A Few Products That Make My Life a Little Bit Better

By Jeff on Sep 30, 2008 in Daily Distractions | 0 Comments

Portable Car Jump Start System – My old VW’s battery goes dead quite often, so I bought one of these bad boys after waiting an interminable amount of time for AAA on a freezing winter night two years ago. The small unit is very easy to use and can jump your car in about two minutes, plus you don’t need to feel like a complete loser when the burly, smirking tow truck driver pulls up to rescue your helpless butt. Best $75 I spent on my car since my last fill up.

Cordless Cellular Shades – Few things are more taxing for anal-retentive types than getting the ends of window shades perfectly even and balanced when hoisting them up using the old dual-string method. Worry no more Rain Man, help has arrived. I dig this simple, honeycomb shade design and am happily baffled by the amazing no-strings-attached technology. It should win a Nobel prize for practical science. Someone call Stockholm.

Resealable Oreo Package – When you absolutely must get your fat fingers in and out of the package quickly before your snoopy 3-year-old discovers what you’re up to in the dark corner of the kitchen.

Tiny URL – Ever send a link to someone (or post one in blog comment or Twitter) but it’s really really long, like an Amazon product link, and it just messes up everything and doesn’t work? Yeah, you stink. Fear not, there’s an awesome little Firefox add-on called TinyURL that creates a very short and practical URL, perfect for sharing. Just download, install, restart and start making compact links from the Firefox toolbar. Easy Peasy.

Trader Joe’s Sane Prices - My daughter loves Morningstar Farms Veggie Sausage Links, which is cool because they are yummy and good for her. What’s not cool? At Acme or Genuardis they are $5 a box! Holy Cowless! When fake meat products cost more than real meat something is just not right. Luckily, our hippie pals at Trader Joe’s sell them for $2.99 a box. How can they afford to do this? Who cares, they just do it, okay.

Also, for you dog owners who cannot afford Greenies anymore because those greedy, minty-breathed bastards raise their prices every week, Trader Joe’s has a good alternative. Check out their Mint-a-Breath Bones. They may not look or taste like the original (not sure, I haven’t tested them out), but they are much cheaper and my dumb pup loves them just the same.

Screw Cap Wine – No cork? How gauche! Sorry, after my rabbit wine opener broke I just don’t have the time, dexterity or strength anymore to deal with a pesky cork. Plus, the Missus and I have no problem draining a whole bottle if need be, so no recorking needed. Here’s my favorite screwy wine: Bonny Doon Ca’ del Solo Big House Red. Yep, I like cheap affordable red wine with pretty labels. (Remember that around the holidays when you’re gift shopping for your favorite nonsense providers).

Feedburner – If you have a website or blog, FeedBurner is a must. It “provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.” I love it because it’s fairly easy to integrate with WordPress and it makes subscribing to a website super easy. It also delivers a very nice daily email with our latest posts to our subscribers without us lifting a finger. Did I mention it’s free? I know, big bad Google now owns it, but they haven’t done much to mess it up yet. Here’s FeedBurner in action:

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iStockPhoto – Need that awesome image of a smiling black businessman shaking hands with an equally happy white businessman for that new kick-ass business website you’re designing? Few years back, you’d have to pay around $100 to post that little masterpiece on your website, not anymore. iStockPhoto provides affordable royalty-free photos, some as low as a buck (I’d stay away from the dollar shots, go up to at least $5 for some quality)! They also have lots of really nice vector images. Pulling back the curtain time… many of stunning photos you see on this very site are not custom shots taken by high-priced photogs, I know, hard to believe. Most are from the iStock with just a smidgen of photoshopping. Some samples: