The Flog

I’m looking at that goddamned list I made up, 101 ways to torture yourself, and I’m failing on so many levels, two weeks in!  O M G!  It needs a total revamp!  All those recurring things can never give me a feeling of accomplishment, because they aren’t cross-outable until the end of 1001 days!  Why didn’t I see that before!?  Everyone, take the lesson I have learned and make sure the items on your own list are QUANTIFIABLE and finite.  Jeez.

I am proceeding with the actual doable ones while I replace the guilt evoking ones, and have knocked #47 and #48 off the list.    Yay, I feel good about myself again!  #47 was done through an accountant, who helped me set up a retirement plan through my corporation.  Yes, I have a corporation.  I’m “the man.” :D  The reason is, actors have such a high percentage of their income flowing out to deductible business expenses, with 10% going to an agent and 10% going to a manager and sometimes 5% going to a lawyer (for fancier actors than myself) plus classes etc., that they invariably get caught paying a buttload of extra money because of AMT.  That is, if you make enough money acting, LOL.  One day Congress might fix that rim job of a middle-class tax, but alas, they can’t seem to do it anytime soon.  They sure take care of that top 1% of earners though, especially the ones who make money through dividends and capital gains!  That’s another rant though.   Anyway, that knocks off #47.  Now I just have to get the money in the account.  And there’s a strike on.  Yikes!

For #48 - Save $100 dollars a month, I did the smart and easy thing.  I opened an ING account.  No, not IGN, the great gaming site that I always accidentally type in first.  The one with the high yield savings accounts.  I looked into other online banks with a higher rate but I went with the most “well know” company, because internet banking makes me pretty nervous in theory.  When I started getting appointments for ING commercials I guess it legitimized them in my eyes, haha.   I set it up to withdraw $100 dollars a month from my checking account automatically, so I don’t have to think about it and thus give myself the opportunity to avoid depositing it and spending it instead on, say…shoes.

This weekend I’ll be working on revamping my list. Oh, and I scratched off #15 too, “Carry a Notepad”.  I bought a kick ass moleskin planner with a notebook in the back and then hot glued some pretty, not very weatherproof art paper on the front.  I’m not a very good long-term thinker.  As this post demonstrates.

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I guess I’m doing a lot of these tech list items because the strike puts a real damper on the more creative endeavors. Plus, they’re easy and a fantastic procrastination tool.

I have been a Gmail addict from very early on. My brother invited me years ago during the beta phase. It’s amazing, it’s an efficiency machine and the best way to do email. Google Reader is a part of my daily internet habit as well. So, you can imagine how happy I was when Google Reader opened up a “sharing” feature to enable sharing RSS stories with my contacts. Er, ALL my contacts.

That’s right. The sharing feature is all or nothing. So if I want to share a weird, fringe story with my brother, I have to share it with every Gmail contact in my contact list, or share it with no one. And the lovely part is that Gmail’s programmed to automatically add every email correspondence to my contact list. Every email. There’s no way to turn that feature off either! So I have hundreds and hundreds of emails, from my grandpa to info@furniturecompany.com in my contact list. Every mail from every friend of a friend’s mass mail list even! And if I don’t want them to be able to read my RSS shared items, I have to remove their email TOTALLY from my Gmail contact list, losing their info forever! Google, why??!!

I decided to go through and clean out a few letters a day from the contact list, removing the random ones, and adding the other ones to mailing lists, so I can form some mailing lists for The Guild and such. It was horrible. The interface is slow, awful, I can’t say worse things about this contact list thing. You can’t choose to add contacts to a Group from an email, so you physically have to go into the contact list after an email and search for the email contact, THEN click on it and add it to a mailing list. OMG. So, in reality, the cleaning out was kind of a waste of time, because every email from now on will be added, unless I go in and REMOVE it after I email some random info@joeblow.com, which is torture considering the delay in response when you’re actually in the contact list. I’m begging Google, get something better, please!

The thing is, I was hoping to transfer a lot of info to Google contacts and use it as an address manager. I have been using Palm Desktop for years. Considering the fact I haven’t owned a Palm Pilot or Treo for over 4 years, it’s pathetic I still store stuff in that 1990’s interface. But, I haven’t looked into transferring until now.

What address managers do you guys use? Ah well, cross off #26.

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