Discounted gift cards

From time to time, I receive eBay 10% off purchases under $100 due to some disruption in an auction on an item I'm bidding on. I'm not that active a member, probably using the site a couple of times a month on average, yet this has still occurred on multiple occasions. The coupons' expiration dates are just a few weeks out, so I usually don't have anything to spend them on. What to do in this situation? Buy a gift card to a retailer like WalMart or Whole Foods. These are readily available at face value with free shipping. Save yourself $10 in 60 seconds.

That'll Costa

The skill set required for successfully conducting broadcast public interviews is not a relevant one for most people to have. But for those who are in the business, I wonder if there are any protocols, spoken or unspoken, against giving distracting verbal cues to show that, I guess, as the interviewer, you are indeed listening to the person you're interviewing.

Rebecca Costa demonstrates what I mean only too well. Scroll down to the interview with John Ross (12/17/10) and listen to the 40 seconds from 40:40-41:20. Notice (which will be an easy thing to do--the challenge would be to not notice) the five "uh huhs" Costa utters. I happened to check the media player during that time period, but it's something she does with great frequency. Richard Spencer also does it to the point of distraction.

I understand that non-words are a difficult thing for people to cut out of their speech patterns and I don't mean to be acerbic in drawing attention to it. But in these cases, it simply requires one person to be quiet while the other person is speaking. With minimal effort, it would presumably be an easy and beneficial thing to do.

An admonition from Captain Obvious

For the last several years, I've been using Facebook as an effortless, free archival backup for TAE. I edited the privacy settings on my notes so that I was the only one able to view them. A few months ago, I happened to notice that the privacy settings for notes had disappeared, but I asked a couple of trusted people to scour my profile to see if they were able to view them. They were not. No harm, no foul. Then a few days ago I got a message from a friend saying he'd recently seen a couple of them in his newsfeed. Uh oh.

Apparently, the privacy setting for notes has been abolished and they are, by default, viewable by all friends, although each note now has an individual privacy setting. That left me with a couple of options, both of them awfully tedious. Either I delete my FB account, create a new one, and reconnect with 500 people (which would have at least come with the benefit of weeding out the undesirable ones), or discontinue the auto feed and go through and manually set each of the nearly 600 notes (blog posts) already there to be viewable only by me. I went with the latter.

I'm probably overly concerned about my identity being tied to TAE. For one, by default I assume people are paying a lot more attention to me than they actually are. There are obvious evolutionary reasons for this. To be pithy, it's better safe than sorry. As a hunter and gatherer, if I'm more wary than I need to be, at worst the vigilance costs me a little extra energy. If I'm not wary enough, it could lead to me being fatally ambushed or ostracized from the tribe. Secondly, there are more prominent guys like Randall Parker and Dennis Mangan who courageously refuse to hide behind a pseudonym, and the black helicopters haven't come for them, at least not yet.

Still, I'd prefer to maintain my anonymity. And, knock on wood, no one else has mentioned anything about the posts to me. They'll soon be buried deep in people's news feeds, so I should be able to keep that anonymity--as long as I get it through my thick head that nothing on FB or any other social networking site should ever be considered private. I could use that as a segue into a rant about how FB is immoral and despicable for having betrayed me, but The Simpsons reminds us of just how pretentious of me that would be:

Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.

Bart: Hey, I know it wasn't great, but what right do you have to complain?

CBG: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.

Bart: What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, if anything, you owe them.

CBG: Worst episode ever.

The hardest part

I recall one of the HBDers on the blogroll off to the right (though I'm having trouble finding the exact post) expressing wonderment at how some people are so physically inert while others, faces contorted, run themselves--literally--to the brink of collapse.

Thinking about the question while doing P90X's plyometrics routine today, the psychological benefits alone make it, for me, an answer that is capable of being comprehended. Everything else becomes a cinch by comparison. There is nothing in my entire week, no matter how full my work plate is, how unfamiliar I am with a girl I'm seeing, or how daunting quantification of some blogging idea might be, that is nearly as formidable. So after an excruciating hour, I know there are easy buttons all over the place for the next 167. It scales daily as well, as it is the rare day indeed in which I don't get something of extreme intensity in.

The Derb pithily accesses the essence of it:

Life’s great law is that poverty and hardship build character; prosperity and security destroy it.

Pushing yourself to your physical limits creates hardship, albeit of an artificial nature. But it beats comfortable flabbiness.

Of course there are other obvious physical benefits, like "performing everywhere better" in Tony Horton's words, and in that respect, I find distance runners to be tragically misguided--distance running keeps you thin and makes you better at... distance running, and little else. P90X, faddish as it may appear at first blush, builds muscle mass everywhere while simultaneously increasing both dexterity (I'm now able to keep up with Dominque, the guy in the back, throughout plyo, and I'm a bigger guy than he is) and flexibility, at least for those of us fortunate enough to reap the physical rewards of exercise.

Anyhow, I am able to relate exclusively to the psychological comforts an intensive workout (which, by definition, almost requires multiple fails) brings and suspect it is one of those things that is hard to understand until you've been there:

Forget Fat Joe and lean forward

With the first blast of this winter's frigidity upon those of us in the Midwest, allow me to dispense a bit of practical advice. When a patch of ice causes you to wipe out, most of the time you're going to be landing on your ass after one of your feet slips forward from underneath you. To prevent this when you're walking on a slick surface, lean further forward than you normally do when you walk, sort of like Sherlock Holmes does when he's scouring. You'll be less likely to fall, and if you do, you'll fall forward, which allows you to use your arms to break some of the impact.