What do you do when you need to log in to Facebook? If you're reading this left to right, with both feet planted firmly on the floor, you probably hit up www.facebook.com or maybe you're a net-ninja and you've created yourself a fancy little bookmark. On the other hand, if you're reading this through the lace on your grandmother's underpants while stirring a medium-sized cauldron full of diced squirrel bits and loose Erector Set pieces, you probably shuffle over to Google and hunt n' peck: "Facebook Login." Apparently there's a soul-crushing number of people who figured it would be better/easier/idontfuckingknow to type "Facebook Login" into a search engine than go to "facebook.com."

I'll give you a second to find that starter pistol Coach gave you after you won the track and field meet in high school. You may need to use it for this next part. Oh yeah. There's a next part. Please follow along. 

Open a new window and type "Facebook Login" into Google. See the results? Any of those look like they would lead to Facebook? See the top news items? Click on say, the second one down, this one. Now, does this look ANYTHING like Facebook? I know Facebook's layout has changed a bit in the nearly 7 years since it's conception but does what you're looking at now bear a smurf's pube of resemblance to Facebook? Not a chance. 

Scroll down to the comments - BUT WAIT! Get that starter pistol ready, hold it nice and tight against your temple. When you're struck by the violent display of ruthless aggression towards meaning and reality, you'll want nothing more than the soft release of the blank in your diecast pistol - just enough black powder to lift you from the briars of hopeless humanity.

Scroll.

Update: This news is via Gruber. Go read what he writes.

But a week ago all of that came crashing down like so many Jenga blocks. EZTV stopped updating half of the shows that I watch and I'm unclear whether it had to do with a broken fanny pack zipper or a disbanded World or Warcraft guild. Maybe both, cruel as that may sound.

So I turned to Hulu. Remember Hulu? Think of NBC, Fox and ABC as little kids in the movie The Sandlot throwing their revenue model over the fence. They hope Hulu is going to get people watching television again. (And I'm not talking about the bazillions of people who watch American Idol and Jersey Shore. Anyone whose parents had the wherewithal to reproduce after the age of 25 will tell you that these feces pieces are more of a societal white flag than actual television shows. If you want to forfeit the gift of sentient thought, go watch yourself some Jersey Shore.) 

Anyway, Hulu. I 80% like it. I like the speed of it: just click and go. I like the subscribe feature: let the website tell me when I have new episodes of The Daily Show to watch. I even kinda like the advertisements: Hulu will monitor your viewing habits and, aided by some simple demographic information in your profile, the ads you see will slowly become tailored to you. A pitch for Yasmin makes me want to lash out but I don't mind seeing ads for things I might actually buy. Like, say, monster trucks. This kind of model gives marketers an unprecedented amount of flexibility and power and I think it's going to work out for the consumers too. On terrestrial TV, you have to watch 8 minutes of ads for 22 minutes of programming because advertisers have to shoot with a shotgun, hitting millions of people and hoping that 5% of them will fall dead in the bucket. With Hulu's model, viewers only have to watch 1 minute of ads for a 22 minute show because that advertiser's dollars are focused not just on the show, but on the demographic - based on who's watching. 

But not all of the shows that I want to watch are carried on Hulu. Discovery Channel, for instance, is not part o the Hulu joint venture and this means that I either have to forsake Mike Rowe and his Dirty Jobs or I have to go over the the Discovery Channel's site. This is the equivalent of telling people they can watch Lost in the living room but Mythbusters only plays on the weird little screen thing in your car's stereo. The experience has to be complete for users to sign up. Look at iTunes. People have shown (nay, screamed) that if they can get all of the music they want from one easy to use source, cost will take second seat. But I'm not going to trade in my Piratey ways and pay Hulu (in the currency of attention span) until they have 100% of the content that I want to watch. The experience of the one-stop is way more important to me than anything else.

I hope they figure it out soon. When the music industry told an entire generation to fuck off by choosing plastic discs in plastic cases in big stores for $18 over the way the consumers really wanted music (digitally) they got their asses kicked and ensured that an entire bracket of citizens were never going to pay for music again. The musicians made it through because, well, because they're resilient, crafty, gifted motherfuckers. But ask yourself, who are the Radioheads and Trent Reznors of the TV industry?

Envelope budgeting is weird. Only people who grew up in the Great Depression use their desk drawer as an ATM.

Cash budgeting is impractical. It only works if everything you buy on a regular basis can be purchased with cash. I use the amazing online convenience store Alice to do all of my household shopping but, like anything on the interwebs, you can't use cash. So how do I work that into my cash budgeting system?

Mint is plain old broken. I love Mint for keep track of my net worth and portfolios but its budgeting mechanism is pretty shitty. It relies on the system's ability to categorize my transactions and unfortunately this system works about 80 percent of the time. What you end up with is 20 percent of your purchases going into a budget called "Zoo Trips."

But pointing out the shortfalls of these various budgeting techniques is moot. Here's the secret to losing weight: exercise and don't eat shit.

Heres the secret to making money: Don't buy stuff you cannot afford.

Before you go looking for tools you need to fully understand the problem. At which point, you may not even need to the tool at all.

For example, I check my RSS feed reader every day for updates to the blogs that I've subscribed to but what if I spent that hour looking for new blogs, better blogs, more popular blogs? There are points in my day, in my life, that I feel like cuddling up with what I know is better than going out and trying to broaden my horizons. When do I stop looking for new things to do to concentrate on doing the things that I do do, better? How many choices do I need to be offered before it's more economical for me to choose from the present buffet than it is to seek out a greater number of choices? Do I even have to make this decision or will the invisible hand eventually settle the economies of time?

Barry Schultz framed the issue very well in his talk at TED. Have a look.

I really wanted to design and build my own web page. I've been learning a lot about HTML and CSS and I think I almost have the chops to live the dream that is hand-designed, hand-coded web presence. I realize that this site looks kinda bland and I'm very sorry for that. I had to get something up quickly and that meant using one of those pre-rolled website-in-a-box dealies. That said, I figured out how to make the corners rounded and you'll have to admit that those corners are second to none. 5 pixels: right between "WEB 2.0 textbook" and "Netscape compatible." Classy as all get-up. That may not be a thing.

Anyway, thank you for sticking around. If you're still reading this and you're a potential employer I think you're awesome. Please hire me.