The Frug recommends

We Forget to Give.

How to think of giving as a daily endeavor. Give365.

By Brad Beckstrom

Original Print Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., Quote AJ Leon

Misfitcon

For at least the next 365 days, I am inspired. I just spent a few days in Fargo, North Dakota attending #Misfitcon. A small handcrafted event for creatives, misfits, and troublemakers who want to make a dent in the universe. I had the opportunity to meet people who are making an impact in places like Lao, Sudan and here in the US. One thing they have in common is they are doing this creatively, through music, film, coffee, food, art, words, education, technology and ideas.

This was the second #misfitcon. The gathering is overflowing with what I would call intense sharing from 8am often through the night. The agenda is secret, speakers are unknown until they get the mic. Then WOW. There are no big stages, meeting tracks, apps, live streams or published schedule. No one is looking at their laptop or smartphone. The lights don’t dim, they go up in 500 colors. Much like Fargo, the group is small, creative and um…… different.

No Conference Flu

Unlike many conferences, where you pour yourself back onto a plane suffering from SXSW Flu or CES Tech overload, I came back from Misfitcon tired but energized and inspired at the same time. Last year was the first Misfitcon. I walked away motivated to create every day. For the first time It didn’t matter how good or bad my writing, photography, or art was. It was time to stop waiting for permission or approval.

This year, the creative message was powerful but I walked away with something even more substantial, to give every day. I’m calling it Give365. I’m sure that name is taken, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it helps me remember to give something away every day.

One bridge in one city, add them all up

On my way to Misfitcon, I read about a man who years ago took a long walk on a beautiful day to the Golden Gate Bridge, stepped out on to a beam, and jumped. Sadly, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Last year alone a record 46 people jumped from this iconic structure in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. What was different (or maybe not so different) about this man was what he was searching for. He left a note behind in his apartment. It read:

“I’m going to walk to the bridge today. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.”

This story, and my fellow Misfits, really got me thinking about what we all have to give. It got me thinking about how often I forget to give. You see, outside of charitable donations and other good causes a few times a year, we often forget to give. Sometimes giving is automated, charged to our credit card or automatically withdrawn from a paycheck as a line item and deposited with a large corporate concern. [Read more…] about We Forget to Give.

The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

05/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

Here’s why you should dump satellite radio and chucklehead talk radio shows and start streaming podcasts.

Podcast-a-palooza

I remember when podcasting first got hot. It was around 2006 and people were discovering podcasts via iTunes, listening on their iPods. Podcasting had another growth spurt when the iPhone came out, soon to be followed by Android phones, and lots of options for listening to podcasts on all types of devices. But by 2011, listening to podcasts started to seem dated and there was less buzz about new podcasts.

At the same time, there were lots of new options like streaming radio apps, tunein and iheartradio as well as video blogs. People were busy looking at their phones instead of listening to them. Podcasts didn’t go away, but they stopped growing.

The Resurgence

About a year ago, things started to change. [Read more…] about The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

The world’s fastest workout. Super efficient and kind of crazy.

04/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

You’re going to start seeing more crazy people working out. They’ll be easy to spot. They’ll be running in place with all their might, then they will huff and puff for 10 seconds and drop to the ground pedaling their legs madly doing bicycle crunches. They will work through an entire set of 8 exercises in four minutes flat. These folks have discovered high-intensity interval training. HIIT. If they’re doing it right they will be putting out 100% effort in eight 20 second bursts. They will look a bit crazy. I am now one of them.

I used to hate workouts.

Not so much the actual workout but the whole time / getting ready thing. At one point , my whole workout (process) was an hour and a half. Due to this hassle, I would only get around to it about 3 times a week.

I then discovered (HIIT) high intensity interval training. I stumbled across HIIT while I was searching for the best exercises for a heavy bag. What I discovered was there was a ton of research on HIIT dating back to successful tests with Olympic speed skating teams in Japan. The original process was invented by Professor Izumi Tabata in 1996. It is also referred to as Tabata training. The basic concept allows Non-Olympic athletes like me to incorporate HIIT into a short 20 minute workout which provides the same benefits as a one-hour workout.

I do 8 minutes of warm-up exercises, 4 minutes of HIIT, and 8 minutes of cool down exercises for a total of 20 minutes. The catch is that during the high-intensity portion of the workout you’ll be going 100% in 20 second intervals with 10 seconds of rest for a total of four minutes.

You will look a bit crazy doing this.

For this reason, I prefer to do this type of HIIT exercise in my basement where no one can get hurt, other than me of course. I use core exercises as a warm-up (8 minutes), a heavy bag for the high-intensity part (4 minutes), then 8 minutes of cool down with weights (total 20 minutes). The heavy bag makes such a ruckus in the basement that it shakes the whole house. Recently SuperK came downstairs to create a quick video clip on her iPhone of this high-intensity heavy bag portion of my workout. The five or six people people who saw the video prior to it being deleted collapsed on the ground laughing.

I can only imagine how crazy I would look doing lots of different exercises, as illustrated here in this infographic provided by Tiny Hearts. The great thing about this type of exercise is that you can mix it up or focus on one type of exercise for your intervals like sprinting, spinning or boxing. [Read more…] about The world’s fastest workout. Super efficient and kind of crazy.

Cloud – You make my heart bleed.

04/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

All of your important data is already in the cloud, so embrace the danger.

The danger includes all kinds of things, bank and retailer screw ups, social media profile hacks, some sort of monthly bug or attack like last week’s Heartbleed. My prediction, in the future they’re going to start naming these digital bug storms like hurricanes.

A few months ago, I was trying out the much-maligned healthcare.gov site, mostly out of curiosity and to make sure we’re getting decent rates on our healthcare costs. I waited until all the initial complaints about the website had died down to give it shot. The experience wasn’t bad, but as I was putting in my entire family’s Social Security numbers, and a ton of other information, I realized just how much data we all have in the cloud.

If you have a bank account, use a credit card, email or file your taxes electronically, most of your important data is already in the cloud. What is the cloud? It’s a server in a data center, most likely secured behind a steel door guarded by an entry-level member of the nightwatchman community. It really doesn’t matter how many steel doors or security guards they have because that’s not how people break into these facilities. The real security guards are the coders and often former hackers these companies hire to keep bad guys, bugs, and viruses from visiting the server from the other side of the world.

When the term cloud computing became popular many of the major hosting companies just added the word cloud to a lot of their existing server packages – “boom” we are in the cloud and so are you. We’ve all been in the cloud for a while. The cloud is not going anywhere, sort of like this past winter.

You can’t hide from the cloud

There are entire books written about becoming digitally invisible and they have very little to do with deleting your social media profiles. Many of them have titles like “how to disappear” and involve living on a deserted island and spear fishing for survival. Most of the people who are reading these books have much bigger problems than someone snagging their debit card number and pin from the Target database. [Read more…] about Cloud – You make my heart bleed.

Find Your Treehouse. My one year experiment using Airbnb.

04/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

Find Your Treehouse

When I was in third grade, my dad helped me build a treehouse. I should say, I helped him. It was a great treehouse, larger than most with a solid deck, walls, and a gable roof. It was built in a huge tree that could easily support its weight. We had windows with large screens and even ran power via a long extension cord. I could run a fan, a radio, and even a small tv.

My stock value went way up for coolness of sleepovers among my friends. I miss that treehouse. It was a great place. For me, it was my “other” place. There was home, school, and the treehouse.

I think Airbnb, the travel app juggernaut, had people like me in mind when they started featuring photos of all kinds of lodging alternatives including: Yurts, Houseboats, Airstream Trailers, exotic treehouses and even old trains. It’s now the most popular page on their website. You can find it on their website homepage just by clicking “popular.”

I mean, who wouldn’t want to sleep on a boat or on a train or in a rainforest treehouse. These are the type of places where people can really get a good night’s sleep. And you get to skip buying the boat or vacation house part. Oddly enough, I started experimenting with Airbnb a few years back for business travel, not personal. I was headed to New York and sick and tired of business hotels that charge over $300 a night with nothing much more than free WiFi. And don’t forget about the 15-23% lodging and misc. taxes most cities add on. I found something much better on Airbnb for $130 a night in the East Village.

One of my best finds was a one-bedroom apartment in the center of the old city in Barcelona for $70 a night. Yes, you read that correctly — $70 per night. Prime location with balconies that opened out to one of the nicest parts of the city. It had WiFi, full kitchen and a living room. In a pre-war building with 15 ft high doors. A comparable room in a hotel would be close to $300 a night. [Read more…] about Find Your Treehouse. My one year experiment using Airbnb.

Save Money by Living an Experiential Lifestyle.

03/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

See More Stuff, Don’t Buy More Stuff

Last week, I went to a free photo exhibit at the National Gallery around lunchtime and hung out there for several hours. At some point late in the afternoon, I got a text message from my boss, SuperK wondering where I was. I was seeing more stuff. I recently attended a conference in Barcelona. I got a early start each day but I put a giant X across the daily conference activities between 1 and 5 PM. I was in Barcelona, after all, and I needed to see more stuff. Seeing more stuff is very important. I think of it as recharging my creative batteries. My one caveat is that I see more stuff, not buy more stuff.

It’s all about your location

The secret to seeing stuff instead of buying stuff is all about the location, and I don’t just mean while traveling. Over the last few years, SuperK and I have been using Amazon Prime, in place of visits to Costco and cutting back on visits to big-box stores. This really works. Even for a very frugal person like myself, it’s hard to walk into a Target or a Costco and not spend over $50. And for someone like SuperK, that figure is more, much more. For some reason, the shiny displays and super deals trigger some I’m going to miss out if I don’t purchase this now and hoard it reflex. You’re guaranteed to come home with extra stuff. Plus going to malls and big-box stores makes me hungry AND gives me hives so there are health benefits to skipping the trip as well.

Just Skip It.

I used to run to Home Depot every couple weeks. I would take the boys and they would play with the vacuums and grills, knock over some stuff. And guaranteed I’d end up with more stuff. At one point, I had four separate toolboxes, not kidding. I am still working on getting rid of all this stuff. An excellent solution I’ve found is to just not go to Home Depot at all. I just skip any home repair that would involve a visit to the hardware store and go for a walk in the woods instead. In the rare instance of some sort of repair emergency (last weekend’s toilet implosion) I visit a small local hardware store and take advantage of their knowledge and customer service to learn something while I also support local business.

If I need something, I now take a hunter’s approach.

I need furnace filters, an item that is absurdly overpriced especially in small quantities.
I jump on Amazon Prime and search my past orders which are auto saved by size, brand, price and rating. No more scribbled lists.
Quickly paste the item name into Google and click “shopping” above the search results to make sure I am getting a great price on Amazon, then pull the trigger. Total time invested – 5 min.
I keep a running list saved in Amazon so I can batch or group my purchases together when necessary. All Amazon Prime items ship 2 day air for free, some other items ship free as part of a larger order.

Done. In the past, buying these filters would have necessitated jumping in the car, sitting in traffic, trying to park, looking at power tools, etc……….If you put a $ value on your time and add the extras like gas, and impulse purchases, the hunter’s approach for stuff you absolutely need makes a lot of sense.

SuperK has spent the last month or so testing this “stay out of Target” theory. She’s confirmed that reducing the total number of visits to malls and big-box stores will save you more money than any sale coupon or circular ever could. The less stuff you see, the less you buy.

So, here are a few more ways to live a more experiential lifestyle and save time + cash.

Stop running to the store the very moment you need something. Do without, skip the chore, skip the errand and go for a walk instead. Your family will survive without duct tape for a day. Your house will still be standing a month from now even if you don’t buy those filters right now.
Go for a walk with your kids or significant other and talk about what you see. Have a conversation instead of buying something.
Nasty outside? Go to a public gallery, museum or library, you’ve paid for them!
Clean out your closet, garage, basement. You’ll find something you lost and something you’d like to give away.
Play with that Frisbee you found in the closet. It’s been a while.
Work from home at least a few days a week. This will keep you out of random places like gas stations, convenience stores, coffee shops, and lunch buffets.
If you’re stuck in a store some reason, practice delayed gratification by putting that purchase off for a few days. Most likely you’ll forget about it.
Skip the trip Use Amazon Prime you can also add Smile.Amazon.com and a percentage of every purchase goes toward your favorite charity.