"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars"
-J. Paul Getty
Hey all, long time no see... While the absence of my updates showing up to greet you on Monday mornings has been 100% my fault, I assure you that I have been very busy with some other exciting projects that I will shed a bit more light on in the coming weeks. To paint the picture of my despiration to finish this and free my mind of the all these things I have been waiting weeks to share; it is after midnight and I am sitting on the floor of my hotel room in 'damn near Canada', NY--surrounded with newspapers, bent corner magazine pages, and of course my handy pocket notebook...[Katie just got our waterproof replacements in the mail the other day]. I hope that you enjoy the links, because I really enjoyed pulling them all together...but I am not proof-reading it, haha. Goodnight.
Some Things that Don't Suck:
Pandora, is without question the best addition to the internet since AIM. A simple and elegant (and free) internet radio station where you select bands that you like, and it fills in with related recommendations. Give a song a thumbs up and you will hear more like it, thumbs down and you will never hear it again. Addiction Warning: They have a cell phone application. Archive your music libraries, they just went obsolete.
Mint.com, just like Quicken or Microsoft Money..only free, more visual, and simple. I personally track all of my finances through their website, and my favorite feature is the automatic updates...Every Friday I get an email that tells me all of my balances, the biggest transactions of the week, and changes to the prices of my stocks. Beyond that there is a budget tracker that will text you within minutes if you get cross one of your preset spending limits for a given catagory--it catagorizes transactions with scary accuracy and you can compare your spending with state and US averages.
Peoria, Caterpillar, and Aaron Schock featured on the Colbert Report...even though this is my favorite show, I definitely missed this one, but was very pumped that the link to the video landed in my inbox on time for my update.
First Time Home Buyer's Credit, Free money doesn't grow on trees...it is direct deposited when you file your 2009 taxes. Unlike the 2008 credit--which was essentially a zero interest loan--this one does not need repaid. In related news, I just bought a house:
Boxed Water, while this may seem like a retro throwback to gradeschool chocolate milk...it turns out that putting our beverages into plastic instead of cardboard was a big step back environmentally...so this group wants to get back forward. Even better, 10% of their profits go to world water relief foundations and another 10% go towards reforestation projects.
In My Backyard, If you have even been curious about how much power a solar array or even a small scale wind turbine would produce in an exact location on your property--this webtool is for you. It is a government website though, so forgive the dry look--it is pretty sweet.
World Largest Model Rocket to be launched next Saturday!!! 36 feet, 9 motors, and 1600lbs of adolescent ambition...I am pretty jealous, I hope that to keep it authentic they launch it with a little metal key attached to the yellow battery pack with an elastic cord.
Solar Powered City to be built in Florida, construction on the 17,000 acre city near Fort Meyers will begin later this year and beyond the cool factor, they are promising to create at least 20,000 permanent jobs. It was only a matter of time before somebody realized that there is an open federal grant that will pay for 30% of the installed cost of PV systems. Beyond that, the smart grid system being used will make residents very aware of their power usage and drive waste out of the system.
The future of Detroit, until afew weeks ago I was not a huge fan of Ford. [for the record, I still think that Mustangs are lame] but several sutble moves recently have convinced me that Ford has the right state of mind to come out of this downturn stronger than they were going into it. Follow the link and you will see that they recently gave away 100 of their brand new Fiestas with only one string attached--recipients had to post their honest opinions of the car on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. The company has had top exectives talking on little NPR shows about why they didn't take the bailout money, and how the Ford family has the capital to repurchase the company 2.5 times if it came to that point. From a marketing perspective they are going all-in on 20-something hipsters and social networking teenagers...From a financial perspective--their has not been much press but their stock has more than doubled since that interview...and now paid for my ticket/trip to Missouri where I listened to it.
Ice is growing--NOT MELTING--in Antartica, I was a little bummed earlier today after watching a 90-minute documentary about glaciers dissapearing all over the world...and I thought, if all of these massive ice sheets are melting why is the water not rising?? Luckily (for all of the coasts) it only took a couple minutes on Google to find that it is all refreezing at the south pole. That mystery is solved...now as far as how all of the people in India and Montana are going to farm when their water source is gone...
Some Things that Do:
Spending this much money, I am not going to argue about the various stimulus packages, they all had good intentions...but the lump some of money spent over the last few months is just incredible...This is a visual representation of $1 Trillion dollars, and you definately need to see it.
MPG rating, I drive a hybrid and I obsess over this statistic, but being a math guy at heart I have always had trouble with it. To be more specific, the average means nothing but is easy to get wrapped up with-the important thing is actually how many gallons it takes to get where you want to go. Take this example:
--You drive downhill for 100 miles getting 100mpg,
--Now you turn around and drive back up the 100 miles getting 10mpg
So what was your average MPG over the course of the trip? 55 would seem logical, but really you used 11 gallons of gas (1 down, 10 up) over 200 miles...so you only got 18.2 mpg. The problem is has more to do with comparing potential car replacements than your operating effieciency. The recommended solution is the sticker rating of 'gallons per 100 miles' as to not mislead consumers. I realize I am drawing this one out pretty long, but to drive this home a little more consider that, "replacing a large vehicle that gets 10 mpg with one that gets 20 mpg reduces gas use per 100 miles from 10 gallons to five, a 5-gallon savings. Replacing a small vehicle that gets 25 mpg with one that gets 50 mpg reduces gas use per 100 miles from 4 gallons to 2, a saving of only 2 gallons."
The item on your list of things to do that will never get done...ever, TuneUp is a $30 piece of software that will go through your iTunes music library and fill in all of the blanks--Cover art, genre, album titles, & even mislabeled song names. I dunno how it works, but I used to think this was great...all of that changed a couple of minutes ago I declared that music libraries were obsolete and I kind of want to send a consistant message here--so this software is a total waste of time...a sweet waste of time.
Chance
