Make Him Regret It

Do you have too many wear-once dresses bought for weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs, charity balls. or Academy Awards? Are men onto something by renting—not buying—duds for a special occasion? That’s the premise for RentTheRunway.

Rent the special-occasion dress at a fraction of the purchase price. Wear it once, then send it back.

Here’s how it works. Browse RentTheRunway’s collection of dresses from 150 designers. You can search it every which way: price, size, style, color, hemline, body type, occasion, sleeve, or neckline. There’s even an over-40 collection. Once you’ve found the perfect dress, you can choose a four-day or eight-day rental and reserve it for the date you want it to arrive.

You can rent The Make Him Regret It Nicole Miller sexy black dress for $50. It retails for $450. Or choose the cap sleeve ,tummy disguising Alberta Ferretti Arch Of Constantine Gown that retails for $1595 and rents for $250.

The dress comes to you freshly cleaned and in mint condition. After you wear it, put it in a prepaid envelope and mail it back. RentTheRunway takes care of cleaning it.

RentTheRunway offers a lot of information to help you find a dress that fits right and looks great: a size chart, information on body types the dress flatters, and live chat with a fit consultant.

Arch of Constantine

You can also browse customer reviews. Reviewers include their height, weight and body type. Even better, many people send pictures, so you can see how the dress looks on someone like you.

Not sure if you’re a size 8 or 10? RentTheRunway will send the dress in two sizes for no extra charge. Do you need dresses for the rehearsal dinner and the wedding?  Add a second dress for only $25.

What happens if the dress doesn’t fit or you just don’t like it? Send it back within 24 hours for a merchandise credit or a different dress.

Sapphire Diana Drop Earrings

I’ve spent too much time and money finding the right accessories for a dress. That’s why I like that you can rent accessories, too. I love the Ciner Sapphire Diana Drop Earrings that rent for $25.

It’s probably a good idea to have a fail-safe in case the rental is a disaster. You can always give one of your wear-once dresses a second outing.

Yelp is a consumer-based website that allows anyone to review a local business or service. Yelp is heavy on restaurants (about 25% of reviews). But it includes just about any type of local business—spas, medical services, landscapers, plumbers, car repair—even parks and museums. Unlike other consumer rating services that charge a subscription fee, Yelp is free, supported by advertisers. Paid advertisements at the top of the results page are shaded in yellow and labeled as ads.

Yelp is easy to use. Just enter the service and location into the search field. You can do a broad-brush search (hair salons) or a targeted search (hair salons for curly hair). You can sort reviews by different criteria including highest rating (5 stars is the highest), most reviews, price or distance. In addition to star ratings, reviewers often post lengthy reviews and comments.

My search turned up a half-dozen hair salons that met my criteria. I read the reviews to find stylists that did a good job on curly hair. I was a little nervous about relying on Yelp. I’ve had my fair share of haircut horrors. But what the heck. I made an appointment for a haircut and highlights. The story has a happy ending: Yelp reviewers were right—my hair looks great.

In addition to user reviews, Yelp provides helpful information about each business: price range, transportation and parking, hours and accessibility.

Are Yelp Reviews Reliable?

It’s no secret that most people review places that they love or hate. Indeed, 37% of reviews are 5 stars and 12% are 1 star.  Yelp has a system of filtering ads that it claims weeds out the vitriolic and those written by owners and friends. Yelp publishes these reviews but lists them on a separate  “filtered review” page.  Business owners can comment on reviews.

As in all ratings, there’s safety in numbers. The greater the number of reviews, the better the reliability. And there are some categories, such as doctors, where recommendations from people you know are probably a better bet. But Yelp can help you narrow your choices.

Found a great local business? Write a Yelp review.

Pinterest lets you tag or pin any image on the web and organize your images in virtual bulletin boards. It works like browser bookmarks, but each link is an image. You organize images in boards instead of folders.

Pin Any Web Image

Not surprisingly, since members are mostly women, the most popular categories are food, clothing, decorating, crafts and DIY projects. Redecorating your bedroom?  Pin any image on the web and add it to your Decorating Board. Planning your daughter’s wedding?  Organize your wedding dress pictures or mother-of-the-bride dresses in a Wedding Board.

Pinterest uses all the tools of popular social networks. You can create a profile, follow users, and comment on someone else’s pin. If you see something you like on someone else’s board, repin it to one of your boards.

Looking for inspiration? Do a keyword search and see what others have pinned. Clicking on that image will take you to the original image source.

How Do You Get Started?

Pinterest membership is by invitation. But don’t worry. If a friend hasn’t invited you to join, you can request an invitation from Pinterest. To sign up, you must have a Twitter or Facebook account. If you have neither, Pinterest suggests Twitter’s quick and easy sign-up. Oddly, after joining Pinterest. you can delete your Twitter or Facebook account and still retain your Pinterest membership.

Once you’re a member it’s easy to add the Pinterest button to your browser’s bookmark bar. Then any time you see an image you like, click the button and store it on a board you’ve created.

Caution: All Boards Are Public

Other social networks such as Facebook and Linkedin let you choose who can access your account. But with Pinterest, all of your boards are public. That means any member can view your boards. Your only privacy option is choosing to omit your profile from search engine results.

One More Warning!

Pinterest is a time sink. There are so many captivating images that you can get sucked down a rabbit hole. Before you know it, there goes another day!

I’ve certainly noticed the price escalation. When I bought a Kindle in October 2010, Amazon priced most bestsellers at $ 9.99. This fit my price point for impulse buying. Ebooks were cheaper than hardcovers. They often cost more than paperbacks, but I didn’t have to wait a year. I could get the book right now.

Why Did Ebook Prices Increase?

After a few months, I noticed that the price of ebooks had jumped. Bestsellers were more likely to be $12.99 and some ebooks were priced as high as the hardcover. The higher book prices were coupled with a disclaimer: “The price was set by the publisher.”

What happened? Publishers claim that at $9.99 Amazon was selling ebooks at a loss to increase Kindle sales. The Department of Justice lawsuit alleges that five major publishers reached an agreement with Apple to enable the publishers, not the ebook vendors, to determine the price of ebooks sold at the Apple Bookstore. After reaching this agreement with Apple, publishers demanded the same right to set book prices on Amazon.

Immediately after the suit was filed, three publishers—Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster—settled with the Department of Justice. But Apple and two publishers—Macmillan and Penguin—refused to settle, repudiating the price-fixing charge.

A Win For Consumers?

Will ebook prices fall? It’s uncertain. After the DOJ filed suit, Amazon announced plans to lower prices on ebooks. But as of today, many bestsellers on Amazon are priced at more than $9.99 and still carry the disclaimer that the publisher sets the price.

Publishers claim that they make just pennies off each ebook. Since many publishers are privately owned corporations, it is hard to tell how much they earn from ebooks. But a recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that an astounding 21% of adults had read an ebook in the past year. Moreover, ebook users read more and purchase more books—both print and ebooks—than non-ebook users who typically borrow rather than buy books.

Are publishers being penny-wise and pound-foolish by jacking up ebook prices? Time will tell. Clearly the ebook wars are just beginning.

I’d been guilty of using an easy-to-remember and therefore easy-to-guess password. Why would someone want to hack my blog? The answer: for the sport.

I had to hire a web security expert to clean up the site. And WebOver50 was shut down for more than a week. But I was lucky. I had only been inconvenienced, my identity hadn’t been stolen, my bank account hadn’t been cleaned out.

It was a wake up call: time to get serious about passwords. But what makes a hard-to-hack password? Here’s advice from the experts:

Password Do’s and Don’ts

• Do use at least 8 characters.
• Do use a mixture of lower and uppercase letters, numbers and symbols.
• Don’t use any words in a dictionary, and don’t use words spelled backwards.
• Don’t use personal information such as name, birthday, license plate, social security number, age or address.
• Don’t use letters or numbers in sequence (123, qrs).

Check the Strength of Your Password

Want to know whether your password can be easily hacked? Run it through a password checker, such as the one provided by Microsoft. Here’s an example of tweaks that will make a weak password strong.

• Swhtuur1: weak
• sWHr#Uur1: medium
• sWHr#Uur368: strong

Use a Password Generator

Do you find the thought of coming up with dozens of unique passwords daunting? Get help with a random password generator, such as the one at PC Tools. Specify the parameters (length, mixed case, numbers and letters), and it will generate hard-to-hack passwords.

Not All Passwords Are Created Equal

Is it okay to use the same password for more than one account? Cyber security expert Bill Cheswick offers this practical advice: weigh the value of the information you’re protecting. It’s okay to reuse “who cares” passwords, for your online subscription to a newspaper or magazine. If someone steals this password the most they can do is read the publication. But don’t reuse passwords for financial information like bank accounts or stock trades that could inflict serious damage if hacked. Make sure you have strong and unique passwords for these accounts and change the passwords every few months.

Write it Down?

Many experts tell you not to write down your passwords. But memorizing your passwords isn’t practical if you have more than a few. Should you keep your password list on your computer or keep a paper list? If others have easy access to your computer, storing your passwords there can be risky. One solution is to store your password list on a thumb drive, instead of your hard drive. Give the file an obscure name. (Not passwords!)

If you keep a written list, put it somewhere safe. (Taping it to your monitor is not a good idea!)

Too Much Work?

All this seems like a lot of trouble. Is it worth it?  If you’ve been the victim of cybercrime, you’ll probably answer yes. If you haven’t been hacked, consider yourself lucky. Creating strong passwords seems less of a hassle when you weigh the consequences of a hacked account, computer or website.

Maybe you haven’t joined Facebook because of concerns about your photos or personal data going public. But you probably use Google apps such as search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, or Picasa without second thought.

If you think that Google has developed these hard-to-live-without apps as a public service, think again. The be-all and end-all behind these apps is data collection.

Every time you use a Google product, the company collects data on your online behavior. Google uses this data to sell targeted ads to sponsors.

Google is not unique.  Just about every Internet company collects user data. But Google’s new privacy policy that went into effect March 1st has aimed a spotlight at these practices. Previously, each of Google’s 60+ apps had its own privacy policy, and the data it collected was used only within that app. For example, if you’re writing an email about cameras using Gmail, the ads appearing on your screen might be deals from camera stores.

Better Service or Big Brother?

Google has now replaced its product-specific privacy policies with one across-the-board policy. As part of this overhaul, Google will now compile the information it has about you from various apps into one giant profile. Google’s spin: “We just want to use the information you already trust us with to make your experience better.”

What does this mean? If you’re using Gmail to send a friend your killer croissant recipe AND you’ve used Google Maps to find a hotel in Paris, AND you’ve Googled Paris restaurants, Google compiles this data and might serve up ads for gourmet tours of France.

So, is this new policy good or bad? That depends on whether you consider targeted ads helpful or harmful. When weighing the pros and cons, remember that Google ads pay for the free Google apps you use.

But if you think the new privacy procedures are too big-brotherish, here are some measures to limit the personal data Google can access.

• See what personal information Google has by checking out your Google Dashboard. This page displays your personal data for each Google app you use. You can also use the Dashboard to edit or delete your personal information.
• Limit the personal information that Google can compile by using alternatives to Google apps: Bing instead of Google Search, Hotmail instead of Gmail, and Flickr instead of Picasa. (For more recommended alternatives, see Going Google-Free: The Best Alternatives to Google Services on the Web.)
• Don’t click on Google ads. Each time you click an ad, Google collects info about you.

You can solve these problems by using Delicious, a social bookmarking site. You bookmark sites like you do using your browser. But instead of storing bookmarks on your computer, they’re stored on a web-based server, so you can retrieve them on any device—computer, iPad or smart phone. Instead of filing bookmarks in folders, you tag them with keywords. For example, you could tag the energy efficient Martha Stewart home as energy efficient homes, green homes, and Martha Stewart home.

How Does Delicious Work?

Once you’ve set up your free account, it’s easy to save bookmarks on Delicious. Setup installs a Bookmark on Delicious button on your browser toolbar. Click on that button to bookmark a website. That brings up a screen with fields for entering keywords. You can also include a brief description or notes. Setup also installs a button on your browser toolbar that links to your Delicious bookmarks. Click on that button to view your bookmarks.

If you are accessing Delicious on a different computer or mobile device, sign on at Delicious.com and copy the URL of the site you want to bookmark into the designated field. Your links will load automatically once you’ve signed on.

What Makes Delicious Social?

Delicious is known as a social bookmarking tool because you can share your bookmarks with friends and colleagues. You can also make your bookmarks private, so that only you can access them. Or you can make your bookmarks public so all Delicious users can view them.

Why would you want to make your bookmarks public?  Say you’ve spent a lot of time finding romantic inns in Italy. By making these bookmarks public, other people looking for romantic inns would be able to access your carefully culled list.

Or maybe you’re looking for vegan restaurants in New York. You could do a Google search, and then sort through the 30 million results. Or you could search Delicious and get 55 recommendations chosen by people, not computers. Each listing includes information on how many people have saved the link, indicating which restaurant people find most Delicious.

You don’t need a Kindle to read these recipes. Just install the free Kindle app and download to any device: desktop, laptop, smart phone or iPad.

“Classic,” it turns out, means books that are in the public domain–no longer protected by copyright. Since  copyright can last for 70 years after the author’s death, you won’t find Julia Child’s or Rachael Ray’s recipes on the list.

You will find books from the 19th and early 20th century and before, with a few as old as the 16th Century. Some recipes are true classics that stand the test of time. Cassell’s Vegetarian Cookbook (1875) includes recipes for carrot and lentil soups that seem straight out of today. And the Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes Cookbook (1909) includes Chocolate Glace Cake and Chocolate Souffle that would delight any modern chocoholic.

But the real joy of these cookbooks is the window they open on the evolution of cooking, society, and the role of women. If you love reading cookbooks, you’ll find a treasure trove here. Some excerpts:

The Book of Household Management (1861)

In this famous cookbook, Isabella Beeton offers 900 recipes and dishes out advice on the proper management of the household. ”The early rising is one of the most essential qualities which enter into good Household Management, as it is not only the parent of health, but of innumerable other advantages. Indeed, when a mistress is an early riser, it is almost certain that her house will be well managed.”

Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six (1879)

This is Juliet Corson’s second cookbook, written to expand her readership. ”The wide publicity which the press has given to my offer to show working people how to have a good dinner for fifteen cents has brought me a great many letters from those who earn more and can consequently afford a more extended diet. In response I have written this book. It is designed [for those who] look for more than the absolute necessities of life; it is a practical guide to the economical, healthful and palatable preparation of food, and will serve to show that it is possible to live well upon a very moderate income.”

She offers this advice to nursing mothers. ”It is generally believed that women who drink malt liquor are able to nurse children to greater advantage than those who do not use it. The fact is that while the quantity of milk may be increased, its nourishing quality will be impaired…. Do not drink beer for the sake of your child….”

Food Remedies: Facts About Foods and Their Medicinal Uses (1908)

The Grape Cure: “Many people have heard vaguely about the grape cure for diseases arising from over-feeding…. In countries where the grape cure is practiced, the patient starts by taking one pound of grapes each day, which quantity is gradually increased until he can consume six pounds. As the quantity of grapes is increased that of the ordinary food is decreased until at last the patient lives on nothing but grapes.”

The Belgium Cookbook (1915)

On cooking game: “Game is like love, best appreciated when it begins to go.”

On cooking vegetables: “Do not let your vegetable dishes remind your guests of Foissart’s description of Scotchmen’s food, which was ‘rubbed in a little water.’ ”

The Story of Crisco (1921)

“The culinary world is revising its entire cook book on account of the advent of Crisco, a new and altogether different cooking fat…. Many people wonder that any product could gain the favor of cooking experts so quickly…. This was largely because [people] were glad to be shown a product which at once would make for more digestible foods….

Good digestion will mean much to the youngster’s health and character…. [Children] may eat Crisco doughnuts or pies without being chased by nightmares. Sweet dreams follow the Crisco supper.”

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill making its way through the House. PIPA (Protect IP Act) is the Senate version. The legislation’s intent is to prevent copyrighted pirated material from being sold on the web. The legislation is championed by the entertainment industry led by movie and cable TV companies.

Almost everyone agrees that piracy is a problem that costs the entertainment industry millions if not billions of dollars. But those opposed–web-based companies, such as Wikipedia and Google–argue that the legislation is overkill. It’s akin to killing a fly with a semi-automatic. They believe the bill will hamstring Internet companies because it makes them responsible–and legally liable–if the company even inadvertently posts pirated content. The legislation also gives the Federal government the power to shut down a website that contains pirated content.

Under this scenario, the government would be able to shut down Google if search results included a link to a rogue site. Internet companies say it would be impossible for them to monitor their content and weed out pirated content.  In addition, the bills give people and companies the right to sue the Internet company if their copyright is infringed, potentially bankrupting them.

A Win for Internet Companies

What makes this battle an epic saga is that the Web companies harnessed people power to fight the entertainment industry and they won. In a matter of hours, 4.5 million people signed Google’s anti SOPA petition. Congress was caught off guard by the overwhelming volume of phone calls and emails. Eighteen senators quickly dropped their support of the legislation. It turns out that many lawmakers didn’t understand–or even read–the legislation they supported. They were merely taking the position of the politically powerful entertainment industry. Finally, President Obama climbed on board the Internet juggernaut. The White House issued a statement opposing SOPA, effectively killing the legislation.

The Battle Continues

But the controversy over the Federal government’s authority to shut down websites that are infringing copyright law continues. The day after the Internet industry’s seeming win, the Justice Department shut down Megaupload’s website, estimated to be the one of the top 100 most frequently visited websites. Justice alleges that the file- sharing site trafficked in pirated content costing copyright holders more than $500 million. The battle over copyright and piracy is far from over.

How did these consumer victories happen? In large part the credit goes to Change.org, a website that makes it easy to mobilize people to fight corporate greed or city hall.

The cause can be global—getting Bank of America and Verizon to rescind their fees. Or the cause can be local. After receiving 1663 emails, the Fairfax County, Virginia Zoning Board reversed a decision requiring an Iraqi vet to tear down a tree house he had built with his two sons.

How Change.org Works

Change.org’s mission is to build momentum for social change by providing the tools to rally support behind a cause. Tools include a simple template that anyone can use to initiate a petition. (Who do you want to petition? What do you want them to do? Why is this important?) Change.org provides examples of successful petitions and tips for soliciting signatures. Each signature generates an automatic email to the targeted individual or organization. For a fee, Change.org will partner with the petitioner to publicize the cause and generate supporters.

Getting Bank of America and Verizon to roll back their fees are Change.org’s most notable achievements. But thousands of organizations and groups have launched petition drives with Change.org. Among its victories:

• Securing the release of a political prisoner in Egypt. (1834 signatures)
• Getting Cumberland County, North Carolina Animal Control to drop its 72-hour kill proposal. (63,000 signatures)
• Saving the home of a 71-year-old cancer survivor. (7578 signatures)

Today, many people feel powerless to change corporate or government policies. So it is heartening to know that victories are possible when people add their collective voices to a common cause. Change.org makes it easy to do that.