Help Me Choose a New Cell Phone and Plan

Every year it seems that I switch cell phone companies and plans in an effort to get a better phone and better service at a cheaper price, and yet somehow I end up with lame phones and expensive plans with no real improvement in service. Well, let's do it again. What would you recommend?

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Why Not to Protect Your Email Address from Being Harvested by Spammers

I just became aware of a trademark/branding issue that affects someone I know. I don't know the guy well, by any means, but I know who he is, and I figured "Hey, I should probably let this guy know about this, just in case he's interested." So I went to his website, clicked through to his contact page (how about putting an email address in the footer?), noticed his email address wasn't linked (annoying), so I had to copy and paste it (hence the annoying bit), sent an email off, and got an error back a minute later. Turns out the guy had included hidden characters in his code so that if a script were out there searching around for email addresses, it would copy the wrong email address and therefore this guy won't get any spam. Unfortunately, he didn't get that email from me, and although I was motivated enough to write this blog post about it, I'm not motivated enough to go back to his website, click through the contact page again, and then type in his email address.

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USPS Temporary Mail Forwarding Could Use Some Improvement

Remember how a few week ago I set up temporary mail forwarding so that I could receive my mail in Ohio while I was out of Utah for a month? Well, it was easy enough to set up, but the experience afterwards has been less than ideal, which is a shame, because the post office could make it a lot easier and probably make some money on the whole deal, to boot.

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Great Speaker = Great Leader?

Barack Obama has come under fire by the Clinton's for being able to speak well but offer little in the way of actual ideas or policies. Rush Limbaugh this week claimed that liberals hate George Bush because he lacks talent when it comes to public speaking. At first blush, the idea that a great leader needs to be a great speaker seems ridiculous, and yet if you were to name the first ten names of great leaders (by "great" I mean effective at getting large numbers of people to follow them, not that they were great people I'd love to hang out with), just about all of them would also be great speakers. Here's a list off the top of my head:

Churchill
Hitler
Mussolini
Stalin
Reagan
Martin Luther King
FDR
Lincoln
Gandhi
Lenin

Now, I frankly don't know much about Lenin or Lincoln's speaking abilities, but I know every other one of these leaders were specifically noted for their speaking abilities, and I suspect Lincoln and Lenin weren't too bad either.

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Weight Loss, Anorexia, and Advertising

Now honestly, who would create an ad like this and honestly think "Yes, this is the type of woman who needs to lose 25 lbs."

Not that this topic is new. The controversy over marketing, its effects on young women, the apparent rise in diseases like anorexia and bulimia and the subsequent need for eating disorder treatment programs has been with us for decades now.

This ad is simply one more example that either people are ignorant, people just don't get it, or people don't care. Shouldn't they have put a big, fat woman in the ad? But then I suppose the people who are sensitive about fat people being portrayed as such in advertising would be up in arms, shouting and waving signs and demanding that fat people be accepted and loved for their fatness and not denigrated or exploited for corporate profit.

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Work Anywhere and Check Your Snail Mail Online

I was just turned on to Earth Class Mail, a service that scans your postal mail and shows you images of it online and then allows you to shred it or forward it to the location of your choice, by Chris Knudsen. I haven't signed up yet, due to the lack of a Salt Lake City street address, but I can't wait to sign up once they get one.

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Help Me Test a Website, Win $200

Alright folks, laundromatic.com is just about ready to launch. It just needs a little testing by some people who haven't been looking at it for several hours each week, which means I'm disqualified. As an incentive, I'll award two prizes:

1. Best list of bugs - Whoever finds the most bugs in the system (either parts of the system that simply don't work, or places in which it works, but works in what is obviously not the right way) gets $100.

2. Best list of suggestions - Whoever submits the best list of suggestions will also win $100.

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Living the 4-Hour Workweek in Ohio

Over the past few months since I read The 4-Hour Workweek I've been experimenting with bits and pieces of it. At Thanksgiving I took my laptop and left "headquarters" for two weeks. I got my work done while a four hour-drive away and none of my clients or employees noticed. But seeing as how it was the holiday season my clients and employees were distracted, plus if anything had happened I could have driven home in a jiffy.

Now I'm testing things a bit further by relocating all the way across the country for a month.

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Security or the Economy?

Floridians are voting today in a primary battle that could play a crucial role in deciding the Republican presidential nominee. If Sen. John McCain wins, his status as the national front-runner will be cemented. If former Gov. Mitt Romney comes out on top, the battle for the GOP presidential nomination will be up in the air.

So states the homepage at CNN.com. Now let's see...explain to me again how McCain can have "front-runner" status when he has 38 delegates and Romney has 67? And explain to me again why a win for McCain in Florida would "cement" his status whereas a win for Romney would merely put the GOP nomination "up in the air" when a win by McCain would mean he would lead Romney by only 18 delegates whereas Romney now leads McCain by 29 delegates?

But that's not really the point of this post. The topic here is whether the security or the economy is more important. Romney is the undisputed leader when it comes to the economy and job creation due to his business background, and McCain is equally the leader when it comes to security due to his military background.

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Common Website Mistakes for the New Year

1. Not updating your copyright. Nothing says "Our website isn't very important to us" like having © 2007 well into February 2008. Changing it on January 1st says just the opposite. If you want to make life easy, get a script that automatically updates your copyright so you don't have to.

2. Neglecting to update time-sensitive data, like scheduled holidays if you're Zions Bank. Argh. They did get the copyright though, got to give them credit for that.

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