Do you have a bad road trip story? Join the club. Almost everyone I meet has one, and the ones that don’t have a bad story haven’t been on a road trip, so they don’t count. How do these vacations go wrong? The idea of the open road seemed so inviting when you said to your family or friends, “Hey, I know! Let’s go on a road trip!”

Luckily, things go right as often as they go wrong on road trips. There are spur-of-the-moment pit-stops that turn into vacation highlights, great and creative road trip games that the players still talk about years later, gastronomic dreams-come-true enjoyed in restaurants off the beaten path, and deep bonding moments that permanently alter relationships for the better. I often hear inspiring stories like the one where a mother packed a book of questions as a way of entertaining her kids and found out things about them that changed the entire way she perceived one of her daughters.

Both the good and the bad things help point the way as to how to better plan for great road trips – ones without the backseat bickering, killer boredom, numb legs, broken down or over-packed car, or the feeling that someone you used to love has morphed into someone you can’t stand to spend another minute with.

So, how do you plan a road trip that lives up to your blue skies-open road kick-butt fantasies – one that will go down in time as your favorite vacation ever?

• Choose Wisely
  If you can choose who you’re traveling companions will be, choose wisely. It’s amazing how often people who barely know each other or who frequently argue will decide to go on a road trip together. Road trips are the ultimate litmus test of compatibility – being in a car together day after day can test even the strongest of bonds. Pick travel buddies who you’re very sure will be a good match to your personality and travel style.

• Where are we heading?
  Select a destination that everyone is excited about. Anything less than a unanimous decision guarantees indifference, less patience when things go wrong ...

Flowers have long been used to convey our innermost feelings. Say it with flowers and you have a good chance of declaring your undying love and devotion to the woman or man of your dreams. These days it is common to gift flowers for Valentine's day, birthdays or anniversaries.

But who says we only have to gift flowers for obvious occasions. Instead surprise your dream date/partner with flowers when they least expect it. In additon, be different. Don't keep giving the same flowers - be unique! Here is the message you are sending based on the color and type of flower you choose.

• Roses
  Roses come in many variations and colors. They are a popular choice for stating your romantic feelings and you'd have to be hard-pressed to find a woman who doesn't like to be romanced with roses. But a rose ain't a rose unless you decipher the meaning of its color.
  
  Red: Red roses are the universal language of love. It states “I love you” if given to your lady. It also speaks of desire and passion.White: White roses declare your eternal love for the girl of your dreams. They also convey the message that she is worthy, showing her your respect as an equal. If your love is pure then white roses are a great gift for the woman of your dreams.Yellow: Yellow roses are associated with jealousy and friendship. In the end the meaning is conveyed through the context in which you gift the rose to a woman. Red & White: Given together, these two colors demonstrate unity, togetherness.Pink: Pink roses are the sign of happiness.
  
• Carnations
  Carnations are most likely a second choice to roses in the context of love. They are a popular flower for bouquets and ideally mixed with other colors and flowers to make an attractive and meaningful combination.
  
  Red: Red carnations are given for love. They also speak of passion and courage.Pink: Pink carnations denote a show of confidence and thankfulness. These flowers are more gentle and low-key to the obvious red.White: White carnations are oft...

Color co-ordination is definitely not one of my strong suits. Ask my girlfriend and she’ll tell you what a mess I make just picking out matching clothes. For anyone like me who’s basically ‘design-challenged’, here are two awesome tools which will help you get perfectly color coordinated.

Search Color Schemes (Use Words)

Picking out a color scheme for your website? Not sure how to describe the actual colors you need? Try out ‘Instant Color Schemes’.

This excellent free service makes it easy for anyone to find an entire matching color scheme simply by typing in a word. For example, just search for ’sunset’, and color schemes related to ’sunset’ will be made available on the spot.

“Instant Color Schemes” makes full use of Yahoo’s image search API. How it works is that they take 5 related images from Yahoo Image Search and then show the most prominent 6 colors from each image and then find related colors to come up with the color schemes.

After some testing, it does work out pretty well in most cases. It did give me abnormal results once in a while (along with yellow and orange, pink and grey colors were displayed to me when I searched for ‘curry’!), but it looks to be a good product overall.

Lost for words? If you are, you can let your favorite image do the talking. Sometimes words don’t cut it. This is especially true when you’re trying to pick colors to match certain objects, a painting or a statue for instance. Just upload a picture to Color Palette Generator and it will break down the key colors from within that photo and allow you to obtain a color scheme from that image.

Also of note is the fact that the source code for this project is available for free which means you can grab it, change and modify the code and put it to good use as well.

So there you go, two tools which will help you make the right decision about colors - all the time.

The fact that my wife and I both have iPhones is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because well… we both have iPhones. But it’s also a curse. It has become another gadget to upgrade, to pimp up and gulp- to depreciate quickly . We were both going to get the 2nd generation iPhones but after weighting in the fact that the original ones are upgradable via software, it became hard to justify the cost of a whole new phone. Sorry, 2 new phones. So we opted for the software update, which gave us in a lot of ways a new phone. The upgrade was free, but the mostly inexpensive apps add up. This got me thinking about Fairplay, Apple’s DRM technology used throughout the iTunes store for music and now applications as well. Fairplay allows you to register up to 5 computers and unlimited iPods/iPhones synced to those computers. So… it should be easy for my wife and I to share iPhone apps with each other as long as both our iTunes are authorized to use them. All we need to do is authorize both accounts in both computers and re-download the apps. This could work in Windows, but why would I right?

Here’s a step by step tutorial on how to do it.

Scenario

I have 2 Macs, 2 iPhones, 2 iTunes accounts.

I used one account to buy a game, and another account to buy another one. The goal is to have both games playable on both phones legally with no hacks.

Solution

Have each computer be authorized for both accounts. Re-download apps on 2nd computer with 1st computer iTunes account.

Step 1: Authorize Computers

I step into my wife’s mac, launch iTunes, log out of her iTunes Store account and log in with mine. 

Still inside iTunes,  I go to the app store and click the Buy App button on the application I had bought in my computer.

iTunes knows I already paid for this and just let’s be re-download it without charging me again.

The app then begins to d...

Recently I read a post on slimming down your wallet (via Lifehacker). As many of you I had my wallet filed with membership and other reward cards from the local hardware store the grocery shop and the rest of it. Some cards used regularly some used only once a year.

As mentioned in the post from the unclutterer most of the companies only need the number from the card. The magnetic strips are hardly used and the barcode is just a store for the number. So instead of writing down the numbers I scanned in the cards -front and back side- and stored them as images on my iPhone.

To test it out I went to the local hardware store and asked the girl behind the counter if she could scan the barcode from my phone. The first look I got was pure amazement. To her the physical card was transformed into a picture on a shiny device. On top of that the barcode was scanned successfully. The result; a slightly confused girl and a happy me.

The cards are stored as images in an iPhoto album that is synced with my iPhone through iTunes. Newly scanned cards are stored in the album and are automatically synced. When asked for the card I pull out my phone and open the "card" in full screen mode.

For iPhone Touch the same routine should work and it probably also works for an iPod with photo capabilities.

In my case I used my Mac to sync but this should also work on a Windows situation.  

Now my wallet only contains three cards, credit card, debit card and the donor registration.

This article is part of Financial Literacy Month.

Most Americans receive a daily flood of junk mail. Some savvy citizens take a stand against the torrent. My friend Pam gets great delight from calling the sender of every catalog she receives in order to be removed from their mailing lists. This works well, but there are easier ways to deal with the problem. Here’s a list of four tools you can use to keep the marketers at bay.

OptOutPrescreen.com
OptOutPrescreen.com looks like it might be a phishing site at first. It’s not. It’s an official site established by the Consumer Credit Reporting Industry to allow consumers to opt-in or opt-out of credit offers. I did this the last time I posted about the service, and haven’t received a credit card offer in over a year!

When you complete your request, you can elect to either opt out of credit card offers for five years, or you can opt out forever. Not only will this keep your credit report and social security number from circulating to various companies, it will also cut down on the amount of junk mail you receive.

This is a legitimate site, endorsed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. (I wonder if similar sites exist in other countries? From the comments: The Canadian Marketing Association has a do-not-contact service. Canada will be launching a do-not-call list in Fall 2008.)

DMA’s Mail Preference Service
OptOutPrescreen.com will stop the credit card offers, but wouldn’t it be nice to stem the flood of other junk mail? You can at least put a finger in the dike by visiting the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service. The DMA web site offers a menu of consumer information and preference services, including:

• How to remove your name from mailing lists
• How to get your name off e-mail lists
• How to remove deceased individuals from marketing lists
• How to protect your identity from being stolen (and w...

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I hate ants.

At our old house, Kris and I were constantly at war with the little devils. Every time we suffered another invasion, every time they managed to find the pantry, every time they discovered the cat food, every time they ruined my chocolate chip cookies, I would berate them with colorful euphemisms.

Eventually it got so bad that we had to bring in an exterminator. It seemed crazy to hire an exterminator to deal with little sugar ants, but nothing else we tried would work. So we plopped down $100 every three months to keep the ants under control. (It may not have been $100 for each visit — Kris thinks it could have been $300.) It didn’t really help. After the exterminator visited, the ant problem would subside for a couple weeks, but then we’d be right back at war with them again.

Sad but true: the ants were one of the reasons I wanted to move out of that house.

I hate ants.

We’ve been lucky at our new house. In the almost four years that we’ve lived here, we haven’t had an ant problem.

Then on Tuesday night Kris asked, “Why is there an ant highway at the bottom of the stairs?” In our secret couple-language, an “ant highway” is the long teeming swarm of ants running from their point of origin to whatever it is they’ve decided they’re hungry for. Kris followed the ants to their destination; I traced them to their source. They were traveling through four rooms to find their treasure: a sticky mess I had made on the kitchen floor. There were hundreds (thousands?) of ants feasting on hunk of goo.

I berated the little bastards with colorful euphemisms.

But I didn’t call the exterminator. Kris and I are older and wiser now. We’ve learned that we don’t have to pay $100 to get rid of the ants. Instead, we use about one dollar’s ...

A staple in most homes, citrus fruit, including oranges, lemons and limes, makes a beautiful, fragrant display that can piled in a bowl. We also like to use them in a flower arrangement. Peeking out from the bottom of a clear glass container, they serve a dual purpose: beauty and as an anchor to an arrangement. They're also handy to have around the house for the reasons we've gathered together here...

If you don't have the citrus suggested, use whichever one you have on hand (although we'd suggest sticking with lemon juice when the objective's bleaching):

• Polish copper by rubbing it with a lemon juice soaked cloth and buffing it dry.

• Brass and aluminum can be polished with a paste of lemon juice and cream of tartar. Another way to polish brass is by sprinkling salt on half of a lemon and rubbing it on the brass item. This method works on stainless steel as well.

• Rub lemon on your faucets to remove lime scale, hard water stains, and soap residue. It also works on porcelain.

• Whiten tennis shoes by spraying them with lemon juice and placing them in the sun

• For a mild, stain-free bleach, soak your delicates in a mixture of lemon juice and baking soda for at least half an hour before washing.

• Boost your laundry detergent’s power by adding lemon juice to a wash cycle for fresh smelling laundry, to brighten whites and remove rust and mineral stains.

• For ink spots on clothing, apply lots of lemon juice to the stain as soon as possible. Wash the garment in normal cycle in cold water.

• Remove unsightly underarm stains from shirts and blouses simply by scrubbing them with a mixture of equal parts lemon juice (or white vinegar) and water.

• To get rid of mildew on clothes, make a paste of lemon juice and salt and rub it on the affected area, then dry the clothes in sunlight. Repeat the process until the stain is gone. This works well for rust stains on clothes too.

• Grind citrus through the garbage disposal to get rid of nasty ...