So web 2.0 it makes babies cry.

Being cooler than most smokers is a bold statement to make, but it is true my friends. Well, mostly just because I like to fill my own ego and to reassure myself that I’m better off not smoking.. Even though I do have a bit of a gum addiction still (two or three pieces daily), I do think I am doing the right thing. Just because I’m a person who likes numbers and results here are a few facts.

151 days, 11 hours, 3 minutes and 53 seconds smoke free.
4,544 cigarettes not smoked.
$1,368.00 and 1 month, 4 days, 17 hours of your life saved.

I have taken this a step further and found that I’ve not purchased 22.72 cartons, or 23 fewer trips over the Commodore Barry Bridge into Delaware saving me an additional $69 in tolls, leaving an additional 460 miles fewer on my car, used 15.6 fewer gallons of gas, saving me an additional $62.

I must admit, I am pretty proud of myself. Including cigarettes, gas and tolls, my total savings to date is about $1,498.33. Now I’m not too sure where I have spent that money, I’ll have to consult buxfer for a while. Besides the obvious health and fiscal savings, I have also done a little part towards not lining the pockets of the oil bastards. That alone is a nice step in being more green without even realizing it, or trying all that hard.

I have been doing a lot of analysis over the past few weeks on my life. Perhaps it is because I have quit smoking, or I’ve been trying to live a bit greener, or who knows. One of my life goals however, is to get my finances in order. I figured now is as good of a time to start as any. Most recently I’ve been really checking over all of my investments, and I started to think about forming a good budget plan. Not something that is set in stone, but something that I can adapt as needed. For instance, restaurant week is coming up here in South Jersey and I really want to play. Going out a few nights a week is something that would be out of my normal realm unless I’m doing reviews. So a workable budget plan needs to be formed. Since I’ve become pretty much addicted to twitter, and to “life on the web” in comes buxfer. What is buxfer? Well from their first tour page they claim to help you :

• How much money (or debt!) you have in your accounts
• The breakdown of your recent expenses
• Who owes you money and who you owe money to

I’ve gone ahead and imported my credit cards, my bank account, and via twitter, I’m now keeping track of the amount of money in my pocket down to the penny. Why would I want to do this? I’m now accountable, for everything I spend. With the tagging feature (which I find is a lot easier to use than Quickbooks or Quicken) I can look back and wonder what possessed me to spend $150 at Starbucks instead of packing my lunch. So far, I have about 6 months of solid data. Unfortunately most of those six months were right smack in the middle of my bad habits and bad spending. So I’m going to really start to use this month as a reference point. Just doing a quick review though, I spent too much money on interest and late fees (sadly not Blockbuster), so I know where I need to improve.

I can also see this being useful for doing the household finances. This way household bills can be split in a variety of ways, and everyone in the house can pay their fair share. Wish me luck, here we go.

After messing around for nearly a week on my test site, I give up. I finally decided it would be easier to just give up and start with a new, fresh widget ready theme for wordpress. What are widgets? Well that allows me to be a bit more lazy, and allows me to be a bit more compliant with some web standards. In other words, the previous theme was bugging me and that’s about it.

So what’s new so far, as of right now I have added twitter to the right sidebar. I’m going to do my best to update it as often as possible. Why you ask? Well that’s a great question if I do say so myself. One of the things that I have been devoting a lot of thought to recently is how much time I’m putting into different projects and or tasks. For instance, I currently spend an entire work day a week in my car just commuting from work. That works out to be just over 21 days a year of my life wasted in my car. So what am I going to do? I’m not quite sure. Part of me has considered going back to audio books, perhaps it’s time to pick Spanish back up. That does seem to be a direction we are heading after all. But I digress, I breathe deep, and I don’t really want to go smoke.. No really, I don’t.

Speaking of cigarette smoking.
51 days, 41 minutes and 46 seconds smoke free.
1531 cigarettes not smoked.
$459.00 and 11 days, 16 hours of your life saved.

I’m not really sure where the $459 is hanging out at, my guess it took a dump along with GM this week.

My immediate plans for this site are to either update the categories, and add tags to the site, or ditch them both. Who knows, it could be some variation of the same, or totally different. This site has had so many changes since 2003, so many posts/changes and improvements. I do promise not to sound like a self help book though. I’m going to be adding openID to the login’s, as well as some other cool “web 2.0″ and buzzword friendly items.  In other words, it’s about damn time I updated.