FeedMe

I'm Rich!

I was party to a discussion about wealth, stimulated by the Global Rich List, which tells you how you rank in the world, based on annual income.

It's all in the definition. Most people think "rich" is a monetary condition. It's not -- it's 100% about attitude.

I have always considered myself rich, even when I was technically poor. It came from my parents. When I would ask if we were rich or poor, they always said we were "middle class." When I wondered why we didn't have certain things, the answer was always that we had what we need. I never, never, heard my parents say "we can't afford it." It was always that we weren't choosing to buy it.

Only when I was in college did I realize that there was one less zero at the end of in my parents' annual income than many of my classmates had. We weren't poor, but we were not in the middle of "middle class."

The definition I've always used for "rich" is having more money than I need to spend. That begs the issue, of course, because you then have to define "need." In the end, it's a self-imposed condition. If you always want things, then you always think you don't have enough, and you can never be rich. On the other hand, if you take "I can't afford it" out of your brain, you're rich.

How to Create

A friend was having trouble getting a site design started. My two cents:

• Don't try to make something perfect, or even excellent. It will keep you from starting at all. Understand that it will evolve.
• Put a stake in the ground. Start at one corner and do something - even if it feels mediocre.
• Limit the flexibility. When you have a truly blank slate, the infinite possibilities can be paralyzing, so make up a theme, a concept. It doesn't have to be spot-on, or even relevant. Just something to give a direction. In product design, they sometimes refer to a "design language." Pick something -- colors, feeling, theme song, an imagined environment, a theme, a message.
• Take inspiration from other works but use that only as a seed, to grow your crystal in your own way.
• Just design. Let the content, the design process steer you. Stephen King, in his excellent book On Writing, talks about letting the characters tell the story. Imagine them and their situation and just write, letting them live in your mind. You become a spectator and just tell the story as they work it out. Likewise for a web site, your copy, or anything else. Build the  theme in your mind and let it guide you rather than you trying to guide it.
• Seek feedback from others but not too soon and don't listen too much.

Tele-Commute Me

WebWorker Daily had an article about how to get the boss to allow you to tele-commute. I found it rather disturbing because of a base assumption that the boss is wrong. Pardon me if this gets rather lecture-y, but I think the people who most need to hear this are the people least likely to hear it.

The most important way to "convince" the boss of anything is to (duh) be a great worker. It is much easier to give telecommute privileges to someone who does their job well, with minimal supervision.

The reasons the article cites that a boss would not want a worker telecommuting mostly presume that the boss is an idiot. Employees who approach the issue with that kind of attitude are unlikely to get what you want. Try imagining that the boss has some good reasons. Remember, your boss has a boss, too, and if we’re smart, we will look for ways to all succeed together.

The article mentions the idea that perhaps the manager doesn’t trust you. That’s probably the most important point. While “you can’t make someone trust you,” you can earn trust.

There are certainly bozo bosses out there and maybe yours is one of them. But you also have to ask yourself if you’re part of the reason (especially is this is a repeating theme in your career). Even if it's not you, you'll benefit from making it work anyway. If you consider your boss’s success to be part of your mission, you’ll do better. Even if this job is a dead-end, you can practice better boss-relationship skills and they will serve you throughout your career.

OK, end of lecture. I'm working at home today and better get back to it. ;)

Free Credit Report -- Really? Really.

The first thing to know is to never use any of the "freecreditreport dot com." They're scum. The one thing they don't do is provide free credit reports.

The place to go annualcreditreport.com. This site is run by the three credit reporting agencies, as required by law. There, you can get a free report from each of them once a year. If you set yourself a reminder, you could get one every four months (one from each agency at a time, spaced out such that each one is used once a year).

Do be careful: There are impostors out there. Here's a good article that talks about the traps and gives lots of good tips.
 

Opt Out the Easy Way

I've started to opt-out of all the mail I receive, both electronic and paper. It's important — not only do these offers waste resources and your time, many open up opportunities for identity theft.

It's a pain to do opt-out one-by-one but happily, there are ways to do it en masse. You can register with organizations (almost always for free) whose members have committed to remove anyone who requests it. They include mail order companies who will stop sending catalogs; credit companies who will stop sending offers; anti-spam lists; and telemarketers.

Even better, all of these services have been gathered in one place. Visit the World Privacy Forum's Top Ten Opt-Outs. Just march down the list and follow the directions. 

One of the most important mailings to dodge are the ones that offer you pre-approved credit. If a bad guy were to intercept one of these from your mailbox, he could sign up for a credit card and if he watched for the response, he could run off with the new card and use it for at least a month. Before you even knew the card existed, your credit history would be a mess. The Pre-Screened Offers Opt-Out (number two on the top-ten opt-out site) is an important one to visit.

Once you have signed up, wait a couple of months and begin manually removing yourself from whatever remains.

And when you sign up for new things in the future, be careful to check (or uncheck) the privacy boxes. But be careful: Some of them are tricky.

Apology

"A good apology has three parts:

I'm sorry.

It was my fault.

How do I make it right?

Most people skip that third part. That's how you can tell sincerity."

— Randy Pausch

Doesn't Matter if it's True

The movie "Secondhand Lions" was on network TV Saturday night and I just happened to stumble upon it, at the exact moment Robert Duvall's character, Hub, is delivering to his nephew, Walter (Haley Joel Osment) the "everything a boy needs to know to become a man" speech, just a piece of it, that he gives young men.  I'd forgotten what a gem that speech was and truth be told, I need to be reminded from time to time of what the speech says.

Following is the text and you can also find a video clip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-aqLUDMTTI

---

If you want to believe in something,
then believe in it. Just because something isn't true,
that's no reason you can't believe it.

All right.

There's a long speech
I give to young men,
sounds like you need
to hear a piece of it.

Just a piece.

Sometimes the things that may
or may not be true
are the things that a man needs
to believe in the most.

That people are
basically good;
that honor,
courage, and virtue
mean everything.
That power and money,
money and power mean nothing;

That good always triumphs
over evil; and I want you
to remember this, that love...
true love never dies.
You remember that, boy.

You remember that.

Doesn't matter if it's
true or not. You see,
a man should believe
in those things, because...
those are the things
worth believing in.

Got that?

Garbage Disposal Tips

The best way to deodorize a garbage disposal is to never let it get stinky in the first place. I used to avoid running it longer than necessary, thinking I was saving water. But it turns out that the best idea us to run it several seconds after all grinding has stopped. Doing that, it stays fresh.

Other tips:

• To clean a disposal, grind lemon slices and ice.
• For a deeper clean, disposer manufacturer Insinkerator suggests you put a stopper in the sink opening and half fill the sink with warm water. Mix in 1/4 cup baking soda. Turn on the disposer at the same time you remove the plug, to flush the mechanism. With the disposer off, remove the rubber baffle at the opening and wash by hand.
• My experience is that the underside of the baffle and the neck of the disposal are a source of stinkiness. but much less so since I began running it a little longer.
  
• Small bones, fruit pits, and ice are good for your disposal.
• Use cold water. I read arguments on both sides on this one but most of the manufacturers recommend cold water.

One more tip: Compost. By feeding your vegetable remains to the garden, you don't have to use the disposal as often.

Wallet Hint

Every six months, photocopy (or scan it, or photograph it with your digital camera) everything in your wallet. If you lose it, it will make it easy to get replacements.

Backup Rules

Is your computer backed up? Are you 100% confident your backups are complete and up to date?

I didn't think so.

Here are rules for a secure backup.

1. Like exercise, the best backup is one you will actually do. Automation is essential, unless you are very disciplined.

2. You need two! You never know a backup is bad (corrupted, missing, has been failing without your knowing it) until you need it.

3. Best is to have two using completely different mechanisms. For instance, one might be a copy that runs via a nightly script and another could be a backup program, and each goes to separate media.

4. One should be a total backup (so you can recover everything on your disks and be up and running quickly); the other can be just essential files. The total backup should be hard-drive based.

5. You should have something offsite. You may neglect this, thinking it's for fire, which is not so likely. But you should also think of theft. If a thief takes your computer, they will probably take your USB drive and may scoop up any CDs or DVDs they see.

This can be a much smaller set (e.g. your e-mail, docs folders, important preferences). To do this, use an online backup service or use DVDs with two sets, one of which is offsite (e.g. at the office). Swap the DVD sets weekly.

6. You can use a USB or FireWire external drive, or a separate drive mounted in another computer on your local network.

Tools

I use EMC Retrospect as my primary. It backs up all the Macs and Windows on my network to multiple sets and supports DVD. I have two DVD sets, one of which is in the office.

My secondary is DejaVu (for Mac) which mirrors the whole drive to a separate disk (you can use the similar SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner).

I will probably use Apple's Time Machine soon.

If you have suggestions for backup programs or services, please add a comment.