Category Archives: Life Management

Ways and means to make life easier to manage

Globalization and Why Generation Y is Unhappy

This is a cross post from my other blog, Student Pro Tips

This is about saving money.

The Boomers had it uniquely good. If you worked in the United States from 1950 to 1980, you made especially good money. If you invested, you got especially good returns. This convinced people that working and saving at a modest rate was all it takes to have a comfortably affluent life.

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Bachelor Chow, revisited

Bachelor Chow:
1 bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats
6oz light yogurt
$1.22 per meal

Breakdown:
Miniwheats: $27 for 4x18oz (0.37 /oz), 1 Serving = 24 biscuits = 2 ounces or $0.74, 200 calories; Yogurt: $2.88 6x6oz (0.08 /oz), 1 Serving = 1 container = 6 ounces or $0.48, 90 calories. Sub total: 1 serving, 290 calories, $1.22 per serving
Daily total: 7 servings, 2030 calories, $8.54

Ultra-Cheap Bachelor Chow:
1 cup rehydrated dry milk
1.4 ounces multigrain hot cereal
$0.52 per meal

Breakdown: 1 cup rehydrated dry milk has 80 calories, requires no refrigeration, and costs $0.29/cup. Multigrain hot cereal costs 2.92/lb or 0.23 per 1.4 oz serving with 133 calories. So total 213 calories per serving and $0.52 per meal for a final cost of about $5 per day. You just need hot water.

Nokia, Goosync, Google, Thunderbird: a winning combination

I use an unlocked Nokia phone, the Supernova 7310. I like the phone. It will act as a modem if I want to get online in a crunch, and supposedly it will work in Ukraine, which is high on my agenda to try out. Having internet access there is important and sometimes painful to get.

But the phone’s compatibility with linux is limited to file transfer, and I want to sync its internal calendar with my Firefox/Lightning calendar. What to do?

I love Thunderbird/Lightning. It’s the Sunbird calendar ported as a add-on to Thunderbird, a slick email client. It works great in linux and it’s quite fast. If you use the google calendar add-on (a separate download available from this link) it can do bi-directional syncing with any google calendar. Then, to get the information too and from the phone, you need to sync the phone with google. There are a number of ways, but I found Goosync to be my favorite. It has compatibilities for many phones.

That’s a “bucket” I can trust. If I put it in anywhere (via Google, phone, or at my PC) it shows up everywhere.