- Completely Missing the Point
I'm to the point where I'm almost entirely paperless with my monthly bills. I think the city water bill is the sole holdout at this point; everything else is either delivered directly to my email (fantastic), or I download from the web (better, but still not the best). I can now use email tags or folders of PDFs to store all of this data very succinctly, and in a searchable and usable manner.
Maybe the biggest benefit though was time savings and reduction of effort. Quite simply, especially with automatically tagged email, there is little to no interaction with these bills any longer. I check them over and archive them.
So, I was highly disappointed to receive the following email after downloading my latest telephone statement from the local co-op:
Data concerning your account was recently made available offline.eLation@southslope.com
If you didn't download this data, it may indicate an unauthorized individual has accessed your account.
A PDF version of invoice 10224020 was downloaded.
In accordance with an FCC ruling, you are being notified that data from your online account was downloaded.
The text of this ruling can be viewed at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07 -22A1.pdf
Needless to say, I was not "elated" about seeing this. What a pointless email. I can only hope they are taking this ruling too far, and that I won't start seeing this everywhere. - Missing iTunes Feature
Here's a sentence I'm pretty sure I've never said before: "Man, I wish iTunes had this feature I heard about in Windows Media Player." That changed after seeing a post on lifehacker today though.
Basically, this is a way to put media player into a full screen mode and have it locked with a numeric password. So, the theory is that you can throw the player into party mode and go full screen with some cool visualizations. Now, somebody bumping or trying to use the computer won't kill the tunes. Simple, but cool. - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
As always, this is a great mantra for living your life. Lately, near the holiday time especially, I have been very interested in the first. Looking at all of the pure excess and junk in the stores just leads me to believe we are wasting effort and resources on pointless junk.
Without leaning too heavily into the preachy category, I thought I would share an interesting article about reducing the number of useless gifts given simply out of expectation and replacing them with things that are thoughtful and simple. In other words, something original and practical, not something overpriced and grabbed from an end cap.
5 years ago
2 comments:
I want that feature in iTunes too. I really liked the idea of a locked, full-screen, coverflow. Toss in a touchscreen and that's the ultimate party juke-box.
Flick, flick, flick [pretty cover art] ooooo this looks good, slide to party shuffle list. Yummy
As for the gifts, a donation in the amount of $100 has been contributed to the human fund.
Good mix of stuff. Not surprisingly, the last section has become sort of a quest for me. I have finally brought my mother towards "the light" as we will be trying to convince her family that we don't have to go out to eat and give gifts for everyone's birthday every year. I would much rather have a homemade meal or just grab pizza and have grandma's yummy cake at someone's house and spend the time doing something fun or talking.
That site has a good list of ideas, but one "gift" I am actively trying to give is a home organizer. This would be for my pack rat relatives that don't have room for more even if they did need it. The current problems are finding a way to not offend the relative and getting everyone to pitch in since they can be expensive for one person to pay for. We'll see how far I can get next by next Christmas :)
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