Catching up on reading with Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics

When I was teenager I was an avid reader. I have a very short attention span so it was something I really had to work at and discipline myself to do. In recent years I got away from reading books and I told myself that I simply didn’t have time and I moved to consuming information from places such as, Facebook, Techcrunch, Mashable, Gizmodo and the Huffington Post. This has probably contributed to me becoming a slave to my iPhone….always looking at the screen even when I’m at a restaurant.

That Microsoft commercial a few years ago really opened my eyes to how much time we spend engulfed in our phones. I decided to start my 2013 New Year’s resolution of reading more books early and I started with Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics. The books were much more entertaining than I anticipated and I didn’t realize how popular the books were until I was casually discussing the, with some co-workers and a number of them read it. (I even met a guy on the NYC Subway trying to pass off the real estate agent idea as his own)

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)Steven D. Levitt; Harper Perennial 1975WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 

Superfreakonomics: global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insuranceSteven D. Levitt; William Morrow 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 

Google Warns of Exact Match Domain Algorithm Change

As you can see from screenshot, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team announced a major algorithm change designed to reduce the rankings of low quality exact match domain sites.

Cutts also tweeted, “New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.”

While I’m not surprised at the announcement, I’m surprised that it took this long, they have been hinting about this for some time now and its been a noticeable and tempting SEO tactic.

This may not have been noticeable to regular users but every now and again, I would search for a competitive organic term and the usual set of suspects would be in the top 10, Wikipedia ect. Then you’ll see a site, with the exact match domain, a few articles and a few links ranking in the top 10, other than the exact match domain, the site had no other business being there.

I sometimes worked this into a clients SEO strategy  buy purchasing exact match domains for mid difficulty terms, sometimes it was successful, sometimes not, but it didn’t take a lot of resources so it was always worth trying. It will be interesting to see if this tactic still works going forward.

Orange Marmalade Pork Chops

Last year when Border’s Bookstore was having it’s liquidation sale, my wife and I picked up a few cookbooks. So now on most Sundays we’ll try different recipes and deserts from the cookbooks.

The first one we decided to try was Orange Marmalade Pork Chops. None of us have ever even attempted to make pork chops before and the pictures in the book looked irresistible.

It took us a lot of looking putting together all the ingredients.

Find my Iphone is Now FREE!

I know I’m a bit late but I just realized that Find my iPhone is now free for everyone. I just finished adding the two iPads and two iPhones to my account. You must upgrade to IOS 4.2.1 for this to to work.  Before find my iPhone was free, it cost $100 as part of Apple’s Mobile Me service. I mainly use the service to share and store files and sync contacts between the 4 machines i regularly use. Find my iPhone comes in very handy especially when I lose my phone in the apartment and need to find it, I just log into Mobile Me and instruct the phone to beep. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to activate.

1. Make sure you have the latest iOS update (iOS 4.2.1) installed. Plug in your iPhone and click “Check for updates” in iTunes to get the software.
2. With iOS 4.2.1 installed, tap the Settings app on your iPhone. Then tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and “Add Account.” Then choose MobileMe.
3. In the MobileMe account menu, enter your iTunes or Apple ID and password (i.e., the login you use to buy iTunes media on the iPhone).
4. The “Find My iPhone” option should appear. Slide it to “ON” to activate it.”

And you’re done! From here on, you can hop on a computer and enter www.me.com in a web browser. Then enter the same login credentials you used to register for Find My iPhone, and you’ll immediately get a GPS reading of the phone, along with a simple menu of buttons allowing you to lock, wipe, or send a message or sound to the iPhone.

Information, including images for this post was taken from this wired article.

Colorado Student Pays Tuition One Dollar at a Time

I found this hilarious story published on January 15th in The New York Times about this University of Colorado student that paid his entire tuition bill of $14,309.51 using  using dollar bills, a 50-cent piece and a penny. Nic Ramos said he initially started doing it because it was a joke then realized it was an absurd amount of money.

It took Mr. Ramos two days to withdraw the money from several banks. He said that when he walked into the bursar’s office on Friday morning with a 33-pound duffel bag full of cash, the tellers were stunned.

The best quote came from a University of Colorado spokesman that said that Ramos’ future earning potential with a college degree couldn’t fit in a duffel bag.

Yeah but that is still  $14,000 a semester – 2 semester a year for 4 years that brings a total of at least $112,000 for fours years of college!

My Xbox 360 vs Playstation 3 Review

I got my previous PS3 as a gift so I had no opportunity to choose but this time I read as many reviews as I could, blogs, podcasts anything that I thought could provide any insight into which console was better. I read how the Xbox 360 had better exclusive titles, ps3 hardware was better, Blu-ray, Xbox online community – there was so much information available it was hard to take it all in.

It came down to a major reason for each

• The PS3 had Blu-ray

• Most of my friends had Xbox 360.

I went with the Xbox 360 for the above reason, I only purchased 3 Blu-ray movies last year and figured I could get a cheap player on sale somewhere.

I regretted my decision immediately. Even more so than player games I used my previous PS3 as my media center. I rip all my movies to my computer hard drive and copy them to the ps3. Even with the 250gb hard drive in the xbox I can’t copy movies to it. I rip my DVDs in full quality and sometimes when streaming them over my home network there is a lag and this annoying to both me and my wife. Yes I am using a wired connection, a gigabit ethernet Apple Time Capsule. This happened in the past with my PS3 and I would simply copy the movie over to the PS3′s hard drive. I realize this is not everyone’s use case but I also liked being able to upgrade my hard drive with any laptop SATA replacement without spending an extra $120 for a proprietary hard drive for the Xbox 360.

I sold the Xbox 360 for a small loss and got my PS3 back. I do miss my friends.