Lately I’ve been using a Sigg bottle to bring water with me. I started doing that ever since I read Omar’s entry on BPA.

So far the Sigg bottle has been pretty cool - the water tastes great, and it’s surprisingly light. However, I do miss my Nalgenes for 3 reasons:

1. The bottle can become untouchably hot if I leave it in the car.
2. I would much prefer a wide mouth bottle - it makes it a lot easier to clean.
3. I don’t like the fact that the drinking surfaces are not covered by the lid.

With that in mind, I look forwards to getting a new Nalgene “everyday” bottle when they come out. It appears they will be available in the traditional form factors, and will be made from a new material:

Made from Eastman Tritan™ copolyester that is manufactured without BPA or phthalates.

This page has been making the rounds, and I thought it was kind of interesting:

When $100,000 makes you Go Broke: The Invisible Hand Forces Americans Into Debt.

Frankly some parts of this budget seem unrealistic: a mortgage debt of just $350k for a house? Making donations when your budget looks like this? Saving for retirement when your budget looks like this? Just $50 for cell phones?

Given how difficult it is for most people to get a true grasp of their finances let alone actively manage it, it seems to me that the future will be very troubling for many families.

If you’re running one of my favorite apps, FolderShare - make sure you have the latest version or you may be blocked from syncing.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7580407

A pain and trouble free upgrade on my 5 machines.

Sometimes when it rains, it pours.

I didn’t feel all that wonderful today so I ended up working from home. That’s when I discovered that my home desktop’s hard drive probably has a hardware failure.

Since late last week, my PC had been locking up for 5-10 minutes at a time, where nothing would respond and my hard drive would simply go “tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk”.

Well, now it simply won’t even boot.

This is pretty not cool considering I bought this computer in mid-January. I have heard that hard drives have a pretty high fail rate these days, but this is pretty ridiculous.

Fortunately, Dell is sending me a replacement hard drive. Let’s see how this pans out…

Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone FreeRangeKids
I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door. Bye-bye! Have fun!

And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself .

Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, ‘Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.’

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating ‘ for us and for them.

Wow, this blog entry certainly generated a lot of heated discussions if you read through the comments. It’s pretty interesting… has crime decreased because we simply do less? Or have we simply done less despite the decrease in crime?

It’s also interesting how much attention this has generated, in part because a lot of NYC kids commute by themselves to school via subway everyday.

For some reason, this brings to my mind a piece I read in 2005 noting how the majority letters to the editor to defending the practice of police randomly searching bags in the NY subway were written by people who did not live in NY.

Does living in “safe” areas make the world less safe?

Lots of interesting questions here.

On my drive back from Redmond today, I noticed that at the gas station at 148th and 51st near RedWest, premium gas was $3.89.

I chuckled to myself thinking “Hah… gas prices are almost the same here as it back at home.” When I left on Monday night, the station near my apartment was charging $4.11.

I guess that joke’s on me - when I got home tonight, I found that the price at that station is now $4.22 per gallon. Ouchers!

It’s so surreal visiting Redmond sometimes. In the break rooms I saw flyers for houses for sale for $500,000. I saw an ad for a 2br apartment, across the street from a Microsoft building, where someone (presumably the person who posted it!) took a Sharpie and marked the price down from $1395 to $1350. Down!

Perhaps the biggest difference that I notice though is when I drop by the Bellevue Safeway as I often do to buy some snacks and water: Cookies at the Bellevue Safeway, a core staple of any balanced diet in my opinion, can sometimes be dramatically cheaper. I had heard about this from other sites on the web. From the Safeway website:

Home
Bellevue

That said, for some reason they never seem to have M&M cookies at the Bellevue Safeway. Maybe I just get there too late and they’re all gone.

Regardless, that, for me, is a deal breaker. California it is!

I occasionally line-by-line read through the bills I receive. Here’s what I found in the last 60 days:

1. Service A started charging me 80% more. A 15 minute phone call changed it so that they were charging me only 20% more.
2. Service B wasn’t providing me with the proper discounts. In fact, they were only giving me 50% of the discounts they had promised me for the last 3 months.
3. Service C didn’t credit me with the right number of bonus points based on my recent activities. I suspect it is because their billing form doesn’t have enough lines to document the activities that I should’ve received extra credits for - so they simply ignored it.

In this new economy, costs are lower, but so is service. I feel like we’re being nickled and dimed not just monetarily, but worse, time-wise.

Recently I purchased a Zojirushi NP-HBC10 rice cooker. Yes, it’s a bit pricey. No, I didn’t pay retail - the price had dropped due to a sale and I got it at a pretty sweet price. I call it Rice 2.0.

Was it worth it? Yes.

This rice cooker is incredibly buzzword compliant. It has induction heating, fuzzy logic, stainless steel, heavy non-stick coating, GABA brown rice (makes your brown rice more stress relieving), time delay, multiple day extended heating, bluetooth, forced induction, TSA ready, UGC, social graph, cold fusion compatible. Ok, I might have made some of those up.

The reason I started shopping for a new rice cooker was because every time we made brown rice, there’d be a giant pool of rice water surrounding our rice cooker. I was always so sure that we were going to get electrocuted. Just to back up for a minute, we decided to go with brown rice for a while as it is healthier.

And what makes brown rice better than the NP-HBC10? Nothing. Check out this description of the GABA mode!

Q16. What is GABA brown rice?
A16. This is not a new variety of brown rice, but a newly discovered way of cooking brown rice to “activate” it and increase natural occurring gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an amino acid in brown rice believed to have health giving properties such as lowering blood pressure, improving kidney function and relieving stress. The brown rice is “activated” by soaking the rice at 104 degrees F for 2 hours before the actual cooking begins.

That’s right - I’m not going to be stressed anymore!

The reviews online are pretty amazing - apparently you can keep (white) rice for up to 4 days in this thing. Wow. It plays twinkle twinkle little star when it starts - and amaryllis when it stop! Does your rice cooker do that?

But seriously - this rice cooker has been a joy to clean so far. The non-stick coating is very non-stick, the other components are also very easy to wash. Every aspect of this device says “high quality” and “well designed” - it’s the Lexus of rice cookers.

I guess I should also talk about how the rice tastes. Both Jean and I agree that the brown rice was surprisingly… no… shockingly… no… stunningly good. Every grain was cooked perfectly - with a great taste, a great consistency, and a great texture. It’s as if each grain was cooked individually by a ninja, and then secretly placed back in the machine. Even rice that was then put in the fridge and reheated the next day in a microwave tasted good. Yes, it’s that good.

Bottomline: Zojirushi NP-HBC10 = totally worth it.