My Two Cents

As I posted a few months back, I hesitantly laid down $300 recently to pick up an iPhone.
It’s an awful phone, but a great little device for everything else.
The iPhone app store offers a ton of free apps for all kinds of uses. Most of the free apps (and probably the paid) are garbage, [...]

It seems like home prices are coming down at least a little in Seattle these days and they are definitely on the market a bit longer than they used to.
A house in Ballard, just a few blocks from mine recently dropped it’s price from 339,000 to 325,000. It’s sort of a funky house, but seems [...]

Update: Turns out this news was bogus.  Jim Goldman over at Tech Check (CNBC) contacted Google and Google completely denied the rumor.  Here is the link to Jim Goldman’s CNBC article.
Rumors are swirling that Google will be ending its free dinner service for employees and that the announcement will be made today to staff.
The stories of [...]

So, real estate is a bit sketchy still, energy stocks seem to have reached their peak and interest rates are still pretty low. Where are you all putting your money?
Stocks?
Depressed real estate?
Staying in cash?
Investing in your own business?

I heard about AT&T’s new tech support service ConnecTech last week and thought it was a lost cause. Hoping to make money in home-based tech support seems tricky. I did it for a few years in the late nineties and any sort of flat rate service plan is likely to be a losing [...]

Google Adsense’s reporting interface has been down for the better part of the day today.  This isn’t the first time either.  I usually check Adsense every few hours to see if I’ve received any clicks and its often down for several hours at a time with no custom message indicating when it may be back [...]

Despite this week’s release of updated firmware for the 3g iPhone, the device still sucks as a phone.
Great as an Internet device, it’s poor reception, awkward form factor and terrible battery life leave me wishing I still had my trusty E815 motorola for my everyday talking, texting machine.

I’ve had a nasty, outdated wordpress blog theme for a very long time.  As it got more and more out of date, it got more and more broken.  The “Previous” and “Next” links on the home page broke at some point so I pulled the excerpts off and just was showing all of the post titles [...]

Seth Godin has a simple, yet fantastic, post over on his blog today that every corporate communications person ought to read. 
The premise is simple.  You should make it really easy for your customers to contact you.  If you send them an email, accept email responses, have someone read them, and reply to your customers’ requests.  [...]

In a quest for ever more passive income streams, I submitted a batch of 10 of my favorite photos for inclusion on ShutterStock.com.  Unfortunately, I got a rejection message this morning from them saying I didn’t make the cut.  New submitters must submit exactly 10 photos, 7 of which must be improved for inclusion.  It [...]