You might not have much ‘stuff’, or you might not THINK you have much stuff, but if you add up the replacement costs of all your clothes, electronics, and other household items, you’d be surprised how much it would cost to rebuild your life.  A good way to help get you going is to have a good renters insurance policy on your apartment.  A typical policy in Boston / Cambridge with ~$15,000 of coverage will cost you well under $400 a year (don’t quote me, but get a quote!), and most places let you pay monthly.  Remember to get a rider on top of that if you have any valuable items, such as jewelry or anything like that.  Ask your agent for info about this.

As for where to go for this, check out Yelp!.  I use a national company (Progressive) for my car insurance now due to my local place not being able to get close to their price after MA de-regulated their auto insurance market, but Progressive couldn’t touch the price I pay for my renters through my local agent.  My local agent is also wicked helpful and great in the customer service department.

Trust me when I say that this is one expense that is worth every penny in the long run.

I have never had to make a claim (knock on wood), so I don’t really know that procedure, or how you prove what you own &tc.  I need to do more research about that, and also how to properly document my belongings in case of the need to make a claim.

Your things aren’t the most important thing.  You have yourself, your loved ones, your pets, and everything else.  But at the end of the day, you need your clothes, and eventually, you will WANT to have all of your stuff.  Protect it.

FYI, also, use Mozy to do your data backups.  I’ve lost all my financial data before, and Mozy has saved my butt.  It’s free and worth it.  More on this subject later.

- Work-wise this week has been hella busy, with adding a new customer to our Citrix based solution, dealing with crazy shipping issues, installing a new server, getting Windows 7 up and running, and other various tasks.  I have not done everything I wanted to, but was nonetheless a very productive person.  There is never enough time.

Computer related linky:
- A great Lifehacker post on what to do with your PC while you are asleep at night.  This covers both the basic (backup, defrag), to the nifty (donating processing time to projects across the Internet).  Check it out.  I confess I am a Lifehacker addict.

- At home, we have added some long-awaited hatchet fish to the 29gal BioCube, but one has already died, and I am worried that the remaining two will fall to the same fate by the time I get home from work this evening.  I should never, ever buy fish from PetCo, but I was there to replace a dead pump on a 10gal tank (BTW PetCo has a great deal – you can get a Aqueon 10gal filter for $16.99 ($3 off sale this week), and then get a $5 mail-in rebate for it – bringing your total cost to $11.99 + tax + postage and patience for the rebate check to arrive – an AMAZING deal and I am going to stock up and get 1-2 more of these little filters).  ANYWAY, I was there to purchase a replacement filter and saw that PetCo had hatchet fish in stock!  I had been looking for these guys, and my usual LFS, Tropic Isle, in Framingham always seems to be out of them.  I had some a year ago and they had all passed away, and G’s mother really loves looking at these guys when she stopped over.  They also really added some vertical-ness to the tank as they tended to stay up top, while most of the rest of the fish were closer to the bottom of the tank.  At $3.59 each, I picked up three last night and integrated them in to the tank.  I had just added some reticulated hillstream loaches (LOONG story on how I managed to find these rare little guys) a couple of weeks ago and they were doing great, so I fully expected the hatchet fish to survive fine.  I should have listened to the weird dude at PetCo though when he said that they don’t often stock the fish, as they die easily.  So of COURSE one is dead now and I’ll be back at PetCo with the fish and a water sample tonight or tomorrow.  PITA.

- That was a lot of typing.  Anyway, other than the fish, this week saw me making some pizzas again.  I was short on time so I used the random dough they sell at Shaw’s.  Yeah, don’t do that.  It’s terrible.  I did manage to get the sauce recipe closer to the way I want it.  I’ll post a whole tutorial as soon as it’s finished, but it involves D.O.P. Certified San Marzano tomatoes, tomato paste, basil, oregano, a little extra virgin olive oil, diced garlic, some salt, and my awesome new Cuisinart immersion blender (stick blender). Wicked simple.  Pizzas went into the 550 degree oven onto the pizza stone (my poor stone is cracked but still works) (FYI heat up the stone for at least 30min in the oven before adding pizza) for 7-8mins a piece and they came out delicious.

- Besides the minor boiler / furnace issues in the apt. this week, it’s been a rather uneventful week at home.  Couple birthdays, some computer work, and a bit of TV.

- Online, I spent some time last night watching a 10 year old episode of Alton Brown’s ‘Good Eats’ where he gives some good advice on pizza making.  Here are the YouTube links to the episode:

- A cool blog that I just found this morning (thanks to Facebook), is GoodEater.Org.  It’s pretty interesting, topical, and is local to Boston.  Check it out.

- One of the first projects that I plan on undertaking when I FINALLY own my own home will be this DIY home computer for the kitchen.  It’s based on an LCD touch screen and a couple custom apps to link to the most common household tasks.  Also, you can link to home automation (probably overkill for me) as well as a bar code scanner to help with shopping.  (I absolutely LOVE the Amazon bar code scanner on my Droid and use it all the time!).  As a complete OCD nerd as a kid, I collected catalogs, and the Radio Shack one was my favorite.  I remember when they touted a computer for the home back in the late 80′s (Tandy 1000RS or something), with specific kitchen related apps.  Radio Shack also was a pioneer in the home automation department, making that stuff back in the 80′s as well.   Long story short, I can’t wait to build this kitchen computer.  Rock on.

- One thing that I have been spending a little more time on lately has been my houseplants.  I have a little baby orchid that I’d picked up recently, and have a spider plant and a couple others around the house, but have never had very good luck with my plants.  It’s always one thing or another, but I tend to kill them, especially during this cold, dark winter part of the year.  I found an interesting article that helps determine if a plant is truly dead, if it’s worth reviving, and if so, then how to revive it.  Check it out.

- Had some friends in from Rochester on Sunday and went to lunch with one of them over at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square.  Great place, but it has changed a little in the past few years.  I Yelped about it here.  Trying to get more Yelping done, as I’m a 2010 Elite member, same as last year.  I feel bad for not spending more time reviewing.  If you are not Yelping yet, you should be!

Other Updates: My photo365 project isn’t going as planned due to a lack of time and discipline.  I am going to attempt to clean out enough space in our back office at home over the weekend so that I can sit there and concentrate on a couple of these online-y type things for 1/2 hour each evening without fail.

]]> http://www.feedmittens.com/fmblog/2010/01/23/weekly-round-up/feed/ 0 http://www.feedmittens.com/fmblog/2009/12/05/lets-begin-again/ http://www.feedmittens.com/fmblog/2009/12/05/lets-begin-again/#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:20:31 +0000 feedmittens http://www.feedmittens.com/fmblog/?p=416 It was time.  After many, many years I have finally decided to retire my old alarm clock.  This thing has lasted me through countless years and apartments and has lived in three states.  It’s held steady through countless ‘Snooze‘-s, and still faithfully wakes me up to NPR’s Morning Edition daily.  The dual alarms and casette player seem aincent by today’s standard, but back in the day (I’m guessing mid 80′s?), it was state of the art and freaking awesome!

My new phone, a Motarola Droid, has a great alarm clock feature, and also has a great multimedia dock so I can set it up on the shelf above the bed (Fancy Ikea Malm with the sliding bookshelves on either side – wicked economical and useful) and use it as my morning wake up call.  It also grabs the temp. so I can tell what to wear in the morning without checking the Internets, the outside, or the other digital thermometer hidden somewhere across the apartment.

The only problem is that the Droid alarm clock only wakes up to ringtones, and I really want to try to get it to wake me up with music or something.  As with all these newfangled things, I’m pretty sure there is an app for that.

So, out with the old and in with the… whatever.  I fear change, so we’ll see how this goes.

Before:

And after:

After:

SO much better!

I have been wondering for a while if I could set price alerts on Amazon for items that I wanted to buy but only at a particular price point.  The short answer that I found was that no, I can’t do that directly on Amazon’s website.  That’s okay though, there is another service named WishListBuddy that helps with that.  You just sign up for the site (free), and add your Wish List to it, and you can set up price alerts for you Wish List items on Amazon.  I don’t want to pay more than $150 for the boxed set of The Wire, so we will see how this whole alert thing works.  I’m hopeful, though!

I figured it was a good thing to let go of because we can always buy a new (used) one for cheap if the need to PS2 game arises, and it was only going to lose value while sitting around the apartment.  It was taking up space, and as you will see by further banal posts, I’m trying to get rid of some of the various unused and unnecessary junk around the house.

Goodbye, PS2.  You got us through four seasons of Six Feet Under, two seasons of Carnivale, three seasons of Deadwood, and countless other random shows and movies

Postscript: Anyone want to buy an Atari 2600 system?  I’m selling mine – complete with games!

The movie is a little more layered than just a plain thriller, and that keeps it interesting. It gave me nightmares, and that’s not an easy thing to do. Anyway, rent it, buy it (hint – Amazon Link below!), NetFlix it, or borrow it from your neighbor. Watch it late it night with all the lights off and be prepared to scare the living crap out of your couchmate when you scream like a girl when surprised once or twice throughout the movie.

At first I thought I wouldn’t like the book at all. I bought it because it had local connections, and I not read anything by the author before. I was pleasantly surprised by the content, and very impressed with Junger’s simple style. I was kept interested from beginning to end, and finished this book over the course of two Saturdays.

The book is related to the Boston Strangler, and one murder in particular for which a different man was convicted. It takes place in and around where I live, and I enjoy books that I have a connection to. Also, the book is part of the author’s life, as Albert DeSalvo himself had been doing a construction job on his house in 1962 when he was a small child.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the Strangler case, anyone who was impressed by the writing style of “The Perfect Storm”, and anyone who wants an interesting look at the life of criminals, not just the Strangler.

Enter last summer. On a trip to Maine, I stopped by the outlet stores on the way home, and lo and behold I found a miracle: stemless wine glasses. Crate And Barrel had them at a really good price, and they are amazing. The Rate Of Breakage of our wine glasses has gone a ton, and, just as important, the Days Since Last Wine Spillage Chart number keeps growing! They don’t spill as easily and are much harder to break when they are tipped over. Plus, they’re wicked cheap to replace when they do break! At $1.95 each, how can I afford NOT to break a few of them every year?!

Link: http://www.crateandbarrel.com/family.aspx?c=130&f=9086