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I’ve been using Aio Wireless for a few months now and I like it very much. Cell service is every bit as good as AT&T for 1/2 the cost.

Send me an email and I’ll refer you to Aio Wireless. We will both get $25 from AioWireless. Write to me at Lee at Lee dat org.

That bit of musical cheese poetry comes from facebook and Charlotte!

In 2012 I took an Abnormal Psychology class at CCSF. My honors project was a response paper to the book  Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche  by Ethan Watters. I loved the book and highly recommend it. Here’s what I wrote about it.

Introduction

Ethan Watters uses four stories to paint a picture about how American culture has a powerful influence on how the rest of the world understands mental illness. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, American culture is shaping how these mental illnesses are perceived and treated.

Americans think about mental illness in a very particular way. This thinking depends heavily on biological, genetic, and environmental factors. But largely missing in this view are the cultural factors that shape the course of mental illness greatly. This isn’t how the ill person sees themselves but how their local culture sees them. For example, the stories told about the origins of mental illness, be it spirit possession or chemical imbalance, have a huge impact on mentally ill persons and can alter the outcome of their disease.

Continue reading ‘Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche’ »

When I got a resin filling for a cavity a few years ago, it hurt for 2 weeks after. I had the sensation that the filling was “too tight”. The dentist said he hadn’t ever heard of a filling hurting afterward and that I should schedule another visit. But before I could visit the pain faded.

Last week Megan experienced the same thing, but it hurt quite a lot. The dentist told her to take a lot of ibuprofen and call in a week. The pain has been slowly subsiding.

I’m here to tell you that resin fillings sometimes ache something awful when you first get them. Take some ibuprofen and don’t worry too much about it unless the pain is steady for a week.

If the pain becomes very specific and sharp, as though you know exactly what tooth is causing the pain, you might need a root canal instead of just having filling pain.

Virgin Mobile has great cell phone service in San Francisco but terrible service in the East Bay. So this week I got a new Moto X phone and Aio Wireless. If you consider switching to AioWireless, send me your name and email address (mine is Lee at Lee dat org) so I can officially refer you, we’ll both get $25.

After playing with it for 2 days, the Moto X phone is super-cool:

• Lightning fast
• a battery that mostly lasts all day (2 days it ran down to 30%, 1 day I made it a wifi hotspot for an hour and it was dead at 10pm)
• Google Now is awesome-creepy-cool. I can speak things to it. Last night I said, “Ok Google Now, set an alarm for 5 minutes” and it did! “I just said, “Ok Google Now, give me directions to El Cerrito Plaza BART Station by bus” and it did!

And with Aiowireless (instead of Virgin Mobile) I actually have cell phone service! So far I haven’t found any dead spots. Ask me again in a week. Aiowireless costs just $35/month for unlimited talk, text, and 500mb of wireless data. I’m excited to think it’s all going to work out well on the cost-coverage front!

I had a blast this past weekend teaching an Arduino intensive class called Workshop Weekend: Arduino with friends to a great group of students!

Here we are putting on a little play, demonstrating how an Arduino takes input from a potentiometer and then controls a light. I got to be the Arduino!

The class was held at Tech Liminal, a great co-working and technology space in Oakland, CA.

See more photos of the event!

I’ve been earning lots of airline miles and cash over the last several years with credit card offers. I often fly on miles alone. Here’s how.

Short form:

Every three months or so I sign up for a new credit card that offers me miles. I spend the money I need to on the card, then set the card in a drawer for a few months. Then I cancel the card. When I am looking to travel, I look in my little spreadsheet to see what miles I have, and fly for free!

Long form:

• When signing up, pretty much the only important benefit is the signing bonus. Look for credit cards that offer things like “25,000 miles if you spend $2,000 in the first 3 months”. Offers for 30k or 50k miles are even better.
• Keep track of your cards by putting notes on them. I print out a document in 6 point font and tape it to the card. Notes usually say something like “spend $2k by [date] for 25k miles. 2pts/$ on restaurants. Cancel by [date] or $95 fee” Then I leave a space to write how much I’ve spent on the card.
• Always pay off your credit card in full every month. Always. If you are tempted not to, stop reading right now.
• Keep 2 cards in your wallet, an Amex and a Visa/Mastercard.
• Cancel the card before they charge you a yearly fee. Most cards say something like “$95 per year, waived for the first year”. It is rarely  worth paying the yearly fee for the next year’s bonus like a free companion airline ticket or points-back.
• It mostly doesn’t matter what airline or offer you sign up for, you’ll find a way to use the miles eventually. Though I usually stay away from hotel miles because I rarely stay in them.
• To start with, just get one new card every six months. Once you start getting the hang of it, you can get a card every two months. Juggling too many cards can be complicated to manage. [July 2016 update: I was recently denied a Chase card because I had opened too many cards in the last two years, I had opened 10 cards so I guess that’s the limit… 10 cards every 2 years]
• Sign up for cards slowly, maybe a card every other month, and cancel your cards at the same rate. If you try to sign up for too many cards all at once, the companies will worry something funny is going on and they might deny you a new card.
• If you have a business, you can open cards under the business’ name and use more cards.
• Keep track of your earned miles from all your airlines and such in a document. When you have enough miles for a flight, use them!
• Sometimes you can spend your miles on Amazon.com points or trade them for cash. Those can be nice because they are easier to deal with and you probably only fly so much.
• Always consider the “exchange rate” of points to dollars when you are considering a card. Earning $0.01 per dollar is the “norm”, like on a “1% cash back” card. But when you pay attention to signing bonuses, you often earn $0.10 of value  per dollar. It’s like getting 10-15% off EVERYTHING.
• Where to find the best offers keeps changing. Google “credit card offers” and you’ll find lots of them. Here are some of my go-to spots: http://milecards.com/, http://www.flyertalk.com/, http://milevalue.com/, http://boardingarea.com/viewfromthewing/, http://www.hustlermoneyblog.com/,  http://www.mybanktracker.com/news/bank-deals/
• Keep track of all your cards in a document. Even the cancelled ones. It’s good to follow this stuff. And for most credit cards, you can sign up for the same offer 24 months after cancelling the old card.
• Hang onto one credit card (I keep a 2% cash back Amazon.com card) so you always know you have a card that works.
• Here are the credit card perks I pay attention to. All the other perks are usually not worth my time:
  • Signing bonus
  • Free first checked bag on an airline. Otherwise, checked luggage can cost $35/bag
  • Can I trade the miles into dollars at a reasonable rate? Trading 100 points into $1 at Amazon.com is great
  • 3% or better “cash back” might be worth paying attention to if it’s on something I spend money on
• If you are worried about your credit score, I’ve been doing this for more than five years and my FICO score was above 800 last time I checked.

So you are wondering if a cell phone network might have good service in your area. Here’s a hint: There are just a couple big companies (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) that have cell phone towers but there are many resellers. For example, the Sprint network is resold by several “mobile virtual network operators” like  Credo, Virgin, Boost, etc. Here’s a list of what cell phone companies use what networks. All the secondary companies (like Virgin Mobile selling the Sprint network) are reselling a wholesale product at wholesale prices. That means they cost less and, like when you walk into a rug remnant store, sometimes parts are missing. What will work for you? I have no idea. Shopping for a new phone has been a big PITA for me.  Caveat emptor!

In the US we’ve been doing the “2 year contract” thing with cell phones for a long time. There is a switch going on. Now the thing to do is:

1. spend $10-$500 on a smart phone that is unlocked
2. buy prepaid monthly service from your favorite provider

For example: instead of going to the AT&T store and getting a $100 Android phone and spending $100/month on a 2 year contract, you go to the Google Play Store and get a $400 Android phone and spend $50/month with Straight Talk. Note that over the course of 2 years, the second option costs $1600 instead of $2500. The downside is that most of the resellers have less friendly customer service than the “full service” providers.

Megan has an Equity Insta-Set wall clock. I just wanted to put the manual for it someplace. Here it is:

Equity Insta-Set 40222B clock manual

I want a cell phone that:

• Has service where I live, travel and work (North Berkeley hills, The BART train system, The Bay Area)
• Run from 16 hours (7am to 11pm) on a single charge (like me)
• Does smartphoney things including: email, calendar, web, view local documents (like PDF train schedules because sometimes the web sucks)
• Doesn’t cost $1,500 per year

It appears that my only option is getting an unlocked Droid Maxx on Aio Wireless. Droid Maxx claims to run 48 hours on a charge. Aio Wireless uses AT&T Mobility (AKA the old Cingular network) for good coverage for $40/month ($500/year)

It is silly that I seem to have so few options for a phone. What am I missing?

On the matter of battery life, every cell phone rep I’ve asked (at least 7 now) has told me that their personal cell phones run until about 7pm if they use them during the day, and they all seem to be OK with that. After my phone died unexpectedly one evening, leaving me stranded, I knew that a dead phone completely sucks. I’m not telling the truth: one AT&T rep told me that all of her phones run well into the night, every night, apparently due to her own special pixie dust.

Virgin Mobile is inexpensive but has crap coverage everywhere in the east bay (their coverage map lies like a rug)