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It’s been a while, but last week I made an appointment to give blood today, so I went and was pleasantly surprised when they gave me a coupon for a free pound of coffee! Did I mention I LOVE coffee? Now, it’s Dunkin’ Donuts, and not Tim Hortons, but, that’s OK - still good stuff.

If you can, go to the Red Cross and give blood! Every 2 seconds, someone in the US is in need of blood. Blood cannot be made in a factory, so the only way for doctors to have blood ready for emergencies is from donations. There are a bunch of other reasons to give, too.

The one that isn’t mentioned is that it may reduce heart disease, especially in men. The blood in your body has been sitting around for a while - get rid of it and make some clean, healthy, strong, new blood.

It only hurts a little, and you get cookies when you’re done.

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

My notes from The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

The book opens with an overkill of stats & figures which I feel could have been summarized more. The lengthy opening does, however, provide some key tidbits of information, starting with Wealth.

• Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend
• Wealth is the result of hard work, perseverance, planning and self-discipline.
• Wealth is accumulated by minimizing taxable income, and maximizing non-taxable (unrealized) income

So who is wealthy? Does it require $x in the bank? If you’re making $5mm / year and have $1mm in the bank, are you wealthy? If you’re making $25k / year and have $300,000 in the bank, are you wealthy? See the difference? The magic number isn’t the same for everyone, but the formula generally is.

Wealthy = (age * annual income) / 10

So take a 30-year old making $65k / year. You’d be considered “wealthy” if your net worth (assets - liabilities) is greater than or equal to $195,000.

Your time, energy, and money must be allocated efficiently.

There’s this analogy about joggers. Goes something like:

Those who do not need to run do so, and that is why they do not need to run

Related to finance, those who do not have to worry about money spend time managing it, while those who worry about money do not manage it. How much time do the “wealthy” spend on managing their finances? On average, 8-1/2 hours per month.

There’s a long chapter about buying cars, which I mostly skipped. The gist of it is to buy a 2-3 year old car, pay cash, and keep it for a long time.

I also skipped the chapter about how to target the rich and what services they do spend money on, and only skimmed the chapter about businesses the rich own. Those really didn’t apply to me. In fact, the rest of the book I just skimmed through. I lost interest, as it was all about habits & demographics of existing millionaires.

If you’re looking to build wealth, this book is not for you. If you’re looking to identify and market to millionaires in America, then you’ll get something out of the book.

I’m just happy I got it from the library, and saved the money.

This entry was posted by Eric on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Only 3 weeks to go! Lost’s 4th season starts on January 31, and I can’t wait!

There’s a lot going on with lost, so to help you remember, here’s a recap of the first 3 seasons, in 8 minutes, 15 seconds:

Of course, that’s not enough for me, so I’m watching seasons 1, 2 and 3 before season 4 starts. I have Season 1 and Season 2 on DVD, but I don’t own Season 3 on DVD. However, I do have Season 3 from iTunes - so I’ll either watch it on my PC, or on my iPod. If I had an iPod RCA cable, then I could watch it on my TV. Maybe I’ll check eBay for that.

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under LOST. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Boy, this weather is nice. While I miss skiing and I’d like to get Scout out skijoring with the kids on a sled (sled-joring?), it’s nice to open the windows and let some fresh air in. It’s just about 60° now (58.8, to be exact) and expected to peak today, before dropping back into the 30’s next weekend.

It’s also nice to actually be able to OPEN the windows! We’ve had windows opened that haven’t been opened since we moved into the house! The new windows are great

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 9:58 am and is filed under Outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I think our house is haunted. Well, maybe not haunted, since I relate “haunted” to mean scary and violent poltergeist stuff. But there’s something else in the house with us.

For a while now, I didn’t say anything to Laura about it, since I thought she’d think I was nuts. Then one day we brought it up, and she has seen this thing, too! She saw it in the reflection of the window while doing dishes one day. We’ve both seen it on the stairs.

One day, we (Laura, Becca and I) were watching TV and Becca quickly looked at the stairs and said, “who was that?” Laura and I looked at each other, as she obviously saw our ghost. Becca went up the stairs to look, but there was nothing there. Morgan was in bed, Jason in the bathtub.

On Christmas, I snapped this photo, from the couches looking towards the stairs:

You can see in the upper-right a strange orb. Could this be our spirit?

How do we know who this spirit is? How can we talk to it?

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I’ve got a big problem with John Chow. He’s a casualty of my information diet, but Steve and I always joke about his site. First of all, he admits:

I Make Money Online by Telling People How Much Money I Make Online

Well, good for him. For some reason, he’s got almost 15,000 regular readers of his blog. These people love reading about networks that John Chow finds with a 2-tier affiliate system, so he refers them to the network, and when they do the hard work, he makes money, or he writes about what he had for lunch that day. In case you were wondering, here’s my lunch today:

Someday, these readers will wake up and realize the only reason John Chow makes money online is because of them. He’s built up an army of bloggers, affiliates and wanna-bes to make money for him. And as more signup for the Chow army, he can charge more for his reviews and ads.

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.