Read the whole article. It is absolutely true. When you relieve yourself of all consumer debt, you can live a very happy and wealthy life. Don’t let wants become needs.

Dave Pell must have been watching my online actions over the past few days when he fashioned his most recent post. And we can assume that the Facebook definitions will ultimately impact if not completely replace the existing definitions of these words – unless Webster’s suddenly gets another 400 million users of its dictionary. Maybe these new definitions aren’t so bad. For eight years after high school, I consistently referred to a former classmate as my girlfriend even though we hadn’t once seen each other since graduation. And today she’s my wife. A real wife, not just the internet kind. ...

This is pure awesome.

That’s the question that greeted me in my e-mail inbox this morning. I subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog via e-mail because I enjoy receiving the knowledge he has to share in short form on a daily basis. The posts provide immediate inspiration and trigger thinking based on Seth’s own experiences and wisdom from years of practicing in the industry. So what of the e-mail? Well, Godin set out to do what he does on his blog, but in book form and with many contributors. Call it a crowd-sourced e-book. What’s more, is that it is a free download. Contributors include the inimitable Merlin Mann, the life hacker Gina Trapani, and the warring artist Stephen Pressfield. ...

Last week, Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, urged us to switch to Bing as the default search engine in Firefox. Since the release of Bing, I have been switching back and forth between it and Google’s search engine depending on my needs and the quality of the results I obtain from one or the other. While I’m still torn between who to make my default (probably neither for some time to come), Asa makes a compelling argument for going with the company that protects your privacy better. In a time when sites like Facebook make sweeping changes to privacy in an attempt to gain more traffic from search engines like Google and Bing, it’s nice to have some tools available that do not leech away all privacy. ...

Developers have had some time to update their applications to use the new thread model in Linux, but should a piece of software still require an old model, there’s always the tempting environment variable, LD_ASSUME_KERNEL, available to lend a hand. This environment variable was handy when it was first introduced for handling threading issues in Linux with applications that used an old thread model. However, with new version of Linux, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x, it can break other applications that are compliant with the new thread model. ...

Tumble Dry Medium There should be a label on Apple’s iPhone headset (the earphones with integrated remote and microphone) that states how unbelievably durable they are. I was rather displeased to find that after about 6 months, the left ear bud was starting to lose volume output. At first, I thought I was losing hearing in that ear, but a quick comparison use of my fiancée’s ear buds with my iPhone proved that the left side of her set had no volume loss. ...

How many applications are installed on your iPhone right now? Do you have a couple of pages of the most necessary apps, or does the iPhone seem to grind to a halt when flicking through your ten pages of essential tools for the road? I previously fell into the last category. Since purchasing my iPhone a little over a year ago, my Powerbook G4 has started to languish in its case. While it had been my daily companion for over three years, once I had the iPhone, I found that I didn’t need to boot the laptop up as much to accomplish my daily computing tasks. ...

Or, how I learned to dance the salsa Experiment is probably the wrong word to describe the exercise regimen I am about to embark on a couple times per week. Zumba is an aerobic workout that focuses on latin music and dance moves. Zumba® fuses hypnotic latin rhythms and easy to follow moves to create a dynamic fitness program that will blow you away. Our goal is simple: We want you to want to work out, to love working out, to get hooked. Zumba® Fanatics achieve long term benefits while experiencing an absolute blast in one exhilarating hour of caloric-burning, body-energizing, awe-inspiring movements meant to engage and captivate for life! ...

The web site, Gravity and Levity, has a great article on the Gompertz law and the odds of surviving through your next year of life. At age 32, I’m looking at just over a 1 in 1500 chance of making it through the year. Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances) ...