After two years of enjoying our 3GS phones, Levi and I finally upgraded to the new iPhone 4S. We’ve been enjoying the new features in our own way–Levi by harassing Siri mercilessly with rude questions and me by obsessively compiling my life in iCloud. You know, to each his own…

One feature we both have been enjoying is the new Siri-enabled Reminders app. If you haven’t already checked it out, the new iPhone Reminders app is a basic task app which allows you to remind yourself. What makes it cool is that it is GPS-aware.  It is able to set up little geo-locating fences around basic areas (home, work) in your contacts. So in addition to reminding you of a task at a specific time, it can also remind you of a task when you are in a certain location, like: “Remind me to feed the dog when I get home.” Sure enough, pull into my driveway and I get “Feed the dog.” on my phone.

That’s cool enough, but with Siri, you can dictate reminders to your phone. Levi and I were playing with it, and I jokingly remarked, “I wish I could tell Siri to remind YOU of something!” We both laughed because–ha, ha! Allowing your spouse to order your phone to nag you! Using Siri! Wouldn’t that be creepy and annoying? “We could give each other nagging rights!” We joked.

Turns out, you can totally let your spouse nag you using Siri. Apple doesn’t do a very good job of broadcasting the ability, but here’s how:

1. Have someone you trust to use the power of Reminders for good rather than evil. You may want to create a special list in Reminders just for this, or you can share your default list. Keep in mind whomever you share it with will be able to add/remove items. (Marital counseling not included in this tutorial.)
2. Share your list in iCloud by going to the iCloud Calendar app. Your Reminders list will appear on the left hand side along with your calendars. Click the little grey broadcast symbol.
3. Enter the email of the person you want to share your list with.
4. The recipient will get an email and they’ll need to accept the invite. Once they accept, the list will show up in the Reminders app as a new list.
5. Viola! Instant Siri nagging rights. Your shared partner will also get an email every time you add something.

Tip: If someone invites you to share their default reminder list, you can also rename it on your end. For example, Levi shared his “Reminders” list with me, but I had trouble getting Siri to add things to it because I had my own “Reminders.” Instead, I went to Edit in the Reminders app and renamed his list “Levi’s List.”

So now I can tell my phone “Add ‘Take out the trash’ to Levi’s List.”

Or “Add ‘Bring Your Wife Flowers’ to Levi’s List.”

Or “Add ‘Remember that Valentine’s is only 6 months away!’ to Levi’s List.”

He’s so thrilled.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Will Hastings

We recently cut the cable bill. Again. (We did this previously while paying off massive student loans with minimal success.) This time, rather than go cold turkey, Levi and I looked into video streaming options for our cheesy television fix. We looked hard at the virtues of Roku and Boxee and the like, but eventually settled on the AppleTV so it could easily integrate with the rest of the Cult of Mac products in our house. We were primarily looking for something to stream Netflix and play videos off the computer and look sexy doing it: that’s AppleTV in a nutshell.

Levi and I are both digital junkies, so we had two quite sizeable iTunes libraries to integrate. And due to our individual OCD methods of maintaining our digital horde, merging into a single account wasn’t an option. We wanted both iTunes libraries to stream seemlessly onto the AppleTV without having to switch log-ins every time. Turns out, Apple does let you do this, but it’s a little convoluted. Since I didn’t find many other write-ups on the process when I was looking, I thought I’d do one myself. Read more →

After hundreds of hours of blood, sweat, and tears, Freelance Confidential is live! Freelance Confidential is my first book and I’m very excited about all the interesting ground I got to cover in this book. Some of the highlights include:

• I got to survey over 3,200 freelancers around the globe, thanks for the FreelanceSwitch Global Freelancer Survey!
• I took those numbers and compared them to the ground-breaking 2007 survey to get some really interesting results on trends and changes in freelancing.
• I got to interview ten of the top experts in freelancing and entreprenuerial gurus, including the fantastic Ed Gandia, savvy James Chartrand, and many others.
• I got to sit down and have an exclusive chat with Envato co-founder Collis Ta’eed about the state of freelancing and what he would do if he had to start from scratch in today’s market.
• Finally, I got to put it all together with my own years of experience as a freelancer and Editor of FreelanceSwitch to boil down the 6 Realities of Freelancing, the Myths of Success, and much more!

Check out the Freelance Confidential page to get the full details and even download a free sample of the book! You can buy digital versions from Rockable or the TutsMarketplace, and can also order a full color print off Amazon.

For the first five days of sale, Rockable Press has discounted the digital download versions from $29 to $24. Grab a copy and let me know what you think!

We received our tax refund yesterday and used it to wipe out the remainder of what we owe Sallie Mae. With one last payment, we’d paid off more than $20,000 in student loans in just eight months. It wasn’t easy, but boy does it feel AMAZING.

I kid Levi that marrying him came with a hefty dowry to pay. Although I had been able to get through grad school on generous scholarships and work-studies, Levi wasn’t so lucky. Like so many college graduates, he’d accumulated student loans. During his time at ITT, he’d accumulated a hefty student loan at, thanks to predatory private lenders, a ridiculously high interest rate that varied from 9% on up. (Yes, that means his student loans were practically as high-interest as a credit card!) We’re focusing on the good news so we won’t even get started about my opinions on the evils of for-profit schools like ITT and their racket with student loans. Levi had been dutiful about putting extra towards the payments when he could, but when we married it was still in the five digits.

In August 2010, we met with a financial planner and got serious about cleaning up our finances and making the money work for us. The first step was, obviously, clearing up the high interest debt. We took a hard look at our spending to try to make a plan. We’re both blessed with very successful careers and professional jobs, but we realized just how much money was disappearing to the “miscellaneous” ether each month. We’re lucky to have a good deal of spending money, but it was damn embaressing not knowing where it really went. After some careful budgeting and elimination, we realized that if we threw all the money spent on unnecessary purchases at the student loan, it could be paid off in 9-10 months. Seriously? Let’s do this! Read more →