Against the grain review of No Country for Old Men

Just when I thought I had a good handle on picking good movies to see at the theaters, I had the chance to see No Country for Old Men last week. All signs seemed to point that this would be a success--IMDb was rating it over 8.5/10 and Rotten Tomatoes, who I've been looking to more these days as a good judge of quality, had rated it 95% based on the professional movie critic reviews coming in. Furthermore, it was written and directed by the Coen brothers who I've really liked in the past with Fargo and the Big Lebowski and the script synopsis sounded very entertaining with a plot surrounding a drug deal gone bad, violence, mayhem and a $2 million stash. Finally, it even had a healthy looking cast list including Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson.

Alas, I found the film to be a bitter disappointment. Although the acting was great and I enjoyed all of the scenes with the film's villain, played superbly by Anton Chigurh, it simply was not an entertaining film. Tommy Lee Jones' character in particular was grating and boring as he played the extremely cliche old sheriff from a small town who imparts nuggets of wisdom through rural anecdotes. During his long-winded stories and monologues I actually found myself inadvertently daydreaming on more than one occasion! I cannot understand how a movie about a man on the run with $2 million of drug money from a vicious killer can actually result in a boring film!

The worst part (***spoilers here of course***) was the ending where the Coen brothers just come off as pretentious by taking the route of 'Hey I bet you never expected we'd kill the
main character surreptitiously off camera and then suddenly end the film 10 minutes later with a cut to black and no real conclusion to the plot! Aren't we hip and unpredictable?!'

As I see good reviews poor in, I can't help but accuse the film of being an Emperor with no clothes on, but perhaps this film just wasn't for me. Alas, I don't see any way I could have seen this coming unless perhaps I had seen more of the Coen brothers' films. Ah well, no system is perfect, bad luck I suppose.

The Kindle: Flop or technological breakthrough?

Amazon has recently released its long-awaited (at least by some) e-Reader, the Kindle. When i first looked into it, it seemed like a very intriguing piece of new technology. Their video demonstration points out some key features that makes it deserving of some praise, notably:

• Electronic paper design eliminates the need for a backlight, thus reducing eye strain, battery drainage, and allows it to be read outdoors in the sunglight.
• Wirelessly connects to Amazon's store and various blogs and newspapers from most anywhere as you would with a cell phone, yet there is no subscription or data plan to pay as you do with cell phones, PDAs, certain laptop hotspots etc.
• Relatively light and thin
• Books are sold for a reduced price
• Purchases are automatically backed up on Amazon's site which is always a worry for me with purchasing music online.
• For the eco-friendly among us, the device could potentially significantly reduce paper usage.
  

However, once you dive into the Kindle a bit more, some of the detractions start to glare.

• First and formost is the $399 price tag. When you compare it to the iPhone and remember its quick $200 price drop, its hard to pay that kind of money for a product that feels like it will be lowered in little time.
• While the selection sounds big, 89,000, in reality it leaves out a huge amount of fiction books and for students, textbooks which they would love not to have to lug around campus are unavailable.
• It completely takes you out of the used book market. Since there is so much DRM on the ebook files (as you would expect), you have no ability to purchase or sell the books second hand. Furthermore, the options which let you 'rent' the book cost a lot more than buying a book new and selling it on eBay or Half.com
• iPods/iPhone comparisons can only go so far when you can't even fit it in your pocket. For those of us with Y chromosomes and no purses, this a fair issue. Furthermore, mp3 players filled a desire that that has been with us since walkmans and portable CD players while the desire for carrying around multiple books might not be as strong.
• Speaking of the iPhone, comparing the two illuminates another problem with the device...

(it's kind of ugly)

The Perils of Sitting

Some unfortunate news for those of us with jobs primarily spent sitting at a desk (seemingly the story of my life since graduating college): Prolonged Sitting Causes Disease. Now this wouldn't be so much of surprise were it not for their finding that even if one gets the recommended 30 minutes of exercise per day, what one spends the other 15.5 hours doing is just as important.

I remember at one of my previous jobs there was a huge emphasis on health at work including ensuring an ergonomic set-up at the desk, advising neck and wrist stretches, exercises while at the desk, full body stretches every 1-2 hours...it began to get a bit ridiculous. When you are up against a deadline, does it really reflect well on you when your boss comes over to see how the project is doing and you're staring off into space bobbing your head back and forth.

Furthermore, it isn't as if standing up at one's job the pinnacle of health either. When I was in high school and college working jobs standing at a counter, I would regularly leave work with a bit of an aching back, knees and /or feet. Still, that never stopped Donald Rumsfeld from working from a stand-up desk. Perhaps that is the way forward.
Likely, optimal solution is to get a job where you are moving around frequently, however not everyone can be P.E. teachers and forest rangers and few jobs like that seem to pay well.

For the Family's Computer Repairman (by default)

As Thanksgiving approaches, Lifehacker published a helpful article for anyone visiting friends/family this weekend for whom they are the 'go-to' computer fixer-upper: How to Fix Mom & Dad's computer (while the turkey is in the oven).

I am in that position somewhat for my family, though only in a limited capacity due to their unwillingness to listen to my suggestion of 'buy a PC otherwise I don't know how to help you'. Still, this list is just as handy for one's own computer, if for nothing more than as a checklist to go through when you feel like your computer is slowing down.

However, in my experience, I'd say that the real solution is more likely to be reinstalling of Windows after which the computer always runs noticeably faster. Unfortunately that usually runs into two major obstacles: 1) "Now where did I put that windows install disc...." and 2) "Where did I put all the other install discs I'll need once I format the drive". Still, all the Spybots and CCleaners won't be able to acccomplish what a fresh reinstall will do.

In the meantime my personal checklist for PCs is:
1. Install and run Spybot S&D
2. Install and run Ad-Aware
3. Install Firefox + Adblock Plus
4. Defragment drives
5. Create a system restore point, then install Easycleaner and use the add/remove programs to uninstall any unnecessary programs, registry cleaner and delete any suspicious entries in the 'startup' section after double-checking with a Google search.
6. Restart!

Google's OpenSocial vs. Facebook: The Battle Begins

Recent developments have seen the surge of Facebook as it strives to compete with MySpace. As someone who has made this switch I assume it has been due to the prevelance of spam and profiles that often end up rather intrusive both visually and audibly. However, I must admit that I am not sure why Facebook appears to continue to not fall prey to the spam problem since opening their network to the public after previously only allowing accounts linked to college email addresses. Certainly their move this year to allow 3rd party applications to be developed has helped their popularity a great deal.

While Google has been involved in the social networking part of the web since January of 2005 with Orkut, it has been one of the few arenas Google has entered that has been largely a failure (with the anomalous exception of Brazil for some reason). Recently, however, Google has announced their OpenSocial project which, while combining forces with the declining MySpace looks to undermine Facebook whose application platform is open in the sense that anyone can develop for it, but is closed in the sense that it forces developers to use a specific markup language exclusive to Facebook.

What makes this develop even more interesting is the rumors of Google's overall project for social networking code named 'Maka Maka". Purportedly the strategy is to create a social network that can beat out Facebook with an 'outside-in' approach. Theoretically developers will be able to connect together gmail contacts, emails, calendar, picasa, etc. and all other google products that many of us use and virtually eliminate the need or desire for an external web platform like Facebook.

Of course, in the end, perhaps Facebook will simply cave into joining OpenSocial but manage to cement itself as the King of social networking platforms. Or perhaps its recent surge will be enough momentum propel itself in front of Google and MySpace for the forseeable future?

Gas Prices: Not so high afterall?

While everyone continues to complain about the rise of gas prices, the New York Times produced an intriguing visualization of gas prices over the last century (adjusted for inflation of course).
[click for big]


at the time of this printing (in May), gases still hadn't even reached the previous high! This seems very odd when there is plenty of talk about diminishing oil reserves and 'peak oil'--surely the lack of supply should result in a higher price? I assume the technology involved in oil drilling has improved ,driving costs down, but there is also the increased difficulty in finding new oil reserves to account for.

Furthermore, why do people complain about the price while simultaneously there is so much talk about climate change and energy dependency? Increasing the cost of oil will have ramifications on everything from consumer choice of cars to the economic viability of the energy industry investing into renewable resources. It just seems odd to me that this issue receives so much political attention while government-regulated oligopolies like cell phones, internet and cable tv total nearly $200 a month in many areas. For instance, in this day and age, why I am I still forced to pay for channels I have no intention of watching?

The Often-Overlooked Downside to Education

Well this past week has been a bit tough for my wife as she inevitably caught the bug that was going around her class. It's never fun to watch classmates go through all the symptoms of sore throat, coughing, etc while knowing in the back of your mind that in all likelihood you will be having the same experiences shorty. Unfortunately now that Kym is home sick, it is my turn to do the same...

When it comes to cold season, I try to strike a balance somewhere between eating other people's food off the floor and acting like one of my co-workers last year who refused to touch anything communal in the office, even putting her hand inside her sweater in order to open doors like the schizophrenic Bill Murray in What About Bob. My happy compromise tends to involve frequent dollops of Purell Hand Sanitizer, most especially before eating and trying to remember not to rub my eyes (though of course having two cats in the home does not help this).

Seeing all this going on makes me start to think that an online business school would be a good idea to avoid this annual ordeal.

Move over Apprentice

I've been watching Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsey recently and its actually a very interesting show to watch from a business standpoint. The basic premise of the show which originally began in Britain, is that the foul-mouthed but extremely successful and talented Scottish chef travels to restaurants which are in disarray due to various reasons and he tries to save them in a week's timeframe. It's not only an interesting look at what goes into creating a successful business, it's also a fascinating look at personality pitfalls of owners which lead to failure.

Over a few episodes, I've noticed a common theme which is the desire to be 'unique'. People seem to much prefer attempting to create their own niche rather than perhaps fit into that is already their. For example there was a pub restaurant in a small town in England that was attempting to be a fine dining restaurant when its potential customers really wanted pork pies and fish and chips. Certainly having pride in one's business is a double-edged sword when one tries to break boundaries too much rather than adapt. This is probably why franchise restaurants are becoming more and more successful these days as the owners' pride does not interfere as much in the restaurants concept.

For me personally, the other effect of the show is making appreciate no longer being in the food industry. It amazes me how deeply ingrained the culture of restaurant is that people simply expect to be absolutely berated by the boss/head chef while getting paid low wages and often expected to work long hours. It seems like no other industry short of human rights-abusing sweatshops is this the accepted norm. I'm just glad I'll never be back in that situation again.

The Market Always Provides

It's interesting how there are so many market niches out there that we go completely unaware of. For instance with cat food, I had hardly even looked at the fancy feast or other top shelf cat food and always simply bought the cheapest cat food that my cats will still like. Growing up, I saw cats get addicted to the expensive wet food and I was in no hurry to do let them do that. I figured that the expensive cat food was just due to a combination of factors such as advertising/branding costs and filling a niche for well-off people who want to feel like their indulging their cats.

However, at one point I bought a certain cat food that was on sale that week, and one of my cats began to have an allergic reaction to it. Simultaneously, my other cat was starting to get overweight due to an insatiable appetite which was outweighing, so to speak, the exercise he was doing running all around the house.

Doing a little research into the field, I found a whole world of different cat foods. I found that every one of the brands available at my supermarket were awful in that they were filled with grain while cats of course are carnivores and can easily lead to the weight gain I was seeing. Even brands like Fancy Feast and Science Diet, the more expensive brands at my supermarket are quite looked down upon by those in the know. This was going to require at least
heading to Petco/Petsmart to get a proper brand and perhaps even a specialty pet shop. This was the best list I found:


1st Tier:
Solid Gold
Innova EVO
Innova
California Natural
Nature's Variety Prairie
Evanger's (not the vegetarian formula)
Wysong (wet)

2nd Tier:
Chicken Soup
Blue Buffalo
Merrick (wet)
Pet Promise (wet)
Wellness
Newman's Own Organics
Natural Balance
Felidae

3rd Tier:
Eagle Pack
Nutro (Complete Care and Max Cat)
Diamond Naturals
Royal Canin
Wysong (dry)
Pet Promise (dry)

4th Tier (last resort) :
Iams
Science Diet
Eukaneuba
Purina One
Diamond
Trader Joe's
Whole Paws

5th Tier (avoid):
Fancy Feast
Purina Cat Chow
Special Kitty (Wal-Mart brand)
Whiskas
Meow Mix
Store Brands

Fortunately I did not have to go too far to find a good brand--my nearby Petco carried 'Blue Buffalo' at a decent enough price and even had a 'weight management' version to boot. Still, needless to say it costs more than my previous Friskies. I should probably be careful exposing myself to more things to spend money on, the market always provides!

On the Necessity of Driving

To drive or not to drive? That was certainly not the question in San Diego where even biking was all but impossible with the way the roads are built and city was planned. However here in D.C., its something we are starting to wonder about. Kym is taking the metro to school and any other social activity really (since all of her friends prefer to take the metro as well) and I am able to take a 20-minute walk to my job each day (which is fortunate since parking would be a huge pain). As we pay for auto insurance, parking fees, gas and maintenance, we are starting to wonder whether wallets would be better off without the four-wheeler.

Really, my main argument against ridding ourselves of it is simply convenience. After all, it is nothing new to spend money on convenience is it? We pay more for an apartment so that its a location that's easier to get to places from, we buy prepared or delivery food since its clearly more convenient than cooking from scratch, and we have plenty of kitchen gadgets sure to make tasks easier when we do.

However, a new company is starting to take off that pokes a lot of holes in this argument: Zipcar. Though I don't recall seeing it in San Diego, it is a company that is really filling the niche for people in our situation who only need the car to run occasional errands like grocery shopping. Basically you're given a card that you can swipe for keyless entry to the car at a time you reserve and are charged an hourly rate for this.

It all seems like a great idea, but I'm just not there yet. Too many times it seems I will need to grab the car and get something at the last minute. This morning there was something wrong with the fish and I had to get to Petco asap for antibacterial. Or other times we will have everything we need for dinner but realize we have run out of one key ingredient. It's easy to say 'be better organized on your shopping trips' but that can be very difficult if we're talking one shopping trip per week for everything from vegetables and meat down to olive oil and stock cubes. I'm not going to say going carless will never happen, but for now the sound of keys jingling in my pocket is a comforting one.

Working With Your Hobby Or For It?

Kym and I just bought and aquarium and after cycling it for about a week we finally got to go fill it with fish. Although for basic aquarium supplies like water conditioner, gravel and hood we went to Petco/Petsmart and a modest local aquarium store, when it came time to buy the fish themselves, we both thought it was definitely worth the time, gas money and slight premium to go to a top-notch aquarium store out in Bethesda that has some rave reviews on Yelp, Congressional Aquarium.

The drive wasn't too bad fortunately as it was early Saturday evening (although you can never be sure on the Beltway out here). Soon after we got there we realized it was definitely worth the drive. Not only did the store have a huge selection of all different fishes, the staff were very knowledgeable and helpful. At first we were planning have a tank of South American Cichlids, and we were referred to a staff member who was their resident 'expert' on the fishes. Without hesitation he then went through all of the fish that would work well in the tank, asking us questions about our preferences and making recommendations from that. Clearly not the canned information you get at many of the larger stores these days. Unfortunately one of the bits of information he gave us is that with a 55-gallon tank, he only recommended we have 3-4 fish total in their since they can grow so large (certainly not aiming to make a large sale this guy!). So in the end we decided to go for a completely different type of tank set-up which didn't seem to phase him at all and he referred us to another employee who knew a lot about 'community fish' tank setups.

When we headed off with our bags of fish it struck me that all these workers were going to be there till late that Saturday night which made me thankful again that I am out of the whole working weekends, nights and holidays schedule that I was stuck in when younger. And yet, it seemed very apparent that these people were truly doing something loved. All the employees we talked to seem to own multiple large tanks and had the kind of knowledge on the subject that one only acquires through passion. This is of course not a rare question as most everyone encounters this as they attempt to balance the benefits of working in a field you have a passion for while not ending up in their mid-thirties struggling to make ends meet with their degree in Native American Art.

A Plug for Greasemonkey

Anyone not familiar with Greasemonkey should really get acquainted with this great addition to the browsing process. The basic premise for various reasons, there are features a website could offer that would enhance the browsing experience of its visitors, but which would likely affect its bottomline whether by hindering advertisers or perhaps enabling competitors. Or there is the issue that many websites have to be tailored to the lowest common denominator and/or first-time user resulting in a website that is intuitive to use but possibly not as efficient as it could be for an experienced user. Heck maybe there's just a website with a lot of great content but not the best design.

The first step of course is to install the extension for your browser. The preferred browser for Greasemonkey is Firefox, since IE, Opera, and Safari's versions won't necessarily be compatible with all of the Greasemonkey scripts (though most of them will work so still worth the download even if you set on using one of the latter three browsers).

For downloading Greasemonkey scripts, by far the best site I have found is Userscripts. From there, I'd suggest using the search box with your most visited sites and scroll through the results for anything that tickles your fancy. Sometimes it's even worth it to look for a site that has something specific about it that really irritates you. For instance, I like reading the articles off of ESPN.com but I detest the fact that a video immediately begins playing that I end up frantically trying to pause when I forget that I have my sound on loud while in a situation where the blaring noise is rather embarrassing and rude. Lo and behold I am certainly not the only one who feels this way and someone has written a script here that removes not only the video but most of the annoying ads.

A couple of my current favorites are:

IMDB - add Rottentomatoes info which adds Rotten Tomatoes professional film critic-based to the IMDb movie pages and their user-based ratings. It is obvious why IMDb might not want to (or even be allowed to under copyright?) include this in their page, yet I find this incredibly useful now that studios seem to be 'stuffing the ballot box' so to speak, on their when their big-budget films are first released. Meanwhile I like IMDb's features overall more than than Rotten Tomatoes, so this is a great best-of-both-worlds solution.

Google Images Auto AutoPager is both very creative and very useful. Not only does it change the link on images in Google's Image Search to go directly to the image rather than the original site which made you have to click an extra link for every image (never quite understood why they do that--something to do with copyright perhaps?) but it also turns the search results into a never ending page that automatically loads the next group of images as you approach the bottom of the page. If you've ever reached page 14 of a google image search looking for that perfect image you'll understand how incredibly useful this script is.

The iGeneration

Since my wife Kym began law school she's has been thrown full force into the world of Facebook. Facebook can be a great tool for keeping up with friends but her professors and advisers have repeatedly stressed that it is a double-edged sword to be wary of. Apparently, for highly important (and costly) positions such as lawyers, it has not just become possible that an employer will check their younger applicants' profiles on social sites such as Facebook, but it has almost become a virtual guarantee.

Oftentimes, when learning the world of applications and resumes writing we rely on older standard advice coming from books or long-standing career counselors. However, this "iGeneration" (as I was recently informed I am apart of) who has grown up with the internet both socially and professionally is encountering brand new issues as the barrier between social anonymity and professional careers breaks down. Other examples include having a different email for resumes than friends (probably not a great idea to but clubber_girl69@hotmail.com under the contact info) and googling your name to ensure it doesn't return results that might cast you in an unflattering light in addition to keeping an objective watch on your Facebook profile (again, probably not the best idea to list "porn" under your list of favorite movies as I have seen some profiles do).

Is There Such a Thing as Investing Too Early?

When should one start investing for retirement? I've heard once you hit the latter half of your twenties, once you graduate from college (assuming you go), and even once you move out of the house and get your first paycheck. I have even met some people who began investing while still in high school with their savings account.

Yet I do wonder how objective this advice is? Is it being given by people who have carefully analyzed the pro's and con's of saving from an early age or is it people who are more quickly approaching their retirement, wish they had more money in their account, and put numbers into a excel spreadsheet that tells them "Gosh if I had invested $500 per month starting when I was 14, I'd have a lot more money right now!". I've lost count of the amount of times people have shown the 'magic of compound investing' as if it were this amazing enlightenment. In reality however, I'd say it exaggerates its benefit since it isn't really factoring in the inflation that will have a severe impact on the savings and it underestimates the financial realities of trying to put a significant portion of your money away when you are still at the very beginnings of a career.

Personally I believe that one should really start investing when you have a real 'career' job. Putting away money while earning a few dollars above minimum wage will look pointless in a decades time when you're earning multiples of that income.

Granted, I could be falling prey to the same rationalizations that I accuse those investment advisers to exhibit, but I still feel confident in that assertion.

Buying the Euro with Jacko

Back in April I mad a post about an intriguing forex trading strategy where the basis was pretty straightforward: buying at each 100-pip level with a 50-pip trailing stop loss, but the key is only to buy in on direction. That post was made on April 21st back when the EURUSD was reaching an imposing resistance level of a 4 year-high meaning it was likely not going to be the best time to buy. However, even then, if you had employed this strategy according to its simple rules (making sure to also employ the strategy of not rebuying if price goes 50 pips past your stoploss until it returns to your last buystop), this strategy would have been very successful as we have seen the Euro make an all-time high of 1.4300 this week. How successful exactly you would have been exactly of course depends on how much of the account you were willing to risk each time the 50 pip trailing stoploss was set.

However, anyone who might think of employing this strategy immediately should be aware of some quite big new in the currency exchange market which is that China has just launched up a $200 billion foreign exchange investment fund. It is difficult to know (well, impossible really) what they are going to do exactly with this, but there is a great deal of speculation that since China has bought so much of the United States' debt (thank you Uncle Sam!) that they have an extremely vested interest in the strength of the dollar and as such, might attempt to manipulate the foreign exchange market by shorting the Euro and Pound. Again it is impossible to know for certain what they will do, but it is probably advisable to watch the price of the Euro from a distance in the near future as we already see the Euro beginning to retrace after its recent surging climb.

Missed Life Lessons

It's interesting how you can grow up and realize that there are certain things you just somehow never learned about. Even worse is if there isn't an easy place of reference to find out. An example of this for me is "dress codes". They never really came up in high school or with parents, so how exactly is this information disseminated. Well, no need to think about that too much anymore with the internet. There is a great little website someone cooked up here called the Dress Code Guide. All you have to do is enter in a few variables such as gender, time of day and the what the given dress code is and the website spits out concrete descriptions of what to wear. A great site to remember for clueless fashion people such as myself.

Idealism at Its Finest

There was an article yesterday that was trying to argue that instituting a four-day work week would solve a litany of the world's problem. When people try to argue something like this (at least in the manner he does), I just have to wonder have they ever read anything about economics? But then again, that doesn't even begin to cover the logical hypocrisies littered over this article.

First the author makes the argument that we would drive less. For some reason this is split into eight different reasons that basically just cover the sam negative aspects of driving. And yet, when I think of the absolute worst traffic and congestion of the year, I think of the first day of three-day weekends. Furthermore, the less commuters there are, the less incentive and money there is to fund the infrastructure of public transportation which is one of the only real solutions to traffic and its associated problems (money, pollution, congestion, time spent in traffic, etc.).

He then naively postulates that people would suddenly work harder and skip work less during a four-day week even though their would be absolutely no incentives in place to encourage such good behavior! The idea that people would suddenly start spending all free time cooking, gardening, playing with children and shopping at Whole Foods if they only had one more day off is ludicrous.

My favorite parts though are where he argues how much money we would save! There would be less road work (ignore the fact that a lower GDP would lead to less tax money for roads), less money spent on daycare (ignore the fact that the parent is not working that day at job which undoubtedly would pay more than the money a daycare costs per day) and of course less money spent on consumer goods at Walmart (since if only I had Fridays off, I would never have bought a toaster and plates to eat on from Walmart this month).

Furthermore, what about all of the people who work for the betterment of mankind? The nonprofit workers, the scientists working on renewable energy, the doctors and nurses caring for sick people, etc.?

I am not quite clear whether the author thinks all people with days off spend them sitting on their hands at home spending no money or if he imagines that employers will pay their employees the same for a four-day week as they would for a five. The bottom line is that anyone who thinks a drastic reduction in number of market transactions would increase market efficiency needs to go read some Adam Smith. I will agree with his final point: an extra day off feels great!

A lot of the time investing can seem like quite a boring process. Well if you're a soccer fan, the next time you have some spare investing money around here's an option for you: "My Football Club", currently sporting (har) 50,000 members who are pooling their money together to eventually launch a takeover bid for a club.

As a soccer fan, I have to say this looks like a very fun idea. In fact, given the success outside of this country of the video game Football Manager, where one controls nothing in-game, only managerial activity, I'm surprised this isn't even more popular. This is particularly true as many fans are becoming increasingly disenfranchised from the sport with rising ticket prices, ridiculous wages, and billionaire owners going into debt buying championships.

This seems like a great application of Web 2.0 as owners will even vote online for team selection and other such activities. The fact that Manchester United, one of the richest clubs in the world is only tenth place in the voting for which club to take over is a good sign that the members are at least somewhat grounded in realism. Hopefully if and when the takeover happens, they will keep the same open spirit that the group seems to have now.

Unfortunately I think I'll have a hard time convincing my wife to spend $70 to buy shares in a TBD sports team right now. Perhaps I should just focus on applying to business school.

One of the most difficult tasks in this life can be building good habits, particularly when it is done autonomously. It's now become the cliche that fitness centers around the country are jam-packed the 30 days following New Year's only to have the numbers severely taper down thereafter.

I watched a fascinating BBC documentary called The Human Mind a few years ago that followed an otherwise normal person with a severe case of road rage as he attempted to shed this habit through various psychological techniques over the course of some months. The end result was failure--inferring that, as much as we might like to believe otherwise, significant personality change is extremely rare.

Still we all know 'that guy', the person who dug deep and turned their academic career around, the person who went from addict to clean and sober, or the person who lost a lot of weight and has kept it off.

So we continue to try to build good habits in hope that we can be an exception. Fortunately there are many of these people on the internet and along with them, some great Web 2.0 methods for tracking and psychologically reinforcing these habits.

To start off with here is a great article at Lifehacker about a great tip Jerry Seinfeld once gave to the blog's author (a beginning stand-up actor at the time). Some who don't know Jerry Seinfeld well might see him as somewhat of a strange person to take productivity advice from, but in actuality he is known in the industry as one of the hardest working comics. If you like the idea, here is a convenient year-long calendar to print off and follow your progress.

Some more advanced methods for of tracking include:

Sciral Consistency - A desktop solution for tracking tasks that need to be done every certain number of days. While a great product in the making, It was a bit too confusing at first and after putting in the time to learn it, I realized it needed a few more key features to be developed before I would use it on a regular basis (specifically the ability to schedule tasks you do a certain number of times per week or month).

Loopdo - A method for keeping track of your longer-term goals.

Everyday Systems - Similar to the Seinfeld method, it keeps track of daily consistence in practicing a habit through a color coded system.

Joe's Goals - My personal favorite, it has a unique method of keeping track of how often you do a variety of tasks and lets you put down a point system for the different goals giving you a sum total at the end of the day. After long-term use, you can even view charts of your success in keeping habits. A bit geeky, but fun nonetheless. It has a very intuitive design as well. Brings out the competitive spirit in me a bit, which in this case can only be a good thing!

Just after announcing their new line-up of ipods, Steve Jobs also announced a $200 price cut on the iPhone, released just over two months ago. In an attempt to appease those early adopters who had just purchased the iPhone for $600, Jobs offered a $100 rebate. The catch? It is specifically a $100 rebate to the Apple store.

Apparently this is not sitting well with those $100 gift certificate holders who view it as money going right back into Steve's backpocket. Now while I can understand their frustration that they are looking a bit like suckers, at the end of the day, isn't that what happens to all early adopters? Early adopters reap the benefit of not having to wait a small time period after a new technology is released in exchange for certain consequences. One of those main consequences is that new technology inevitably has a price cut not too long after its initial release along with increased possibility of buggy software like we've seen in some parts of Windows Vista this year or defective hardware as was seen in the Xbox 360's recently released driving wheel accessory.

More than anything, the ridiculousness of the complaints is that they should be happy they were given anything at all (though having perused the Apple store before, I can't recall too many items <$100). After all, basic price theory dictates that these consumers deemed the iPhone (for some reason) worth the $599. In fact in all likelihood, they probably valued it as worth more than that as they were so eager to dispense with their cash, even waiting in line or buying off ebay and craigslist. This reminds me, hopefully some of those worthless people who buy up stock in iPhones just in order to then resell it on Craigslist had overbought their supply of iPhones and got a bit of comeuppance with this price cut.