Queercents

I’ve been a big fan of the Sims since the game was released in its original incarnation. For those who don’t know – it’s a simulation game where you micromanage the lives of individual families and people telling them when to go to work, when to use the restroom, what fabulous furniture to buy etc. Just like with real life you have to constantly clean up after yourself or the house becomes filthy.

To make any progress in the game it’s essential to hire the maid. Otherwise your Sim will be too busy scrubbing toilets to brush up on their mechanical skill, or paint their masterpiece. She costs about 10$ per hour and comes daily. With the income you earn in the game the cost is almost minimal—even my college students hire her. That may be pushing the boundaries of reality—I would have spent that money on Zima. But for the cost of my fledgling alcoholism I could have afforded it.

When I finally moved out of my parents’ house my typical cleaning strategy was to ignore it. I’m not terribly concerned with the aesthetics of my surroundings and found I could become quickly inured to almost anything. My visitors were all unconventional young people (or tricks) so I never felt the need to impress anyone by caving to the patriarchal hegemony of modern domesticity. Every so often I would lose something important and go on a crazed rampage—not resting until I could see my own carpet. Read the rest of this entry »

“There is only one boss. The customer.” - Sam Walton

Since I’ve been on a customer service rant lately, why not continue the trend? I’m not the only one… there are others at Queercents that have an equally low tolerance for lousy service.

Here’s my latest experience. This week, on several occasions, I’ve been unable to access my Yahoo! Mail. I receive an Error Code 5 which is the email equivalent of your desktop going to the dreaded blue screen. A prompt allowed me to send a message to customer care. Of course, I didn’t see this reply until my email was working again:

You can always try hitting the refresh button, closing some windows or making sure you are only signed into 1 account. However, if you are repeatedly experiencing these errors, please reply to this message and a Customer Care agent will respond within 24 hours.

Here’s a posted message from another disgruntled customer: Read the rest of this entry »

A good hack is all about efficiency: hacking a task might accomplish it better, but mostly it’s about making things happen faster and less painfully. Personal finance is full of simple, slow-and-steady tenets to make you secure, stable and maybe even rich, like spend less than you earn and pay yourself first. They require discipline, commitment and an utter disinterest in the Joneses.

Personally, though, I’m more interested in hacking my finances–planning, for me, is about putting in effort at the exact moment where the smallest work will have the greatest payoff, allowing me to be lazy and stay safe and happy.

In the interest of laziness, here are the three things that keep my finances in order and off my mind. They aren’t foundational wisdom, and there are lots of ways to take care of your money–these work for me. Read the rest of this entry »

February has always been an odd month in my mind. I sill have trouble understanding why there are fewer days. I can explain it, but scientifically it’s just abstract enough that I have to admit it does not necessarily fully make sense. I like the more colorful explanation that Augustus Caesar wanted his month to have the same number of days as Julius Caesar’s month so he stole a day from February and gave it to August. It is also one of the coldest months which really means something here in Wisconsin where the month’s average low temperature is -9ºF.

Maintaining commitment to professional development and professional productivity in February can be challenging. Sales in nearly every industry tend to slump during the month. My dad tells an interesting story about February that I think puts professional productivity in a better respective than some examples of more conventional wisdom.

In December of 1979 my dad graduated college. He has been a sales person all of his life. His first full month of sales was February 1980. In March, less than three months in he first job, the boss called him in the big office. My dad was unsure what to think and it was possible he got in trouble for something. Turns out that my dad’s sales figures for the month of February were better than anyone else in the company — for February and for a lot of the other months besides. The boss asked him how he pulled it off. His co-workers who had understood February to be a “slow month” also wanted to know what he did. My dad’s response was pretty simple: “nobody told me February was supposed to be a bad month.” Read the rest of this entry »

I recently purchased a copy of Microsoft Vista Home Premium edition. After some initial frustrations I am up and running successfully.  My version of Vista runs about $240 retail or $150 if you’re upgrading from XP, so you might want to think twice if upgrading is worth the cost and effort. Here are some of the pros and cons.

Pros

Vista looks cool. Some day people are going to look back at how hideous and boring computer desktops were and wonder what developers were thinking. The transparent windows and fade-in transitions are a nice touch and ergonomically things are laid out nicely—although you will go nuts trying to find things at first. I’m finally getting the hang of the explorer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know? The typical American home has more Televisions (2.7) than people (2.5).

When I tell people that there’s no television or phone in my apartment, they sometimes wonder if I’m part of some strange religious cult. No, I’m just a wacky minimalist doing what we love to do: get rid of stuff. Although the decision to cut my land line and go TV-less didn’t come overnight.

Three years ago I had a certified roommate from Hell. She owed me a lot of money and when I banished her to whence she came, she absconded with her TV rather than allow me to apply it towards her debt. I was left with a feeling of profound relief and an empty TV stand.

My new wonderful roommate, appropriately named Joy, wasn’t really all that interested in replacing it. I had just lost about $600 so neither was I. We didn’t have cable before and so I rarely watched anything other than Blind Date. So we went without a television. It’s a great way to improve productivity. Read the rest of this entry »

I went back to NY to visit my family this past Christmas. I haven’t had cable TV for the past seven years, so I was looking forward to catching up with all the latest cable entertainment offerings during my stay. I certainly did watch a lot of TV, but to this day I still don’t know what’s new and worthwhile on cable, or why people even have it.

In clockwork fashion, I found myself waking up minutes before 9:00 a.m. to catch Golden Girls on Lifetime. I already know every line of the show because I spent my childhood and adolescence watching it. Then I’d move on to Food Network. I don’t remember what I was watching, but I was captivated. I vaguely remember sitting through a few Rachael Ray episodes, and I don’t even like her. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend I surprised my partner with a little trip away.  We were heading to St. Louis to explore a city that neither of us had ever visited.  This was going to be about a 4 hour drive from our home in Indianapolis.

That morning in my daily Indianapolis business update, I had read an article about ChaCha and their new text messaging service.  We both became addicted to this service as we were on this long road trip.  As ChaCha mentions, our phones had become smarter! Read the rest of this entry »