Greg @Greg@social.coop

Night before a (10 day) family trip with the trailer ritual of packing and organizing until 1:30 am.

For example, my battery carrier (short but square-ish hinged kid plastic bin for AA AAA, C, D, and GS13 batteries, including a good amount being rechargeables) is exceptionally provisioned and organized.

Time to try to let the mind's flywheel spin down.

I had about a month of weakness and installed birdsite and Reddit on my phone. It wasn't great for me nor others if I'm honest.

Last night before I meditated (getting back in the habit, thanks vacation) I removed both of those.

I kept Instagram for now. Pictures from my friends are cool.

And the horrid bookface. For now. Only because I'm posting things to get rid of to the parent groups. But it's a temptation I don't want so its days are numbered.

This is not a list of recommendations. There are better options for all of those, I'm sure.

Management: Using many SaaS products that are not your own to do you work.

We write the largest (by readership) CMS/multi-user authorship platform. However, on a frequent basis, to do my work, I use:
* GoogleDocs (obvs)
* AirTable (fancy spreadsheets, almost a decent roadmap)
* Adaptive (budgeting)
* Namely (HR)
* Mural (virtual post-its)

That's it for this week, at least.

I am up far too late futzing with financial data stuffz.

I just signed up for Clarity Money tonight to use their "search for recurring charges you might have forgot about" feature. It's "AI Powered!" *sigh*

I think it's not getting more than 30 days of back data so I guess I'll give it another month, but so far not great.

In light of the Equifax settlement etc, I did a quick survey of what credit reports I get access to through my various sell-my-data-I'm-the-product services:

SF Fire Credit Union (my home bank/credit union checking account)
* Experian FICO

Mint (Intuit)
* TransUnion Vantage Score

CreditKarma (???)
* TransUnion
* Equifax

Clarity Money (Goldman Sachs)
* Experian

I think I'm covered, yes?

You know, for being one of the largest and most technically advanced companies in history, Amazon sure can't make quality software.

Details don't matter, insert your own example. Mine has to do with a Kindle Fire my son has (ugh) and me trying to get Alexa on it so it can listen to music. Shouldn't be hard, right?

(spoiler: the Alexa app on it doesn't have the Alexa button to talk to it.... the entire point of the app and what it has on my phone.)

Dear Internet Service Providers,

I understand that consultancy firms prefer to build huge webapps like it's IE7-world still, but why would my session time out on a service availability/purchase search?

I'm 2 clicks away from making a purchase! Don't make me start over again!

Yours truly,

A Frustrated Internet Consumer

5am destroy my brain for effectively all productivity for the rest of the day. I'm going to take a shower.