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Dear Flavors.me and About.me, 

Please let me add my Pinterest pin boards to my personal website.

It would be easy, and it would be awesome. 

Regards, 

Your Customer

I’m sure if you’re reading this tumblr you’ve seen this graphic before. It started making the rounds about 4 months ago, and I remember when I saw it I immediately loved it. It’s so simple. Like life probably should be if we remove our silly human problems and just focus on the Happiness. 

What’s the secret? Ask the Dalai Lama.

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

The DOD, Walmart, and McDonald’s are the US reps here. Strange to see those three institutions grouped together. 

I like this: “The best jobs to attack are those that are done inefficiently” — from a co-founder of @Cloudwordsinc:http://bit.ly/xe391S

I’ve been debating myself for the past couple weeks about whether or not I should sell my (ancient) iPad 1 before Apple unveils its latest version Wednesday, essentially rendering mine worthless for resale. 

First of all, the question I’m dealing with, and the one my sister feels strongly that I haven’t thought all the way through, is, “Why would you sell it?” Well, sis, I would sell it so I could get money, which would help me purchase something that I want more than an iPad 1: a refurbished Macbook Air. You see, I’m in need of a laptop so my girlfriend can have hers back. 

Lets look at the numbers: 

There is a lot of conversation out there about how to go about selling an old iPad, but my best reference point (and highest dollar amount offered) is at the Radio Shack down the street, where I could sell my 16 GB iPad 1, in good condition, for $205. 

Refurbished Macbook Airs go for about $900-$1000, depending on screen size (I’m fine with 11”), memory, speed, and condition. You can buy them on Amazon or from Apple.com. 

So I tell my sister, look, if I can sell this old iPad and if it can basically offset 20% of the cost of another product which serves a similar purpose, but it’s a product that I would rather have, why wouldn’t I do it? “It was a present,” (true, from Santa, Xmas 2010) and “You can’t play Words With Friends with me” were the two best arguments she had. One more — that it keeps me somewhat on the cutting edge, more so, at least, than not having a tablet — is weighing a little on me now, since I love tech and staying up to date on what’s out there. 

Now, it’s true, $205 isn’t really that much money. Do I really want to give up having an iPad entirely for a measly 200 bucks? So what if it’ll help me purchase a laptop, it’s an iPad and it’s awesome, and you generally don’t sell awesome things. Plus, I can probably put together $1000 without too much hassle. But still, it’s the principle…

The question is still up in the air, and I probably have about 5 more hours to decide, before that $205 goes down to $100…and then to $50. 

There’s also another, more universal force working against me: I, like most people out there, am change-averse, meaning, all things equal, I’m much more likely to stay put than to make a change*. 

Plus, I really do like playing Words with Friends, and I LOVE Flipboard. You know what, I’m keeping it. I missed the boat on getting a great deal for it (something in the $300-$400 range), and I bet Macbook Airs will come down in price over the next 4-8 weeks due to iPad HD frenzy, and I’ll just buy one then.

And in the meantime, I can still wow my girlfriend with my cutting edge-ness.

*I don’t think this is a good thing about me, and I’m trying to fix it.

It doesn’t work on my iPad, which I found out last night while gazing at my navel. 

While I love that Ex.fm automatically includes a picture when you share a track (see below), unfortunately their audio player is Flash-based, and therefore doesn’t work on iPhones or iPads. 

So, what I’ve done for anyone who’s reading my stuff on a tablet — I added a Soundcloud and a Youtube ThingLink on top of each picture so my iPad peeps can still hear the track I shared from Ex.fm (TL doesn’t require Flash). One more step of work (and probably zero people will care), but in the off chance someone has found my little corner of the Internet, I figured I would tie up the loose ends. 

Keep it going, Ex.fm. You’ve got a great service. 

UPDATE: On the other end of the music sharing spectrum is a new service called This Is My Jam, which I just heard about. Instead of sharing all the songs you like, TIMJ allows you to pick only one at a time: it’s like saying, “This is my jam,” instead of “I like all of these songs.” You can, of course, change your jam at any time. 

Check out my first Jam and try the service for yerself.

“Why Does Voicemail Suck?”

I asked Google this question and It gave me a few articles. Mostly, though, no one (I could find) is really talking about it. My two takeaways are that 1) maybe most people don’t really care about voicemail or think it needs to be drastically rethought, as I contend, or 2) it’s not a big enough of a problem (market opportunity) that much money is invested in innovating the space. In the final paragraph, I end up falling on the side that reason #2 plus timing is the problem. 

Since Google gave me them, I read these three articles about voicemail sucking, and I mostly agree with everything their authors say (one of the more humorous lines, in the first article, when our narrator imagines her reply to her credit card company’s nagging voice mail: “I’ll get to you when I have money, Tanya! Go fuck yourself! “) To me, the act of and time spent checking voicemails, plus the weird feelings and energy exerted over voicemail etiquette, is enough to make me think we’re better off without it altogether. Einstein’s line comes to mind here: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” If we’re going to figure out the best solution to making voicemail not be terrible, we’re going to have to change the thinking that got us here: something like, “I call Joe. He’s not there, but isn’t this great! I get to leave him a message.” No, that’s not the best we can do.

Apps like HeyTell are the future to me, but they’re nowhere near completely replacing voicemail. (Also, I’m a Blackberry user, and the process of getting apps is much more of a headache than it is for iPhones users, because they don’t have to deal with things like the ball being stuck and not being able to click on the Agree to Terms button needed to even access the Blackberry app store, which is happening now to me, which is why I can’t try out YouMail, which sounds awesome and like I would love it; it’s also been a bitch trying to get HeyTell, even though my iPhone friends say it’s great.) For 99% of the cases, I’m sure HeyTell is just fine. But sometimes a voicemail is nice to keep. Right? But those cases are so end-of-the-normal-curve, six sigma-esque events, that it doesn’t make sense that the built-in method of transmitting and receiving time-delyaed voice messages on my phone is one that I, personally, hardly ever use. I’m sure I could get more analytical about this, and probably end up digging a deeper hole, but basically I just want to have it known that I believe voicemail is pretty wack, and I’d rather live in a world with something better. 

Let it be noted that YouMail, a service which basically is a voicemail transcription service that sends you emails or texts of voice messages, and which I had been intent on downloading for my Blackberry before being foiled by a broken ball, seems to charge a monthly fee for their service, as you can see above. Personally, I would feel much better and honestly be more inclined to use the service if it was baked in to the phone company and that fee was invisible to me, aka included in my phone bill. Anyway, that’s a whole other topic, but I’m probably not even trying to pay $5 a month to try YouMail at this point. 

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding: voicemail hasn’t changed much because I guess things aren’t bad enough yet to enough people. So when will the sea change come? I honestly can’t say, but don’t ever #&^%#@( leave me a message, please. 

Buckets of emails would be okay.