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This is good stuff

I’m not Dead

Hey everyone. I’m not dead. Just been really busy between working and studying for the CFA (one more month to go!). I haven’t had much time to post here, but I did want to make you aware of something new. Google Reader just added a new feature that allows you to add notes to shared items. So as I’m browsing through my feeds and share stuff, I can now add my own witty little comments. Sweet!

As always, you can see a feed of my shared items to the left there, but if you ever want to see a more robust version, just go here. Or, you could use Google Reader yourself and add me as a friend. That’d be even better. Google Reader is sweet, by the way. Check it out!

I thought this was pretty funny…

Podcasting with Utterz

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This is cool…

Courtesy of Legends of South Bend…

Latest Movie Rental: Once

It’s 10:45 PM on Friday night, but I’m staying up to write this blog post because I liked the movie I just saw that much.  The movie is entitled Once and stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.  You may recognize the name because it won an Oscar the other night for best original song, beating out three songs from that stupid Enchanted movie (thank goodness).  When Marketa’s acceptance speech was cut off by the “Oscar music”, John Stewart had her come back out after the commercial break and do her speech.  It was a nice moment.

Frankly the likability of the two stars in their acceptance speeches is what drove me to see the movie.  In this day and age, I’ve grown incredibly tired of the same old Hollywood bull crap.  It was nice to see two humble people up on that stage.  It was nice to see something different.  So tonight at Blockbuster, my wife picked up Once, and I wholeheartedly agreed on the rental choice, a rare occasion.

Once is the story of a struggling Dublin street musician and a poor Czech immigrant that make a connection through their music.  In some ways it was reminiscent of Lost in Translation in that it was a story of two people that find something in each other that they’re missing alone.  In contrast to Lost in Translation, however, the main characters in Once have much more in common than did Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson.  On the other hand, the two movies ended in a very similar fashion.

The movie is one of the best films I’ve seen in awhile.  I suggest you get your butt over to Blockbuster and rent it if you haven’t already.

Technorati Tags: once, marketa, hansard, oscar, film, movie

A day later: Issues with GrandCentral

Ok, yesterday I posted about GrandCentral.  I think it’s a really good idea.  For a more complete rundown of all the stuff it can do, you should read Lifehacker’s post about it.  Despite being a REALLY good idea, I’ve discovered a few things that are going to prevent me from jumping head first into the deep end:

- GrandCentral does not support text messaging.  It does, however, look like they may be looking to change this soon based off of reading their help section.  What does it mean?  Well, if I tell all my friends I’ve changed my number to 555.555.5555, if they try and send me a text message it wouldn’t make it through to my cell phone.  I don’t want people to have to keep two numbers for me (one for voice, and another for SMS).  That doesn’t simplify my life.

- Caller ID doesn’t work the way you want it to.  For example, if I call my wife from my personal cell phone, the number of my personal cell phone will show up on her caller ID, not my GrandCentral number.  This will do nothing but confuse people.  If I send out an email to my contacts saying, “My number has now changed to 555.555.5555″, and then later I call them and it shows up as my cell phone number, 333.333.3333, they’re going to want to change the number back in their cell phone contacts.  Confusing for someone who doesn’t know what’s going on (i.e., you).

- In-network calling isn’t a two way street.  My wife and I both have Verizon Wireless.  If she calls my GrandCentral number and I pick up on my VZW cell phone, I will not be charged for out-of-network calling, but she will.  You see, she dialed a non-Verizon cell number (GrandCentral), which is how the cell companies determine in-network calling.  Of course, if you talk during your “unlimited anytime minutes”, this isn’t an issue.

Like I said, I think this is a really good idea, but these few things are keeping it from the big time, in my opinion.  So, you ask, how will I use it?  Well, in our household, we don’t have a local, landline phone number.  This can be a pain in the neck when you’re trying to order a pizza, or someone from town without a cell phone wants to call you.  It’s also a pain when people want a joint number for our family (like at church).  Solution?  With GrandCentral, I simply set up a new local number and associated both my and my wife’s cell phone with it.  So now, whenever anyone calls it, both of our phones will ring.  To your average Joe, it will seem that he’s calling a landline phone.

The other nice thing is that we can give the number out and if a telemarketer starts bugging us, we can just mark him as a “spam caller” on the GrandCentral website and block him, just like in email!  Furthermore, any time we get a voicemail, it will be sent to our joint Gmail account that either one of can check from anywhere (or we could do it the old fashioned way and just call in to listen to it).  Genius!

Technorati Tags: grandcentral

All about GrandCentral

Mobile post sent by ndbutter using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Ok, so I had to cheat a bit to post to my blog.  Unfortunately, WordPress.com won’t let you post flash to your blog, so in order to get this up here, I had to go through Utterz.  I’m a sneaky kid.  Just press play above!

New Gear

So it’s my birthday next week, and I’ve asked for a bunch of photography gear this year.  Yesterday I got a new flash for my camera, and I’m quite excited about it.  I know no one else will care, but it’s a big deal to me.  I have a ton to learn about how to use it and whatnot, but I played around a bit last night.  It’s going to be fun learning how to do this stuff!  This is the best shot I came away with:

This is why I switched from Comcast…

Get Mobile with Swift

I know, I know.  I haven’t posted here in over a month.  Well, tough.  Big whoop.  Wanna fight about it?

I’ve got a new website for you to check out called Swift.  Basically it’s an online tool that allows you to create a mobile site for all your content.  Here’s how it works: you go to the site, register, and create a site in the format http://username.swiftmob.com.  Then you design your site.  Thankfully, no prior HTML knowledge is required.

The real backbone of service lies on the utilization of RSS feeds.  Think of Swift as a mobile pot to throw all your content for easy access from a mobile phone.  So for me, I threw in my Twitter feed, my Flickr feed, my blog feed, and the feed for my shared stories from Google Reader and Swift produced this.  Swift pulls all those feeds together on one page and formats to show up correctly in a mobile browser.

The whole design interface is easy-to-use AJAX, so there’s a lot of intuitive dragging and dropping involved.  There looks to be a pretty decent stats system that I presume is built on Google Analytics, so that’s nice as well.  There’s also a bunch of stuff you can do to actually design your site like photo headers, footers, background/text colors, etc.  I haven’t played with any of that yet.

I’ll keep playing with it, but mobile is definitely the future of computing so it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Technorati Tags: swift, mobile, ajax

Merry Christmas

Ok, obviously I’m a couple days late here, but just hope that everyone out there on the web had a nice Christmas, whether you’re of the Christian persuasion or not.  The wife and I have traveled about 1,000 miles in the past week and half, which is why I haven’t done much posting here lately.  The picture above was taken at my mom’s house on Christmas Eve.

Here’s wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

“Da da da!  Da da da!  Da da da da da da da da da da da da!”

Christmas in NYC

This past weekend was my wife’s 24th birthday, so I decided to take her to NYC for the weekend to see a show and hang out in the city.  We had a great time, helped in large part by her best friend with whom we stayed and who showed us around the city all weekend.

Manhattan is not for everyone, mind you.  I know I could never live there, although it is fun to visit.  Everything just seems like it would be such a hassle!  Going to the grocery store, getting to work, doing your Christmas shopping, doing your laundry…all these things would be  pain in the neck if you lived in downtown New York.

In any event, we saw The Lion King, which was fantastic.  You may think it a bit juvenile (as I did at first), but I can assure you that it was excellent.  As “business person”, the sheer creativity and artistic talent that people like that possess is dumbfounding.  Highly recommended.

Anyway, I took a few pictures, but the weather was crappy for a decent part of the weekend, and it was packed just about everywhere we went so I didn’t take a ton.  Check out Flickr if you want to see.

Google Reader Shared Items

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here before, but since I started using Google Reader, I’ve been sharing stories from the feeds I read that I find particularly interesting.  You can see an RSS feed of the latest 5 things I’ve shared in the sidebar to the right, and also on my Facebook profile (via the Feedheads application).

Alternatively, you can actually go to the “Matt’s Shared Items” page here for a blog-like layout of all the stuff I find interesting.  Right now I follow about 200 feeds (each with multiple stories per day), and I share a couple a day max.  So maybe you’ll like something that I like!  Enjoy!

Get rid of ads in Lifehacker Feeds

Of all the feeds I read, Lifehacker is probably my favorite.  There’s always something interesting there.  Recently they’ve taken to using ads in their feeds, which I find a bit annoying but up until now have put up with because I enjoy their content so much.  Then I said to myself, “there’s no reason why I should have to look at these when I can filter them out with Adblock”.

Adblock is an extension for Firefox that, as the name implies, can block ads on any webpage.  So if you’re me and you’re reading Lifehacker in Google Reader, all you have to do is click on Adblock at the bottom of the browser, and find the links that start with http://www.pheedo.com.  This is where the ads are coming from in the Lifehacker feeds.  All you have to do is set up your filter as http://www.pheedo.com* (* is a wildcard that will filter out any text following the “.com”), and you’re golden.

As I said, Adblock can be used on any webpage, and is particularly nice on sites like ESPN and Scout.com.  This isn’t revolutionary news to people that use FF heavily, but I’m guessing that some people that read here might not know that you can do all this stuff.

iPhone Weather

Have you seen that iPhone commercial with the airline pilot who had his iPhone in the cockpit and  told air traffic control that the weather was ok according to his iPhone so they should take off?  Well, some smart aleck passenger tried to pull that on a pilot recently when delayed on the runway.

Read here for the pilot’s response.  Classic!

New Ride

Well, if you paid attention to my Twitter, you’d know that I just bought a new (used) car the other night.  This was a long time coming.  Here’s some background:

- I drive 53 miles each way to work.  This means I spend a lot of time in the car and rely on it heavily.
- Driving this much means I need an oil change about every two weeks, tires once a year, and spend a fortune on gas.
- After getting married, I starting driving my wife’s 2003 VW Jetta because it got better gas mileage than my other vehicle.  Unfortunately, it also required premium gas.
- Because I’m cheap and poor, I didn’t put premium gas in the car.

Now the problems start…

- In February, the engine coolant thermostat quit working.  Total cost to fix: $236 ($35 for the part, $201 for labor at crazy overpriced VW dealership).
- Early in the spring, the car would barely start when left to sit for the weekend.  The engine cranked by wouldn’t start up.  I ignored this.
- In August, the vehicle required over $400 of work to pass state inspection.  Brakes, headlights, wipers, etc., etc.
- In September, the coolant thermostat started acting up again. I ignored it.
- In October, it was starting to get cold out and the car was starting really hard in the morning.  I took it in to a VW dealer and they told me I needed new spark plugs and my fuel system flushed.  Total cost to do this: $750.
- I told the VW dealer, “screw you”, and took it to an independent place that did it for $350.  Of course, the VW dealer charged me a $100 diagnosis fee.
- Battery died in early November.  Replacement cost: $92
- Last week, when driving home I stopped at a 4-way stop sign.  When it was my turn to go, I let off the brake, went for the gas, and the whole car shut off.  Literally.  Everything just shut down.  I put the car in park and it started back up, but it was weird.
- Two days later, the exact same thing happened at a different stop sign.
- I said screw it, we’re getting a new car.

The Jetta still had two years left on the loan term, but I figured we could get more for it now than if I drove it another two years (figure 50,000 miles), continued to money into repairs, and tried to trade it in sometime in the future.  Thankfully the Jetta netted us about $2,700 bucks towards a downpayment on the new car (trade in value less our loan payoff).  It had almost 79,000 miles when we traded it in for a 2006 Accord with 17,000 miles.

Now, if I had kept the car for another two years or more, it’s possible I could’ve netted more than $2,700.  But I would have had the constant headache of dealing with the car, the wondering if it was going to start each morning, and the worry of it shutting off at every stop sign I came to.  I feel much better about what I’m driving now.

Now, I know it’s an Accord and a totally boring vehicle, but as Colin says, it’s dependable and not too flashy, just like me.  If history is any guide, it should be much more reliable than the Jetta, and get about 25% better gas mileage while using cheaper fuel.  It’s also going to save me some money on insurance!  You can’t argue with that!

Robert F. Thomson, II continued…

I don’t check the comments of my blog that often, so I just ran across a comment that Robert F. Thomson, II left on November 16th.  It reads as follows:

Mr. Butter -

Do me a favor and take my personal information off of your website.
That was a private letter and was not posted anywhere public by me.

If my information is not down by the end of the day, you’ll be hearing from my attorney.

Thanks, and Go Irish!

Well, I didn’t get the contact info from a private letter, I got it from the Notre Dame Club of Orlando’s Board of Directors page.  All I did was copy it from there.  However, because I’m desperately frightened of the threat of legal action, I have removed it from my site.

So if anyone out there really wants to get in touch with Robert F. Thomson, you now must go to the Notre Dame Club of Orlando’s Board of Directors page to get his phone number or email address, and proceed from there.  Is it illegal to link to another website on a blog?  I hope not, because I do it all the time!

Sports Guy Gem

I just had to link to this column from the Sports Guy.  I don’t think he’s as funny as he used to be, but this made me laugh out loud.  He writes a letter to himself in 1982, and then gives his NFL picks for the week.  Best line:

“Speaking of old people, some buddies and I had a great argument last
night: Who’s the oldest celebrity you’d be excited to have sex with?
The consensus? Sophia Loren. She’s like 77. I voted for her as well,
but only after confirming that Mona from “Who’s the Boss?” wasn’t alive
anymore.”

Classic.

Health

Lately I’ve been trying to eat healthier.  In an effort to get my vitamins and minerals, I’ve taken to swallowing a multivitamin supplement each morning and drinking a warm glass of Ovaltine before bed each night.  I’m such an old woman.

“Why do they call it Ovaltine?  The cup is round.  The jar is round.  They should call it Roundtine.”

“It’s gold, Jerry!”