Frug Rants

Mo Stuff = Mo Problems

Separate happiness from owning stuff

by Brad Beckstrom

You would think someone who writes about living lean and minimalism would not have a stuff problem. Think again.

It’s the start of a holiday weekend and I just spent a over an hour on the phone with Apple support. Turns out I have too much stuff on one of my two computers. I have too many extensions on my Chrome browser. One of these extensions, or other apps, are creating issues, causing the browser then the computer, to hangup.

Apple was nice enough to help me with my out of warranty iMac. I’d imagine there’s some reason for this. Maybe they looked at my support file and got a glimpse of how many Powerbooks, Macs, iPhones and iPads I’ve purchased over the years. I’m embarrassed by this number. When you add in my wife SuperK, my two kids, and various ventures I’ve purchased Macs for, I am very embarrassed by this number.

Mo Stuff = Mo Problems

See the problem is not really the Mac, it’s the number of Macs and the number of apps. Mo Stuff = Mo Problems. Rapper Notorious B.I.G. famously said Mo Money = Mo Problems and things did not end well for him. Shot dead, likely due to some money problems with other rappers. [Read more…] about Mo Stuff = Mo Problems

The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

05/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

Here’s why you should dump satellite radio and chucklehead talk radio shows and start streaming podcasts.

Podcast-a-palooza

I remember when podcasting first got hot. It was around 2006 and people were discovering podcasts via iTunes, listening on their iPods. Podcasting had another growth spurt when the iPhone came out, soon to be followed by Android phones, and lots of options for listening to podcasts on all types of devices. But by 2011, listening to podcasts started to seem dated and there was less buzz about new podcasts.

At the same time, there were lots of new options like streaming radio apps, tunein and iheartradio as well as video blogs. People were busy looking at their phones instead of listening to them. Podcasts didn’t go away, but they stopped growing.

The Resurgence

About a year ago, things started to change. [Read more…] about The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

Cloud – You make my heart bleed.

04/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

All of your important data is already in the cloud, so embrace the danger.

The danger includes all kinds of things, bank and retailer screw ups, social media profile hacks, some sort of monthly bug or attack like last week’s Heartbleed. My prediction, in the future they’re going to start naming these digital bug storms like hurricanes.

A few months ago, I was trying out the much-maligned healthcare.gov site, mostly out of curiosity and to make sure we’re getting decent rates on our healthcare costs. I waited until all the initial complaints about the website had died down to give it shot. The experience wasn’t bad, but as I was putting in my entire family’s Social Security numbers, and a ton of other information, I realized just how much data we all have in the cloud.

If you have a bank account, use a credit card, email or file your taxes electronically, most of your important data is already in the cloud. What is the cloud? It’s a server in a data center, most likely secured behind a steel door guarded by an entry-level member of the nightwatchman community. It really doesn’t matter how many steel doors or security guards they have because that’s not how people break into these facilities. The real security guards are the coders and often former hackers these companies hire to keep bad guys, bugs, and viruses from visiting the server from the other side of the world.

When the term cloud computing became popular many of the major hosting companies just added the word cloud to a lot of their existing server packages – “boom” we are in the cloud and so are you. We’ve all been in the cloud for a while. The cloud is not going anywhere, sort of like this past winter.

You can’t hide from the cloud

There are entire books written about becoming digitally invisible and they have very little to do with deleting your social media profiles. Many of them have titles like “how to disappear” and involve living on a deserted island and spear fishing for survival. Most of the people who are reading these books have much bigger problems than someone snagging their debit card number and pin from the Target database. [Read more…] about Cloud – You make my heart bleed.

Individual Containers of Crap

11/13 by The Frug 2 Comments

A Frug Rant about Doubling Down on Duplication

By Brad Beckstrom

Okay, once a while I just need to do a quick rant to get something off my chest. In this case, about 40 plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner and body wash.

Growing up, we had two types of shampoo (Pert and Head & Shoulders) and a bar of soap, usually Dial, or if someone got fancy, “Irish Spring.” In college, I had a roommate who shaved, showered and shampooed with one bar of soap. He was ahead of his time.

Alas, my simple living college days are over. With a teenager, a tween and my lovely wife SuperK, the shampoo, conditioner, body wash situation has gotten a bit out of control. I did a quick count including our three bathrooms and various other cabinets around the house. Grand total: 41 bottles of shampoo, conditioner, face soap, and body wash.

We may be uniquely ridiculous in this regard but I was so fascinated, I needed to share it. Turns out, with all the different flavors of body washes and rinses and shampoos, the kids and SuperK have been trying certain products out, then not finishing the less popular ones.

Looks like a lot of these bottles just get chucked in cabinets or put into the rarely used basement bathroom. I guess we’re hoping some guest will love one of the seven or eight bottles of three-year-old shampoos that we’ve displayed for them. There was also a dog shampoo in the basement bathroom. I did not include that in the total count.

I have no problem with grooming but we need to really work on using up all of these individual containers of crap. I tried setting an example by complaining to the family about it at dinner, letting them know that I was personally using up all of their unused soap. That was until I tried using some of my son’s AXE Shock Body Wash Gel. It had pieces of mint scrubbing crystals in it and smelled like a very strong industrial cleaner. It made my eyes water and burned hair out of my sinuses.

I also bought some nice soap and tried to explain that this was a better way to keep clean and get rid of all these plastic bottles. They just end up having a third of the gel/crap stuck to the bottom, unused or in some landfill somewhere. This suggestion was met with outrage and angry stares.

Well, if it was up to me, I think an ideal solution would be something like this:

Yea, it’s called MAN 2.0. It’s a combination body, shampoo and shaving bar. I guess once we use up the other 40 containers I’ll give this a shot.

I’m not going to kid myself and think that we’ll end up with my ideal solution. However, I am hoping to go from 40 to about six bottles total.

Frug rules for containing shampoo gluttony

Don’t buy any more shampoo until the current three year inventory is used up.
When you must buy shampoo, soap etc. open it up in the store and smell it, they won’t mind. You are a great customer.
Replace all body wash with a quality bar of soap.
Find a good combo shampoo conditioner.

That’s it, end of rant. Look for future rants on other types of individual containers of crap. I’m happy to have problems as insignificant as these, and share my futile attempts to save the planet.