An Information Diet: one month later
May 20, 06:28 PM by Eric Allen
It’s been over a month since I went on my information diet, and it is such a better lifestyle. I still read blogs, check email, and function normally, but I never read slashdot, digg, or reddit. As it turns out, this works quite well for reducing my inforporn to a reasonable minimum. Even four weeks later, I still find myself trying to check news sites once in a while, but thanks to AdBlock, the urge goes unfulfilled. I’m very productive at work (I’m back in CA for the summer), and I have a 3-day average for finishing tasks that I keep track of in Tracks. I’m even reading real books!
Paul Graham seems to have discovered a different solution to the same issue. Some other people have also found RescueTime to work well for keeping tabs on themselves.
Going on an Information Diet
Apr 16, 04:16 PM by Eric Allen
How often do you read the newspaper? Slashdot? Digg? Reddit? Blogs? Twitter? None of them?
Today’s information worker (or children thereof) is inundated with information. This problem has not gone unnoticed. For the last couple of years I’ve been borderline addicted to “infoporn,” and this week I decided to do something about it. I re-configured my web browser’s ad-blocking software to block any addresses at the infoporn sites I visit regularly. I thought I could just exercise self-control, but until this week I kept going back!
What a feeling! Without the constant instant-gratification of new information, my brain is hungry again—remember, it’s only been two days! Suddenly I’ve ended up more productive, as my information-starved brain quests for something to do. When I do consume information, it’s in the form of books (both fiction and non-fiction) and (gasp!) school. I actually want to read my textbooks because I’m not letting myself read things that aren’t worth the mind-clutter.
I will see how this develops over a few more weeks, but so far it’s an amazing success! Just say “no” to useless information, kids!
Twitter: how to avoid caring about people
Apr 4, 01:03 PM by Eric Allen
I’m struck by the attitude taken in an article I just read about how Twitter is changing lives. To be honest, I remain very skeptical. How can you really connect with people when all you’re doing is seeing their broadcasts and making your own? It takes the caring out of communicating, allowing people to ignore each other at will. In particular, the author says:
Because Twitter has allowed me to meet and converse with people all over the world, without much of a commitment. The tweets come in as a stream, and if I see something engaging, I answer it. If not, I don’t.
That scares me. So we all feel “interconnected,” but none of us are actually connected? What happened to sitting down with people and talking? While you were whiling the time away sitting in your room “feeling the interconnectedness,” did you ever consider calling a friend up and going for a hike or something?
Generation Me, we can be better than this.
CitizenTax: Epic Failure
Mar 4, 11:26 AM by Eric Allen
I really should have Done my homework before picking a free tax preparation service through the IRS’s Free File site. After my ordeal with CitizenTax (or CitizenTaxFree.com, the version I used from the same people), $75 to a tax preparer seemed like no big deal.
I should have run at the first sight of trouble: every now and then as I walked through the process their site would return an error page. A simple refresh fixed it, usually, but that is a little worrisome for a site that’s supposed to be processing my taxes. I went ahead anyway, and after submitting my taxes (I must admit, the site was pretty easy to use) logged out and went on to do other things.
I came back the next day to check on the status of my return, and lo and behold I can’t log in! I double-check, triple-check my username and password with no success. I then sought out their support page, and after 10 minutes of digging got myself registered (yes, yet another account) with their issue tracking system. I filed a ticket, and the following day I got a completely unhelpful reply saying to enter my username and password to log in. I carefully explained that I was unable to log in with said username and password. After a good deal more back-and-forth, I came to discover a fun feature of their password hashing algorithm: they don’t support symbols in passwords. I had naïvely used my secure password generator (1Password) to generate a good password, and it had put in symbols! CitizenTax informed me that my account was impossible to access, they couldn’t reset my password, and I should just sign up again and restart my return. But I had already filed it!! I just wanted to check the status to make sure the IRS had accepted it. After calling the IRS I discovered that I was supposed to receive an email confirmation from them, which I never got, saying the IRS had processed my return. The only way I know it went through is that they took the money out of my checking account four days later!
Just to add to the ordeal, CitizenTax doesn’t inform you about standard deductions, so I ended up paying $400 too much. This I discovered from the CPA (who will be filing my taxes next year) I got to clean up the mess CitizenTax left.
Good job, CitizenTax. Way to handle people’s tax records in a completely incompetent and unfriendly way. Next time I’ll be more careful!
TipJoy.com
Feb 12, 01:18 PM by Eric Allen
I was reading Hacker News this afternoon and stumbled across an announcement for the launch of TipJoy. People have been talking about micropayments and how to monetize blogs for quite some time now, and the only answers I’ve seen so far are PayPal and advertisements. I don’t particularly care about making money from this blog, but TipJoy is so easy to add I figure, why not? So from here on out every article will have a “Tip This” button below it. If you like the article and feel like tipping me for it, just click the button! You are under no obligation to pay said tip (but you can if you want to), but at least it gives me feedback about what articles are good and gives everybody a warm fuzzy feeling.
These guys are a Y Combinator startup, so I have a special place in my heart for the company regardless of the product. I’d like to see this model succeed, and I’d love to see a YC startup make it happen. Kudos to Abby and Ivan!
Wesabe vs. Mint
Feb 8, 01:25 AM by Eric Allen
I’ve been using Wesabe to keep track of my personal finances for the past year or so now, and I must say I love it. Uploading data is fast, easy, and secure. Viewing my transactions is simple and intuitive, and getting numbers out for taxes was a piece of cake. It doesn’t do everything, but Wesabe is a great tool for a young person with fairly simple finances who just wants to keep track of his money.
Now, a similar site started up a few months ago called Mint. Their software is much slicker, with window-esque overlays and fading page transitions. However, they lack two features I consider critical: they won’t support one of my credit cards, and they have no API. This means that not only can I not get all of my data in, getting my data back out is a pain. When I needed to file taxes this year, I was able to whip up a little Ruby program that downloaded and sliced up the information in a way that helped my file my Schedule C.
Wesabe gets a few things very much right for the kind of company they are. First, they interact amazingly closely with customers. If you join the “Make Wesabe Better” group inside of Wesabe, you get access to a forum with long conversations between users and developers about how to improve Wesabe. When I have a feature suggestion or a need, I know I can ask for it there and be heard. Second, they favor functionality over flash. Mint is much prettier, but Wesabe actually works. Not only does it work, but it works well and securely. That’s pretty awesome for such an early-stage web startup.
Basically, Wesabe is awesome and I highly recommend it to manage your personal finances.
