Potpourri

It's been a while since I did a post with several interesting items, so here goes:

• 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:

  eLation@southslope.com

  Data concerning your account was recently made available offline.
  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.
  

Opt-In

It's late, I'll keep this one short and simple.

Why do I need to receive 3 dead-tree versions of the phone book every year? Better yet, let me ask this, why do I need any? Google can find pretty much anything, if not, I can probably find it online somewhere else such as the dreaded QwestDex. I don't need this fat books duplicated and sitting on my shelves anymore.

Thus, I figured I would hop online and find how to stop receiving them. Turns out that isn't really easy to do yet though. This group is trying to get it done, but they really haven't gotten anywhere yet.

I do like their push to make it opt-in, rather than opt-out though. This is how everything should be. Don't assume you have my implicit permission, come and ask for it, or wait for me to ask you. Opt-out is only slightly better than having no choice at all.

In the meantime, if someone knows a trick to kill off some of these phone books, let me know.