Microloans

A friend of mine just told me about a cool thing he did. He loaned $25 to a woman in the Philippines. She needs some cash to buy more stock for her store. This will allow her to make more money since she has a wider selection of goods to sell when ever people shop there.

Nothing new or bold about the way this loan is set up. It is through Kiva, which makes a lot of microloans. My buddy wanted me to make a loan too but I think I need to learn a bit more about how all this works before I start loaning cash to someone living on the other side of the planet. One way I can discover more is to keep up with my friends lending and if what he has going on raises any questions I will ask him what he knows.

It sounds pretty cool and I will get involved, provided all of how this is set up works the way my friend told me it does.

New Earbuds

I finally had to bite the bullet and shop around for new earbuds. The old one's have been through heck. Frayed, nicked up and starting to even get a bit crackly when I try to listen to my music. They look like something the cat drug in.

Looking around on the web, there is a lot of info about this and that kinds of earbuds. There are wireless, noise canceling, noise blocking, cheap, expensive.....you name it. So I have to make some kind of decision to narrow things down. I think I should be able to do well as my budget is about $100. I do think I want something to cut down the environmental noise, which means I have to figure out if I want noise isolation, noise canceling or both.

I am pretty picky about buying stuff when I have a lot of choices and a range of prices. Probably I spend (waste!) way to much time figuring this kind of stuff out. So I am off on this new adventure and it will be interesting to see what I end up with!

Email and Time Management

I spend way too much time with email. One aspect of this is checking it to many times a day. The other is my inability to keep my in box empty. There are solutions though.

I have read a number of time management ideas that suggest making a commitment to only checking your email once a day. You set aside some amount of time, put it on your schedule, and stick to it. I don’t think I need to get that rigid with this and I realistically would not be able to have that much discipline. Still, I think I should try it for at least a week to see how it changes how I do things. I do believe it is valuable to shake things up once in awhile. This helps you see yourself, your habits, and how your approach things in a new and often helpful way.

The other is to be a little bit more aggressive in just dealing with the daily onslaught. Every email that I open, deal with it. Answer, throw out, or put somewhere else (and don’t just make a I don’t want to have an inbox with emails folder). At times I have been able to attain some success with this method but I have slipped far from that lately.

I guess the obvious thing to me in writing this post is I need to pay a bit more attention to being on top of myself in dealing with and processing my email.

TV2

Continuing on with the theme of my last post, my poor TV tech savvy, has allowed me to be really wowed by seeing a nice picture on a TV set. I’m still not impressed or rich enough to have to have one – and since last week I have also not changed my viewing habits to being someone that watches TV a lot – so I am not worried or compelled yet to go out and buy one.

My first really wow that is a good picture was a few years ago when I spent a summer working out of state. I was invited to a party over someone’s house and they has a large screen HD set in their living room. I think it was the Discovery Channel, with its awesome nature shows, that really got me. It was really apparent to me in seeing some cool nature shots that this technology was a dramatic difference.

The strange thing about being over that house was the people that were having the party were not even close to being the kind of people that should have been spending the kind of money that did on that TV. In fact they were later evicted from their apartment because they could not afford to pay their rent.

I wonder if they got to keep their fancy and expensive TV?

TV

Television technology has gotten so out of hand. I must admit this is not a part of my realm of techno fascination. At least in terms of my knowing and dabbling in knowing what is going on with TV’s. I just plain don’t have the cash to go buy a $1,000 set.

My first weird experience, one that told me that I was out of touch with this technology, was a visit to one of the big box electronics retailers a number of years ago. Just to see what all this stuff was all about (plasma, HD, etc.), I wandered over to the TV section. I was floored. The prices, the number of different kinds and the awesome pictures that were on the screens. Still, I could not believe that this is where things had come to with this technology. I don’t watch to much TV, which is another reason I do not know or care very much about the latest greatest new sets.

With that I could not believe that folks were readily buying TVs that cost many thousands of dollars. Yet apparently there were. Very strange is what I thought then. And I still do think that today.

8 tracks?

Just kidding. I don't have any of those but I do have plenty of cassette tapes. I just can't let them go. I even have a two cassette stereo component with my music equipment.

Yeah it is true that at least I do not have any eight-tracks but still. I should throw in the towel with the cassettes and let all that go. Part of my inability to chuck all this stuff that I never use out the door is an old habitat.

When I was growing up with LP's, cassettes and eight-track tapes I was always very careful to protect my recordings. Part of that was often times recording a new album to a cassette so I did not harm the album by playing it too much. Not that they were that fragile, but every time you play an LP (especially with butter fingers like mine) there is the risk of a scratch. I was also dealing with this stuff when the quality of most vinyl records were pure crap. Poor quality control, cheap materials and a commitment to try to make the cheapest material that the medium could stand.

Another matter was that when I had records, I had a record collection. That soon expanded into a cassette and record collection but still the records were the core. I never bought a record, did not like it and got rid of it. There were plenty that went the one-two step but instead of heave hoing the bad, they backstopped the better things. They remained a part of the "collection." Kind of hilarious because I bought some of the most mainstream crap that you could imagine. Me and millions of others had the same records, with most of them pressed on crappy vinyl. It all eventually got lost in the shuffle of moving long after I got rid of my last record player.

Somehow a box or two of cassettes hung around. Later they grew larger as I would occasionally buy a cassette for what was then my car player. Later still I started listening to other kinds of things on cassette – talks and lectures. Those too were added to things. It is almost like this stuff grew larger of its own accord. Where did it all come from? Years of accumulation, lots of time in the car and my love of listening to stuff – music, spoken stuff, whatever.

Weird to even write all this in the age of mp3's, CDs and DVDs. Maybe writing this will motivate me to get rid of this stuff! Somehow though I doubt it. They are not as heavy as albums, are a little easier to hide away in a box, in a corner in a part of the house where stuff like that can be stored.

mp3

Zune. Yes I am a zune person. Why? Economy was the main reason for my choice. I had been looking for an mp3 player for awhile and the biggest thing I was looking for was a large drive. I did not want to spend more than $100 dollars though. So I never got anywhere until I started seeing Zunes popping up on Woot! First I saw them for something like $90 a pop. I hesitated and couldn't pull the trigger. Then they had chocolate ones for $70 one day. I said "mine" and bought one.

I'm real happy with it and have had it for over a year. Since I have never had any other mp3 player, I can't say it is to big as I have no comparison to make with something else I owned. And I am not in any position to be buying another anytime soon.

So yeah, I'm a Zune owner. And I like it!

Obligatory Hello World Post

Here is my first post. This blog will be about things I want to write about that are related to technology. There is nothing like that in this post but there will be more coming.

See ya.