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 →

In the most unexpected way, my career undertook a major change this month. For the past two years, I’ve managed two major web projects for Envato: GraphicRiver and FreelanceSwitch. As of last week, I no longer manage those sites. The bosses approached me in early February and offered me the opportunity for a job that allows me to more fully return to my interests in writing and media publications. As of last week, I am on full-time retainer as Editor for Rockable Press, the publishing arm and book press for Envato. Read more →

Last week, I talked about how I have been reading more since I was gifted a Kindle. If you’re a reader like me, that means your library of books can quickly grow unwieldly. Luckily, the Kindle comes equipped with user-defined “collections” which allows you to sort your library into manageable categories or tags. Read more →

For our first anniversary in November, Levi bought me my very first e-reader device, an Amazon Kindle. The fact that I hadn’t owned one yet is pretty amazing–I’m the kind of geek girl who picks up gadgets soon after release, especially if it’s for an activity I already do a lot of like reading. .And I read. A lot. But I just wasn’t sure I was sold on ebooks. I like my gadgets… love my books. In grad school, I prided myself on lining my apartment walls with row after row of books. Science fiction, science non-fiction, history, physics, fantasy, biographies, horror…I was an equal opportunity bookworm. An early test of our relationship was when Levi had to help me pack all six bookcases-worth of my books for moving. Twice.

Come to think of it, Levi probably got me the Kindle to avoid doing that again.

But another side effect of graduate school was that my reading for pleasure had drastically dropped off. I spent years doing nothing but reading and analyzing theoretical texts then talking, teaching, writing 30 page papers on it for a living. Reading became Serious Business(tm) in grad school, and if a book wasn’t in my field of study, it felt like cheating to spend time on it. This allowed me to cultivate lots of other hobbies and interests, but it wasn’t the same.

Since I got my Kindle, I’ve found myself happily reading more. a LOT more. I’m back to my old, pre-grad school levels of a novel a week, easily. My interests haven’t changed, nor has my free time, so I got to thinking about what it is about the Kindle that encourages me to read more. Read more →

I came to the realization the other day that I’ve been dabbling in World of Warcraft, on and off, for five, going on six, years. After some basic math on my subscription time, I realized that included over a thousand dollars spent on subscriptions and expansions, at least 352 levels across a dozen or more characters, and more hours spent than I even want to consider. And I consider myself a casual player! Imagine what the numbers of a hardcore player look like. But consider this: I have been using the same game software, day in and day out, for almost six years. Along with millions of other players, I’ve used the same UI to complete the same actions and even paid for the privilege. There are features we don’t like, of course, and there are plenty of vocal complaints, but we keep on playing and, despite the frustrations, keep having fun doing it.

Is that a racket, an addiction, or just….good design?

You can bet your +150 shield of intellect that Blizzard takes the design and interface of their game very, very seriously. The success of Warcraft’s user experience and Blizzard’s subsequent success has made “WoW clone” a legitimate descriptive attribute for any newly released MMO game. But lets assume that you are designing a humble website, not a massive-multiplayer virtual world home to millions of heroic characters. Is there anything we can learn about web design from World of Warcraft? Read more →

So, what do you do?

That’s pretty much the question that defines the average working American professional. The required answer should be brief and easy to grasp: “I’m a designer for BigBoxCompany.” “I’m a developer for ABC Corps.” Short, simple, easy to grasp. To the majority of people you interact with, you are your job title. After grad school, for a very long time it was “I’m a designer” while I created any number of things in a sundry of visual and interactive media projects at various companies. Still: a designer. Simple, easy. People like designers. If they are especially interested, they can even go above and beyond the call of polite society and ask what kind of designer you are.

But, as life often does, it got complicated. Now I’m a researcher-designer-writer all wrapped up in several managing roles. Read more →