Tell someone you’re heading for a casino and you’ll often get a piece of cautionary wisdom having to do with not losing your shirt. A specific warning that seems to come up a lot is, “Don’t gamble more than you’re willing to lose in an evening’s entertainment.”

The problem with that advice is that it makes you start thinking that gambling is an evening’s entertainment, and after grimly losing your set limit during ten unfortunate minutes at a blackjack table, it hits you: this is not entertaining, and that advice just didn’t work for me.

Which brings us, in a very unlikely fashion, to office supplies. If you’re a parent or know one, you know how aggravating it is when kids lose interest in costly toys they’ve begged their parents to buy. Part of the problem rests with the tendency of some parents to ignore yet another bit of wisdom: “Those kids like playing with the wrapping paper more than the presents.” This one’s true more often than you’d think.

With beans.com’s parenting correspondent observes that if you buy a kid a new coloring book and crayons for a plane ride – an outlay of about nine bucks, say — your return on investment or ROI will be minimal, as your kid will be too distracted to color. However, give that same kid a $1.89 roll of Scotch tape, and he will mindlessly keep himself busy, making tape sculptures and, of course, taping his nostrils as far back into his head as they’ll go.

Let’s scale up the expense a bit – consider a replacement cartridge for a standard ink jet printer. At around $25, we all know it’s ridiculously expensive. And it doesn’t feel any less expensive when a kid decides he needs to print out every last page from all the Web sites he’s visited during the last hour. However, think about the cost– if that kid has used 1/5 of the cartridge or $5 worth of ink, that’s far less than what a parent would spend on any toy, game, or activity if they left the house. So the next time you see a kid using up your pads of pricey post-its, remember: it’s an entertainment expense.

Image source: Metoc via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine walking into a room and on a table is a bucket. Beside it are three very large rocks, about six smaller rocks, about a dozen pebbles, and a pile of sand. Now imagine that you’re asked to place each of those things in the bucket in a specific order, and explain why.

The explanation, according to most business school professors who enjoy this analogy, is simple: each of those items represents the priorities in your life. With that in mind, you place the large rocks in first, as these represent your big goals – healthy family, better job, bigger house, for instance – followed by the medium priorities or smaller rocks. You get the idea. The pebbles, then the sand come next. But guess what? If you don’t have enough room for all the pebbles and sand, you stop filling the bucket.

If this analogy sounds familiar, it’s because it mirrors what 7 Habits of Highly Effective People guru Stephen Covey advocates as his third habit: put first things first. This not only means organizing your priorities in size order, but also knowing when to say no.

“First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth,” Covey says. That’s it. Of course, in Covey’s world, the third habit is in context of the other habits you ought to follow. But in your world, take a moment to think about what you’re currently putting first.

Chances are, you’re dumping smaller rocks and pebbles into that bucket – maybe even some sand – before you’ve even thought about the big rocks. One recommended exercise: try to identify what the pebbles and sand are in your life. Often, these are little things that can wait, or demands others are making on your time that you can perhaps push aside. Think about it.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

There was a time not long ago when you could Google the name of any product plus the word “sucks” and get a search result yielding a fairly clear and passionate taste of what Internet users thought of the said product and how it stacked up against other products. Try that trick today, however, and you’re likely to find that according to the results returned by a Google search, pretty much everything sucks.

For example, take the two popular Blackberry Twitter apps, ÜberTwitter and Open Beak (formerly Twitterberry). Popular opinion is split: Internet users enjoy both, and likewise feel both suck. And that makes it a bit harder to decide which of the two a Blackberry user ought to download. So we asked withbeans.com’s technology correspondent to load both apps on his Blackberry and report back. Some observations:

– ÜberTwitter is pretty. Its balloons are easier on the eyes than Open Beak’s interface.

– ÜberTwitter has far more menu choices than Open Beak via the all-purpose Blackberry menu button.

– ÜberTwitter allows you to drill down more with your menu choices, but that can make it all too easy to back all the way out of the application when you’re hitting the return key to get back to a screen. Here Open Beak’s simplicity is a plus – you won’t find yourself inadvertently leaving the app as much.

– ÜberTwitter has “@[your Twitter name]” as one of its menu choices, not so with Open Beak. Also when our tech correspondent was cited in a Tweet, ÜberTwitter sent an alert; Open Beak did not.

– Both apps provide a glimpse of your Twitter timeline; Open Beak took a shorter amount of time to retrieve it.

So while neither app sucks, ÜberTwitter, by a comfortable margin, doesn’t suck more.

According to yet another Google search there is one thing Blackberry and Twitter fans do seem to agree on: Twitter is taking a bit too long certainly took long enough to come out with their official app for the Blackberry.

Even if you’ve never heard an off-duty flight attendant vent — and trust us, it’s a pleasure — it probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that one of a flight attendant’s biggest, perpetual problems is the inability to get passengers to switch off their cellphones before take-off.

If you’ve seen FA’s having to do this on a flight, you can imagine it’s stressful for them, just as it’s stressful for the other fliers watching. One would think it also would have to be stressful for the callers forcing themselves to cram or text in that last bit of business.

Frequent business traveler and Allbusiness.com blogger Ken Walker, recognizing that he had enough stress in his life, decided that at a certain point before he even boarded he was going to stop trying to work and unplug, employing a strategy he calls “board with a book.”

While at the airport waiting to board Walker says ” I use my electronic calendar to set email and phone ‘deadlines’ based on my flight time, and I discipline myself to shut the phone OFF a half hour prior to boarding time. I stow all gadgetry and gear in my carry-on with the single exception of a book I’m reading. I’ll go off to a corner of the waiting area somewhere to read until they call to board.  When it’s my turn, I’ll simply scan my boarding pass, walk on, stow my bag, sit, buckle up, and continue reading.  I don’t dig through my stuff for an iPod or other gadgetry until we’re well on our way.  Walk on, sit down, and read. That’s it.”

Since he began living this strategy Walker has witnessed the all-too-typical confrontations between FA’s and passengers convinced that the phone calls they’re on are too critical to be ended, one time hearing a passenger bark at an FA, “This call is crucial to the survival of my company!” Says Walker, “if there’s anything so important that it cannot wait a few hours, and it demands your immediate attention on a cell phone, you probably should take the next flight anyway.” We couldn’t agree more.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Dig deeply into 4-Hour Workweek guru Tim Ferriss’ trove of advice and you’re bound to come up with some DIY potions, one of which he takes up in his post 4 Anti-Cold Cocktails That Work: From Ancient China to German Alcoholics and Modern Labs.

For our purposes, the cocktail that seems most practical, given its ease of preparation and low-maintenance ingredients, is what Ferriss describes as the Chinese cure.

You’ll need fresh ginger as well as the peel from one orange. Cut and mash the ginger, boil it for 20 minutes, and add the orange peel (cut up into sections) for 10 more minutes of boiling. Strain it and drink up.

Ferriss says a bit of honey may take the edge off the strong taste of the brew, about which he says “for me [it] cuts symptoms like sore throat and sinus pain by at least 50% over 24 hours.”

Image source: böhringer friedrich via Wikimedia Commons

The “magical and revolutionary” $499 iPad hits the Apple store today, and with beans has got to side with Fast Company writer Gina Trapani’s caution that you should not run out and buy an iPad just yet.

Trapani’s first point goes to the fact that first-gen Apple products unapologetically come to market in a sometimes half-baked fashion. She points to the early iPhone adopters who felt burned by spending $500-$600 on a product whose price dip was inversely proportional to its performance improvement, to the point where as of this writing, Trapani notes, the iPhone “3G is now on sale for a measly $100, one fifth of the price of the first generation’s cheapest model.”

She goes on to say very eloquently that “next year’s iPad will be faster, cheaper, less buggy, and have better apps and worthy competitors. Let all the deep-pocketed Jobs apostles be your canaries into the iPad coalmine.”

Trapani’s other salient point perhaps goes against the grain of folks who buy gadgets for the sake of having gadgets, but she suggests quite frankly that “you don’t know if you need an iPad yet. If you’ve already got a smartphone and a laptop, the gap in your workflow that the iPad might fill isn’t obvious, and discerning consumers only absorb gadgets that fulfill a need.”

If you all are too young to remember the debut of the first Mac, withbeans.com’s technology correspondent does, because he dropped three grand on the Mac 512K in the early ‘80s, only to watch the Mac Plus come out a few months later. This is what’s classically referred to as “planned obsolescence,” and we’re not afraid to say that Apple is famous for it. So watch out for that little trick, too.

What do you think, dear withbeans readers? Are you inclined to wait to buy your iPad, or in your world is it okay to have a new gadget just because?

Image source: Apple

If you’re just starting up your blog or Web site and you’re not sure if you want to monetize it or if you don’t know if how well it’s trafficked even matters to you, you may not see the immediate need for installing and using Google Analytics. And that would be short-sighted.

Let’s start with the fact that Analytics is fiendishly easy to install – a withbeans.com correspondent added the tracking code to his Web site within a few minutes and was also pleased to discover that when he moved his site pages over to WordPress, Analytics continued analyzing without interruption (by the way, WordPress users running analytics would also do well to install this plugin that tracks lots of links from within posts).

But the main reason to install Analytics right away isn’t just because it’s there, or its ease of installation or use. The first day you install this program is akin to the first day you start shooting a time-lapse photograph of a flower growing – you’re not getting instant gratification from this puppy. You may have to wait a week or two or a month to see appreciable changes. And the moment you see visitation start to claw upwards on your site is akin to that joyful moment in the time-lapse photo when you see the flower petals starting to open. In short, even if you don’t think you need Analytics now, it needs a little time to cook.

Our aforementioned withbeans.com correspondent didn’t need Analytics at first, either, but once he incorporated more jump pages and posts into his site, he did have a desire to see which pages were underperforming. His favorite Analytics feature? The simple “day/week/month/year” toggle that gives him a glimpse of site visits and reassures him that he isn’t the only one visiting his site. Because let’s face it, admit it or not, how well your site’s trafficked always matters to you.

Image source: Google

Bluetooth speakerphones that do double duty as a hands-free car kit and conference speaker are not so common that they’ve become passé but enough have come to market that it’s already a struggle to figure out which of these gadgets is ahead of the pack. Well, if having your Bluetooth go green packs appeal, Scosche Industries unveiled a solar Bluetooth speakerphone at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show that also ended up in a CES travel gadget round-up by Travel & Leisure.

Like most Bluetooth speakers designed with motorists in mind, the solChat, as it’s called, will take a charge from an old-school USB hookup or car adapter, but thereafter can be clipped to the windshield visor or can be suctioned directly to the windshield to soak up the sun’s rays; according to the manufacturer the “integrated solar panel continuously re-charges the lithium ion battery.”

In all other respects the unit functions like most other similar Bluetooth speakers do, so the embedded how-to video, while not absolutely necessary, gives you a good idea of how delightfully small the folks at Scosche managed to make this product.

Image source:  Scosche Industries