Google just tossed a (good for us kind of) bomb at other cloud services.  $1.99 per month for 100GB (previously $4.99) and $9.99 per month for 1TB (previously $49.99).

I’m looking forward to the return of Mad Men.  Speaking of which, here is a (new) review of my favorite episode so far.

One of the 3,000 reasons why Reddit is the best thing about the internet is IaMA, the place where people- many of the famous and/or interesting- answer questions.  One guy always asks the same question, and it is a great one (I’ve started asking it at important work meetings when someone goes on too long about something and then asks for questions).  “Would you rather fight one horse-size duck or a hundred duck size horses?”  Arnold Schwarzenegger gives a video demonstration (and confirms that he’s a pretty cool dude).

I wonder if Dave and Mike agree with this ranking of Australian breakfast cereal?  I just want a Vegemite sandwich.  Served by a strange lady who makes me nervous.

Who needs zombies?  Here is the real proof that the apocalypse is upon us.

Speaking of Reddit and IaMAs, Arthur Chu of Jeopardy fame is doing a very interesting one right now.

You’re only as old as you feel.

Agreed.  One of my favorite movies.  Along with Broken Flowers.

Guess I was the only one who “don’t need [his music player] around anyhow.”  Speaking of music, looks like my next Tundra could, in fact, have CarPlay.

Interesting read on how the Target data theft went down.

OK, I have a new favorite podcast.  Mac Power Users.  If you have a Mac, you need to listen to all of these.  I’ve been binge listening.  If you still use a Windows machine, you also need to listen to all of these to help you understand what you’re missing.  Here’s the feed and the iTunes link.

This Flappy Bird cat is doing a great job of marketing.  Seriously.  Yes, I tried it.  My high score was 1, and it took me several attempts to set it.

All I can say is anyone who actually prefers iTunes radio to Spotify hasn’t used Spotify.  I love Apple, but pretty much everything about iTunes sucks.  If you like good music, here’s my primary curated Spotify playlist.

That’s not just the best holiday movie ever made, it’s also chock full of socialist dogma!

How to get rid of telemarketers.  Some dude called me the other day wanting to recommend stocks for me to buy.  Rather than engage him on the very legitimate question of who would buy a stock just because some stranger called him on the phone, I took a new approach.  He said he wanted to send me some “market recommendations.”  I said “what sort of market are we talking about?”  He said “the stock market?”  I asked “you mean cattle and pork and whatnot?”  He said “no, stocks of companies.”  I said “nah, man, that’s just for rich people.”  He actually laughed and said goodbye.  True story.

World Science U makes me happy.

Looks like Mac users will finally get updated Microsoft Office apps this year.  I really like Pages, but the corporate world runs on Office.

Confessions of a Disgraced Crowdfunder.  I backed Instacube, and gave up on getting one many months ago.  Even if I do eventually get one, there’s little chance it won’t seem dated from the first use.  I don’t care anymore, but the excuse that “the product hasn’t shipped yet because the reality of hardware development is that hardware is hard,” is a load of crap.  Instacube sought $250K, and raised over $620K.  That was enough money to overcome a lot of “hard.”  Having said that, I have obtained a lot of really cool stuff via Kickstarter.  I’m sold on the platform, just not the excuses.

The only people who don’t want to kill all the feral hogs are city-dwelling yuppies who think they’re all like Babe.  They’re not.  They are extremely disruptive.  Here’s an app to help destroy as many as possible.

iOS 7.1 is here.  Macworld has more.  I can’t wait to use CarPlay.

On the other hand, Neil can keep his iPod substitute.  An iPhone man don’t need him around anyhow.

Interesting read on that kid who killed all those babies in Connecticut.  Even if that symphony of warning bells could have been missed or misinterpreted, to add a slew of accessible guns to the mix is stunningly idiotic.  But it’s not about gun control, either.  It comes down to obsession.  Guns are tools.  Like pliers.  Use guns and pliers for reasonable purposes?  No problem.  Obsess over guns or pliers, or cats?  Crazy.  Fill your house up with crazy people and accessible guns?  Insane.  This was a tragic storm of bad decisions.

Well, there are 29 places I still need to go see.  Lots of cool places on that list.

This is crap, because the implication is that divine intervention put those other people on there.  Again, I love God.  I just dislike about 80% of what human beings say about God.

The other day I posted the first photo I ever uploaded to Flickr.  Here’s the first digital photo I ever took.

30 Cult Movies Everyone Must See.  I’ve seen 17 of them.  Altered States and the Holy Grail are two of my all-time favorites.  The Warriors, Lost Boys, Night of the Living Dead and Rocky Horror are excellent.  Eraserhead is horrible.  People only claim to like it because somewhere along the way, it became cool to claim to like it.  Where is The Belly of an Architect on this list?

Speaking of awesome movies (the first one was on the list above), Sharknado 2 will be here on July 31!

Yet another reason why I dislike Bank of America.

Thank goodness for this.  Otherwise, my entire family (including me) would be goners.

Good.  I may lose my liberal card for saying this, but it’s a horse race between crazy people who harm kids and death row inmates for the group I have the least sympathy for.  Stated another way, were I to list the ways we should spend our time improving the earth, there would be a lot of things above helping those folks.

OK, some of these are pretty funny.

The bad news on retirement.  On top of that, I think 300 is too low.

I’ve talked about flow before.  The related podcast is very, very interesting.  I have been aware of this concept/experience for a long time.  It’s good to see someone study it.  Here’s the podcast.

10 URLs That Every Google User Should Know.  Unfortunately, the one I want to use the most doesn’t work with Google Apps: “You are trying to access Inactive Account Manager from a Google Apps Account. Inactive Account Manager is only available for Google Accounts.”

I just love WordPress.Com (where this blog is hosted).  Yesterday, Getty Images makes a lot of images free.  Today, WordPress enables easy embedding.

I can’t believe I’d never heard of sonder before.  It’s early, but I think this might be important.  I’ve been thinking about it.

sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.  (via Reddit, with what may be a really good example)

I think maybe it’s important to be a good extra.

A friend lost her husband this week.  I saw this song on Reddit.  For all that have gone…

One of the things I have learned over the years is that if I buy a stock, the price will go down.  If I love an application, someone will kill it.  So when I started to really enjoy and rely on Zite, it was only a matter of time.  Flipboard is OK, but there’s something about having my preferred application nuked in the hopes of forcing me to become a Flipboard user that rubs me the wrong way.  TechHive has more on the likely results of this acquisition.

While I will miss Zite, I wouldn’t miss optical drives at all.  I can’t remember the last time I loaded a DVD on a computer or a DVD player.

The SAT, like the times, is a changin’.

Speaking of things that I (at least used to) love whose days may be numbered.  I ported my mobile number to Google Voice years ago.  Google doesn’t seem to be doing much with it, which is never a good sign.  I also find that I use Google Voice less and less, because it still doesn’t fully integrate with my iPhone.  Would I do it again?  Probably not.

Run, hide, fight.  Sadly necessary advice.

16 Family Feud Answers That Caused Steve Harvey To Lose Faith In Humanity.  Cupine was priceless.

“For those who disagree, I can only say that I am doing what I think is right. In the final analysis, I had to make a decision that I could be proud of — for me now, and my daughters’ judgment in the future.”  I wish more politicians would think and act this way.

That was the first photo I uploaded to Flickr, on June 20, 2005 at 11.23 p.m. CST.  Anyone else remember my failed Flickr experiment?

OK, so you think you’re not tech-savvy enough?  Trust me, you’re good.  27% of respondents identified “gigabyte” as an insect commonly found in South America.

June Squibb was excellent in Nebraska.  Highly recommended.

Which TV series from today will stand the test of time?  Assuming today means the last 10 years or so, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and (at least season 1 of) True Detective.

10 mysteries of the Bible that we’ll never solve.  Well, John Prine solved one of them.

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I finished the new Kent Haruf novel, Benediction, last night.  I really like rural literature and Kent is a great writer.  Having said that, this is an easy, but pretty shallow, read.  It’s an OK way to kill a few hours, but it’s not his best.

TV Streaming Head-to-Head: Netflix vs Hulu vs Amazon Prime.  I haven’t tried Hulu in a while, but when I did, the ads were an immediate deal-stopper for me.

Free Up Bathroom Counter Space with Mounted Mason Jars.  This is really cool.  I’m going to do this, soon.

It’s probably piling on (given my numerous earlier rants), but why are people still trying to make us take Bitcoin seriously?  I’ll tell you the only logical reason I can think of- because they think they can make money off of it.

Living off the land, 1950’s style.

I tried IFTTT a while ago, sort of forgot about and, then recently rediscovered it and have become a heavy user.  Lifehacker has some good uses for IFTTT and RSS feeds.

Here’s a list of documentaries someone doesn’t want you to see.

I want to be clear about this.  I am very close to either dumping satellite TV altogether or paring back to basic channels only, and using the huge savings that would result to buy the things I want to see on demand, via Apple TV, etc.  The minute I can’t fast forward through commercials, I will.  I promise.  I don’t like hate- the word or the emotion, but I frickin’ hate anyone who wants to force me to endure ads of any kind.

Giant snake vs crocodile.  SyFy movie or news story?

ETA looks like a useful app.  If I left the farm for home right now, it says it would take me 1 hour and 49 minutes.  In reality, it would take about 1 hour and 20 minutes.  The problem with these driving time apps is that they don’t have an accurate way to estimate driving speed.  In low traffic conditions, people drive varying amounts over the speed limit.

When did Christians become so un-Christian-like?  I believe in God and pray every day.  But if I were to mount an argument for atheism, it would be the fact that God has not struck down all these jackasses that purport to speak for Him.  At the rate we’re going, religion is going to turn more people away from God than all the sex, drugs and rock and roll combined.

I’m doing my part to give squirrels the opportunity to show their kindness and adopt orphans, by shooting the ones who repeatedly raid my bird feeders.  So far, I’m only using a BB gun, but if a little pain in the butt doesn’t work, I will move to the .22.  The bigger problem is the raccoons who empty even the most squirrel-proof feeders in the middle of the night.