Archive for category Links
Why Does Brita Water Taste Better?
I’ve been drinking Brita-filtered water at home just about exclusively for over ten years (using the same original two pitchers, even; is that bad? – I do change the filters regularly, religiously). I just can’t drink tap water anymore:
- I’m bothered by the thought of drinking nasty germ-ridden municipal water. Yes, I know, Brita only filters out chemicals and doesn’t do anything for microbial agents. But growing up in a doctor-headed household, and now living in a family of doctors, it’s more natural for me to think in terms of germs instead of chemicals.
- I really do think the Brita-filtered water tastes better.
Why does Brita-filtered water taste better? Ostensibly, all the bad-tasting bad stuff is filtered out. And Brita marketing would like us all to think that.
But … what if there is some insidiously-applied taste agent included in the filter (alongside all that activated charcoal)? I looked on the outside of my box of filters, and on the shrink-wrap around each individual filter. The front of my 4-pack box of filters prominently reads:
Guaranteed to make your water taste better.
The back of the box reads:
The Amazing Brita® Filter – The Brita Filter’s activated carbon and ion exchange resin work together to filter your water so you get healthier, great-tasting drinking water.
Interesting. The taste of the water gets top billing, and removal of chemicals is only alluded to with the mention of “healthier” water. I found nothing resembling a “List of Ingredients” that you find on food items. I suppose that is reasonable, since the Brita filter is not “food”. And one might argue that the recipe for filter technology is some kind of proprietary trade secret, like Colonel Sander’s secret recipe, or Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi. But it also means that we all could be unknowingly drinking lightly-flavored vitamin water, or something worse …
I couldn’t find any other research into Brita filtration. The best I could come up with was some people using a Brita pitcher to make some deep-well vodka taste like something closer to Grey Goose (hey, I’ll have to try that some time) …
Conventional wisdom says that municipal water supplies are viable targets of terrorist attack, but if I were a trillionaire maniacal arch-villain bent on world domination via some water-soluble ingestible mind-controlling drug, I think I’d just buy Brita (the company) and use their filters as my delivery vehicle. And their US headquarters is just an hour away in Oakland …
Buying vs. Renting (2)
Like dogs but don’t want to (or can’t) own one?
The Real Price of Cheap Online Tax Returns (2)
Buying vs. Renting
From the NY Times:
![[Rent vs. Buy]](http://sfnewsletter.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/rentvbuy.jpg)
Of course this applet is no substitute for crunching your own numbers, but in the absence of number-crunching, I plugged in the following constants:
- $1995/mo. rent
- $700k house (modest house in San Francisco)
- 20% down
- 6.25% mortgage rate
- 1.00% annual property tax
- 5% investment return
I left everything else alone. To make it “worth it within 15 years” to buy, one of the following things would have to happen:
- Home appreciation would have to be 4-5%. Some reports say that SF appreciation is around 2% right now.
- Rent would have to increase by 10% every year. I have no reference, other than that rent control is 1.7% (we don’t live in a rent-controlled house). A 10% bump sounds plausible, but sounds like a lot.
- Rate of return on alternative investments would have to drop to 0.50%. An ING Direct savings account gives you 4.50%, and it’s not even the highest rate out there.
In short, the “carrot” to buying a home is for housing prices to fall to about $475k (a huge drop), or for home appreciation to rise again. The “stick” to buying a home is for rent to increase by 10% every year, or for alternative investments to be even worse than real estate.
None of these “carrot” or “stick” events appears likely to happen anytime soon.
Update: I forgot to include the roughly $1000/mo. that the downstairs in-law tenant is probably paying. So with a total monthly rent of $2995/mo. for the comparable $700k house, it looks more reasonable to buy.
SFHousePrices.net
Posting has been light because of a new project, now complete.
Comcast.Net – Internet Explorer
I ordered high-speed internet from Comcast. In theory, all they need is for you to provide them with the model number and MAC address of your cable modem (usually on a sticker on your cable modem). In practice, they make you run a setup wizard on some kind of “install CD”. It’s fine that they want to use a computer to communicate technical information instead of making you read a bunch of digits over the phone, but what is unacceptable is that this “setup wizard” takes a further unwelcome step of “branding” your Internet Explorer with a spinning Comcast logo and putting Comcast in the title bar.
I found this tool to remove IE/OE Branding.
Brand New Laptop
Posted by Rob in Computers, Links, Rants & Raves on Mon Jul 24, 2006
This story is about a hand-me-down Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop with the following antique components: P3-500MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM, 9GB hard drive, and an add-on Linksys WPC11 802.11b wireless card. It was pretty sweet when first purchased by my younger brother circa 2000, but now it probably won’t meet the minimum requirements for lots of charities. I don’t necessarily enjoy always using slow old hardware — of course I would love to have shiny new hardware — but I really can’t just turn away a stray.
The other user of this laptop has a history of destroying my old electronics. In this case, it is a bad habit of always fully opening the laptop screen, over my repeated protests that this would weaken the hinges. Well, two months ago or so, my prophecies of doom and gloom came true — the hinges gave up their ability to support the weight of the screen. Unless the screen was at a perfect 90° position of unstable equilibrium, it would gradually fall open or fall closed. After my admonishments of I-told-you-so, her protests of “but the screen shouldn’t wear out like that!” went unheard by me and the laptop.
After one particularly-infuriating incident of laptop-screen-is-falling-down, I was all set to exercise my long-awaited-excuse to buy a sweet new laptop. But curiosity got the better of me, and I found this link: Repairing a Loose Dell Laptop Display (huge “thank-you” to Geoff Kuenning). Five minutes and two turns of a tiny eyeglass-screwdriver later, this laptop feels like new again.
Nothing comes for free:
- The screws are covered by little rubber bumpers that need to be pried out; prying them out weakens the adhesive used to hold them in there. Someday the bumpers will fall out and won’t stick back in.
- The act of reseating the screws will slightly strip the screwhead and/or screw seat. Someday the screw will not want to reseat itself.
Television Advertising in your Groceries
Posted by Rob in Links, Rants & Raves on Mon Jul 17, 2006
From the New York Times (link courtesy of Freakonomics) comes news that advertising is going to get even more annoyingly aggressive (and aggressively annoying):
Newspapers, magazines and Web sites are so crowded with ads for entertainment programming that CBS was ready to try something different, Mr. Schweitzer said. The best thing about the egg concept was its intrusiveness.
They have borrowed a page from the affiliate-marketing ad-network model so annoyingly common on today’s websites:
Egg producers, distributors and retailers all share in the ad revenue.
Obviously this kind of business model works in the short-term because it addresses a perceived inefficiency in the market (“education” of uninformed but willing customers). However, in the limit, it is unfriendly to consumers: in the advertiser’s perfect world, everyone would shop via affiliate or ad-network links; prices would then ultimately simply rise across the board to cover these costs. In the end, some extra money simply gets transferred from the consumer to the ad network or affiliate marketer.
The only party being conspicuously left out of this ad-revenue-sharing plan is the consumer. This is similar to the entrenchment of credit cards: people who pay with cash subsidize the merchants’ costs of accepting credit card purchases from people paying via credit card (although the cash-users do get to live off the grid).
In both cases, the merchant maintains a status quo, a middleman makes money, and the consumer pays more.
Street Fighter World Cup Edition
In case you didn’t see it yesterday, here are the events leading to Zidane retiring from international competition about 15 minutes earlier than anyone expected:
This reminds me of one of the Street Fighter moves, but I couldn’t find a decent comparison video. However, Metafuture has obliged with what will have to pass:
![[animation]](http://www.metafuture.com/media/2006/07/zidaneff.gif)
![[animation]](http://www.metafuture.com/media/2006/07/francefighter.gif)
Meet Dr. Patrika Tsai
![[photo]](http://www.healthcentral.com/common/images/Tsai.jpg)
Patrika has joined the ranks to which many aspire but few can hope to achieve — the ranks of the professional blogger. Her blog can be found on the HealthCentral Network.
![[Feed]](/blog/wp-includes/images/rss.png)
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