. Considering the amount of mud they're slinging at each other, I would have hoped that they attracted some interest. Unless they're both telling the whole truth, of course, but ... no, surely not.
I think there are two interesting ideas here: One is measuring audience sentiment and the other is real-time or almost real-time fact checking. Chris, I think you've characterized the measurement of audience sentiment well and it would certainly be interesting, although I wonder what the externalities of such a technology might be (more populism?).
On the fact checking idea, I agree that it's hard or impossible to verify some information. But other information is very easy to verify and check. Politicians and others regularly mis-quote measurable facts and broadly agreed upon facts (who has spent more money on their campaign, the size of earmarks relative to the budget, etc.) and are never held to task. I agree the idea of "truth" is very difficult, but that does not mean we cannot strive for it. And if politicians felt they would be held directly accountable for misstated facts and figures they would likely be much more careful with their rhetoric.
Truth isn't all that difficult. Living in an age of relativism, however, has made people wax philosophical about "what is truth." In my experience, lying is generally not beneficial, and certainly not by a public servant to the people she or he serves. As for showing what we think of a politician, I think that happens with too much regularity these days in many forums. If you only watch Fox News, you've got plenty of people confirming to you that Obama is the devil incarnate. If you only read Huffington Post, $#*! Cheney is a monster from another planet. What good does all this "feeling" and mocking do us? I'm looking for a more civil society, and I think that verifying the words that come out of a politician's mouth is a good start to getting there.
Sounds like a great site and I'd love to see it become more widely used. Thanks for the review.. and what interesting comments!
This is my home page on my laptop. Probably the best classical programming in the nation, with great announcers, free live streaming, live music broadcasts (Lyric Opera, in-studio guests), interviews, some syndicated shows (Pipe Dreams), and so much more. Plus The Midnight Special on Saturday night (show tunes and folk music) and The Best of Studs Terkel, also on Saturday. Great stuff.
After going to a national park in South Africa and seeing elephants, a cheetah, and many, many other amazing animals, I got hooked on wildlife live cams. The first, and probably still the best, is Africam. The site has a lot of features in addition to its live and refresh cams, including education, sighting lists, screencap of the day, and more. There are a lot of ads because of the cost of maintaining these sites in remote locations, and the cams sometimes go out and take time to fix because of their location. North Americans get the best views in the morning, when the sun is still up in Africa, but don't miss out on nocturnal creatures from time to time (the hyenas are very cool).
I love it. I grew up watching Wild Kingdom http://www.wildkingdom.com/index.html and Nature http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/
I watched Wild Kingdom, too. Was there ever a stranger team than Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler?
I found this site about a week ago, and I can't stop going to it. It exists "because there is a serious shortage of pictures of cute boys with cats." You can submit your own pictures. There are also a few celebrity pictures (Marlon Brando, James Dean, Steve Martin) with their cats. Anyone who thinks men are pigs or dogs should see all these sweet guys and their cool cats.
too awesome :) Any "guy" who owns a cat is okay in my book. They need to make a dating site for "men with cats"....
too awesome :) Any "guy" who owns a cat is okay in my book. They need to make a dating site for "men with cats"....
If you love documentary films, this site is a must for you. Hundreds of documentaries, including such gems as "Super Size Me" and "The Times of Harvey Milk," and they are all COMPLETELY FREE! The site does insert very short commercials at odd moments during the films, but they are a very small price to pay for access to so much great work, and the site is so much fun to browse.
Amazing! It's hard to believe it's all free. I will certainly be using this to supplement my Netflix movie streaming...
It's also interesting that to submit a film it needs to have been accepted at a recognized film festival. I wonder if this will become the new home for many of the documentaries that have trouble finding distribution?
Thanks! I just watched Super Size Me...scary film. I do not mind the commercials either. I found this here too, and it was also pretty good
http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.documentaryheaven.com
If you just want to have a daily smile, click on The Daily Kitten. People from all over the world post pictures of kittens - often rescues, so the word about the need gets out - and their stories. You can vote on cutest photo of the set. A good-vibe site.
I think it's just great that they post rescues. So many people spend so much on pets when there are poor shelter pets that need their love so it's great to increase awareness of this. Thanks for posting =)
Marilyn,
If you like cute kittens, this site is tremendous: http://www.theittybittykittycommittee.com/
This reminds me that I need to write a review of it!
Enjoy!!
The Coffee Fool has a huge range of coffees to choose from, including a nice selection of Fair Trade coffees. The coffees are generally vacuum-packed and shipped within two days of roasting, so the flavor is really great. You can set it up for monthly deliveries so you never run out of coffee and can change your coffee choices easily. Prices are competitive, and shipping is free for larger orders.
My GF loves everything that is fair trade and from out of town (NOT LA) and I can't stop drinking coffee. This may be a winner.
Expensive, though. I can get 1lb fair trade organic at the local co-op for $9 when it is on sale. It costs over $9 for 10oz on Coffeefool plus you have to pay shipping. Just sayin'.
I've used Sidestep for years and find it the most helpful way to comparison shop for airfare, hotels, and rental cars.
Comparison shopping seems to be the wave of the future with so many sites out there! Will be looking into this one the next time I travel...hopefully to hawaii :)
SwapaDVD is an engaging site for people who love movies and like to trade. They have good protections against pirated copies, a very complete list of movies to add to one's wishlist, easy listing of DVDs to trade, mailing label printing, and social interaction functions. My main beef with them is that if you want something a little unusual, you might have to wait a long, long time or may never get it. Criterion DVDs rarely if ever come up for trade, naturally. Nonetheless, though I had to wait almost a year, I did get Zeffirelli's "Romeo & Juliet," and really all you have to do is list it and forget it. They send e-mails when the DVD is available. They have a book-trade and CD-trade site, but I haven't used them.
OMG! This is what I have been looking for. My local Hollywood video just went out of business and netflix is so expensive. This is like netflix for free AND they start you off with a free DVD just by listing 10 dvds that you have for swapping. I'm guessing this company makes money off of their shipping boxes and postage or something like that. Thank you for this amazing revew.
Senteamental Moods is a one-woman operation. I first bought a couple of her teas at booth at a fundraiser, won 6 months in her Tea of the Month club, and was hooked! The teas are absolutely wonderful (Chicago Passion, Grandma's Kitchen, and Night Blues are my favorites). She's also gotten into creating original art out of used tea bags. Help an entrepreneur raising a daughter and enjoy the best teas around.
Very cool site. On a trip to China I learned a bit about good tea (a lot like wine tasting?) so I'll have to try it out. And I love that it's being run by an entrepreneur and her daughter. Great find.
I love this site. I've purchased everything from rain boots to massages there, and everything was delivered quickly and accurately. When I've had a problem (rarely), they resolved it quickly and to my satisfaction. Good bargains and great customer service. UPDATE: The site now offers full refunds for returned items (less shipping).
This looks similar to http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.gilt.com ... The big question is how good is their return policy...Gilt group has a bad policy IMO...no returns only store credit. Thanks for this review I will check it out
They, too, only give store credits, but I've returned very few things, and have always found other things to use the credit for. The shipping cost is $10, but returns are free. That's the built-in fee to Ruelala, and I pay 10% sales tax in my county, so it really doesn't matter to me.
This site ridicules women mainly for the fashion, make-up, and companion choices they make. They even ridicule women for not smiling enough because, you know, only a smiling woman is attractive and, hey, what do these celebrities with lots of dough have to complain about? Thank you, but NO to these femininity police. They suck.
Great review! I totally agree. There are a lot of these mean spirited celebrity sites popping up. My friend sent me this other one that's really bad: http://idontlikeyouinthatway.com/
Sometimes I can't believe how degrading it is!
-Sophie
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