Letter Never Sent

I’ve been attending to my finances in my typical feast or famine fashion. I sat down and looked through my records after ignoring everything for a few weeks… checked my accounts, analyzed earning / spending and tried to see where I can cut costs. I have two checking accounts (one business and one personal), two savings accounts, and a handful of different brokerage accounts (partly due to having a few different 401k plans over the years and partly from chasing after the lowest commissions). As a result, the process can get complicated.

One thing I discovered is that I had some additional charges on my cellphone bill due to receiving a bunch of text messages from a few people I’ve been following in Twitter. (This was a case of poetic justice as I unfairly maligned Twitter in the past.)

To avoid future surprises, I signed up for a bulk messaging package ($5 a month). Then I called to have the plan applied retroactively so I could save forty bucks on my past bill. Many people would not have done this, but I enjoy negotiating.

The whole point of this is that I found another nice use for Google Calendar. Normally after such a conversation, I might make a note of who I talked to and what was the outcome, so I could safely forget all about it. This time I dropped an entry into Google Calendar and included all the relevant information. If I need to reference the event down the line, I can use Google Calendar’s search function. As Ron Popeil might say, “Set it and forget it.”

If I made a list of all the things I wanted for Christmas, it would include two items. A new laptop and a GPS receiver. Unfortunately, the laptop is a little more necessary.

There was some good news last week that made everything better. Google released a really cool update to Google Maps. Now that Google has released a new version of Google Maps for mobile devices (with My Location), I can do 70% of what I would do with a standard GPS receiver (Garmin, TomTom, etc.) on my Blackberry, which, unlike most other gadgets, I always have with me. Using this new version of Google Maps I can determine my position to within a few hundred meters; close enough for things like driving directions and finding the nearest Starbucks. The Google Maps application does this by using your cellphone to figure out where you are in relation to the nearest cell towers. It works very similar to GPS in that instead of determining position by triangulation against orbital satellites, it just asks your phone where the nearest cell towers are and figures it out from there.

Google was nice enough to put together an informative video about how it works:

I was startled when my 18 year old cousin told me to “email” him on MySpace. I asked, “No, what is your email address? So, I can actually send you an email.” Email = MySpace? Since I’m not a user of MySpace’s closed garden, basic old-fashioned open-protocol email is how I get in touch with people. He had a Hotmail account, but couldn’t remember it. I was really surprised that he contacts his friends solely via MySpace and the cellphone. But, my guess is a lot of other people his age are the same way. After all, on MySpace only your friends can message you, right?

It just seems like a strange way to do things. I have a feeling a lot of kids these days are comfortable using the Internet, but that maybe they find aspects of it a little complicated so MySpace and Facebook have a natural appeal. It’s easy. No need to manage multiple accounts for blogging, photos, messaging, etc. Just sign up for whichever social network is hot and go crazy.

I take it for granted that not everyone enjoys the challenges that come with some stuff on the Internet. So, I get it now. I think. Social networks make the Internet easy by keeping everything all in one place. It’s like AOL, but not old-skool AOL, which is for old people. Is that it?

I read a good entry over at Signal V. Noise about how to go paperless by using an expensive duplex scanner from Fujitsu. While I still think this is a great way to do it, and I may even buy one of those scanners, a while back I came up with an easier and far cheaper way to scan my mail and documents into a digital form and have been using it for a while.

Most offices, like mine, have fax machines or fax copiers. I also have a fax to email service through my toll-free provider, Ring Central, where your fax documents are scanned and emailed to you as PDF attachments. If I ever want to archive a paper document into a digital form, I just fax it to myself and save the PDF to my computer. I also leave a copy in my gmail account where I can access the file from anywhere.

The only downside I have discovered is that the faxed PDF is not transformed into indexable text via OCR (optical character recognition) during the scanning process. I compensate for this shortcoming by giving each document a readily comprehensible file name. If you fax each document at a high enough resolution you may be able to perform OCR on the output, however the descriptive file naming used in conjunction with Google Desktop Search has worked well for me.

My friend Phillip recently recommended the blog of Marc and Nathalie Fleury. Marc is the former CEO of JBoss, which was acquired by Redhat. Both Fleury’s are entertaining bloggers with a matched sharp sense of humor. Maybe it’s a French thing. Many of Marc’s entries are delightfully over the top like Fake Steve Jobs, but with the added bonus that it’s the real Marc Fleury. For example:

From Remember, I don’t give a shit:

And, while you’re at it, please address me as Doctor Fleury, and no, that’s not my DJ name. I didn’t suffer through ten years of differential equations to be talking on a first name basis with some random honky.

From Life After Marc Fleury:

And then I wonder, maybe Cameron is on to something. Could it be that all the ballsy visionaries are in one place and all the pontificating windbags are in another? Is it possible that Cameron is very happy at Oracle, just as it is apparent that Shaun is happier at Red Hat and I am only happy when I call the shots?

Good stuff.

The Blackberry makes a pretty good alarm clock. It has a weekend off setting, so you can leave the alarm set all the time. And, it’s portable and battery-powered so you can hide it on a shelf or behind something, so you have to get up and turn it off. It also makes an awesome travel alarm. Just stretch out, set the alarm and you’re good to go. Another good feature is the ability to set the alarm to play any sound file based on how you like to wake up. The other day I had the idea to create a ringtone from Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” to use as my alarm sound a la Phil Connors in the Harold Ramis classic, Groundhog Day. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is jaded weatherman, Phil Connors. Trapped in time, he wakes each morning to a clock radio playing “I Got You Babe” to relive the same day over and over.

When every day can feel like a repeat of the day before, it makes the perfect song to wake up to. Download it to your Blackberry or cellphone.

A while back I recommended a cool Greasemonkey script to check the library for the books you are browsing at Amazon.com. It has saved me a ton of money (sorry Amazon) and has turned me into a regular library patron. Now when I click a link to Amazon, the script checks to see if my libraries have the book. Then I can click through and put the book on hold and grab it when I get to the library.

I was talking to this guy I work with about good books and I told him about this script and found out which library he goes to. Then I just edited the script to support his library. So, if you get your books at the Plano library, you can now use this script. (Remember to install Greasemonkey for Firefox first.)

While we’re at it, if you have a library and can’t find a similar script on userscripts.org, let me know what library you go to and I can whip one up for you.

For more on Greasemonkey, you can read Mark Pilgrim’s Greasemonkey Hacks in its entirety online.

Due to my general lack of patience, I was a late arrival to shopping with Amazon. With the zeal of a convert I am convinced that this is the way people will shop in the near future. It is just a superior way to buy things, especially if you hate shopping or fighting the Malthusian crowds. Anything not needed immediately can be ordered online. For any trip to the grocery store or a place like Wal-mart or Target, a certain percentage of items will be non-perishable. Most of these items are already available via Amazon. Amazon has also recently started delivering fresh groceries in select cities.

As a business, I think Amazon could grow to eclipse even Wal-mart. Sure, anyone can sell products online, but Amazon just does it better. Also, with an online model they need fewer facilities (lower overhead) and fewer employees than their bricks and mortar counterparts. The retailers deliver goods to you and you ship them to your customers via UPS. No truck fleets to manage, no shoplifting, no fancy stores with big electricity bills, etc. Pure sales. For customers, you get a good deal and often no sales tax unless you’re in the same state as an Amazon facility where they must collect sales tax. With no sales tax, this is an automatic 6-8% discount.

Amazon Prime is a good example of this superior approach to retail. With Amazon Prime, you pay $80 a year for super cheap shipping. This is a great deal if you use Amazon frequently. As an Amazon Prime member you get free two-day shipping and $3.99 per item for overnight shipping.

Amazon Prime is also genius for a few reasons:

1. When you join Amazon Prime, you buy a whole lot more. With free two-day shipping and super cheap overnight shipping, you can order something and have it the next day, which is tough to resist.
2. Amazon Prime also trains you to buy more exclusively from Amazon versus from other retailers who offer products on Amazon.com. In addition to selling their own stock, Amazon is a storefront for independent partners who use Amazon as an ecommerce platform. The thing is, if you’re an Amazon Prime member and there are multiple sellers for a particular product, given the choice you will buy from Amazon since only Amazon fulfilled products qualify for the free shipping.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t get so-called social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. I don’t use them to find music, hang out, send messages, or whatever it is people do. I don’t use them period. I have signed up to try them out and to see if I could stalk find people from high school, etc., but after that what else do you do? Just leave notes on people’s pages? Why not just send an email, instant message, or make a call? Whenever I go to the library it seems like all the people on the library computers are using MySpace. I don’t understand it. Is it basically asynchronous, public instant messaging?

My working theory is that social networking sites are the successors to online dating websites. In effect, MySpace reintegrates online dating into some semblance of a normal, social life, albeit one that is semi-virtual and online rather than physical and actual.

Rather than cruise for connections with strangers (the normal online dating paradigm), social networking sites facilitate lively echosystems where people can potentially pair off. In fact, I believe this is the whole point of MySpace-type sites. According to this theory, I would expect the people who are most active in MySpace/Facebook to be single and looking. Or cynically, in a relationship and looking. In simple terms, dating sites are the online equivalent of a singles’ bar, whereas MySpace is a party. Even though the goal in both often comes down to romance/sexual gratification, they both go about it in very different ways.

Social networking sites will eventually replace dating sites because they perform one very important function: they erase the stigma of meeting people online.

This is just an idea because I am clueless about it. I’d be curious to know what the appeal is. If you participate in social networking, how do you use it? What purpose does it serve for you?

I subscribe to several feeds. It’s the main way I do any recreational web surfing since I don’t generally participate in social networking, forum posting, or whatever else people do on the Internet. I use the web in a mostly functional manner, either to look up specific information or to stay on top of some of the things that are going on. I’m one of the legions of asocial lurkers out there. Sifting through the dross to find useful information.

There are several sites that update 10+ times a day. Even if I enjoy the content, this is too much for me. I can’t keep up. I organize my feeds by category, but I also have one folder for my daily reading. These are my personal A-list bloggers. Everything else is read only when or if I have the time. With a couple hundred feeds, it’s a chore to try to keep up with them all, so I don’t.

The bloggers on my A-list have some things in common: the authors are smart, perceptive and insightful, they are not part of the echo chamber (In fact, they are often the source of popular blog postings elsewhere. They start an echo.), they have their own interests, and most importantly they post no more than 5 times a day. I have a feeling that many people out there are exhausted by the sheer volume of information posted to their favorite sites.