DailyGenesis.com

I am a big fan of iced tea. Ever since I gave up drinking soft drinks (and lost about ten pounds in a week as a result), unsweetened iced tea has been my beverage of choice.

Recently, however, I realized I was spending quite a bit of money purchasing iced tea at restaurants. They charge you the same amount for iced tea as they do for other beverages. So, it’s maybe $1.50-$2 for tea. When I added up how much I was spending per month on this infused water, I decided something had to change.

So, no more paying for iced tea at restaurants. Well, I’m not saying I’m perfect. Sometimes I break down and just have to get some. But, I can say I have drastically reduced my spending on tea.

Of course, one of the key factors in being able to avoid paying for tea is to have some good tea at home. If I can get my tea fix there, then I’m less tempted to purchase it while out. At home, we’ve been using decaffeinated tea for a long time. I guess I figured “why not?” You know, if you can avoid the caffeine, all the better. However, the taste of the tea hasn’t been enough to replace my tea purchasing tendencies.

So, I finally broke down and tried the caffeinated tea at home, and viola! This is what I’ve been missing in the homemade tea. Who knew that caffeine made such a difference in the taste and the strength? Well, probably everyone knew this except me but now I have discovered it and homemade caffeinated tea is well on its way to replacing my need for tea purchases. Woohoo!

A McDonald’s hamburger costs around 80 cents, but when my parents were young, I think they were around a dime or something. But nobody complains about the price of a McDonald’s hamburger. Prices rise. It happens.

People my age grew up with gas that was considered expensive any time it broke $1. Now, there are growing outcries as the price tops $3.50 (regular unleaded, OKC prices). True, this over 300% increase has happened largely over the past eight years. Such a rapid move up in prices on a product we all use is sure to get attention.

But here’s why I think gas prices aren’t really that high — because demand for gas hasn’t fallen off. Most reports have shown that throughout this dramatic move up, people have continued to consume gas at the same rates, and I’ve heard some speculate that oil will have to reach $150 per barrel before demand really lessens. I know I’m just an outsider looking at this from a limited perspective, but I also know that in my own life and the lives of most people I know, our driving habits haven’t truly changed much in reaction to the rising costs.

So if gas can increase 300% without seeing much change in demand, I don’t believe it’s overpriced. Rather, I believe it was artificially under-priced previously.

When demand falls, prices will stabilize. But for demand to fall, we’ll have to make some changes. We’ll have to start treating energy like any other budgeted item — separating what we “need” from what we “want” and managing our consumption accordingly. Businesses might have to do more web meetings to reduce their airfare costs. Families might have to recognize that every trip, even in town, has a price tag, then let that impact the number of trips taken.

How do you plan to adjust your energy consumption in response to the rising prices?

I use gmail on my own domain for my personal email running on dailygenesis.com.  At Element Fusion, we also use gmail for our company’s email solution.  So, needless to say, I am a big gmail user.

However, I’m not one of these guys who digs into every feature and facet of an application right off the bat.  I’d rather just figure things out as I go along, which probably costs me a good deal of productivity in the long run, but oh well.  So, anyway, I’ve never archived a single email message in gmail ever — until now.

I figured, “why archive?”  I mean, I can just keep everything in the inbox and search for what I need, right?  Why take that extra step of clicking the “archive” button.  Seems like a waste to me.

But, I finally found a good reason.  You see, when I have emails that represent things I need to respond to or things I need to do, I need a way to keep those in front of me.  Now, I could star them or label them, but that doesn’t make them pop out at me, so I prefer to mark them as “unread”.  That way, they look very different in the box.  But, here’s the problem.  Gmail doesn’t have a way (at least that I’ve found) to show only the unread messages in your inbox.  If you know of a way to do this, please let me know because it is this, and this alone, that has led me to get into archiving.

That said, now that I’ve started archiving, I’m not sure I can go back. Once I got the 5,000+ messages sent over to “all mail,” I was left with just the “unread” messages awaiting my attention in my inbox.  I marked them as read (which I can do now, since they are the only messages in my inbox), and there is something pretty satisfying about not having any “unread” messages.  It’s somehow more peaceful.  Also, there’s something nice about “archiving” a message when you are finished with it, as if to say, “farewell, message, I have no need of you anymore.”

So, I’m not sure that I’d go back, even if there is a way to view only the unread messages, which I’m pretty sure there is not and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

Why do people say “no pun intended” when, clearly, they do intend to make a pun. This happens a lot, but here’s a specific example I came across while reading a Seth Godin book:

“What about a Polaroid camera? Was your first exposure (no pun intended!) in a TV ad, or did you discover it when a friend showed you how cool the idea of an instant photograph was?”

– Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus

So, are we supposed to believe that Seth Godin was just typing along one day and happened to spit out that clever pun unintentionally, realized the crazy irony in what he just typed and therefore wanted to let us know that he didn’t really intend to make that pun, it just slipped out? Not likely.

It seems to me that the reason to say “no pun intended” is if you really didn’t intend to make a pun. This would seem to happen a lot more in speaking than in writing. If you are just talking in conversation and you happen to say something that you think back on and realize it was a pun, then that’s when you say “no pun intended.” You don’t say “no pun intended” when you did intend to make a pun.

Ok, enough said.

How long has it been since you’ve watched a live launch of the space shuttle? For me, I’m not sure if I ever actually watched one live. I know that sounds crazy, but as I think back on it, I can’t remember sitting and watching a live launch.

But this week, I was at the gym on a treadmill at 5:24pm central time on Wednesday, August 8th. I looked up at one of the five TVs in front of me and saw in the lower right hand corner a little bug that said “Launch at 6:36pm eastern.” That was just 12 minutes away. I only had 6 minutes of my regular treadmill program left, but I decided I’d stay on a little longer and catch the live launch.

I’m really glad I did. I mean, I got really excited about it. It was awesome, and I couldn’t even hear the sound so I was just reading the captioning. I watched the launch and the whole ascension all the way until the tank separated. I really got a good treadmill workout that day.

I don’t know, but there’s something pretty special about the space shuttle. There’s only three more years until they retire it. Try and catch a live launch sometime.

I’m a big fan of wordpress and I love the fact that there are so many freely available themes to choose from. But, recently I’ve actually tried for the first time to find a theme that could work for my blog until I have the chance to create a custom theme.

That’s when I discovered that while the plethora of wordpress themes are a good thing in theory, it can be a real challenge to find one that actually works well. Since I didn’t want to sift through the thousands of themes out there on my own, I started with this article on 83 beatiful wordpress themes from Smashing Magazine. But, as I sorted through the list, I grew more and more disappointed. I found a handful that I sort of liked, but then when I actually tried them out, I haven’t yet found one that I feel is just right.

I am pretty picky, I’ll admit, but why can’t all of these great wordpress themes “work”. So many of them have missing pieces like separate templates for “pages” instead of posts or improper handling of comments, or not including a spot for links. To really fine tune things, I think I’m just going to have to build one myself.

So, I’m back to the old default theme for now. It may be plain and overused, but it is full featured and works great on all counts. Hopefully a new custom theme will be coming soon.

UPDATE 4/30/2007 — Through a little HTML and CSS tweakage, I’ve now created my own custom Wordpress theme out of the Wordpress default theme. This will continue to evolve but for now, I feel better at least knowing it’s a little bit unique.