I have a dream. I want to drink fine microbrews and laugh at the latest youtube video. And I want to do it in a bar in the Cambridge/Somerville area.
So I’m announcing the Boston Diggnation Meetup group.
For those not in the know, diggnation is a popular tech video podcast.
The only thing that should suprise you is why someone else hasn’t already done it.
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I started using google docs because I wanted to take my to-do lists with me - when I was at work and thought of something I needed to do when I got home, I’d have to write it down and forget about it to stay focused.
Now, I’ve found a very useful application that does what I want - Omnifocus, now with an iPhone application. And be warned, productivity ain’t cheap.
Basically: your to-do list - organized by projects (i.e. build a home media center) contexts (home, errands, office, best buy, etc) and actions (buy tv tuner, return monitor, etc) is synced between your mac-only application and your iphone.
And - get this, the application is location aware. That means the iPhone uses your located to show your action-items that are nearby - i.e. you tag home as a location and office as a location and it will automatically display your next to-do item.
To get it to work, you need a mac, an iPhone with the 2.0 software, a webdav or mobile me account, and OmniFocus for mac (there is a free trial). I followed the instructions below
1. Get BingoDisk account ($20 a year for 10GB is really not much)
2. Enter BingoDisk account data in OF WebDAV sync field (http://accountname.bingodisk.com/bingo/)
3. Sync
4. Do same on iPhone/iPod Touch
5. done.
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My personal finance ponderings have led me to avoid getting a gym membership - - at the very least for the rest of this beautiful Cambridge summer. I’d rather spend the 420$/year on stuff that’s actually fun to do and gets me outdoors So I’ve been looking hard for ways to stay fit in the outdoors or the comfort of my own Porter Sq apartment.
So far I’ve ordered a Creative Fitness Door Gym (aka pullup bar, which I will review in the future), purchased a Hybrid Mountain Bike for commuting and recreation, as well as a Nike + Ipod Sport Kit - well….minus the expensive Nike’s. I will review these all at some point.
For those who haven’t heard of it. 100 Pushups is a simple an interesting concept. You take an inital test - you record as many pushups you can do in a row without stopping - and then you get started on an every-other-day program of doing pushups that will eventually lead to 100 consequitive pushups.
Based on your initial test results, the website sorts you into 3 categories.
I did about 22 pushups, and was sorted into the highest section.
Today was my 3rd day, counting the initial test, and here’s what wasthe plan was.
I completed this easy and maxed out at 13. I look forward to the next step, which will see me maxing at 15.
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I installed this yesterday at about noon thanks to this macrumors post…though apparently this has prompted Apple to ask them to remove the link. It did have a link to the firmware upgrade about 12 hours or so before it was actually released through iTunes.
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Your car
Your gym membership
Your Cell Phone
Your video games
Your big screen TV
You keep on buying these things that you don’t need, until, eventually, they own you. You have to decide what’s more important: this things, or financial indepedence and freedom to do what with your time.
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Moving to a new city and knowing only a few people is hard; it can be even harder if you live alone and work alone.
But, it’s a lot better than moving to a new suburb. So take advantage of City Life and get out there and meet some people.
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I’d love to not work another day in my life. Retirement at 25. How…lazy…it must sound to you all.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, I hate work. It’s boring. It’s unsatisfactory. It’s unfulfilling, and I’m bad at it.
I’m not talking about quitting my job as a computer programmer of web software, however. I’m talking about finishing doing all those things in my life that feel like work. The unfullfiling drudgery that maintains my at times pitiful existence.
For example, I hate going to the gym. It’s just not a fun activity. It feels like work, except YOU pay THEM. You sit on a treadmill for however man hours a week staring at a wall, or trying to not grunt so loudly that you sound like you’re having a good time when you’re lifting weights.
I’d rather spend that 480$ per year on a bike. And an iPod Nike sport kit. So that’s what I did. I bought a 311$ Hybrid Bike from EMS, a new pair of Asics, and an Ipod nike Sport kit plus one of those thingies that holds the sensor to your shoe. I commute to work on my bike at least half the time, which will save me about 100$ over the course of the year, plus I don’t have to look at old fat sweaty naked guys in the gym locker room 3 days a week. I’d love to apply these same sort of choices to the rest of my life.
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A few weeks ago the cheapo in me decided to buy a new monitor for my computer (acquried via my previous job). After seeing that you could get a L2410NM monitor for only 360$ via a random seller on pricegrabber.com (newegg didn’t have nay in stock) as opposed to about 600$ at a retail store like Target, i decided to save a few dollars and have it ordered online.
The cheapest seller was y2inc. I would soon learn the 380$ price tag was too good to be true.
A week later, I had not recieved any notification of shipping. They didn’t have a website, so I had to email them through Google Checkout. They got back to me promptly saying that the warehouse would ship it shortly. The next day, they emailed me saying that it would come shortly via UPS.
Too bad I already paid for fedex.
2 1/2 weeks into it, I recieve my monitor…and it’s broken.
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Thanks to some enlightening dicussions with a few freinds and coworkers, I have decide to give a no-meat policy a try for a week.
It’s funny, because I have never been able to undrestand why people would choose vegitarianism for ethical reasons. In my mind, human life is far more precious than animal life, human suffering far more sad than any animal suffering, so on and so forth. My arguement has always been - animals clearly are not capable of love. To be capable of good, you have to be capable of evil, and I don’t start thinking my dog is evil just because he took a shit in the kitchen.
While I have no quams about killing and eating other animals for survival, I personally have the means to survive without having to support the mass-producing livestock industry.
My main motivation is enviornmental.
Environmental vegetarianism is based on the belief that the production of meat and animal products for mass consumption, especially through factory farming, is environmentally unsustainable or otherwise harmful. Recent research strongly supports these concerns. According to a 2006 United Nations initiative, the livestock industry is one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation worldwide, and modern practices of raising animals for food contributes on a “massive scale” to air and water pollution, land degradation, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. The initiative concluded that “the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”[121]
For more info, see Wikipedia’s article on Vegitarianism.
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Pearbudget.com is by far the best way to create a simple budget where you track how much money you take in, and track how much you spend.
I’m admitted self improvement fanatic, and one of the things I’ve lamented not improving on in the past is not controlling my spending by sticking to a budget.
This is what I wanted:
Simple and easy to use for my small meansHere’s what I’ve tried
What I really wanted was to track spending and money intake easily, preferrably with a good movie interface
I was delighted to discover pear budget.
(insert screenshots)
The simplify budgetting to a 3 step process
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
