Jason tagged me. I hate this stuff, so I’ll just answer and spare others. Here’s the deal:

• Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
• Find page 123
• Find the first 5 sentences
• Post the next 3 sentences
• Tag 5 people sorry, no

The book is The 80/20 Principle. The following text is pulled from a chapter on the ways in which the principle relates to negotiation:

Similarly, they respond to concessions, even trivial ones.
(new paragraph)
Twenty percent or fewer of the points at issue will comprise over 80 percent of the value of the disputed territory. You may think this will be obvious to both sides, but people like to win points, even completely unimportant ones.

Amy and I were on a cruise to the Bahamas last week. I had to go for a business trip, and she got to tag along. We’d never been on a cruise before and it was pretty fun. ‘Course I had to sit in hours and hours of meetings, but there was still plenty of time for hanging out in the sun. Interesting stuff:

• watched the space shuttle take off
• at three lobster tails the first night on board
• inadvertently swam with a (nurse?) shark
• watched a drug bust unfold on a boat in Nassau
• saw a massive lightning storm at sea
• rescued a fishing boat with a bum motor

I have been, and remain, a fan of Dennis Kucinich. A Kucinich presidency would be truly revolutionary, which is why he’ll never get the job. So these days I’ve become a fan of Barack Obama. Today I encountered a great video by Larry Lessig on why he supports Obama. Take the 18 minutes and 32 seconds to absorb it.

Tru’s been digging on Star Wars videos on YouTube lately. That’s fine, but he’s also figuring out the address bar in a browser and just kinda being the 6-year old information sponge he’s supposed to be. All good. But a little worrisome since you never know what he’ll come across (no, I don’t sit right next to him the entire time he’s on the computer).

Amy and I’ve been kinda wondering out loud when/if we should get some kind of ‘kid safe’ software or whatever. Instead, I ran across the coolest alternative ever. And it’s not just for kid safety, either.

OpenDNS is a free service that basically routes your Internet connection through their servers. The benefits to this are multi-fold:

• Super easy adult site blocking
• Phishing protection using PhishTank (which they also operate)
• Domain correction (if you enter craigslist.og, it’ll correct it to craigslist.org)
• Domain whitelisting (in case you want to include a site that’s otherwise blocked)
• Domain blocking…you can even add a custom message about why it’s blocked
• Network shortcuts…this is really cool. If you’re on our wifi and you type ‘bh’ (without quotes) into a browser address bar, you’ll be taken to http://bikehacks.com. You can set up as many of these shortcuts as you like. They’ll work on all the computers on your network.

And there are lots of options behind all that stuff, which makes it super flexible in terms of usage.

I’m really stoked about this. I know my kids are protected, and since we leave our wifi open for our neighbors, I know their kids are protected too. Setup is totally easy–they’ve got great tutorials for a ton of different routers. Our basic fios router was in their list and I pretty much followed the instructions word for word. Had to change settings on both the wifi and the Ethernet parts, but the whole setup took about 5 minutes, tops. Easy.

Just in case you find yourself in a tight spot without your neti pot….

27

Yeah, I just can’t help myself. Yesterday Matt and I started a new blog that I’m super exited about: BikeHacks.com. This’ll be a relatively high-activity blog since we’re aiming at a minimum of two posts per week. That’s not high by blog network standards (usually 5-9 per week), but it feels like a bit of a stretch to us. But we’re stoked and we’ve got a lot of ideas for content. Should be super fun, and I’m going all-out in terms of tweaking and optimizing it for search engines. We’re definitely going to be aiming for high traffic for the blog, and then we’ll apply some monetization stuff to it. Time to make some coffee money again!