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MSN Feature: Demystifying Your Credit Score
The folks at MSN highlighted a feature I originally wrote for CardRatings.com about the ingredients that make up your credit score. Each one of the four major credit bureaus uses their own recipe: FICO TransUnion Equifax Experian Some bureaus give more weight to what you’ve done with your credit history over the past two years,…
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Multiple Audiences, Multiple Networks
When I helped relaunch XPN‘s online presence over 10 years ago, our biggest concern was unifying the experience across multiple platforms. At the time, it still felt strange to shepherd your audience from your on-air stream to your online content. Moving somebody from an FM signal to a blog page felt wrong, and I know…
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Best of spinme.com: Cultural significance, microfunding, finding collaborators
I’m through the hardest part of the “remastering” process on the spinme.com books series, so I’ve been able to spend more time posting new essays to the site: “What’s culturally significant?“ I remember being part of a team that asked this question at WXPN in the late 1990s, and it crops up again today. When…
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Why we never cut the cord.
I declared victory over the need to get a cable box in the new apartment in this post from a few months back. You might be among the dozens of folks who’ve been asking me about what happened since then. Turns out, it’s not as easy as you might think to totally cut the cord.…
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I’m starting my New Year’s Resolutions a few weeks early.
Attending Barcamp Philly inspired me to solidify a lot of these ideas. There’s a JFDI attitude in this town that I find myself connecting with more and more. Now that I’m settled in from our move to Center City, I’m no longer content to wait until 2011 to make some changes. 1. Add more white…
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Best of CardRatings.com: PayPal, Kardashians, APIs
Some of my favorite recent stories from our CardRatings.com Credit Card News blog: PayPal’s mobile app enables person-to-person transactions. It sounds like they want to take on the folks from Square, but Intuit’s rolling up with a serious contender for mobile credit card acceptance. Kim Kardashian launches a prepaid debit card. Brilliant and scary at…
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Busting Your Performance Bottlenecks at Work
As a boss, I sometimes have to listen to a member of my team explain why something went horribly wrong. As as a business owner, I also have to ease the concerns of clients who have been burned by vendors in the past. And as a human being, I hate being on the hot seat…
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Planning an Unconventional Home Office Setup
I’ve had a home office for the past ten years. During that time, my wife and I have moved four times. Besides working full time at jobs we love, Lori and I also run our own side hustles: I write, and she creates art and jewelry. Juggling all that leaves little room for a social…
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Put the Sleeper Hold on Boring Meetings
Productivity gurus love to pick on lame meetings. But let’s be realistic…even top creative professionals have to endure meetings with clients or with project teams. Taking ownership of your work means taking responsibility… Read the whole article on WorkAwesome…
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Scams, Lies, and Credit Cards: Fraud Rings’ Five Favorite Schemes
Even if you’ve become religious about shredding your credit card statements before you toss them away, criminals can still find ways to cheat you out of time and money. Investigators want you to watch for five of the fastest growing sources of identity theft and credit card forgeries… Read the full article at CardRatings.com…
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Five Surprising Credit Card Bills
And no, they’re not mine. We’re still on a roll with some fun credit card lists over at the CardRatings Blog. This time, we wanted to find a few of the wildest things anyone had ever bought with a credit card. Our search turned up a historic dinner, a bargain wedding, and a fine art…
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Why Professional Writers Need a Blog
When Mario Batali comes home from a long day at the kitchen, does he cook for himself? If you’ve read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, you’ll know that professional cooks often end up at the same diners and dives that we like to haunt at 1am. That’s the dilemma whenever I talk to a writer about…