Friday Fast 5

1. A couple weeks back, I got sunburnt in 5 major spots while we were at the Lake. It sucked.
2. Speaking of that, and my deep regret of not being more diligent of putting on sunscreen, remember "The Sunscreen Song"? If not, here's a link for reminder. That song's been on my brain a lot in light of my sunburn. I liked it back in 1999, but I admit that as I get older, more and more pieces of advice in it ring true. 
3. Allow me to nerd out for a second here... but I play this video game on my iPad called Hay Day. It's a cute farming game. I've been playing it for two years, it's the longest I've ever played a game, and I still love it. The game is currently celebrating its 5th birthday, and the developers are making a big deal and having fun with it. But really, what an accomplishment! When was the last time you heard of anyone playing Trivia Crack? Or Farmville? Phone games typically burst on the scene, have a huge following for a year—if they're lucky—and then get deleted, but it's rare that a game has staying power to last this long. They still update the game and add new content, which definitely helps, and I am always seeing new farms. It's just a great little game and I hope it'll stay around another 5 years.
4. We need better Asian restaurants out here. China King is not cutting it. Jarrod and I love Asian food, and we both constantly wish we had either a Thai or Vietnamese place. Or both, but I won't get too greedy, haha. Overall, though, I think we just need more restaurant choices in general, places that aren't fast food. But if they were Asian restaurants, that would be great. 
5. I saw a young woman at work today who was wearing a light yellow dress, and dark blue underwear. I feel like young women these days never wear slips under their dresses anymore, like no one's even heard of them! I wish I could send out a PSA or something, begging the young ladies of today to please buy a damn slip (or learn to better match the color of your underwear with the color of your garment.) I'm tired of seeing so many outlines or knowing the color of your underwear. It's not proper, and there's a simple solution. Most of all I guess I'm just baffled at how much they seemingly don't care about this. Seriously, do none of you turn around in the mirror, hold your dress against yourself, and check if your underwear are visible through the cloth? Come on!

Friday Fast 5

1. I stopped by H&M the last time I was at the mall. In my younger years, I liked H&M. Maybe it was because my first introduction to the store was during a New York trip in high school. At the time, H&M was a European import store, only found in major cities. Then they expanded to malls, and they are fairly common stores now. Anyways, back in the day I loved that store. It was hip, the clothes were cute and cheap. But now, not so much. Maybe it's because I am willing to spend a little more on my clothes now for better quality, or maybe it's because I'm a pickier shopper, or maybe it's because I'm an adult now. Everything in there is just so cheap, and I can't help but wonder if after like 5 washes it will look like a piece of junk.
2. I stopped in another store I went to in my teen years: Hot Topic. In high school, as I started to create my own weird style, I definitely dived into the punk attire. Plus Hot Topic was my store where I found all of my sarcastic buttons. I don't really resemble their main target customer anymore (that day I was wearing a striped fitted shirt, skinny jeans, and floral Nikes), but I ducked in there to check out the t-shirt walls. I was greeted by a worker wearing blue lipstick. It was kind of nice.
3. This week I took a self-imposed hiatus from my iPad. I just felt like I was on my phone and iPad too much lately. I turned it off on Monday morning. At first, I took note of the times I would have usually reached for my iPad (especially when I did my vest) but fortunately I didn't feel any withdrawal issues not using it. It hasn't been that bad, honestly. 
4. I've cut myself twice in the past two months, which is more than I have in the past ten years. Ugh!
5. Does anyone else find it hard to concentrate when reading a book? My friend and I were talking about this the other night. As kids, we both were able to read for hours (her even more so than me) but now, we're lucky to make it a few pages without losing focus, thinking about all the stuff we need to do soon, or dozing off. I'll probably expand on this in another post of its own, but I'm wondering if others have this problem too?

Friday Fast 5

1. Wow! It's been a month since I wrote anything on my blog.
2. I've decided to try and cook one new recipe each month, and on Tuesday my new dish for dinner was Mongolian Beef. And it turned out awesome! I was so happy. I made the sauce, cooked the beef, got the rice and noodles ready and it all tasted so good. Jarrod said it tasted better than the restaurant versions he's had, so woo hoo! If anyone wants the recipe, email me. 
3. A bit of advice when making Asian food at home: Jarrod and I have found that you must make your own sauce. It's more ingredients and a little more time, but it makes your kitchen smell oh-so-good and tastes 100 times better than sauce you can buy in a jar. I have another copy-cat recipe for PF Chang's Spicy Chicken where you make the sauce, and it also tastes great. We've tried going the easy route and buying the Panda Express orange chicken sauce and another General Tso's sauce with lackluster results. It doesn't end up tasting like takeout, and it doesn't taste all that great either. So, it's all in the sauce!
4. Last week was a stormy week. Thankfully, we were spared some of the worst. But Josie was stressed out a bit more with the bad weather. I went downstairs with her a couple times, which seems to be the best way to handle her storm anxiety so far. We sit in the back treadmill room where the wind, rain, and thunder cannot be heard much. More than anything, I'm trying to establish a consistent place for her to go, and hopefully this bit of training is catching on... slowly. I watch the radar on my phone and once the coast is clear we come back upstairs. 
5. This year midway through Lent, I decided to give up Facebook on my phone. Once Lent was over, I talked about how I might keep it up most of the time in another blog post. Lent ended almost two months ago, and I am still keeping up with it! I am very, very happy with my decision. I log out of my Facebook app every time I am done using it, and for me that has been the key to keep me off of it. Being met with the login screen each time I open the app is like a stop sign for me to mentally ask myself Do I REALLY need to check Facebook right now? Why am I doing this? and sometimes I log in and see what's up, and sometimes I just close the app and leave it alone. On the rare occasion I don't log out when I'm done, it's like my brain knows that the cookie jar is wide open so it just wants to keep going back for more and more treats (excuse my metaphor, but I thought it worked haha) and sure enough, I find myself coming back to Facebook 3-4 times in an evening, just like old times, scrolling through hoping for something new. If you're wanting to reduce your social media time, this plan of attack would be my suggestion. It still allows you to get on there, but that tiny little pause is enough to break the habit of just opening the app over and over without thought.

Friday Fast 3

I'm only doing three today, since my three that I have are long.

Nummer Eins
Our dog can be strange sometimes. Almost daily, Josie will wander off. I'll notice she's gone after about 10 minutes or so, and decide to go find her to make sure she's not doing something she shouldn't. I have lately been finding her in our bedroom or bathroom, but it's so odd it makes me laugh. Sometimes she's standing in our bathroom, staring at the floor, sometimes she's just laying near the foot of our bed. One time I found her half standing in our shower, half not, staring at the floor like like she was confused. Another day I found her just laying down in our closet. Not, like, curled up in a ball, but paws forward, head up, like it's the most normal thing in the world to want to chill out in the closet. It's so random and goofy. Maybe she's playing hide and seek with me, because she probably knows that I will eventually always come looking for her. I'll see where she decides to hide out next week...

Nummer Zwei
This week Apple re-introduced a smaller iPhone the same size as the one I have from 2 years ago. I'm glad, because I'm not a fan of the bigger phone trends. Along with that, they updated their software which I installed on my iPad yesterday. One new feature is the "Night Shift" option. Night shift removes some of the blue light from your screen during evening hours. The theory is that all of us who use our devices an hour or two before bed are getting less or poorer sleep due to the 'blue light' emitted from the screens. It is said that it messes with our brain and sleep chemicals our body produces to help us become tired and fall asleep. But the jury is still out on whether this is true or not, or how much it actually affects sleep. 

However, what is known is that blue light is damaging to our eyes. I know this from my eye doctor and since I wear glasses, I am always offered (and encouraged, since I have a job using a computer) to add a protective coating to my lenses that helps block the damaging effects. 

I tried out the "Night Shift" option last night, and it basically makes your screen more orangey. But after some time, you get used to it. And when I went to turn it back off, the quick shift back to normal on my screen actually hurt my eyes. Apple is pushing this as a way to help us sleep with set hours for the option to come on the evenings, but I'm wondering if it should be enabled all the time? If my eyes were already more comfortable in that short time, maybe it's something for me to consider. The problem is, being the designer and creative I am, I like my colors to be as true as possible. White is no longer white, it's a warm off-white. I went back and forth with LED lightbulbs because I didn't like the slightly different light they cast, but now I admit I'm used to it and don't notice as much if it's different than incandescent. I'm due for my yearly eye checkup, and I think I'm going to ask my doc about this feature, see what he says. But maybe I should just put up with it for the sake of my eyes? 

Nummer Drei
As Lent comes to a close, I'm faced with a decision: keep up with my Lenten resolution, or go back to old habits? I semi-failed at my first Lenten resolution, so partially in to Lent I switched it up and gave up Facebook on my phone. I need it for my job, so I couldn't just stop entirely, but taking it off my phone felt like a decent plan. 

The first week was the hardest, and I realized that checking it was something that was hardwired into my brain, because I would swipe over and hit Facebook with no thought, only to be met by the login screen because I forgot I signed out for Lent. I had this innate desire to look at it for that first week, but once I got past that point it wasn't so bad. For the most part I didn't miss it a whole lot. I won't pretend I was necessarily making 'better' use of my time, but I'd rather watch a show or movie I enjoy, or read or crochet, or just sit in silence, than scroll through stuff on my phone. So personally, I find that a better use of my time, even if it's still not all that useful, haha.

For now, I think I'm going to stay logged out. I'll allow myself to log in on occasions I need to, like for a group I help manage, but I want to try to stick with this. I'm a bit of a news junkie, which fits well with my job, but I gotta be honest that the election coverage is really getting me down. I realized that seeing those headlines so often—even though it's unintentional—in my feed is bad, and I need to distance myself from it. When I log in to Facebook less, like I have been, the most important stories are on top from people I care about, it takes no time to get through them, and the rest is just filler.

Shared Videos

As I was scrolling through my Facebook feed earlier, I came across a video. You know the kind, the sweet, emotional tear-jerkers that someone originally posts, and then others share them over and over and over, possibly going "viral."

There have been many debates, especially regarding adults of my generation, about 'living in the moment.' As in Put your phone down, dummy, and enjoy this moment before it passes. A few months back, there was an article about people at a parade. Every single person (really, every one of them) was holding their phone up to take a photo or video as the parade came down the road. Everyone except for this one little old lady, who was smiling and actually watching the parade. I can say I'm guilty of this occasionally, though not nearly as much as some.

Thanks to our readily available smart phones, we've turned into a culture that wants to document EVERYTHING. And in some ways, this is arguably a good thing. Children born these days will have way more photos of their growth and development as they get older than any generation before. I take photos of my dog all the time. Do I need to take that many? No, but it makes me happy to look at them sometimes when I'm down.

On one hand, this doesn't seem all that far off from days gone by when a designated family member held the camera, looked through the lens, and took our pictures. I don't think I would have said they "weren't living in the moment" by being the family photographer for the day. But somehow it does seem a bit more extreme now, doesn't it? Way more narcissistic, when you add in the element of posting it online. I know some people who seemingly can't have a family get-together without taking multiple candid and posed photos. It's not like they're crazy people, they're just obsessed with holding onto those moments, capturing them for all time. Funny though, I think it's safe to say that never before have we taken so many photos, but had so few physical photos to show for it. For all these photos we've taken, we sure don't print out many of them. (Hey, remember the days of photo albums? That you actually flipped through, like, with your hands, haha?)

I certainly understand wanting to preserve memories. I'm nostalgic for the past, love looking at old black and white photos, and am a bit of a pack-rat when it comes to being sentimental about things. But I also believe that some moments should simply be enjoyed between the people in the room. There is something beautiful about that. Not everything needs to be documented, and beyond that not everything needs to be shared for everyone to see.

I should make a point here to say that I find a big difference between 'sharing things with only your friends' and 'sharing things publicly online.' I still don't feel everything needs to be posted, but I really don't understand the people who share things for the entire world to see—literally.

So as I was scrolling through my Facebook, there was a video of an old lady. She had just been given a very special gift. Her husband had passed away, and she was given a pillow that was made of an old shirt of his, so she can always "have his shoulder to lean on" or something along those lines.

Grandma was crying, obviously. It was a sweet moment, but this is just one of probably hundreds of videos now that I almost wish I didn't see. It feels awkward. I don't know these people, yet I'm somehow peering into this very special, very intimate moment in their lives. I almost feel bad for the grandma, that one of her family members is shoving a cell phone in her space like a television reporter so they can record every second of her reaction.

There was just something about it, the invasion of privacy, that led me to write all this. I think we could all use a moment to re-examine how we view our world via our phones. Take pictures, sure, but keep them to yourself and your loved ones. You don't have to invite the world into your living room.

1 Year Without Satellite TV

It's been one year since we cancelled our satellite TV. We have our local channels over the air via antenna, but that's it.

We don't miss it. At all.

I wrote all about it last year when we decided this was something we were going to do. We cancelled TV with the hopes of saving money, spending time in other ways, and to have less frustration. A year later I can say we have accomplished all of those things. Yes, we still watch things on our streaming services and all, but we have a much easier time just turning off the TV when we're not finding anything appealing to watch.

I also feel I have so much less aggravation now that I don't have cable channels. As I wrote about last year, I find the dirge of crappy shows the networks churn out aggravating. I don't want to watch them, I don't want to support them, and personally I feel better not putting our hard-earned dollars toward networks who create such shows. This year I also stopped watching the local TV news, and I am much happier for it as I've mentioned on here a few times. And I'm sure the not-so-noticeable blood pressure spikes and biological symptoms of anger and stress that came with all of that were not good for me.

I've had occasions, like when I'm in the hospital, where I have cable again and each time I have the same reaction: Wow, I am really NOT missing anything. I realize some people love their television, and if you're a sports person this would never work, but for me I feel getting rid of cable has been freeing for all the reasons I just listed. I'm so glad we finally took the plunge, and as always, if you're thinking of taking the plunge too, I'm more than willing to talk to you about it.

Friday Fast Five

Five little things!

Number One
Josie is now on a diet, haha. I've kind of felt she was getting a tad heavy when I picked her up, so I weighed her the other day, and she is about 2.5 pounds over where I'd like her weight to be. So we cut back her food and plan to play with her a little more. I know she's not that much overweight, but I figure we might as well get her weight back in range before it becomes a problem.

Number Two
I'm really becoming unhappy with Facebook. This isn't going to be the usual Facebook rant of mine, but I've been noticing more and more items in my feed that I absolutely DO NOT care about. More often than not, it is showing me posts of things people liked or commented on from other people's pages. Why would I care that my friend commented on a post from one of their friends, someone I don't know?

I think I know what Facebook is trying to do: they're showing you these in hopes that maybe you know this person too and will friend them. But I don't know these people, so I don't give a care. It's getting kind of old.

Number Three
This afternoon I played ball with Josie outside, and while I was sitting there a hummingbird came by and got nectar from the rose bush!

Number Four
Please allow me a quick whine about my CF... It is a beautiful day today, cooler temps are on the way! I would love to sit outside and enjoy it this evening, but the problem is so does everyone else... with their fire pits. Which then means I'm stuck inside. Or I'd like to open up the windows and air the house out, but I can't. Even being many feet away from a fire, if I can smell it, then it will bother my lungs. I can't be around fire in the slightest. Trust me, I wish I could. I'd love to sit around a fire on a cool night as much as the next person. It's small everyday things like this that remind me why I really dislike CF. *Sigh...

Number Five

I'm not a very emotional person, but I shed a few tears this morning as the moment of silence and beginning of memorial services in NYC and DC were shown on the morning news. For some reason, I was overcome with emotions about the gravity of that day. 

The TV Situation

Jarrod and I have been tossing about the idea of dumping our satellite TV for a while now; almost to the point where some may be asking 'Why don't you just get it OVER with already!?'

Well, we have finally made a decision on our TV situation. And...

We are going to officially "cut the cord" and no longer have TV on December 1st.

We did a two-week trial of living without TV, which started four-ish weeks ago. The rules were:

• you can only watch local channels (as it would be if we had an antenna)
• you can't record anything to the DVR
• you can't pause the TV
• but you can watch things already on the DVR, which would be like a streaming service

The first week was a little difficult, for me at least. Jarrod would have ditched satellite a long time ago if it was up to him. But I knew part of it was just a mental thing, really. Since I knew I still had the channels there, I just couldn't watch them, it was playing games with my brain; you always want what you can't have—just like really wanting a big hamburger on Fridays during Lent. But by week two, I had gotten used to barely watching local channels, watching a lot more Netflix, and kind of forgot all those other channels were even there. And I didn't care. 

Our satellite auto-billed, so with this month already being paid for, I'm not going to try to cancel mid-month and argue with them to refund me my money. Plus, this way we get a little more time to watch a few things stored on the DVR and time for Jarrod to build an antenna. 

We will be canceling in 11 days. And hopefully we'll never look back. 

I honestly doubt we will. While we "didn't have TV" I would watch things on Netflix. And the things I was watching were shows or movies I actually wanted to watch, instead of just whatever was on the channels. Because the sad truth is that, even though I could hypothetically do this anyways, while still keeping my satellite, the satellite is like the default. It just becomes habit: When I turn on the TV, I turn on the satellite and try to find something to watch. I usually just watch something, even if it's not that great, because it's right there and it's what's in front of me. Without that option, I immediately turn to Netflix instead, where I have all kinds of things queued up that interest me. On top of that, I swear that ever since we made this decision, more often there is nothing on TV that I even want to watch. And I end up turning it off anyways. Why am I paying for this?

I've found out that more people our age have this kind of setup than I originally thought. And it's common with my generation: no TV, just watch online. With the announcements of HBO and CBS creating their own streaming services, I think more channels are going to follow suit and the traditional definition of TV is going to change fairly soon. That's not to say television as we know it is dead, because there are still many reasons for some people to keep their cable, like watching live sports games, lacking a good internet connection, or just preferring the convenience of it.

But as more and more people like us "cut the cord" the networks are going to be scrambling for that lost advertising money and it's going to be exactly like the newspapers—which also means that it is going to take them a long time to figure out a workable model for this.

Somewhere back in the early 2000s, newspapers started to realize 'Hey, we're losing print subscribers, everyone's online, but they don't pay for what they read online... why are we giving away all of our news for free?' And then around 2010-2011 you started to see paywalls popping up. I predict a near-identical outcome for the big TV companies. The difference is that the networks can at least place ad-rolls on the videos, and those aren't that different from having commercials during shows in the traditional sense. For newspapers, an online ad is not a print ad and never will be a print ad, and online ad revenue rarely makes up for lost print ad revenue. But I predict that in the future, most every cable channel will either come up with their own streaming service, place everything behind a paywall in some form—either a "hard paywall" where you pay for all or nothing or what is called a "soft paywall" or a "pay screen" (like a screen door) where you get some episodes free, after that you have to pay—or they are going to place even more ads on the videos. 

On a random note: Hey remember YouTube before it had ads? Oh... those were the days...

So why are we doing all this? Well, for a few reasons:

• To save money—Even if we signed up for both Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime for streaming more movies and shows, we still save about $400-500 a year. We can put that towards things we'd enjoy way more than our crappy TV channels we barely even watch.
• To spend time in other ways—For me, I hope that I will spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing other things I enjoy, like reading or crocheting. Or once we move the treadmill downstairs, I can play the piano again. 
• Less frustration—I've touched on this one before, but TV really frustrates me in 2 ways. 
• 1. It is really frustrating to look through all of your 100+ channels and see that there is NOTHING on there that sounds remotely appealing. Now I won't have that problem. Yes, I expect there will be times I can't find anything on Netflix either, but so far I have not had that problem. If anything, I've had the opposite of having too many things that I can't keep up.
• 2. The stupidity of TV, in commercials and in shows. Almost any new reality show that has been introduced in the past 3 years is a regurgitation of some other kind of show. For example: Deadliest Catch was almost 10 years ago, and there have been a ton of other 'obscure careers that you didn't know were fascinating until now' shows. And then, of course, in 2012 we hit the bottom of the barrel with Honey Boo Boo. Because sadly, America likes to watch train wrecks. With the exception of Swamp People, haha, I just can't bring myself to watch this stuff. It just doesn't interest me in the least. So now I don't even need to worry about it, I won't even know it exists, so I won't have anything to be frustrated about. And as far as commercials, Netflix and Prime don't even have them, and Hulu only plays a fraction of the ads you deal with normally. 

So it's se la vie to TV in less than two weeks! If you're interested in switching to the dark side with us, feel free to message me. We did a lot of research while making this decision, I'd be happy to share what we found out.

TV Weirdness

We've had some weird things going on with our satellite TV service. Suspicious things, really. Not, like, the TV turning on by itself in the middle of the night, but these things are just... suspicious.

On Saturday our satellite lost its signal. It said "Complete Signal Loss", gave the list of idiotic things to check, and then said to give them a call if your problem does not go away. The dumb part is that it wasn't storming, it wasn't windy, and nothing was going on when this happened. Jarrod was watching the TV as it happened; he said it started to get fuzzy, and then it just went out.

After seeing this "Complete Signal Loss" screen for more than an hour, I knew exactly what this meant: we would have to call a service tech to come out here to fix it, which we would also have to pay for, which is stupid.

I knew this because exactly one year ago to the day, we had this exact same problem. At the time, there was a storm, and our TV went out during the storm, which is par for the course; I don't care how many times they tell you, when they're installing your setup, 'No, you have a perfect signal, no obstructions, it should hardly ever go out', they are lying, it always goes out during rain. I remembered it went out on Saturday, we called the company on Sunday, and they sent a guy out on Monday, Labor Day last year, to fix it.

Jarrod called the company today and was aggravated and stern with the service reps on the phone. He didn't yell at them, but he was firm and stayed the course with his point that: No, I'm not paying for a service call for you guys to come fix your equipment that we pay to lease when we did absolutely nothing to it. All of the error codes coming back were saying it was something with cables, and they kept asking if we had moved the equipment or whatnot. Again, Jarrod was sitting in the living room while he watched the signal go out, so no, we did not move anything around.

The first person he talked with wouldn't budge on the price. They kept insisting he either pay for the service call, which is $95, or buy the protection plan for a year, which at $8 a month works out to be $96, how convenient. Once he mentioned he'd have to talk it over with me and that we were thinking of switching anyways, they told him to hold on and they put him through to another person. No surprise there, as soon as you say you'll switch they usually try to work with you, but he wasn't lying. He talked at length with a guy from Charter yesterday about what their TV packages offered and would cost. Long story short, they finally agreed to send someone out tomorrow at no charge! Thank goodness.

Jarrod barbecued steak tonight, which on a normal day would be cool, but tonight it was really cool because he has not grilled anything in for-ev-er. He's been so busy with the basement that he has not had time for it; I seriously think this is the first time he's grilled all summer. After we were done eating dinner, he sat down in the recliner and joked "Let's see what's on the tube tonight."

He turned the TV on and funny story: we had channels again. We were both so aghast. I think I stood there with my mouth hanging open for ten seconds. Lo and behold, our satellite magically works again. No joke.

This entire thing is just so odd. And it's hard not to think up theories and suspicions about it.

• How weird is it that exactly one year ago TO THE DAY this happened, it happens again?
• And for no reason?
• And then after complaining and complaining on the phone, getting them to agree to eat the dumb cost of the service call, hours later, it just magically works again? 
• Really?
• It's almost like, if you put up with it for long enough, it'll fix itself. They just want you to have to pay for a service call. 

Clearly they didn't need to send someone out, because I have a hard time understanding how this went on for two full days with it never fixing itself. But once we called, and complained, and threatened to leave, and they would have to send someone out, for no charge, it fixes itself? Yeah, they had to have done something on their end, otherwise I'd really like them to explain this one to me.

I cancelled our service call. I thought about leaving it where it was and then letting the guy get here and then say "Oh, well, it works again." but I nixed that idea. I didn't want to waste his time. Who knows if we'll still have Dish by this time next year, or if we'll have "cut the cord" by then, but if we still do, I'll know to be prepared for my TV to go out Labor Day weekend.

Thoughts on that Walmart Savings Catcher App

You may have seen a few TV ads from Walmart touting their latest app improvements, which includes this new little thing called "Savings Catcher." The premise is if you buy something at Walmart, then you can scan your receipt with this app on your phone (which means, you take a photo of the barcode), and Walmart will automatically price compare the items in your receipt with other local stores. If they find a store with the item for cheaper, they will refund you the difference in an e-gift card. Sounds great, right? 

Maybe, if you're okay with Walmart knowing a lot about you. Let's see what's going on here...

First of all, I'd like to start with the caveat that I have not downloaded this app. I don't know if it works well, if it is designed well, or if it's easy to use. I'm speaking solely about the idea for this app as a person who has a well-rounded understanding of tech and analytics.

Let's take a big step back and acknowledge that there are many, many companies that know a lot of data about you already online. Facebook is probably the biggest information grabber, simply due to people's compulsion to share things about themselves. So what I'm about to lay out shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, but I wonder how many people are aware of the amount of data mining that retail companies do to get to know you; it's a very big business. If you don't care and want to save a couple bucks here and there, download the app, if you're curious, then let's continue.

First of all, in order for this entire app to work, people will have to create an account for it. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but this app is going to generate a lot of new accounts for Walmart from people who wouldn't ever actually shop online at walmart.com. So you would most likely have to fill out your usual information like your name, address, phone number, email, and create a password. Bare minimum, that's what they would require from you. So let's pretend, here. Walmart now knows: I'm Susie and I live in Orlando Florida. 

To qualify for the price savings, you have to scan your receipt, which means you are linking yourself to your receipt. Now, I need to mention that stores will typically track a lot of this information on their own simply through credit card use. When you use a credit card in most stores, they will assign a generic ID number to you to track your purchases. However, with this app you are without-a-doubt giving away your information. This also means that you will have to give the app permission to access your camera and most likely your photos. Walmart now knows: I'm Susie, I live in Orlando, and I just bought 5 items which were milk, diapers, shampoo, carrots, and lettuce. 

One week later I go back to Walmart, and let's pretend I buy 5 more things (for the sake of keeping this simple, I realize most people buy LOTS of stuff at Walmart.) I scan my receipt again, Walmart now knows: This time I bought milk, diapers, a frozen veggie pizza, coffee, and butter.

Furthermore, Walmart now also knows: I'm most likely a new mom, since I've bought diapers two weeks in a row, and I bought coffee, I am maybe a vegetarian, since I haven't bought any meat and bought a veggie pizza and vegetables the week before.

To look for the price saving ads, you will have to enter your zip code or it will pull it from the store listed on your receipt so it can search for them. Walmart now knows: I'm Susie, I live in Orlando, I bought 10 things in two weeks, and I also shop in Orlando. 

Now let's pretend that it finds one item cheaper at Target, and it then refunds me 56 cents. It sends me an email. Walmart will then also know: if I opened the email, if I was on my phone, my IP address, and from there, they will be able to gather a whole lot more information about me and my internet habits. When I go to spend the money (which no doubt will be in the form of some barcode in the app or in the email they sent me) they will also be able to pinpoint the exact location of my cell phone.

If willfully giving all of this information about yourself to Walmart is okay with you, by all means sign up for it. But I wish more people realized that all they're doing is signing for up a marketing data collection system, with the "reward" of offering you a few cents here and there in price checks. 

Lowe's does something similar with their "My Lowes" program, except their slightly more blunt about what they're doing. They tell you upfront that they will keep track of your purchases, and the "reward" of it is making returns easy, and sending you reminders to buy replaceable household items like air filters. Lowes can, and does, also track your purchase through your phone number. So every time they ask you for your phone number at the end of your transaction, that's what it's for. Rewards programs work in this same way.

It should be noted that this Walmart app will only compare with other store circulars, not the entire store. The other thing of note about the app, versus other price comparing apps, is that it keeps you going to Walmart. Other apps will price check all stores when you scan a barcode at the store, allowing you to then choose where to make your purchase. This scans your receipt after you've already made it, then offers money to spend right back at Walmart.

No TV

For a while now, Jarrod and I have bounced around the idea of "cutting the cord" and getting rid of our TV service (maybe I've written about it on here too, I can't remember.)

I already have Netflix, so I'm already paying for that one, and if we added Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime, all three of those services would be half the price (or even less) of what we are paying annually for satellite TV. We would want a Roku to stream it all with, because the apps on the TV suck and even the BluRay player can be iffy sometimes—who knew we could have SO many options yet all of them suck?

Being methodical like I am, plus I love making lists, I made a list of all of the TV shows that we tend to watch and then looked to see if they would be available online or through one of those services. In almost all cases, the answer is yes. Mad Men is the one show that is not available online, and that's an AMC thing (if Halt and Catch Fire turns out to be good, we will have the same issue there.) But I think the episodes are released for purchase the following day and again, that would still be cheaper than what we pay now.

Fortunately for us, we don't follow many shows. Mad Men, Breaking Bad when it was on, Halt(...), maybe The Americans, and I like to watch Frontline and NOVA on PBS. Jarrod prefers to watch movies over TV shows, so that's easy.

Thursday the drywall guys started working on our basement, and Jarrod had to move all of his equipment downstairs so they could drywall around it. So Thursday was an interesting day of no TV and no internet. Luckily, my parents lent me their internet during my workday so I could still work here from home.

After they were done drywalling that area, Jarrod hooked up the internet and some sound that evening. But no TV yet. Not because he couldn't, but because I said it wasn't imperative that he did.

So this is officially day 3 of no TV and I gotta say... it's not that bad. I find myself occasionally getting bored, but then I usually find something else to do. Something much more productive too, I might add. We've hooked up my old N64 and have been playing that a bit, we've been watching stuff on Netflix, or just listening to music.

One benefit I didn't think about or foresee: The TV is not annoying me. I can't get annoyed over stupid, irksome TV commercials, or roll my eyes at the latest dumb reality show, or get upset because out of the HUNDREDS of channels we have I can't find anything I want to watch.

It's feeling a little less complicated, being without the TV.

Now, if we ever do truly cut the cord, we won't be completely TV-free. I still want an antenna for the local channels, mostly for news and weather. And yes, I will miss my DVR. But then again, I'd be able to pull up a lot of things that I'd want to watch anyways, so it won't really be all that different.

So we'll see. We might end our satellite TV sooner than we thought.

Anti-Paper-Receipts

It's Earth Day today, and in honor of this day I'd like to put one small Earth-changing suggestion out into the universe.

I wish more retailers would have the option to email receipts, or the option to not even print a receipt if I don't want one. The only reason my purse ever gets filled with clutter is due to the ungodly amount of receipts that get shoved in there for weeks on end. I never take them back out, I rarely look at them again, I don't do anything with them. They are a waste of ink and paper on me.

There are some items that just don't need a receipt either. When I buy a soda at the gas station, I don't need a receipt. I can't return the item, neither would I ever need proof that I bought it.

I realize some people might still want receipts to balance their checkbook, and that's fine. But if you're like us and you charge everything in order to reap the cash-back benefits, it's not as essential. Again, just email it to me, if I need to check it against what was charged to my card it would be so much easier to pull up a folder of PDFs than to dig through my purse of tiny papers.

I would gladly set up an email account with a phony name to use specifically for this purpose (in case the privacy concern crossed your mind, like it did mine.) Square has jumped on this idea, and I wish others would too. In this day and age, it just makes sense.

1000

Yay, this blog just received its 1000th pageview! It just happened too, because when I logged in it was at 999.

The problem is, Google's analytics that they built in to Blogger kind of suck. The data always only seems to go back one day. For instance, it may tell me that I've had 14 views in the past two days, but only tell me that 2 people read 1 post, with no mention of anyone else reading anything.

Compared to Google's actual Analytics, the kind I'm used to digging through at work, that's annoying. Going through our analytics is one of the things that I really like doing, strangely. You wouldn't consider me a fact-checking math person, but when it comes to website analytics, give me all the data I can get. My mind just goes bonkers over it; comparing, contrasting, cross-referencing. I couldn't do it all day long, but intermittently I find it really really fun. One of the things I like the most is when a news article gets picked up by someone and we get a lot of referrals. It's always interesting seeing where they all comer from.

Anyways, woo hoo for 1000 lifetime pageviews, and here's to many more!

Totally Rad: The Facebook Issue

Thanks to my dear friend Marie, I was introduced to the "Radical Life" blog. The Radical Life is thought-provoking, to say the least, and challenging. I highly recommend checking it out, it might just change your life, or at least awaken it. This all came about because my friend decided she was finally pulling the plug on her Facebook account. If you'd like to read about her thoughts on that, click here. But in the RL blog, he wrote about reasons to quit Facebook and objections to doing that. In short, it's not that Facebook is terrible, it's just that there are so many better ways to spend your time (but that really doesn't do it justice, I encourage you to just read the whole thing lol.)

This is not a completely new idea. I know that Facebook isn't a productive way to spend my time. And to some people, who haven't had FB their whole adult life or who aren't what I would call "power users", this all may seem quite obvious. Because it is, when you really think about it. But for those of us who have had Facebook all through college, and surely spent countless hours dodging our studies with it, it is still easy to get sucked in. It is so easy and so accepted to spend an hour (plus more...) scrolling through Facebook every day.

Thanks to all of those blog posts, I too have been doing a LOT of thinking and analyzing lately in regards to how I spend my time, aka life. But in addition to how much time we spend on Facebook, he also took a critical look at what we all do on FB. There were two points that really hit home for me in the original Radical Life post; they go hand in hand actually.

One was the observation of how few intimate moments we have these days. How true, yes, how true, said the Sour Kangaroo. Whether your time is interrupted by a text message or you spend more time playing with your phone than talking with your spouse or kids, that alone is a huge distraction and killer of intimate moments. But the bigger point is to think about just how much STUFF we all share online. How many times do people post photos of their babies onto Facebook practically minutes after they cut the umbilical cord? Or how often do people share photos of their spouse, because they're on a romantic dinner date and want to tell you about it? I would not consider myself an "oversharer" by any means, but the takeaway to me is that some stuff (okay, a LOT of stuff) just doesn't need to be shared. Relish in the moment, live in the now, take it all in! Don't ruin it by "Wait-hold-on-I-wanna-take-a-picture-of-you!" or thinking about how you should show this to your friends online. Some things should be left shared only by the people in the room.

The other part to this is we start crafting posts in our heads before or as things are happening; hoping our carefully crafted post will gain Likes and Comments. He called it "Life through a lens" and we are "reporting our lives instead of living them." I'd be lying if I didn't say I've fallen victim to this sometimes. And it is really great to realize it so I can work on cutting it out.

I think that part really resonated with me because my job is social media. I carefully craft posts in hopes that, as a business, we will get our posts in front of eyes. Because eyes, essentially, can equal revenue from the website. So thinking about what to post, what not to post, how to word it, what not to say is engrained in me. But I think there is a way to separate my social media obsession that I'm required to have to do my job from my personal life's social media usage. It's difficult, but I think it's possible. My husband has this incredible ability that when he walks out the door at the end of the work day, he is no longer working and it is far from his mind. I think the same thing is achievable for me. Once I'm off work, I don't need to and shouldn't think about what I should post to my Facebook.

Because the big question that this entire mess of thoughts and blog posts is: WHY DO WE DO THIS?!

I mean, seriously!? Why in the world do we feel like we have to share so much with our "friends"? I wonder if it has something to do with a longing to be appreciated, noticed, valued, etc. We want people to like us, we want people to pay attention to us once in a while, and with Facebook it's so easy. Consider telling your friend something. He/She is one person. You'll get a response from one person. But in telling Facebook, you've just told (probably) hundreds, and if ten people respond in some way, than woo hoo! I don't know, maybe that's not it, I haven't figured that one out yet. But still, that one personal response is way better than ten empty, lifeless Likes on Facebook.

Without trying to make it too complicated though, I wonder if the big reason we do this stuff is that it is just so darn easy and people are getting lazy. It's easy to "keep in touch with people" versus calling them up and actually talking to them. And I'm certainly guilty of that too.

In closing, if anyone's still reading this, all of this has made me do some reevaluation that I'm sure I will write about some more some other time. I am by no means perfect, and I am struggling. But I'm a little less quick to post things to Facebook the past couple weeks. Sometimes I even write something up then delete the whole thing because I ask myself "Why am I doing this?" I'm also working really hard not to visit Facebook on my phone very much, or on the computer. I deleted the Facebook bookmark off my browser so it's not staring me in the face all the time. I'm working on putting down the lens and just enjoying the moment. Because like the people I mentioned at the very beginning of this have said: there are SO many more awesome people and things you can spend your time with.

Cheers.

Sorry, the address you entered does not exist

So in a bit of weird news, it has come to my attention that our new house cannot be found on the two most used map search engines, Google Maps/Earth and MapQuest. First time this was a problem was with my friend Becky using MapQuest, and just now with my friend Marie on Google. Sure enough, I looked into it, and our road shows as a road, but it has no name! It's a no name road... we don't exist.

Fortunately, Bing has our road in their map, so it is searchable on there. I also decided to try my Garmin and double-check that, and it did pull up Jessica Hills Court in the correct spot. Phew, thank goodness on that one.

But I wonder how to go about contacting Google about the no name road? Even with Google, there has to be a way to correct their map stuff, or email them with issues, right? If anyone knows this, let me know. I'm going to try to do some digging myself.

In other quick news, we are moving tomorrow. I'm just ready for it to come and go. I'm excited, because I like taking on semi-large tasks of this nature and planning them out. But I'm just so tired of packing, as Jarrod is so tired of painting, and I'm so tired of shuffling stuff over. I'm ready to be done.

Why I Will Never Buy an Android Phone Again

I hate my phone. Everything seemed all dandy and sweet in the beginning, as I moved up into the world of smart phones. My first cue should have been the fact that, when I started out, I had an HTC Inspire. I had it for a week, and after numerous crashes and freezing, the final straw was when I had to take the entire phone apart and take out the memory card because the phone would not turn off or restart. Jarrod was not having any problems with his Samsung, so I switched and got the same as his, a Samsung Infuse.

I realize (or at least, sure as hell, hope) the issues I am about to complain about may have been resolved by more recent OS updates, but I don't have those... so I'm only writing what I know.

Here are the reasons I will never again buy an Android phone:

1. The lack of OS updates—I realize I have Samsung to blame for this one. See, when Google releases a new OS, it is then up to the phone makers to provide a kernel of that for their specific phones. Some phones may get it, others may not. The only people who don't have to worry about this issue are Nexus phones, they always get the updates (similar to Apple's way of doing things.) If your phone is over 6 months old, there's a good chance you won't get it. I am stuck forever on Android 2.2, aka Froyo. Android has a fun/cutesy naming system with sweet treats, in alphabetical order. Currently, the up-to-date Androids are on Ice Cream Sandwich, soon to become Jellybeans. F, G, H, I, J... I'm five versions back. And will always be that way because, like I said, Samsung has deemed my phone, the Infuse, unimportant or incompatible to upgrade the operating system. Yes, this is Samsung's fault, but that's the problem. With Apple, the OS is from Apple, and the phone is from Apple. At a point, your device will become obsolete, but that probably won't happen as quickly as Android. Is this outlook a bit walled? Yes, but it makes for a fluidity that Android doesn't have for probably 90+ percent of it's devices.
2. Delay or Lack of Apps—Something I've started to notice, because everyone I work with has an iPhone, is the enormous lack of apps on Android. There have been more times than I can count where I've been reading about this great new app, only to get to the end of the article where it says it's for iOS only. Furthermore, updates seem to come to the land of Apple sooner, too. It took AP over two months before they updated their app, versus when their iPhone app updated. And I'm still waiting on Twitter to update theirs with their new logo/icon. It's ridiculous. Wanna do Pinterest? You'll need an iPhone for that. Want to manage a Facebook Page with Facebook's new Page app? You'll need an iPhone for that too.
3. The unpleasant-ness of the App store—Or "Google Play" as it is known these days. The process for approval, to get your app to market, is much more loose on Android than with Apple. I think I heard once that there are 2 stages, where with Apple there are 6? Anyways, the lack of development shows. Furthermore, the abundance of, how do I say, "adult" apps is appalling. No joke, in almost any category you browse through, you are bound to find an app relating to pictures of girls, sex position 'dictionaries', or something like that. It's been a while since I've perused the Apple App Store for my iPod Touch, but I never, EVER came across one of those in there. I guess that goes back to the stricter approval process.
4. Stupid bug issues—Again, I hope these have been resolved since my OS version. But there are so many little issues, like how the phone operates, how the screen goes off randomly when trying to hang up a call, to how I can't see what I've written in a comment on something because the text box won't expand more than two lines. And the list goes on and on.
5. Gmail sucks—Come on Google! This is your baby here! Wouldn't you make your native mail client work better? Gmail on mobile is pretty much useless when you have a forwarded message. I asked a coworker one time how iPhones display forwarded messages, and it shows the history of a message in a neat, nice menu format. Not Gmail. Gmail tabs over each previously responded message, but doesn't expand the text field so if you have more than 4 replies in the conversation, the message shows up one letter on top of another.

i
m
a
g
i
n
e

r
e
a
d
i
n
g

a
n

e
m
a
i
l

like that. It's impossible!

Android, I expected better of you. I don't care if I have to sign my life away to Apple and only buy everything Apple for my next phone, because my daily experience will be worth it. Androids are selling like hot cakes these days, but I just don't believe they'll be able to retain their audience. I realize every phone will have problems, including an iPhone, but I can't imagine things will be more clumsy than the stupid Android phone I have right now.

First Android experience: D+

I'd been up for an upgrade to my phone since August, and my husband had been for quite some time. Still rockin' a Palm phone, he really needed the upgrade more than myself. We decided we were ready to delve into the smartphone universe, and finally made that jump in the middle of October.

Then the obvious question: which phone to buy? I wanted to wait to see what kind of new iPhone Apple released, and if I maybe wanted to get that or the iPhone 4 for cheaper. Not all too impressed by the 4S, I didn't feel it was worth $200, and the more I looked into the specs, I didn't feel the now-outdated 4 was even worth the reduced price of $100. So, I went with the HTC Inspire.

The Inspire turned out to be nothing by trouble for me. My Facebook app crashed every frickin' time I tried to post a status update. I had to uninstall the updated app and run the old one in order to ever post anything. I'm not a Facebook addict, but come on. That's pretty ridiculous. Then, other things started to never work on the phone. I finally had it when, in trying to open a game, the phone did nothing buy black out. The screen went black and I couldn't do anything. I tried tapping the home button, which lit up, meaning the phone was still on, but nothing would respond. I couldn't hold in the power button to turn it off either. I finally had to take OUT the battery to shut the damn thing off. I was done. I had only had the thing for a week and had this many problems. I wanted Jarrod's phone, the Infuse. He had not experienced any problems, and I was still in the one-month span of time you can trade your phone no questions asked. I will never buy an HTC again. It was an awful experience and not to mention, the thing was a brick. I know 5-6 ounces doesn't sound like much (the Infuse is, like 3 oz.), but my arm would actually be tired from holding the phone up to my ear. Their phones are all really heavy for some reason.

So I traded in and got the Infuse to much excitement. Things seemed to work better, the screen was much sharper, all was well. I was delusional... The only noticeable 'flaw' was that wifi signals were weaker, which Jarrod did warn me about. Other than that, seemed fine. Until... I went to the Facebook app. Same problem. I am currently running the old version, because once again it crashes every time I want to post something! Furthermore, turns out the Infuse is still running Froyo, with no upgrade in sight (for you non-tech'ers out there: this is kind of ridiculous.) Despite it's flaws, the HTC was at least on Gingerbread. I've toyed with the idea of rooting my phone, but never actually have gone through with it.

Anyways, so Facebook still crashes, and in less than a month's time I have also had another wealth of problems: 

• I can't send picture messages--this only works about 50% of the time.
• I can't download picture messages--the message says it's "downloading" but never ever finishes downloading and I never see the photo.
• I can't watch any YouTube videos. My video player NEVER works, in either the YouTube app or the web browser.
• My internal video player never works, so videos I myself record on the phone never play. The only time it will work is if I restart my phone. But the fact that I have to do that is stupid, and then it never fails that it just goes back to not working soon after.
• Just in last week: my phone's video recorder does not work either. I tried to take a video at a store, and it would not work. I had to resort to a boring photo instead.
• Half of my games never load properly, so I never get to play those.

On Friday, I realized I actually hate my phone. I hate my phone, so boy is it going to be a looonnngggg two years, when I'll get my next one. My old 1st generation iPod touch from 2008 is more reliable than this piece-of-shit Infuse! 

Since I've had both the Apple experience and now the Android experience, I now understand why Apple costs more. iOS is more refined, and if you want that, then that's why you pay extra; makes sense, that's how all of Apple's products are. Granted, a lot of the little buggy things that tick me off about Android (like how your text box where you're typing does not expand, so if you have more than two lines of type, you can't see the rest of it and have no way of seeing it unless you want to tap and tap away trying to get the cursor up there) have probably been fixed with the newer OS versions. 

But still. For my first Android experience, I can't say I'm impressed. I guess I just have terrible luck with phones, too. Yes, I do plan to go by the store sometime soon and tell them all of these issues I'm having with my phone. I've done nothing wrong, so hopefully they can help me out.

Next time, I think I'm just buying an iPhone.