Mint Makes My Personal Budgeting Hands Free, Happy
I'm a personal budget nerd.
I regularly check my online Bank of America account, keep Excel spreadsheets tracking all kinds of various things and use personal budget software to track and record all my receipts, payments and expenses.
Pre-September 2007 I used Quicken as my go-to personal budget software. Using Quicken was painful and tedious but I did it.
During mid-September 2007, Mint launched at TC40 (which I attended since I was as a TC intern at the time) and I immediately signed up for an account after seeing their demo.
What's Mint? In a nutshell, it's an online money management service that lets you plugin your bank accounts, credits cards and investment accounts and than automatically tracks, categorizes and trends your spending.
Above: Screenshot grabbed from Crunchbase's Mint profile.
The great thing about Mint is that its almost completely hands-free outside of minimal re-categorizing of expenses like changing an item from the "Grocery" category to the "Restaurant" category.
I also have my Mint account set-up to send me weekly spending reports via email. And, if Mint finds any weird banks fees or low balances they'll send me an email, too.
If you hate spending time and effort on your personal budget, or if you don't have a personal budget (yet) but would like to start one, you should definitely give Mint a holler.
Inevitable privacy and security concerns can be answered here.
Oh yeah, see my video question for readers in the comments.
I Just Googled “Landline Reasons To Have”
Me and everyone I know has a cell phone. I don't have a landline in my apartment. This afternoon I was pondering the reasons why someone might want a landline in their home.
In the workplace I understand. But, for the home I'm had a hard time coming up with reasons.
So, I turned to Google and entered "landline reasons to have".
The most obvious reason that Google spit back at me was something to the effect of 9-1-1 and kids. Most small children don't have cell phones, so if an emergency were to happen in the home its a good idea to have a landline around for them to dial 9-1-1.
Outside of 9-1-1 and kids can you give me a good reason for having a landline in the home? Do you have a landline under your roof?
See my video question in the comments?
Update: Here are some more reasons why landlines are still useful: Uptime during power outages, don't need daily battery re-charging and they provide your location to emergency services faster on average (This is more an issue with emergency dispatcher technology).
Get Me Riled Up and I’ll Probably Cough Up $10
The movie theatres don't get my $10 as easy as they once did. Nowadays, I have to get super riled up about a movie before I go waste $10 on CGI, escapism, cheap thrills, superheroes and/or laughs. For the most part, I usually wait a month or two until movies are released on Netflix.
I can't explain what it is about the few movies a year that I get completely psyched up about and cough up $10 willingly. I think it has something to do with quality plus landing in the "must be seen on the big screen" category. Most Oscar-season flicks and movie festival darlings aren't included in the "must be seen on the big screen" category instead they are put in my Netflix where they wait until they're released on DVD. A movie like The Matrix or Iron Man would be included in the "must be seen on the big screen" category.
These are two movies that I'm currently riled up about:
The Happening
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Release: June 13
The Dark Knight
Director: Christopher Nolan
Release: July 18
I'll let you know if I cough up $10 to see either on the big screen. I'm guessing I probably will.
TV Show in China Attracted 420 Million Viewers During Its Season Finale and Than Was Promptly Cancelled
There were zero typos in my post title. You read it correctly.
A show by the name of Super Girl, which is similar to the Pop/American Idol concept with auditions, voting etc, was able to attract 420 million Chinese viewers during its 2006 season finale and than was promptly shut down by the Chinese government.
According to Wikipedia, the show ran from 2004 to 2006 on Hunan Satellite Television and was sponsored by a Chinese yogurt company named Mengniu Yoghurt. TV viewers could vote by phone, text messaging and online.
There are so many things that pop into my mind when I read/watched this story on VBS.TV: First, the show attracted 420 million viewers during its 2006 season finale and I never heard a thing about it. We are talking the biggest television show ever. This tells a lot about our media coverage/access to China. Second, it appears to be one of the biggest displays of democracy in China (via the voting). Third, I bet US media companies are salivating about the possibilities of getting into China. But, we all know that won't happen anytime soon.
You can see the whole string of videos that VBS.TV is doing on the Super Girl phenomenon over on their site (or in the embedded video below). I definitely suggest watching the videos since VBS.TV was able to get a crew over to China and interview 2006 Super Girl finalist Yang Lei.
(Video might not be viewable in RSS reader)
23andMe Unveils 23andWe
23andMe just sent out an email announcing the launch of 23andWe. Awwwww another cute name.
The concept behind 23andWe is pretty simple: They provide me with easy, fun questions in survey form and I get to see how my answers compare to the rest of the 23andMe community. At the same time, 23andMe is correlating my answers to my genetic data (which they think will lead to a new way of doing genetic research).
Here is a question from one of the surveys:
Here is one of my answers compared to results from the rest of the 23andMe community:
All in all, the surveys are a breeze and I can see myself doing plenty more of them in the future. Plus, there's the added bonus that I might be helping progress genetic research in some tiny way.
Update: I guess 23andWe was launched at D6 today. You can read about the demo over at the D6 blog or watch the video below:
When It Comes to Refried Beans, I Choose Rosarita Every Time
I recently graduated from college and moved into my own apartment. That means that I've been buying stuff on a routine basis to keep my "household" running smoothly (i.e. food, cleaning, hygiene, storage etc).
In stepping into this world of buying things on a routine basis I've become hyper-aware of how indistinguishable most products are from each other (i.e. cheese, toilet paper, dishwasher detergent etc).
I now know why companies like Proctor & Gamble spend so much money on ads trying to distinguish their indistinguishable products from competitors.
I've always thought that I wasn't influenced by TV/print/radio ads but now when I browse through Safeway and Target aisles I can't help but have indistinguishable products jump out at me because of all the ad money spent on them over the years.
Maybe it's just me but I'm finding the realm of personal buying trends to be very interesting.
Can you ever recall the last time you saw an ad of any kind for refried beans? I can't. But, when I go to the supermarket to buy refried beans I go with Rosarita Vegetarian Refried Beans every time.
No exceptions. No wavering. No second thoughts. Rosarita. Every. Time.
Why do I go with Rosarita when there are so many other refried bean products to choose from? When I have a blank slate due to the absence of refried bean ads? The reason is pretty simple: Rosarita is what my family always used for all their refried bean needs.
I'm not sure what refried bean product I'd choose if I'd seen refried bean ads my whole life. Or if a friend tells me to try a new refried bean product that "is way better than Rosarita".
SNPedia Releases a Mac Version of Their Promethease Tool. Hurray!
I've been waiting for Mike Cariaso over at SNPedia to turn out a Mac version of their Promethease tool.
Well, last night Mike emailed me and told me they now have a Mac version. I immediately ran my raw genome data (a file downloaded from my 23andMe account) through the tool, which took about 2 hours.
The tool compares your raw genome data against SNPedia's impressive collection of DNA information and creates a report that you can browse. Here's a screen grab of my Promethease report:
SNPedia explains how to read the Promethease results here. This is the general format for the results:
As you can see above, the presentation of the report's results is very basic. They plan on improving the report in future iterations. Stay tuned here and over at SNPedia's blog.
You can subscribe to my 'My Genome' posts only by 
RSS or email.
Google Health is a Phenomenally Useful Tool for Armchair Doctors
Google Health officially launched today and I couldn't help but create a profile and see what I could do. In under 5 minutes, I linked my Longs Drugs account to my profile, added my doctor to my profile and added some pertinent personal details.
Right now, the feature that impresses me the most is the "condition or symptom" reference tool. You can enter a condition like "Vitiligo" and Google Health provides a whole package of amazing results.
Here is a quick rundown of all the stuff Google Health's Vitiligo page provided:
1) Definition
2) Symptoms
3) Treatment
4) Causes
5) Tests & diagnosis
6) Complications
7) When to contact a doctor
8 ) Illustrations, 9) Related news
The related news feature is very helpful in finding relevant news coverage on Vitiligo.
10) Google Scholar results, 11) Related Groups
I like that you can see what the experts have published on Vitiligo or you can go find advice/support/whatever from people who also have Vitiligo (AKA the amateurs).
12) Search trends
This is probably the most Google-y feature on the Vitiligo page. And, it also seems to be highly relevant and insightful.
The “TechCrunch Bump” Isn’t Magic for Small Blogs
Back in early December 2007, Mike Arrington wrote a TechCrunch post that linked to this blog. His post sent over a horde of TC readers AKA the "TechCrunch bump".
At the time, I thought it was going to give my blog a huge reader base that would cling to my every word post after post. Well, that's not what happened. As you can see above, the "TechCrunch bump" quickly dissipated and returned to pre-bump numbers in little time.
What lesson can small blogs take away from my experience?
Just because TC and its readers find one of your posts interesting doesn't mean they will find your future posts interesting.
Why? Because if you have small blog (traffic-wise) it probably means a couple of things:
1) It's your personal blog (like this blog). And, most personal blogs are only interesting to the author and a couple of his or her friends.
2) You cover an array of topics (like this blog). There's only a few blogs that cover tons of topics and are also popular (i.e. Kottke.org). Most popular blogs cover very narrow topics and become the definitive source for those topics (i.e. TechCrunch and Web 2.0 startups).
3) Your blog is relatively new. It takes awhile for readers, Googlebot and other bloggers to find your blog. Just because they find one post doesn't mean they find the rest of your blog (A result of #1 and #2).
All in all, you shouldn't focus on getting magical links from huge blogs. Instead, you should ignore the huge blogs and focus on posting content from your own distinctive voice day after day.
As you can see above, it's been about five months since my small blog got the "TechCrunch bump" and I'm only up to about 20% of the daily readers I got from the bump.
Wiki: Where to Watch NBA Games Online
Update: See our Guide to Watching NBA Basketball Games Online.
We here at BUZZYEAH love watching NBA games. Go Warriors! However, we don't have cable or TV so we have to do all our NBA watching at friends' homes or on the Internet.
We've noticed through our own Google-searching experiences that it's hard to find sites that stream NBA games online. They either have strings attached (ahem ESPN260) or don't exist.
So, we've decided tap into the power of the Google-searching crowds and create a wiki for where to watch NBA games online.
The wiki, as you can see below, is very simple consisting of only two input columns: "Website name" and "URL". Anyone can edit or add to it. To add to it, use this form (Not viewable in RSS reader):
What's been added so far (Not viewable in RSS reader):
I'm sure we might add a few more input columns in the future, so please leave suggestions in the comments if you have any good ideas.
I pretend to have a real job [read: started my own company]. 
