The solution to the financial crisis is too late in coming but here you go folks. This is what we should all be doing. Just because some of us have debt doesn’t mean it’s too late to start now! So… Don’t buy stuff you can’t afford!!!
Posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009
Under: Finances, Great Sites, Movie, Online | Comments Off
Sometimes I have a lot of files I need to share. Great gobs of user generated content I want other people to be able to get at, but I don’t want to e-mail to them… or just that they may not need right this minute, but they may want to get at later. Things that they might not ever need, but that I use and think they’d benefit from seeing. E-mailing these things to them is sometimes not practical or the best choice. Handing them a memory stick or burned CD or DVD isn’t going to work if they’re a zillion miles away.
Once upon a time I was a huge advocate of box.net as my primary source of file sharing. I have entire books of work forms and reference over there that I’ve shared with myself and a couple other supervisors in the company. It was my favorite, most suggested file sharing service. I could share with specific people or nobody or even make things public for anybody to access via a URL that didn’t expose all my files to the public. It was great.
Their upload functionality isn’t always what it should be though. I tried to upload multiple files last night and it just wouldn’t upload at all. I was kvetching about the upload problem to another box.net early adopter and he said that’s why he decided to give Dropbox a try and maybe it’d help with what I was looking for. I was trying to use the drag and drop interface to upload to box.net and it was letting me drag and drop, but it wasn’t doing the important part of the upload interface… the uploading. So, I signed up with Dropbox, installed a desktop client, drag-and-dropped my way into converting to a Dropbox fan in seconds. Talk about easy! Dropbox just displaced box.net as my favorite client because I can upload files to it without having to do it by hand, one at a time, while watching it. Drag files into the folder and go about my business. It uploads files in the background, and if I drag and drop the folders on the desktop client it does that on the online version. (I can’t find a way to organize files on the online client and that’s irritating, but I assume they’ll fix that in a later iteration for now I just organize them on my desktop version and it syncs it all up quickly and painlessly.)
So, if you need to share large files with someone consider Dropbox as a way to share little Johnny’s first steps on video or all those TPS reports you typed up. You won’t regret it.
Posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008
Under: Great Sites, Online, Programs, Webtools | Comments Off
It’s not entirely true I’ve reached mid-life. I’m not even sure when midlife is. I am sure I’m older than I’ve ever been before, and while I prefer that to the alternative I’m not crazy about the up-coming trailing zero my age will soon have.
I’m just now coming off a week long vacation that was perfectly timed. In the days before the vacation my boss said to me that he could tell I just wasn’t feeling it any more. I was going through the motions of the job, but I wasn’t fully vested in it. He was absolutely right. I was burned out and not sure if the job had changed or I had changed or if it was just my impending trailing zero causing me to seek change for the sake of change. I’m still not sure what was going on when I left. I’m not entirely back yet, tomorrow is day 1. But I know now that I don’t want to go back. I talked to him today about demoting myself two or three levels just to improve the quality of my life and decrease stress. It’d add a financial stress, but I’ve got money socked away and I lived on that money before. I’m sure I could again. He thought I was kidding. I’m not sure how serious I was.
All that being said, work ennui happens at times. Work isn’t who I am though. It’s something I do. As I approach the zero-trailing birthday I’m paying more attention to myself, my food intake, and my exercise. The tool I’m using to do this is Sparkpeople.com. I hate all the buttons because they all mention it’s an online diet. I’m not using that part of it. I’m using the tracking tools. Tracking my exercise and tracking my food intake. If it goes in my mouth it goes on this site. Just the awareness of what I’m eating helps me make better choices.
Sparkpeople.com has a great community feature with message boards, built in e-mail for within the system, and a wealth of articles you can read about all sorts of topics from health issues to diet to exercise. I really like the site. I like it enough to recommend it. I used to like fitday.com and suggest it to people. I set up an account there years ago. Sadly, in the intervening years it has not changed one bit. Everything else on the Internet has grown more feature rich and easy to use, but not fitday. It feels old and clunky now.
So, if you’re of a mind to go all fitness minded with me join Sparkpeople.com and add me as a buddy in there. I’d be happy to share what I know of it with you and I remember when I quit smoking, 3 years, 1 week, and 3 days ago as of today the support of a buddy was very important. I’m all about friendly helpful support. I like to give it, and I am the type who needs their positive strokes so give me a shout out if you’re interested. My name’s simplerich there too.
Posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
Under: Great Sites, Online, Personal, Webtools | Comments Off
When I heard the name, “Phileas Club” I immediately thought of Phileas Fogg in Jules Vernes’ Around the World in 80 Days. I was driving though so couldn’t verify if my guess was correct. It was being mentioned in another podcast (1). I jotted it down and downloaded it a while later and found that I was right. The show is hosted by Patrick and he, like Jules Verne, is French. Unlike Jules Verne, Patrick is still alive. That is an important difference and one that helps the pace of the show quite a bit.
What is “Phileas”?
This is a reference to Phileas Fogg, the main character in the book “Around the World in Eighty Days”, by french author Jules Vernes. We thought it would be an interesting way of summing up what this show is about, and the fact that Patrick is french also makes it all the more fun.
The premise of the show is that Patrick and two other people on the show with him from different countries around the world discuss the previous month’s headline news. The different perspectives and takes on things is a good mirror to my own thoughts on the different topics. In the first two episodes there weren’t any heated arguments, fights, or anybody stomping off in disgust. Perhaps that’s being saved up for some time in the future, perhaps as the election results come in November.
The feeling of all of them sitting in room with dark wood panelling in over stuffed chairs sipping on drinks in glasses that sparkle and catch the light coming from sconces on the wall is really strong. The people are not people who know each other and thrown together as they are to discuss things as ersatz representatives of their countries they do really well at being very civil and considerate.The first show was sort of all over the place, but Patrick I think felt it too and by the second show there was quite a bit more direction, moderation, steering of the conversation to keep it short and to the point. The quality of the second show was quite a bit better than the first. It was much tighter than the first. Patrick knows where he wants to go with this, and listens back to his podcast to see what was right and what could use tweaking. I look forward to finding out just how great it will get as time passes. I’m very excited about the show.
On the one hand the time between shows (about a month it seems) is good because it allows enough news to talk about. On the other hand my appetite for the show is such I would love more. The time between is nice. It helps reduce immediacy and knee-jerk reactions and people’s answers seem more thought out. I wish the self-imposed time lapse between event and reaction were still there. Sometimes immediacy and haste to react is a bad thing. As the world gets smaller and communication faster I worry we lose something in everybody making snap decisions all the time just to keep up.
I often hear people talk about how the internet is an anonymous cess-pool of every dark vice and unmentionable sin the world has to offer. People bemoan the loss of communication skills as people no longer interact face to face, and I think anybody who has ever gotten a text message from someone under twenty weeps at the spelling without knowing if they know better or are abbreviating intentionally. SRSLY. (For a more in-depth discussion of this check out this other podcast, it’s towards the end.)
This show is an excellent example of why that isn’t the whole story of the Internet. I’ll go over other podcasts in the future. I wanted to start with this one as it ties in more nicely with my previous post about whipping my brain into shape.
(1) Podcasts are like radio shows you can download to your computer and listen to when you want to.
Posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Under: Great Sites, Online, Reviews, Website | Comments Off
