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Easter’s here… and that means coloring eggs. I always liked eating hard boiled eggs, but never liked removing the shell. It always seemed that it’d crack into a thousand little pieces, and it’d take me 10 minutes to clean an egg that takes me < 1 minute to eat.

Then I started steaming my eggs, and what a difference! We have an Oster Food Steamer which comes with an egg tray just for this purpose (we all know eggs come in dozens, so why does the egg tray hold 8???). Just fill the bottom with water and set the timer for about 13 minutes. Let the eggs cool a bit then put back in the ‘fridge. When you’re ready for an egg, crack all the way around the middle (around the equator of the egg) and the shell practically pulls off in 2 big pieces.

So there you have it: steam your eggs, and you won’t be swearing at thousands of pieces of eggshell this Easter.

This entry was posted by Eric on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

DirecTV emailed me this morning that Across the Universe was on PPV this weekend, so I snagged it right away. The Across the Universe soundtrack is probably one of my most listened-to albums in iTunes, and the only thing better than the soundtrack is the movie itself.

Even Becca, laying on the couch next to me with a fever, going in & out of sleep, seemed to like it. Some parts were a little psychedelic, but being such a huge Beatles fan, I love this movie.

If you’ve got DirecTV & $4, you won’t be sorry for buying this movie. Now if I can only get the DVD burner to work again, so I can get it off the Tivo (then rip the DVD and compress it for my iPod).

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I caught Human Body: Pushing the Limits on the Discovery Channel the other night, and it was an amazing series. I hope it’s on again soon, so I can Tivo & watch it once more. There are 4 episodes: Sight, Strength, Sensation and Brain Power. I think I only caught Strength and Brain Power, but based on those the others must be good, too.

I have to admit when switching from live athletes / actors to the CGI models, where they took the skin off to show how the muscles worked, was pretty freaky. Probably because these things w/ no skin still had eyes.

But there’s a lot I learned about strength, muscles and bones. Like how bones are the strongest naturally created material on Earth, yet they can flex to avoid being broken. Or that when we use all of our strength, we’re only using about 1/3 of the muscle’s true power, but in life-or-death situations, our mind can override that and allow us to use the whole muscle.

If you see it in your TV listings, be sure to record it.

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 3:57 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.

I’ve really wanted to go running again lately, and after a some emails were exchanged yesterday, a few of the group I workout with decided we’d get together in the morning. They planned on going pretty far (in my book), so I was going to turn around mid-run and keep it short. But I felt great at my pre-determined turn-around point and decided to keep going. And going. And going.

When done, I had run for nearly 1-1/2 hours, covered over 8-1/2 miles, and used up 1,160 calories!

The furthest I had consecutively run before that was the 5-mile Turkey Trot. Even with the Turkey Trot’s warm-up & cool-down, it didn’t total 8-1/2 miles. Needless to say, I was quite tired and my legs are killing me. But it felt GREAT to get out & run again. Let’s hope the weather keeps improving so I can get out more often.

I’m looking forward to next Saturday & a chance to run again.

This entry was posted by Eric on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 5:15 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.

When looking to reduce our expenses, the one thing that really bugged me was our phone bill. With Verizon, we were paying (on average) $48.72 per month for simple phone service! I’d been using Vonage for my business lines, and after switching from DSL to cable, have had no problems what-so-ever. So I decided to move our home line to Vonage as well.

We started with the unlimited plan ($24.99 per month), as I didn’t know what our usage would be. But after 3 months, I was easily able to switch down to the lower plan as were were using approximately 300 minutes per month (on average only using 58% of the lower limits). Changing plans cost me $11, but I’ll recoup that after a couple months at the new rate. For 500 minutes, the cost is only $14.99 per month (turns out to be $20.62 after taxes & fees, and fees for paying taxes and taxes on the fees).

So I’m saving $28.10 per month, or $337.20 per year on my phone bill! The switch was very easy, especially since all of our phones run off of 1 base unit. The hardest part of the switch was getting our 3 DVRs plugged in properly.

Click here and receive up to 2 months free when you switch to Vonage!

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

If you’re running AdWords ads, I’m sure you’ve searched for your own keywords to see your ad in the live results. But in doing this, you’re increasing your impressions and lowering your CTR. Google has provided a nice feature which allows you to “preview” search results and see your actual ad on-screen, without affecting your CTR. When you’re using this preview, you’ll see:

You can’t click on any results, of course, but it’s still quite useful. Since I use this quite often, I decided to make a search plugin for Firefox & IE to make the Google preview more readily available.

Click here to install the Google Search Preview for IE & Firefox.

You’ll then find “Google Preview” in your list of available search engines.

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.