Doing More With Less Since 1972
Amazon has released even more movies and TV shows for Prime subscribers today, including the last 7 seasons of Sesame Street
We ditched cable about a year and a half ago and are exclusively streaming stuff from Netflix, Amazon, and Pandora through our Roku
$11 a month for Netflix plus $79 a year for Amazon Prime gives us way more TV than we could ever watch.
Make your secondary Google Voice number permanent – Perfect solution for a a reasonable price. I don’t want to give up my old number for old contacts, but only give out my Google Voice number for new contacts.
The 5 Switches of Manliness: Challenge – Part II of this series. Dead on so far.
Texas movie theater makes an example (and a PSA) of a texter – Awsum. This should be rinsed and repeated for pretty much every venue except for phone booths.
Millionaires versus The Aspirationals – I’ll see your $10 wine and raise you a light beer in a can.
TN columnist: No athletics for home-schooled kids – Public school services (classes, athletics, etc.) should be a la carte.
Desmos Interactive Education – Saw this from TechCruch Disrupt. Coupled with Kahn Academy…strong!
The 5 Switches of Manliness: Physicality – Hells yeah.
The newly designed visual that tells us what we should be eating is going to be revealed today. That’s probably a good thing, since no one was paying to much attention to the Food Pyramid as the chart below shows.
Since Al Gore has taught us that correlation and causation are interchangeable, it makes sense to blame the jump in obesity starting in the early 80s on Atari. I’m not sure what George W. Bush was doing during that time, but there’s probably plenty of blame for him too.
Of course, the real reason for the jump in obesity is that people consume more calories than they burn. They don’t exercise and don’t pay attention to the food pyramid, or any other reasonable recommendations. You know, they’d rather just eat stuff like this.
It probably would have made more sense to ditch the Food Pyramid for a Food White Castle, Food Pizza Hut, or some other more modern structure that people do want to acknowledge.
Just brainstorming.
I’ve been looking at (wanting) a Kindle for a while. But, I’m cheap. And I know the prices are going to keep dropping. Besides, it’s not like I haven’t been reading just because I don’t have a Kindle yet. I just keep having to go to the library, reserve books online, pay late fees, etc. Several things have happened recently that have me (almost) ready to buy, but the sum of these things makes me think I should wait it out just a little bit longer.
There’s speculation that Amazon is going to have two Android powered tablets out by Christmas for under $500. That means they’ll be motivated to empty out some of their lower end Kindles between now and then. They’ve already started to do so with the $114 6″ Kindle with ads for a screen saver.
This seems like the best choice for me…if I was going to buy yesterday. I’m really wanting the e-ink display instead of the LCD the tablets will have, and it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a touch screen or not. I just want something easy to look at with long batter life. Also, I don’t care if it’s 3G or not. I’m home most of the time, and I’m sure I can load it up with plenty of stuff to keep me entertained in the event I’m away for a few days, so Wi-Fi connection is fine with me. The screen size is actually perfect. I currently use the Kindle app on my phone, and my two biggest complaints with it are that the screen size is small and the display. A bigger screen would be nicer to look at, but the 6″ screen is about right for lugging around the house and holding without being cumbersome.
Barnes & Noble announced its own 6″ Nook today, priced exactly the same as the 6″ ad-free Kindle. It’s not a Nook color; it’s black and white e-ink. But unlike the Kindle, it’s running Android 2.1 and has a full touch screen. It also features a two month batter life. Sounds like a nice little device. It’ s not the one I want to buy though…I want to see what kind of pressure this puts on Amazon to lower their price even further, especially considering what they have coming later this year.
For the kicker, there was a rumor a while back that Amazon was considering giving a free Kindle to all of its Prime customers. That’s what I hope actually happens. I’m all about free. Now would seem like the perfect time. I could imagine one scenario where they do this sooner rather than later as a “reward” for existing Prime customers. Another possibility would be to not only give current Prime customers a free Kindle, but also send one out to new customers around October/November. This would be a great way to get rid of existing inventory while putting the device in the hands of people who don’t yet have one to entice them to request/purchase the newer devices as gifts. Wouldn’t hurt to entice people to try out Prime right around Christmas and have their gifts shipped (and purchased) through Amazon.
I think the end game here is control of the market itself. Readers are eventually going to be available for next to nothing either way.
Is bowling becoming too easy? – Yep. I just read an entire six page article on bowling. I didn’t know about 90% of the information here. Now I know.
Self directed effort is the best kind
Are you addicted to a taskmaster, to someone else’s to do list, to short term external rewards that sell your long-term plans short? If no one is watching, are you helpless, just a web surfing, time wasting couch potato? Who owns the extra work you do now that you’re being directed?
Apple Has Keys To The Cloud Music Kingdom – Agreed. The beauty of Lala was that it worked without uploading. Long term though, the labels are still doomed. They will only matter for older tracks; you know…the good stuff. Oh…wait…
How good is Google’s Instant Mix? – Just the fact that it has a “WTF Score” makes this worth skimming.
Libertarianism and Selfishness – It’s important to note that libertarianism != objectivism.
Reading of Excerpts at Tucson School Board Meeting – Please refrain from reading the profanity in the public school text books in school board meetings. KThanksBye.
If you’re going to dream, dream big. Any idiot can run from the cops or get involved in a car chase with them. It takes a special person to attempt to swim from them.
“He just took off, and he got a good head start,” DeMorat said. “He was in a foot chase for a few blocks. Then he ran straight into the water.”
Usually, the mugshot section is the best feature on the FloridaToday website, but the stories behind the violations are pretty boring. Today the tables have turned.
Google’s cloud music service. Request an invite to the beta. 20k tracks stored for free isn’t a bad place to start!
Shit My Students Write – Best new (to me) website I’ve run across in a while
Apple Trumps Google as Most Valuable Brand – Shocked Coca-Cola doesn’t trump both. The carbonate sugar water industry is much more stable than technology. Do you think it’s even within the realm of possibility that someone could knock KO from its perch? Can you say the same for Google and Apple?
Here’s my most successful tweet recently:
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/sadcox/statuses/67615378800513024″]
Celebration standout wins 100, 400 at 3A state track meet – My buddy Ryan’s little brother.
Online Poker Caused Osama Bin Laden’s Destruction? – A little out there, but you never know.
What’s high school for? – This is the best post on education I’ve ever read. Seriously.
Password Manager Last Pass Possibly Hacked – Let thy password algorithm reside only in thy head.
I’ve been crazy busy with work for the past few weeks, and a lot has happened. Obviously, I haven’t been reading very much, but here’s a small sample.
An Outsider’s Guide to a Triathlon – Love Todd’s approach.
Justice is Not an Excuse for Jubilation – Pretty much how I feel about it all.
Gas Pump Activism – This. Is. Awsum.
Surprise! Woman finds 7-foot gator in bathroom – Had to read this just to make sure she didn’t find it in my bathroom. Of course, I’d be just as concerned about this woman wandering into the house as I would the gator.
Apocalypse later: what happens the day after we hit the debt ceiling – The horror. The horror.
Higher Education: The Next Asset Bubble? – If you consider college to be an investment, it’s reasonable to calculate your ROI before investing, right?
Social Media for Small Businesses: 6 Effective Strategies – Great tips here for one man shows!
Online Poker Legal Now (in D.C.) – I bet (haha) it won’t take long until this ripples out.
Awesome post over on The Logic of Long Distance on stoic running.
Finally, and this point is probably hardest to grasp, you are responsible for you. Not your shoes, not your watch, not anything else. Those are tools, to be used with the requisite understanding, but they do not take away your responsibility to yourself.
I’d maybe even take this a step further. I think some of the best long distance running a fella can do takes place when there is no watch, HRM, or iPod involved at all. Just run and figure it out. Pay attention to what’s going on, and let what you’ve learned about yourself dictate what you are doing at that moment. Get rid of the gadgets that are telling you what you should be doing. Get rid of the external influences that may push you to do more than you should or hold you back from doing what you could. Instead, just do what you feel like you should do.
We’re talking about distance here, right? If you’re running any kind of distance it’s because you’ve worked up to it, so you should have learned something along the way. And you can keep learning as you go.
I miss running long.
Just like last time, I still think he has no chance of winning. But just like last time, he will have the ability to shift the debate towards more libertarian ideas.
The big difference this time around is that Gary Johnson is also running. So instead of being the only libertarian voice in the mainstream debate, there will now be two voices–one a little more extreme than the other. Just an idea here, but maybe Trump is to Palin as Paul is to Johnson.
I do think people are going to be paying more attention this time around when Ron Paul somehow finds a way to tie every single debate question back to the Federal Reserve. You have to give him credit for staying on message. But I think people may be more drawn to Gary Johnson. Not because he’s saying anything that much different than Ron Paul, but because of the way he says it.
Wait…let me get this straight. Using this approach, if a person is facing extreme debt with collectors calling, cars and houses on the verge of being repo’d and foreclosed, and maxed out credit cards, these are the steps they should take to fix the problem:
Here’s another mind dump of thoughts on a few of the link worthy things I’ve read lately…enjoy!
Now you can buy a Kindle for $114! The gotcha here is that you have to be willing to look at ads and special offers. Still, I’m glad to see the price coming down one way or another. I still think the magic price for this device is $99. At least, that’s the price at which I’d bite.
5 Common Remote Work Misconceptions – Word!
Roth IRA: Time to retire Roth IRAs – Could not be more wrong. This guy needs to run the numbers, although I doubt he’d know where to start to do that. Roth IRAs and Traditional IRAs generate the exact same tax revenue if you make the assumption that the tax rate doesn’t change. But for the gov’ment, they get to have their candy now instead of waiting for you to retire. The upside for the account holder only comes if they end up in a higher tax bracket or tax rates rise across the board. Look where people have placed their bets.
Gov Shutdown’s Impact – Great argument by @newscoma for keeping $ in state instead of sending it to D.C. 🙂
IKEA desktop – <3 IKEA. This is pretty cool.
Portugal, Illinois and Caterpillar – “The Portugese have decided to protest against mathematics….” That’s pretty much all you need to know. Of course, as Dave Ramsey likes to point out, if they’d been doing math they wouldn’t be in this mess.
Local boy does (not so) good…allegedly. And worse, he’s a Robertson County Commissioner.
There are now as many as 40 people who say they are owed millions, and a criminal investigation is under way. Robertson County Commissioner Shannon Polen already faces three civil suits.
I went to high school with Shannon, and it would be fair to say we were friends on some level. I mean, we didn’t hang out at each other’s houses or anything, but we were teammates on a couple of 2-8 football teams and laughed at a lot of the same stuff in classes we had together. Lot’s of laughing in those classes–not much learning.
I would run into him every now and then in college too. I remember bumping into him and another guy we both knew at a basketball game once. We ended up sitting a couple of rows behind Andy Kelly, whom he was heckling just loud enough to not be heard.
I’m sure the Vols lost that night, but I can’t blame that on Shannon with a clear conscious. While I remember him having a biting sense of humor and being a master heckler, the ability to affect the outcome of sporting events doesn’t stand out in my mind as one of his strengths (see the 2-8 football teams) .
But seriously, how do you heckle Andy Kelly when Wade Houston is in the same room?
Time and malt beverages have ravaged a fair percentage of my memories, but there are a few interesting facts I can tell you about Mr. Polen. Digest them at your leisure and make of them what you will…
In all sincerity, this doesn’t smell like a simple misunderstanding, and I hope the people who have lost their savings and faith in elected officials are at least able to get their money back.
UPDATE: Michael Silence has a point.
Sometimes you just have to wonder if stupidity shouldn’t be a felony.
*NOTE: I like to play fast and loose with the word “teacher”
Android as Google’s Moat – I like this take on Android as a defensive product for Google. I also like what that implies for us as consumers–costs keep decreasing while functionality keeps increasing. Can you believe someone wanted to charge for a web browser at one time? Now there are several free browsers, and they are still trying to out-do each other in features and speed!
The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire” – Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Are We Better Off Today? – Definitely. I think the problem is that we have a skewed idea of "comfortable". If I have food in my belly and shoes (hopefully some $1 Old Navy flip-flops) on my feet and I'm not bleeding, chances are I'd say I'm comfortable.
6 Common E-Mail Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make – Read the bold points as a checklist before you hit send.
Integration Of Google Voice and Sprint – A daddy of an announcement. Now…do I have to pick one number or the other to have seamless integration? I like having both.
"Red" rocker Sammy Hagar says abducted by aliens – Still trying to "Out-Dave" DRL. You sir, are no David Lee Roth
NYT’s DIgital Pricing Plan Discriminates By Device – Alternate Headline: Requiem to an Ass Biter.
I was just checking out the speech to text feature in Chrome’s v11 beta, and I have to say, it’s pretty good. Even if you sound like you have a mouth full of marbles like I do, it does a decent job…at least a good enough job that you could speak long documents and go back to edit by hand later. I bought some software not too long ago to do this, and it was a lot more expensive than the “free” Google is charging.
Added bonus, this is part of HTML5…Google doesn’t own it, they are just taking advantage of it.
If you like this kind of stuff, it’s worth checking out. I am a little curious why Google hasn’t thrown a little microphone up onto their main search page so we can use it there. Seems like an obvious way to get people to use it immediately.
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