DisSuggs4u

One of the goals I have for this blog is to begin sharing not only some of my tips in both organization and personal finance. The problem I am having with both of them is they are fairly large topics and I am trying to figure out where to start.

With that said, there is one personal finance tip I can share today involving what has historically been (for me at least) a very large money vacuum: magazine subscriptions. (Continued)

I’m a huge fan of trivia, and for some strange reason I am able to not only consume it in large amounts, but also recall it at will. This “talent” does not really do much for me in my daily life, but it does help grease the wheels of conversation when the need arises.

(Of course, there is a fine line between being “interesting” and “a know-it-all jerk.” The key, as with many things, is knowing when to quit.)

You can imagine my delight when one of the internets’ tubes I was riding brought me to a new source: I Did Not Know That Yesterday! It is a great site, and is written with tongue-in-cheek/sarcastic humor, much like one of my favorite magazines.

Now, if only there was some way I could make money off all this useless trivia.

Oh, knowledge, how I love thee…

Yesterday evening was the grand conclusion to another NFL season. As is usually the case, it was the only NFL game I watched all year. In general, I am not a very big professional sports fan — other than professional cycling — and usually occupy my time doing other things. However, my wife and I make a special case for the Super Bowl wherein we head down to the Alamo Draft House to watch the game on the movie screen. This year was no different. (Continued)

I love it when graphics are used in a way which instantly and quickly conveys the message behind them. Of course, some of the time, the message they convey is not entirely positive. However, other times they can be used as a tool to quickly analyze and absorb data. (Continued)

I know you cannot change the past, hind sight is always 20/20, and all the other similar clichés that say the same thing. And I know that the past is history, the future is a mystery, and the present is just that: a gift. However, all that being said, I cannot help but be bothered when I see things like the following:

The full story behind the graphic is worth a read, even though it is a little irritating (for me at least).

There are so many better places we can (and probably should) be spending our taxpayer dollars. I find it very sad and irritating that so much of those dollars are devoted to this warrant-less war when there is still so much work to be done here at home.

Oh, well. For now, I guess we will just have have to live with being stuck between Iraq and a hard place. After all, we made this bed. Now, we will have to sleep in it.

Four years ago today, I walked into a HealthSouth outpatient surgical center here in Austin, TX, to have surgery performed on my lower back — specifically, a partial discectomy to repair a herniated disc between the L4 and L5 segments of my lumbar spine. The surgery itself lasted just under an hour, the nurses had me up and walking around five hours later, and I literally walked out of the hospital nineteen hours after they stitched me up.

While back on my feet, I was not cleared to work for another two weeks, and it was half-days at best. It took two months of therapy and exercise (mostly walking) before I was back to anywhere near “normal.” Seven months after that, I was finally released from therapy and able to ride my bike again. The biggest bonus: over the course of the experience I met and grew to know better the person who would become my wife. (Continued)

It is currently 28 degrees (F) outside and snow has started falling. For many parts of the world, this is a common site during the winter months. However, in this part of Texas we only have three seasons: a week of “winter,” a couple of months of “almost summer,” and then many oppressive months of summer heat.

So, you can imagine that when weather like this hits our city there is nothing less than pandemonium. The grocery shelves go bare with people stocking up on food. I mean, it could be a whole day or two before they are able to leave the house again. You have to prepare for the worst, I supposed. It’s like Y2k all over again. (Continued)

I have written many times before about how great the anti-spam feature of Gmail is. (12,064 today and counting, by the way.)

Today I wanted to share some tips that I have picked up which aid considerably with my Gmail usage: dot & plus addressing.

Gmail addresses are much like any other e-mail addresses out there and are in the format yourname@gmail.com. No surprises there. Where it gets interesting is that you can alter the e-mail address you give out to others (including web sites) and they are all delivered to the same mailbox in Gmail. (Continued)

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of TiVo. (And, for the record, I am talking to the actual TiVo box and service. Not that crappy cable company provided DVR which pales in comparison to an actual TiVo. My official opinion and comparison of such shall have to wait until another post.)

One of the best things about TiVo, other than the ability to “shift time” and watch programs when I want to and not be a slave to the TV schedule, is its ability to skip past commercials. Sure, you can press the fast forward button on either the TiVo or a craptastic cable company DVR to speed through the commercial breaks while watching a recorded program. However, what I am talking about is not only something that cannot be found your normal DVR, other than the handful of ReplayTV owners out there, but also something that I am not sure many existing TiVo users even know about. (Continued)

In a previous post, I commented on just how much spam I had received during a one-month time frame. At the time of the post, on 17 November, I had acquired 5,481 spam e-mail messages.

A little under a month later, on 12 December, I updated the post to indicate that the total number of e-mail messages in my spam folder had risen to 7,184.

Now, (Continued)