Geek Girlfriends

My husband and I were recently enjoying a bottle of wine while watching the sunset over the water. There was a lull in the conversation – not an awkward, uncomfortable one, just a pause. He stared at the river and the colors washing over the clouds and I picked up my mobile and checked my email. Ironically, the only email worth reading was one from Alison at Intel who wanted to tell me about a mobile etiquette poll Intel and Harris Interactive had done. (She was also offering you, my readers, an amazing giveaway. I’ll get to that in a minute.)

“Nine out of ten adults say they’re annoyed by some mobile behaviors,” she wrote. “But only 38 percent actually admit to personal wrongdoing.” I chuckled at the irony of reading this message from Alison while I myself was behaving very badly in this regard. Checking email while on a date ranked pretty high among the most offensive behaviors reported. Intel even made a silly video about this very behavior. Also, the public restroom (as illustrated) is noted as one of the most inappropriate places people have been spotted using mobile their devices. Ewww.

I looked up to share this irony with my husband but quickly realized — from the dirty look on his face — that he had joined the ranks of the nine of out of ten who are annoyed by someone else’s lack of mobile etiquette. So I quickly joined the less populous 38 percent of those who admit to wrongdoing, apologized, put my phone away, and poured us both another glass of wine.

How good is your mobile etiquette? Here’s a little quiz to help you decide:

I learned early in life that the best defense is a good offense. So I quickly changed the subject. “Intel wants to give one of my readers a netbook!” I said. “I guess if people are going to learn mobile manners, they need the right tool for the job.”

“Wow!” he said, impressed, stunned, and jealous. His desire to have – or give away on his blog – a netbook had quickly replaced his annoyance at my poor mobile etiquette.

He can’t have this netbook. But you can. And this is just your average netbook either. It’s the gorgeous Vivienne Tam HP Mini. This is a netbook so sweet you will make all your friends jealous. Here’s a photo:

What do you have to do to win it? Answer this question in the comments: What is your worst mobile manners offense to date? This is true confession time. It’s not your chance to rat out your sister. So tell it like it is.

I will choose a random number from the comments. And Alison will send that person this adorable Vivienne Tam netbook. I don’t trust myself to send it on if I get my hands on it because I have been coveting this particular piece of geek bling since it came out.

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Two weeks ago, I mentioned I was going out to dinner – without blowing my budget – using gift certificates from Restaurant.com. I know it’s a little early to bring that up again but the site is having a 70 percent off sale so I am. My husband and I went to lunch together yesterday for about $5. And we are taking both kids to dinner at our favorite Brazilian place for maybe $13. Just log onto the site, find a nearby restaurant you like, buy yourself a gift certificate, and take it with you when you go eat. Oh, you have to use this offer code at checkout from Restaurant.com: RECIPE.

Here are the details from Restaurant.com:

Save 70% off Dinner of the Month Club purchase and receive $10 certificate when you use code RECIPE. Now thru 6/30/09 at Restaurant.com.

In other news, I have a fantastic giveaway coming up next week so stay tuned. (Sign up for my feed if you haven’t already.) This is a great giveaway. Killer. Seriously, you want to win this. Heck, I want to win it. So don’t miss it.

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Yesterday, my son began lamenting the end of summer. “It’s almost OVER!” He wailed. “It just started!” I answered. But he’d done the math. “It’s July, like, next week,” he said. “July will go as fast as June did. Then we only have August and it’s back to school.”

Okay. That’s true — in the desperate logic of a soon-to-be-teen. So that means I can cover stuff here that’s about school, right?

When my kids go back to school in the fall, it will mark the first year that they both go completely digital. I’ll feel less guilty when I pass a tree because I won’t be party to so much pointless arboreal murder. My house will neater because the kids won’t have so much paper to keep track of. And — I hope — everyone’s grades will improve.

When we got my son a netbook last year, his grades quickly went way up. He stopped losing homework, was better able to manage his time and keep track of assignments, and got more work done because he could do it wherever he was. It was a successful experiment (even his teachers agree) and his sister wants in.

One key – of course — to using a netbook successfully is leveraging cloud computing: Google calendar for appointments, Toodledo.com for to-do lists, EverNote.com to remember the stuff of life, Mozy.com for (free) online backup.

And Box.net for work-in-progress.

I’m a recent convert to Box.net. Here’s why: I have a desktop at work, a laptop at home, and a netbook in my purse. Sometimes I work on the same project on all three of these machines in the course of a single day. Crazy, I know. But it all works out. I can even collaborate with a colleague or editor using this file sharing and storage service.

For example: Yesterday I had to leave early to pick up my daughter at camp. But I also had to write and file an article. I wasn’t done with it when I had to leave my office. So I logged into Box.net and uploaded it. (This takes less than a minute and about three mouse-clicks.) I got to the camp pick up, which has Wi-Fi, and logged onto Box.net again from my netbook while I was waiting and to make the few changes that occurred to me while I was driving. (Why do the best ideas happen while driving or in the shower?) When my daughter got in the car, I uploaded that new version to Box.net. At home, I got out my laptop, downloaded my recent version, and finished the article while dinner was cooking. Then I uploaded it again so I would have the final version from any of my computers. I filed this article right from Box.net simply by sending a link to my editor.

A free Box.net account gives me 1GB of data. Perfectly reasonable for keeping an ongoing copy of my work-in-progress. But I may upgrade to the fee version to get more storage. For $7.95 a month, I can store 5GB.

This is a great tool for students, too. And the free version is sized right for them. My son lost a big assignment during the last school year because he threw a “cool and super-powerful magnet” he found on the playground into his backpack. While it was in there, it (naturally) wiped his key drive — nuking the only copy he had of his project. The project was due the next day and there was no time to recreate it. That data failure cost him an A he’d worked hard for. But he learned a lesson and I know he’ll be pleased when I sit him – and his sister — down before school starts and set him up with a Box.net account.

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Personally I like high-quality sunglasses and have been wearing the same pair of Smith Optics glasses for two years. But, when it comes to sunglasses, my husband is a loser…and a breaker. He has been known to completely destroy a pair of sunglasses within a week of buying them. So he is devoted to cheap sunglasses. He usually gets them at Target but the process is clearly torture for him. So I knew when I discovered The Sunglass Warehouse, he would be grateful. Sure enough, he ordered several pair within minutes of me telling him about the site. He’s difficult to fit when it comes to glasses so he ordered three pairs so that he would have a selection to choose from. “They came within two days,” he reports. “I plan to pick one pair and send back the other two. The most expensive pair was $17. They cover shipping one way [on orders over $25], so it will cost me a bit to send back the other two. But the place had a much better selection than Target and it was much less hassle.”

And, with that bit of Frugal Friday intelligence, I bring you these words from ZZ Top (Billy Gibbons of same is pictured):

Now go out and get yourself some big black frames
With the glass so dark they won’t even know your name
And the choice is up to you cause they come in two classes:
Rhinestone shades or cheap sunglasses

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I’m not very good at filing. I tend to pile things on the corner of my desk and hope they go away. This makes it difficult to find things later. But there seems to be nothing I can do to fix this behavior. Even when I do have time to file, which is very rare, filing is not what I find time to do. So I am very grateful for cloud computing.

I subscribe to Pixily.com. So instead of filing, I move those piles into a prepaid envelope once a week and drop them in the mail. Pixily.com scans them and uploads them to my private file cabinet in the cloud. Now I can find everything with a simple search, print them out, email them to people, or just look at them online. I am now using my filing cabinet to store shoes – a much better use for it.

Pixily.com announced a few weeks ago that it had partnered with EverNote.com. I used EverNote.com for a while just after it launched – years ago — but something about it wasn’t ready (I don’t remember what) and I stopped using it. But this announcement made me think I should take another look. I’m glad I did. It’s terrific. It’s a lot like Microsoft OneNote (which is part of the student version of Microsoft Office) but it’s online (and free). It also offers a software download that synchs my online stuff with all of my computers so I can find things from my laptop, my netbook, or my office desktop.

It is great at capturing stuff that I know I will want to remember later but don’t know what do with now.

For example, I recently got a new fridge. The fridge has a built-in water filter system that will need a new filter in six months. I need to remember what brand to get. But by December, I will most certainly have forgotten. Do I keep the package that came with the original? Where? Nope! I used the Web camera on my laptop to snap a photo of it and sent that photo to Evernote.com. Then I threw the package out. Later, I was reading an article on the Web that contained a gardening tip I know I’ll want later, so I clipped that and sent it to Evernote.com too. I can grab info off the Web, take pictures with my cell phone – maybe I’ll see a book I want but don’t want to buy right now – or send things over from Pixily.com. I can email ideas, photos, or phone numbers from my cell phone or laptop to Evernote.com and I will always be able to find them later.

At Evernote.com, I can organize all that stuff into notebooks. But since I never file, I probably won’t do that. But that’s okay because I can just search for it when I need it. Evernote.com will find it even if the word I search for is in an image. So when I need to know what brand of water filter to buy, all I have to do is go to Evernote.com, type in the word “filter” and it will find that picture I took.

I have been using OneNote for years for this sort of note-taking and ad-hoc filing but I love this cloud angle. Fortunately, Evernote.com offers a very slick import feature so I can get ship all those OneNote files to the cloud, too.

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If your Dad (or husband) is yet to get with mobile email and text messaging, maybe you should set him up for Father’s Day? The Peek is pocket-sized mobile email device that’s gift-priced, even in this economy. It doesn’t do voice, just texting and email.

It’s pocket small, simple to use, and has a QWERTY keyboard so even if your Dad can’t be bothered to figure out a feature-heavy, touch-screen phone, he’ll get this in a matter of seconds. Best of all, since Peek came out with a new version – the Peek Pronto – the slightly older Peek Classic is on sale for $19.95. Service is $19.95 a month with no contract. And you won’t have to explain to him how to search for a Wi-Fi connection because this operates over the cellular network.

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We are tightening down the budget a bit right now because of the new fridge. But it’s looking like it will be a beautiful weekend and it’s been a very long work week. I want dinner and a movie! I could ignore the budget and blow a lot of money at my favorite wine bar or my husband’s favorite Irish pub. But, with a little geek cleverness, I think I can manage to stay within my budget and take the entire family to dinner without reducing us to living on canned beans and Ramen noodles for the rest of the month. (Okay, I’m exaggerating but you get my drift.) I want to go to the Brazilian restaurant that has something each of likes. I don’t get any argument from either kid or my husband when I suggest eating there but we scratched it off our regular rotation because it’s a bit too pricey. Before I shut my computer down today, though, I’m planning to buy a gift certificate to eat there from Restaurant.com. The gift certificates cost a fraction of their face value. So I can get a $25 certificate for $10.

The site offers gift certificates for lots of restaurants nationwide – not just big chains – but it varies by region so you’ll have to check out what they have in your area. We live in a small town and there are only about 6 restaurants listed but two of them are places we like to eat. In fact, another place we’ve wanted to try is offering $10 gift certificates for $3 so I might get some of those, too. There are some restrictions, of course so read the fine print. For example, the Brazilian place excludes alcohol from the certificate and requires we spend at least $35 to use it. That’s easy if we have our hungry tweens with us. But we’d have to hoover a pretty hefty meal to do that on our own if his Negro Modelo’s don’t count against the tab. But, even with that restriction, feeding the four of us in a place we like for $20 — the gift certificate costs $10 and is worth $25 but we have to spend $35 to use it — is a great deal.

As for the movie? We have a projector at home where we get a 100-inch image in our living room (on a unit that I cost much less than most 42″ LCDs; you can read about how to set that up in my book) and I make a pretty mean bowl of popcorn. So we will probably download something from Amazon Video On Demandto our Roku. (If you don’t have one already, the $99 Roku makes an awesome Father’s Day gift.)

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You have all heard me rave about the joys of having an office outside my home. You know I love the quiet, the distance from the refrigerator, and all the work I’m getting done. (Those beautiful views from the ninth floor are also pretty sweet.) But having an office is reacquainting me with some elements of going to work that I had almost forgotten about: Dressing up, packing a lunch, and carting files from my office desktop to my at-home laptop. But I am sporting the cutest little key drive these days that I’m enjoying that last one. I don’t have to hunt around in the bottom of my purse for a portable drive to drag files to, I’ve got one right on my key chain: The LaCie 130869 4 GB iamakey USB Flash Drive. And I always know where my keys are since I need them to get in my office. There it is in the picture. It looks just like a key. But it’s a 4GB portable drive. I just love it.

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This has been one crazy, busy week. And now it’s Friday and I just want to put my overtaxed brain on ice. But I have been neglecting my GGFs here all week so, before I do that, I want to share a quick Frugal Friday tip: Promotionalcodes.com.

Whenever you are shopping online and ready to pay at the checkout, hit this Web site first to see if there is a promotional code that can save you a bit of money.

Like this: Yesterday, I needed some supplies at Office Depot. I quickly did my shopping and headed for the check out. (Office Depot delivers to my office the next day for free. How cool is that?) Right there where I was filling out my shipping and billing information there is a space for discount or promotional codes. I know Office Depot sent me a 10 percent off coupon a while ago but I had no idea where it was. I didn’t have time to track it down but, fortunately, there is no need. I simply opened another browser window, went to Promotionalcodes.com, and searched for Office Depot. It had a slew of them. I picked the one that suited the purchase I was making and paid ten percent less than I would have if I hadn’t spent ten seconds on that. Promotionalcodes.com has codes for lots of online merchants. It doesn’t have codes for every place I shop but it has enough that it’s worth a quick stop before I hit buy every time.

Now for that ice.

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I have been writing about online shopping since the idea was pretty new. So over the years, I have bought just about everything online – either for myself or as research for an article: Jewelry, underwear, furniture, toys, cars, computers, flowers, light bulbs, groceries, and much more. But I have never purchased a major appliance this way. That may be about to change.

When we remodeled our kitchen nearly ten years ago, we bought a GE Profile fridge. We hated it almost the minute we got it home. I ripped the vegetable drawer out in a fit of anger when we had owned it only a few months. My relationship with this fridge only got worse from there.

On the plus side, I have gotten to know some very nice refrigerator repair people, all of whom are now on friendly terms with my dogs, over the years. These guys have been to my house more often than some of my closest friends because we’ve had this fridge repaired – on average – every three months. Another positive: My husband (Dan) and I are collaborating on a TV pilot in which the fridge plays a starring role. It randomly tosses ice cubes at people in the kitchen. The door falls off at breakfast. It (more than once) fills the basement with two feet of water. The things it does not do well? Keep food cold, make ice consistently, and freeze things. This script is a lot like the Lucille Ball Show and we haven’t had to make anything up.

Last night we finally decided it was time to get a new fridge because the door no longer closes and we’ve had enough. So Dan and I spent an hour this morning (via Skype chat) shopping for a new one. According to the EPA, “An appliance has two price tags: what you pay to take it home and what you pay for the energy and water it uses.” So we started our little shopping spree by narrowing our choices to those fridges that have are ENERGY STAR rated. You can search for these at Energy Star. Also fun is the energy-savings calculator there that will help justify a purchase by telling you how much you’ll save every year by operating an ENERGY STAR rated appliance. (Not only will we no longer have to skitter through the kitchen to avoid the ice cube assault, we will save over $100 a year on our electric bill.)

We also checked out ConsumerReports.org ($5.95 for a one-month online subscription) for recommendations. Then we looked at what was in stock locally at Sears.com, Lowes.com, BestBuy.com, and HomeDepot.com. Next we browsed some sites that sell direct via the Web. Some local merchants charge for delivery and online merchants have tempting free shipping offers and charge no sales tax. (This varies by your location. If they don’t have a physical location in your state, they don’t have to charge you tax).

Dan wants me to point out that the best prices online were at merchant he calls, “Brooklyn camera dealers.” These places — such fotoconnection.com — are, he says, “Places to avoid at all costs.” For more on why, you could read the article he wrote on it at Computer World. I would never buy from an unknown merchant just because they offered the best price but I pass that along as an FYI.

That still left us with legitimate-seeming sites such as Number 1 Appliance, which offered the Maytag fridge we’d settled on for $300 less than we could buy it locally and with “free” (there is a $25 handling charge) curb-side delivery. For another $89, we could have the fridge brought into the kitchen. But the company does not offer installation (for the water and ice machine) and it won’t haul away the fridge we hate. The deal was similar at US Appliance, where the shipping was “free” (with a $30 fuel surcharge) and the “white-glove delivery” (where they bring it in the house) cost $90.

As I do with any merchant I’ve never bought from, I next searched on the name of the merchant and the term “complaint” in Google. US Appliance got pretty mixed reviews at Epinions.com but the reviews didn’t indicate so much a shady outfit as a less-than-ideal customer service experience, which is just too common all around these days. Finding intelligence on Number 1 Appliance was harder but I did find a discussion where many people had positive experiences with the merchant and offered some hindsight advice. I jotted down a couple of good suggestions from there: Make sure the delivery person waits while you inspect the goods. If you let the delivery guy leave, you have agreed the appliance is in fine shape. Some people discovered dents only after letting the delivery guy leave. These online merchants demand return shipping and a 15% restocking fee if you change your mind later. But the best advice here was to take the price you find online, call a local merchant, and see if they will match it.

I called my local Home Depot, which has the fridge in stock and offers free setup and delivery (including hauling away the old fridge) for $200 more than I would pay (with “white-glove delivery) from Number 1 Appliance. I called to see if they would match that price. Nope. They don’t match online merchants and the person who answered the phone “Had no authority to reduce the price.” I eliminated Sears.com from this competition early because their Web site was so embarrassing for them. I just couldn’t continue. Many links led to a page that reads, “You are not authorized to access this page.” But I called the local store. It didn’t carry the fridge I wanted. At my local Lowes, the fridge wasn’t in stock but the sales guy offered to get it. And, while he couldn’t match the price at Number 1 Appliance (though he said he could have if he’d had the item in stock), he offered 10 percent off his retail price – and he would deliver for free and take away Crazy Fridge. That brought the price to within $100 of the white-glove-shipping-included price at my favored online merchant. Best Buy offered me an identical deal, saying they don’t price match against online merchants but they would match what Lowes had offered me.

Next? We are planning to go in to the local Home Depot over the weekend (the only one that has the fridge in stock) and see if we can escalate this price-matching request to a manager. If not, we will then decide if the comfort of buying from a store we can set foot in (and that is willing to take possession of our insane fridge) is worth $100.

Now if someone would offer to haul away the old fridge and torture it for a decade the way it has tortured us, that is just the sort of service that would make me a loyal customer.

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