Day In The Life of Baz

Some people like this time of year. Spring time; we say goodbye to Winter for another few months (we hope) and we welcome the warmth, the sunshine, the birds and all that good stuff. However, in Texas, it’s always a little bit more complicated than that. We’ve had nothing but sudden scattered showers for the past three (3) weeks. For the past two (2) nights in a row, we’ve been having nothing but freak thunderstorms: lightning, thunder, and of course it wouldn’t be Texas if we didn’t have any hail.

Just wanted to share with you guys, that this weather sucks. It sucks a lot. Now added to these conditions outside, we have the temperature problem inside: There’s a constant battle among the thermostats from various departments. Some departments are too warm, some and just right like Goldie Lox and of course mine has to be freezing. Therefore, it appears that I need to wear a jacket year round. Yay Texas.

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Now I’m not usually the self-help type, however this book has been getting a lot of press during the past year, so I figure, what the hell, let me give it a try. I was just disorganized enough to make good use of the thing.

In a nutshell, Mr. David Allen does a few things differently from the classic organizational tips that we’re all used to. He hates the traditional todo lists. He figures that listing everything you need to do on one list makes you "go numb" that the list rather quickly.

An Empty Head is a Happy Head

I think this is my favorite of all his philosophies. Generally, we’re not supposed to try to keep any bits of information in our head. That’s why he advocates things like planners, notebooks, PDAs, etc to keep track of everything. You collect everything into your inboxes . This is basically for dumping place for any loose bits of data that have had to be processed or organized. It takes the stress out of a lot of things. Even though I’m far from perfecting his process, just having an inbox has already done wonders for me. You remember something that needs doing, you scribble it down on a piece of paper or a notepad and you throw that in the inbox and you’re done.

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I know that I’ve spoken about it in the past. I’ve gone through a ton of reasons why I don’t need one, why I shouldn’t get one. But I finally just bit the bullet and got it. After monitoring the Garmin nüvi 350 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator for months and reading tons of reviews, I purchase it.

I don’t know what to say. When I first opened up the package I was speechless. I just sat and stared at it for a while. Kudos goes out to Garmin for shipping the product fully charged. I don’t think I could have survived waiting for the unit to charge.

Why I Got It

I’ve been playing around with the idea for awhile, but I just kept trying to justify the purchase to myself.

1. It’s too expensive
2. I don’t need it
3. I should learn my surroundings
4. I should learn to use maps better
5. In two weeks I’ll get fed up of it and never use it again
6. blah blah blah

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I’ve had my Chase rewards card for about four (4) months now, so I decided to call them up to see whether or not they’d be able to reduce my interest rate. It was at a ridiculous 23% At first, I didn’t really mind since I use this card as a rewards card only. That being said, I pay off the balance in full every month.

Now there’s a lil’ catch 22 with whole reward card thing. Since it’s a reward card I want to get the maximum rewards I can. Therefore, I use this card for everything. That makes it a little bit harder to pay off the balance every month. I had to pull some money out of my savings last month to pay it off.

So just in case, I called up Chase and asked for a reduction in my APR. Great news! There was a “promotional reduction available” on my account. So I asked, “What’s the promotion?”. The guy on the phone (Juan I think his name was) told me that today they would be able to reduce the APR on my card to a whopping 21% from 23%.

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OK, so I guess I’ve been living under a rock for most of 2007, but I just stumbled onto this guy. I stumbled up Clipperz just this morning from reading a comment on someone’s blog (sorry, the source escapes me).

Here we have a snippet from Clipperz.com

• Clipperz is:

  • a secure and simple password manager
  • an effective single sign-on solution
  • a digital vault for your personal data

• With Clipperz you can:

  • store and manage your passwords and online credentials
  • login to your web services without entering any username or password
  • protect all your sensitive data: codes for burglar alarms, PINs, credit card numbers, …
  • share secrets with family members and associates (coming soon)

• Clipperz benefits:

  • free and completely anonymous
  • access it any time from any computer
  • no software to download and nothing to install
  • avoid keeping secrets on your PC or on paper

Now, in the past, I’ve frowned upon online password management. They seemed like glorified excel list. Yeah, it’s secure, but who cares.

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