• Apple Keynotes – I’m a self-proclaimed Apple “fanboy” and this makes it easy to get the latest Steve Jobs keynote presentation.
• IT Conversations – This feed is full of interesting interviews and conference panels dealing with science and computer technology.
• Joe Genius – I’ve lost interest in most things from Revision 3, but I like this one because it deals with cool scientific experiments and projects. At times, it reminds me of high school chemistry class.
• NPR: Fresh Air Podcast – I only spend a small portion of my day in my car, but sometimes I’ll hear part of an NPR show that I really like, but I’ve either missed the beginning of the end of it. This podcast allows me to hear the show in its entirety. I do not have iTunes automatically download all episodes; just the ones that I want.
• That’s Gay – This is the most interesting part, to me, of Current TV’s weekly InfoMania show, so I’m thankful that it has a dedicated podcast.
• WAMU: The Diane Rehm Show Podcast – I like many of the topics on this show, but, similar to Fresh Air, I miss a lot of it because I’m only in my car for a short period of time. As with the former, I don’t have iTunes automatically download all episodes.

What about you guys?

Today, the Star has an article about the shootings last night during the Black Expo.  As of a short while ago, there were about 140 comments with people literally calling each other “whitey” and “blackie.”  Seriously!  I thought this was 2010!  And then of course, you have the socialism versus capitalism arguments going back and forth.  Blah!  Blah!  Blah!  It’s nothing but drivel with generous sprinkles of bigotry and hatred.

News articles don’t need comments.  Very rarely does a truly productive, worthwhile conversation happen on the Internet when the general public is allowed to anonymously participate in a forum.  So why bother doing it?  Stop worrying about imitating blogs and start innovating better ways to serve the community.  That’s what will keep you in business.

• Returns rates are better than the previous iPhone model.
• The dropped call rates are less than 1% worse than the previous model iPhone.

Link: Full Press Conference Presentation (No Q&A Session)

As I suspected, the media has blown this way out of proportion.

You know, I think it’s amazing how people get worked up about these things. Perception is everything, isn’t it? When you’re worked up about something (i.e., being emotional about it), it’s very difficult to step back and actually look at the facts. And the facts, in this case, don’t seem to indicate a problem that’s proportional to the outrage people have been expressing lately.

So, there you have it — now we get free cases. Fuck yeah!

Anecdotally, my only problem with my reception isn’t something anyone has mentioned yet. I would leave my phone next to my bed when going to sleep, but I’d wake up with it either saying “No Service” or “Searching…” instead. A simple reset of the phone fixed the problem, which makes me think it’s a software bug.

Sure enough, Apple released iOS 4.0.1 yesterday which I installed last night. I woke up this morning and my phone was behaving normally, as I had hoped. It would seem that 4.0.1 has fixed my particular problem, but one instance of success does not indicate a pattern, as a colleague of mine likes to say. I’ll just have to wait and see.

I got into this habit back in mid-2008 when American Express offered me one of their fancy cards.  I liked having the card, although I stopped using it because a lot of places didn’t accept it, which was a pain in the ass, but I digress.

The big feature of the AMEX card was that I earned 1 point for every dollar I spent.  This compelled me to put as many financial transactions on this card as possible so I could maximize my points earnings.  After several months, I had enough points to purchase a few gift cards, and ended up with some free clothes and a new pair of shoes.

My basic rule for using a rewards card is that I put everything on it — as many of my purchases as possible — and then pay off the full balance due every month, giving me the following benefits.

• I accrue zero interest because I do not carry a balance from month to month.
• I have purchase and fraud protection from the credit card company.
• I earn rewards from my card usage.
• It’s easy to track spending.

I’ll explain each point further.

No Interest

I don’t pay interest because I don’t carry a balance over from month to month.  Doing so would eat away at my rewards because these cards have high interest rates.  If I needed to carry a balance, it would be smarter to put that on a card with a low interest rate instead.

Credit Card Purchase & Fraud Protection

Credit cards offer excellent purchase protection, in the event you buy something that’s faulty or damaged.  This has worked for me in the past and wouldn’t necessarily be possible on a debit card.

Having been a victim of credit card fraud, I have better protections on my credit card than I do on my debit card.  There are some big differences between legal liabilities depending on when you report fraudulent activity on your account.

Plus, there’s the fact that debit cards allow direct access to my checking account.  That scares me, so I would prefer they steal my credit than hard cash out of my bank account.

Rewards Are Awesome

All major credit card providers have rewards cards.  Some are better than others.  Usually, the better your credit score, the better the cards available to you.  The rewards come as points, miles, cash back, etc., resulting in some sort of rebate to customers for every dollar spent.

The method by which these points are redeemed and their cash value depend on the card.  I look to use rewards on items that equal 1 point per 1 cent.  So, redeeming 15,000 points should get me something that’s $150 in value.

My most recent use of rewards points was a round trip plane ticket to Las Vegas.  I didn’t pay a penny for it.  What’s not the love about that?

Tracking Spending

Using a credit card allows me to track spending very easily.  (Of course, the same thing is true of debit cards.)  It’s easier to look at my transactions online (using Mint.com) than it is to organize dozens of paper receipts to figure out how I spent my cash.  I prefer the pragmatic, automated approach to tracking spending, and use cash as little as possible.

Conclusions

I know a lot of people are hating the credit card companies right now, thinking they’re better off using debit cards and cash.  More power to them!  I don’t care the method people choose to spend their money.  All I can say is that this system works great for me because — put bluntly — I like free shit.

I utilize a strategy called Zero Inbox (or Inbox Zero), which was created by Merlin Mann. Here’s the original presentation Merlin gave to Google back in 2007.

This process has made my email much easier to handle because it ensures that I process every message, making a decision on how to handle each one.

Rules

I do one of four actions with every message: reply to it, defer it, archive it, or delete it. Here are the basic rules that I follow.

• Every item must be processed until the entire inbox is empty.
• Not every email requires a reply, so the vast majority of email I receive in my work email box is deleted.
• If an email requires a response and can be handled in just a few minutes (three to five, for example), I will reply to it and get it out of the way. After I’ve sent the reply, the original is usually deleted, unless I have a reason to archive it. More on archiving later.
• If the email requires a response, but takes longer to handle than just a few minutes, it goes into a folder named Actionable. I’m deferring the email until later, after the entire inbox is processed or whenever is timely based on priorities.
• If I have an email that I should keep, for any reason, I put it in a folder named Archived. There’s no need for a folder structure. If I need to find an email, I can simply use desktop search which has been built into Mac OS X for many years now. Windows has it, too.

Getting Started

I started out by creating an email DMZ. I immediately took all emails in my inbox and moved them into one folder, and right away I felt a relief because my inbox was totally empty.

After migrating existing mail to the DMZ, I immediately implemented my zero inbox strategy on all new emails that arrived. Doing this helped get me in the habit right away. Not long thereafter, I took the time to go through all of the emails that I moved and processed every single one of them. While I ended up deleting the vast majority, I found several that I forgot about which required action on my part.

Conclusions

After adopting this system, I found that I didn’t need to keep the amount of email in my entire email account as I previously through. I didn’t realize the burden I was putting on myself by keeping all of that data around, and I’m sure you will realize that, too, if you were to implement your own strategy.

Being concerned that I’ll end up with a crap-ton of overages when I upgrade to the new iPhone coming out this month, I looked up my usage.  Turns out that the most I’ve used in the last six months is 350 MB.  That’s about 17% of the total allowable cap, so I should be just fine, as far as I’m concerned.

A lot of people feel cheated by AT&T, but I don’t agree.  They’re not going to charge the same amount of money for it.  In fact, your cell phone bill is going to go down as a result.  I’m totally speculating here, but I would guess that 95% of all iPhone users are well under that 2 GB cap, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s much higher in reality.

• I don’t pay much attention to Twitter anymore.  I’ve gone from constantly checking my timeline throughout an entire day (so I didn’t miss a thing) to casually checking it every few days.
• I’ve disabled the majority of push notifications on my iPhone which has resulted in fewer interruptions at work.  Of the ones still enabled, they’re almost all “badge only” which is passive when compared to a loud sound or pop-up.
• Along those same lines, I’ve switched my settings on my iPhone to manually check my email accounts.  In other words, it’s not checking for new emails throughout the day, but only when I open the email application itself.
• I deleted my email archive at work.  I had been keeping the majority of messages sent and received for the last 5 years, resulting in a gigabytes of data.  I took a further step by configuring Outlook to permanently delete trashed and sent items that are over 60 days old, preventing the archive from building up again, but keeping enough email around just in case I need something.
• Instant messaging is now turned off at work.  Most people don’t realize that interruptions are one of the best ways to kill productivity.  The same thing goes for phone calls.  So, if someone needs to talk to me, they should use email, which is what I’ve always preferred they do.
• I’ve returned to working one day at home every week.  This has helped get me out of the office, which is a loud, distracting place.  As much as I truly enjoy all of the people I work with, I also enjoy having a smaller “to do” list now that I am getting some more things done throughout the week.
• I’ve stopped trying to multitask.  No one is actually good at it, no matter what they claim, especially me.  I’m more productive by concentrating on one thing and doing it right the first time, as opposed to doing it wrong and having to waste time fixing it later.  There’s also less stress because I’m not worried about a bunch of other tasks, except the one at hand.

These changes came about after recently reading a couple of books: Rework by Jason Fried and David Hansson; and, The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss.  They’re both excellent reads that I recommend to everyone.

By no means do these changes make me the most productive person.  No one is perfect and I don’t care to be that person, anyway.  I still enjoy chatting about non-work things with friends at the office, check Facebook and Google Reader when I have time, and still check my work email more often than I should.  Yet, I feel less overall stress and that has resulted in better work.

Seriously, if you’re so worried about your data, I have some advice: DON’T POST IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.  You can have a fully functional Facebook account by NOT populating every field in your profile with data.  My “Info” tab on my profile has only the following items.

• Sex (I’m a boy)
• Birthday (because I want happy birthday wishes, of course)
• Siblings
• Parents
• Relationship Status
• Current City
• Hometown
• Personal Email (this is required, but I hide it from everyone)
• Web Site (this here thingy)
• Facebook Profile (just a static link to my profile)

None of these are secrets and most are public record.  I don’t have anything about where I went to school, where I’ve worked, and definitely none of my interests.  Not having school information will keep former classmates from finding me, but I’ve already made friends on Facebook with everyone I want, so I’m OK not having more.  As far as the interests are concerned, most of your friends don’t pay attention to that information; however, that’s data third-parties are definitely interested in having.

The basic rule of thumb here is that I don’t have anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t mind the world to see.  This is especially true with status updates.  I mostly post funny or interesting links to web sites and YouTube videos.  If I really needed to restrict something, I can do that on a per-update basis since each one can have its own privacy settings.

Of course, in one big swoop, you can disable third-party sites from having access to your profile.It’s under Account > Privacy Settings > Instant Personalization Pilot Program.  Just turn it off.

I’m aware that Facebook is more and more open by default.  I know most poeple will not touch their privacy settings, but I really could not care less.  What they do with their profiles is up to them.  It’s not our problem.

In the end, I do share concerns about third parties having access to my Facebook data.  I only share what I’m OK sharing with the universe.  This means that it doesn’t matter what Facebook does; my privacy is covered.  It’s much easier than being a drama queen about every change Facebook makes to its privacy policy.

It’s going to take some time, but I will be bringing back most of my old blog posts, too, and may cross-post a few articles I did over at Wagist.