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Reflecting on 18 Months of Environmentally Friendly Diapers

I first came across the idea of a more environmentally friendly diaper when I was living in Seattle and saw them in the aisle while going grocery shopping at the local market. There wasn’t much that I could do with the information at the time although I did buy a starter set for a friend of mine who was having a baby — that was the flushable gDiaper system, the one that my wife Elizabeth and I started using a little after we brought Chaim Yosef home from the hospital.

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Could You Come Up with a Thousand Dollars in Cash Today?

I was talking to a financial planner friend of mine the other day, and one of the standardized questions he asks clients and potential clients is if they had to, could they come up with a thousand dollars in one day for an emergency?

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The Stride Rite Shoe Review

At first there was a lot of hesitation in our son Chaim Yosef‘s movement when standing. He would hold onto the couch and slowly make his way over from one part to another. When he reached the end of the couch, however, he sat down and proceeded to crawl away. It went on this way for a long time until one day he apparently got sick of just toddling along and just started walking as though he had been walking for months with almost no stumbles or spills along the way. When I told my coworkers about this, the two that had children well past the age both asked me the same thing — had I purchased Stride Rite shoes for him? Specifically, the ones meant for toddlers who were just starting to walk. I answered that I had not and they insisted that I immediately buy him a pair.

My wife took young Chaim Yosef to the Stride Rite shoe store at the mall not too far from our home and when I got home from the office that evening proudly showed me her findings — R2D2 shoes. We are both big fans of the original Star Wars trilogy and of course adore little R2D2. The shoes close by Velcro and have the design of the body of R2D2 where it straps shut, with the head being the part that straps the shoe shut.

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Upgrading to a 200 gig Google Drive

This is my third Google Drive article in as many days, and I can’t help writing about the cloud storage service because I have been waiting so long for it to become a reality.  Last night, I did what I hoped I wouldn’t have to do for a long while:  I gave up my 80 gigs at $20 a year deal for 200 gigs for $9.99 a month!  Yes, I upgraded to a Google Drive is that four times larger than the available space on my MacBook Air SSD!

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The Lessons of Trayvon Martin

I have seen quite a few interesting websites in the past few weeks that have cropped up that have evidence of various kinds that Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead by a neighborhood watchman, was suspended from school and that he was a small time drug dealer. None of the websites I have seen thusfar have provided any reason why he, at the time that he was killed, was doing anything remotely threatening that would possibly cause a person to feel the need to shoot him in so-called self-defense.

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Clash Mobs and Infinity Blade 2

I’m a new owner of the retina display iPad, but I’m a bit of a latecomer to the Infinity Blade 2 game.  I’ve been playing the game for several days now and I’m having a delightful time leveling up, collecting all sorts of goodies and forging new gems from old gems.  The game looks beautifully and plays exceptionally fine in every aspect.

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Failure of Verizon LTE on the New iPad

I had high hopes for Verizon and their LTE network when I first unboxed my new iPad. I knew the LTE spec could be as high as 20Mbps down and 10Mbps up — but I’d settle for half of those numbers.  I’d read reports that people were getting LTE speeds in NYC of 10Mbps down and 6Mbps up and I’d love to be able to live that fast on the web.

Unfortunately, my initial tests in Jersey City were lousy, and yesterday, I did some informal LTE testing around Bryant Park in New York City.  You’d think at 6th Avenue and 40th Street you’d have a saturating LTE signal from Verizon.  Here are the results of my first, dismal, test:  Two Verizon LTE bars and 1.7Mbps down and 1.47Mpbs up.  Ugh.  That’s miserable 3G territory!

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Gordon Gekko Helps the FBI

When I was in eighth grade, there was a large poster hanging on one of the walls with the image of Michael Douglas on it and a long speech about greed. I had no idea what it was or why his face was on it but it was an interesting speech, albeit one that went against everything we were taught in school. The speech taught that greed was good and important. We were taught in school that greed was bad and that sharing with others was good and important.

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Game Change: The Aftermath

I spent my Saturday evening watching the HBO debut of — Game Change — the misanthropic story of how Sarah Palin almost ruined our nation by becoming Vice-President.

I did not appreciate Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin because she was too reserved and imitative instead of inhabitative.  I much prefer Tina Fey’s combative sendup of Ms. Palin because she better characterizes the manic wackiness that made Palin so ridiculous and so very dangerous — we laugh because we are terrified of what could have been.  Ed Harris as McCain was ordinary and not angry enough and not stiff enough to be convincing.  Woody Harrelson was magnificent.  He stole the show as campaign advisor Steve Schmidt.

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When Fluency No Longer Matters

There’s an infuriating move afoot in several major universities to “dumb down” graduation requirements by removing foreign language fluency from the core program of study.  Some schools incredibly want to make a mere semester of a foreign language an elective and not a hard requirement for earning a diploma.  When I was in college, we had to take four semesters of a foreign language in order to graduate.  Soon, that minimal forced fluency that formed many generations of students will no longer be important to a college education.

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