create your own RSS feeds through email

So Bloglines, my feed aggregator of choice, has this cool feature where you can create on the fly email addresses, and any emails sent to those will show up on your feed aggregation page. This is a great feature for email lists which have a lot of discussion, but don't have an RSS feed (or for "newsletters" from websites that you just want to scan, but you don't want to clog up your inbox).

One way I've been solving this problem is by creating labels in gmail and then having those emails skip the inbox, but this seems like a better solution because I often forget to check those labels. Cool!

* Bloglines email link [bloglines, found via Lifehacker]

folding tshirts

I haven't quite wrapped my head around this yet, but this is so cool! How does she do that?

* Folding tshirts fast [Google Video, found via Lifehacker]

Update: I have mastered this ingenious technique! My tshirts just don't look as nice. I am still a tshirt folding fiend.

pay your friends!

How annoying is it when you go out dinner, or pick up a cab, or buy a round of drinks, hoping that in the grand scheme of things it all evens out between you and your friends? Now you can be a huge stickler! I found a couple of cool online programs which allow you to enter in expenses and have them do the math for you. It still means you have to enter them in, but at least it will add for you.

The first is UK based (meaning they probably have great accents): I OWE You, which I am currently trying out, and the second is BillMonk, which I haven't tried yet.

My Stickies

This Firefox extension is a cool way of annotating web pages with little sticky notes! It lives in your browser and saves your sticky notes on a per-site basis.

Update: I have moved the link from the title so it's more obvious (thanks omar).

* My Stickies

new plan

this blog shall contain cool links to things I want to try, or go to, or in general share with you, gentle readers.

Pandora -- place to find music like the music you already like.

I know, I know

It's been a while. I was in Hawaii! Here are some lovely pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neha/sets/1485594/

It was a great time, Kauai is a gorgeous island. I highly recommend it.

The FBI sucks

This is seriously scary. A quote from the blogpost:

To summarize: under the Patriot Act, the FBI can present entities--individuals, libraries, companies, non-profits, universities, hospitals, banks--with a letter--a secret letter! that the presentee can never metnion to anyone ever again!--requiring them to share records they have about a person's banking, purchasing, correspondence and reading. They can then collect that information and keep it forever. The person they are collecting information on never need be informed (indeed, cannot be informed!) and does not need to be any kind of foreigner or terror suspect.

figuring out finances

So, I've been on a bit of a finance kick lately. I got a bit lucky joining Google, you know, so I have a little money sitting around in a bank account which I feel guilty not investing. I figure there are three levels of passively "holding" money:

1. put it in your mattress (aka low, low interest checking account)
2. find something that *might* keep up with inflation (ING, emigrant direct)
3. put it in a diversified set of no-load funds, rebalance once a year, watch the moolah roll in, retire happy and rich in 40 years

all of those are pretty passive, and since they are, why not put in a little time up front and go for #3? I'm in such a good situation -- good income, no mortgage, no kids, simple life. also, i am quite lazy and don't like work very much, so the sooner I can get out of it the better! I am very fortunate in that I have a money-oriented dad who started me a Roth IRA when I was very young. This is my one VERY IMPORTANT piece of advice to any of you reading this: if you can, put money in a Roth IRA!!! there's a limit of like $4,000 a year, and I know you can't touch the money till you're 59.5, but you are going to be able to take that money and all the interest it's earned out tax free when you retire.

Ok enough preaching. I read this book by Suze Orman, which is a little bit annoying but still very good called The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke. Ok, I am not two of those things (I'll let you guess which one I am) but I still found it VERY useful.

I'm currently reading Personal Finance for Dummies. Don't laugh, some smart people at Google recommended it to me. It's not as easy a read as the Suze Orman book, and I find some things it suggests oversimplified and a little fishy, but I know very little about funds so I'm reading those chapters.

So, the point of this very long and drawn out post: be nice to me now, because I'm going to have tons of money when I'm 59 and a half!