Archive for November, 2005

11-26-2005

Save 75% Off Select Speck iPod Cases

Thanks to NickStarr.com for posting the following coupon:

Speck Products is offering 75% off all 4G iPod, iPod mini, and iPod shuffle cases until Dec 1 with coupon code BLACKFRIDAY2005.

The ToughSkins received especially great reviews from Playlist. I’ve been wanting to get one for a while, so tonight I finally placed an order.

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Posted by Matt in music, tech | No Comments »

11-23-2005

Speak to a Human Being, Not a Machine

I see the IVR Cheat Sheet coming in handy in the future. The table, created by the founder of the travel site Kayak.com, is a list of shortcuts to bypass various corporate phone systems and get to a human being.

travel phone steps to find a human
American Airlines 800-433-7300 ”00, then say “”agent”“”
Amtrak 800-872-7245 ”0 or say “”agent”“”
Delta 800-221-1212 ”say “”agent”” four times – every time it asks for a response from you”
jetBlue 800 JET-BLUE 1 flight status; 2 reservations; 3 vacation packages
Kayak.com 203 899-3120 0
Northwest 800-225-2525 Star, 0,0 after initial greeting
Southwest 800-435-9792 Calls answered by operator; during busy times you might have to hold
United 800-864-8331 Do nothing, wait for human.
US Airways 800-428-4322 4, wait, 1
Walt Disney World 407-824-4521 Direct line to Magic Kingdom Guest Relations

The full sheet includes shortcuts for a variety of industries, including finance, government, insurance, and retail.

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Posted by Matt in business, communication, lifehacks, travel | No Comments »

11-21-2005

Stanford’s Non-Violence Lecture Series

Considering how much time is spent teaching students about the history of war, it is sad how little time is spent teaching peace. I’m always on the lookout for resources to help learn about the philosophy and practice of non-violence.

I ran across Stanford on iTunes online recently. In browsing the offerings, I found a great series of lectures hosted by the university’s Aurora Forum entitled “Waging Peace: Practical Approaches to a Violent World.” If you have iTunes installed, you can download the lectures for free. If not, the lectures are also available in streaming real audio via Bill Warters’ Campus-adr blog. I’m only a little over half-way through listening to them all, but the lecture by Gandhi’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, was especially interesting and thought provoking.

On a related note, a series of lectures by the Dalai Lama is also available on the Stanford section of iTunes, as well as on the Stanford website. This makes me wonder what other universities make their guest lectures available online. I saw Alex Halley, Kurt Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams back when I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin and recently saw Madeleine Albright at St. Edward’s University. It would be nice to find more lectures like those available online.

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Posted by Matt in communication, general | No Comments »

11-19-2005

Cave Without A Name


cave grapes

Amanda and I toured the Cave Without a Name today with some friends. The cave is west of New Braunfels, about two hours from Austin. Formations include cave grapes (photo, right), a 40 scoop ice cream cone, a rooster claw helictite, giant cave bacon, a uvula formation, and soda straws. One of my favorite formation names was the “Leaning Tower of Boerne,” which is named after the nearby town of Boerne, TX.

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Posted by Matt in Austin, photography, travel | No Comments »

11-19-2005

Black Friday vs. Buy Nothing Day

Black Friday is almost here—lots of crazy deals, the day after Thanksgiving. If you’re interested, a site called Black Friday 2005 has already posted lists of what will be on sale at most major retailers. The Fat Wallet Forums also have plenty of information, mostly in the OFFICIAL Black Friday 2005 Thread.

I feel obligated to also mention Buy Nothing Day, brought to you by Adbusters.

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Posted by Matt in business, money | No Comments »

11-14-2005

Wikipedia Knows All

I had been wondering recently about the meaning of the phrase “Hollaback Girl” from the Gwen Stefani song of the same name. Google pointed me to Wikipedia for the answer. I should have started there in the first place:

Although the term “hollaback girl” was never confirmed by Stefani, Greg Stacy of the O.C. Weekly assumed its meaning in the May 6, 2005 edition, writing, “Gwen is apparently the captain of the cheerleader squad; she is the girl who ‘hollas’ the chants, not one of the girls who simply ‘hollas’ them back.”

Posted by Matt in music, wikis | No Comments »

11-14-2005

Communication Nation: How easy is your writing to understand?

Communication Nation has a good post about analyzing documents for readability.

Are your written messages easy to read and understand? One way to know is to look at how often people respond positively to your requests; or whether they respond at all.

From there, I found links to a couple of web forms that analyze text for readability:

I tried writing a bookmarklet to feed selected text into the form on the second site, but it chokes when the text gets too long. I’m guessing that there is a way to use post instead of get when passing the text to the form, but I need to dig into javascript a bit more to figure out how to handle that. If you happen to know the trick, please feel free to post a comment.

Posted by Matt in bookmarklets, communication, reading, tech, writing | No Comments »

11-12-2005

New WordPress Theme

I’m trying out a new WordPress theme. I found it on a site called Theme Viewer, which has hundreds of WordPress themes to choose from. The design is called “Blueberry Boat” and it’s by a theme designer named Frances “Francey” Sun. Unfortunately, Francey’s site appears to be down, as I post this.

I’ve already tweaked the design a bit and will probably continue to tweak it some more, but so far I’m pretty happy with it.

Posted by Matt in tech | No Comments »

11-11-2005

The Slackers in Austin


Slackers

I went to see one of my favorite bands, The Slackers, play at Flamingo Cantina last night. If you have even a passing appreciation for ska, you owe it to yourself to give them a listen.

And if you’re in Austin and you read this in time, they’ll be playing another show tonight at the same place. I didn’t make it in time to see the opener last night, but the Slackers took the stage at around 11pm and played a great, high energy show.

If you can’t make it to the Flamingo Cantina tonight, check out a few of their songs on myspace.com.

Posted by Matt in Austin, music, photography | No Comments »

11-04-2005

Great Deals on Magazine Subscriptions

I’ve been wanting to subscribe to several magazines that I’m interested in writing for, but I was waiting until I could find the best deal possible. In scouring the FatWallet forums, I ran across two great resources. The first is a price search site for magazine subscriptions, called MagazinePriceSearch.com

MagazinePriceSearch.com saves you time and money by continually monitoring subscription prices for 2552 magazines from 24 online magazine merchants, plus 63 coupons, and compiling everything into one easy to use site!

Surprisingly, the other source of inexpensive subscriptions I found was eBay. In the end, for each of the three magazines I ordered this week, I found the best prices on eBay. I made sure to check seller ratings and that none of the sellers auto-renew the subscriptions, so it actually felt safer than ordering the same magazine from one of the dozens of discount subscription websites.

Posted by Matt in money, reading, writing | No Comments »