Not your normal financial advice
Here's a great essay on "financial advice", although it isn't the normal "set a budget" and "spend wisely" that you normally read and instead focuses on how you manage your time (which has an indirect impact on your finances). I know in the world of Facebook, Twitter, smart phones, and the internet I've definitely struggled with balancing everything with things that add value to my life and aren't just time wasters. Where can you trim your "budget"? Read here
Some of my favorites:
- cut back on TV - I dumped cable and it has been awesome
- sleep - I think Saturday and Sunday mornings are two of my favorite times of the week. Getting out and enjoying Boston before everyone else stirs I've found to be really peaceful and relaxing
- shopping - Amazon Prime for the win! Boston Organics bi-monthly deliveries are also really tasty and excellent time savers
- Exercising- such a great way to clear your mind and ironically get more energy for the rest of the day
- Building relationships - my time on Facebook is mostly concentrated on friends that I'm close with and see regularly, not the random people from when I was 8 that I will never see again and it adds no value to know what they had for dinner the night before
What every guy wants
Someone once joked to me that everything you own takes batteries or plugs in. They were right of course, except for my toilet. Now that can change, although I can only imagine how expensive this is. Check out the Kohler Numi toilet. It includes features such as a full touch screen remote, self-cleaning wand, automatic opening/flushing/closing, heated seat, ambient lighting, speakers, water conservation features, and a bidet with a precision air dryer. Where do I sign up?
Lame 4G marketing and why Bostonians should choose Verizon Wireless
If you live in Boston, here's a good reason to have Verizon Wireless as your carrier. First, courtesy of @michaelrestivo, I read an article talking about the lame marketing efforts of companies like AT&T to brand today's HSPA+ networks as "4G". You have likely seen the ads plastered all around the city advertising this, when in fact they have made little investment or technology changes compared to the new LTE network that Verizon just rolled out. Here was my favorite quote:
Even if HSPA+ networks may beat LTE someday, they don’t today. If you’ve got an HSPA+ device (like the iPhone 4S), you’re likely to achieve download speeds of between 1 and 3 megabits per second. That’s about half the speed of the average U.S. home broadband connection. An LTE device (like the new iPad), meanwhile, will let you download at speeds of 5 to 12 megabits per second, according to both AT&T and Verizon. That’s about on par with your home broadband line. In practice, then, real 4G handily beats faux 4G.
For wireless carriers, though, real 4G networks—that is, LTE networks—are expensive and time consuming to install. In 2010, T-Mobile decided that it would focus on improving its 3G network rather than build out its LTE capabilities. The company began touting that its new HSPA+ network could offer “4G speeds.” This marketing trickery was criticized by everyone in the industry, including AT&T. “I think that companies need to be careful that they're not misleading customers by labeling HSPA+ as a 4G technology. We aren't labeling those technologies as 4G,” an AT&T spokesman said back then.
But now AT&T has changed its mind. Mark Siegel, a spokesman, told me that the company’s about-face came as a result of a 2010 decision by the International Telecommunications Union that HSPA+ could be referred to as a “4G.” This change is very convenient for AT&T, because while its LTE network is smaller than Verizon’s, its HSPA+ network is the largest in the country. If 4G is taken to mean LTE, then AT&T loses to Verizon in the coverage wars. But if both HSPA+ and LTE are 4G, then AT&T’s network looks really great, and its claim that it’s the largest 4G carrier in the country isn’t total balderdash.
Later that day I stumbled across another article that features an infographic based not on an alphabet soup of technologies like CDMA, LTE, or HSPA+, but real live data based on two iphone apps that SwayMarkets produces (DataMonitor, which keeps tabs on your monthly data usage so you don't incur extra fees, and NetSnaps, which tells you how the WiFi or wireless network is performing where you are). It shows that based on real time usage Verizon is clearly the leader in signal strength, speed, and low latency (shortest response times by servers basically). Bottom line: if performance is your only consideration, you should go with Verizon Wireless.
Here is the infographic from SwayMarkets, a Cambridge startup:
Awesome ski trip out to Vail and Beaver Creek
I've always said, a winter isn't a real winter until I take a ski trip out West. This year I really lucked out, not only did I get to head to Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek in Colorado for a few days skiing with some awesome friends, but I also was there for probably 2 or 3 of the best days they have experienced all season. Fresh powder on Day 1 at Beaver Creek meant that I spent most of the morning remembering how to ski powder, as it had been a few years. By the afternoon I was loving the glades with all of the hidden powder stashes.
Day 2 at Vail meant yet more fresh powder and an unbelievable day at an amazing mountain. Favorite trails of the day: Lover's Leap, the Glades between Cloud Nine and Steep and Deep (a completely deserted paradise in the trees), and the Shangri-La Glade. For those that have never skied at Vail, picture this: the front side of the mountain is 7 miles long. You then take a lift up the front side and you have the entire backside of the mountain to ski. Ski down the back bowls and take another lift up the next mountain (BlueSky). For those of you on the East Coast that think Killington is big, Vail is 5,000+ acres compared to less than 700 for Killington. WOW. Even the trail map has to be split up into essentially three maps: front side map and the backside/Bluesky map.
Day 3 was back at Beaver Creek. No fresh powder today, but I got up early and hit some perfect groomed trails. It was so smooth that I'm pretty sure I hit speeds I've never hit before on skis. Once the crowds started to arrive I headed to the Rose Bowl and started to do laps on the Stone Creek Chutes. The snow was amazing and this was some of the steepest and most challenging terrain I've ever skied down. It was labeled as "Extreme Terrain", one step past a double diamond. I liked the sign that described it as "any place within the ski area boundary that contains cliffs with a minimum twenty foot rise over a fifteen foot run, and slopes with a minimum fifty degree average pitch over a one-hundred foot run". Unfortunately the pictures just don't do it justice, but when every turn you take snow goes whizzing by you down the hill in front of you, you know it's steep.
Video of me heading down Stone Creek Chutes:
http://vimeo.com/38193445
Here are some of the pictures I took on my iPhone (not as nice quality as my usual SLR pictures):
