Your Laundry's Ready
I've been living in dorm rooms and apartment buildings for the past ten years of my life, and one of my biggest pain points is doing laundry. I've never had my own washer and dryer in the unit, so I either have to wait until the communal laundry room in my apartment complex is free, or I have to haul everything to a laundromat. (The laundromat isn't all bad.) Coordinating the use of the laundry...
Facebook Clean-up
People seem to like it a lot when I write my opinions about Facebook, so today I'm going to offer you a quick clean-up tip. It will take you a few minutes to do and Over the course of time, most of us that use Facebook on a daily basis end up accumulating a bunch of Facebook Apps. We see our friends taking a quiz that reveals which "Lost" character you would be, and we...
Read By The Author
I bought a couple of Audiobooks recently for the long car drive back from Tucson. The first one I bought was a book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt, which is a fascinating book written by a computer scientist about human psychology on the road. (It is, incidentally, the perfect book to listen to in the car while you're driving.) The other book...
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Yesterday was my birthday. (Thanks to all of you Facebook peeps that posted on my wall.) It seems like people my age (late twenties, early thirties), more and more, use their birthdays not as an excuse to go out and party, but instead to reflect on how far (or not far) they've gone in life up to this point. People seem to be less in favor of enjoying the current moment, and more in favor...
Are You An Entrepreneur?
I think you are. I'm sure you've had an idea, an inkling, a thought of something you could do online. I'm not talking about those online scams that promise you'll get checks for doing absolutely no work. Instead, I'm referring to those conversations that come up when you're out to dinner with friends. Those times when a good idea strikes you and you wonder, "Is anyone doing that?" Chances are, you Googled it to find...
I'm Going To Google You
And when I do, what am I going to find? It's not any big secret any longer that companies are Googling prospective hires in an effort to learn more about them when they apply for jobs. But have you ever bothered to Google your own name and see what comes up? How about under the image results? No one's going to find that MySpace photo of you with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth,...
Passing Along the Books
There's a Goodwill a few blocks from me that I go to a few times a week, mostly because they tend to have a respectable book selection. (It's also interesting to browse the old CDs they have there, which now seems akin to thumbing through my parent's collection of old LPs.) Since the books are cheap, I find that it's a pretty cost effective way for me to sample lots of more popular titles just...
We All Fall Down
I've heard more than one casual mention in the past few weeks about what will happen "when America goes the way of Greece." Because we now live in an interconnected economy, thanks to technology, a major economic crisis in one country is sure to spread out across the rest of the world, impacting other countries through some kind of ripple effect. The riots of Greece will soon plague Manhattan and the streets of Madrid. Certainly,...
Infringe On Me, Will You?
I got an email from a programmer with a blog who wanted to post an excerpt from the book I wrote, and he was writing to me to ask for my permission to do so. And my first reaction was to be flattered that someone would want to quote anything that I had written. I was just glad someone had read it and that they liked it enough to want to share it themselves. As...
Burn the Mother Down
An idea for big businesses struggling through hard times: you probably have a rule book in your possession that was compiled in order to keep customers from getting too much out of you. Take Blockbuster: they have a rental policy about their in-store rentals that spans several pages, so long that even the employees working in their stores don't understand all the legal-sounding garbage in its pages. They did this because there were a few...