Matthew’s Blog

Absolutely. Elections are won by those who are voted for, not by those who didn’t vote.

We put far to much weight on the presidential election and despite the sometimes contentious electoral balloting system for the executive position, every voter and vote does count.  Those electoral votes are representative of the states.  So on a state by state basis, every vote counts.

Now, of far more importance are all the other candidates and positions on the ballot. The US Senate, US House, State Senate, and State House, governors, judges, county, municipal, mayoral, and local board elections, which are on the same ballot, are equally if not more important than the presidential ballot.

Many of these “smaller” elections are won or lost by individual votes.
These “smaller” elections have more impact on our daily lives than the presidential, and we can have a definite say in what that life is like.

Get out and vote!  Your Vote Counts!

I just stumbled across this great Recycling/Waste resource.  I’m in the process of cleaning out my house and I’ve run across many things that ought to be recyclable if I only knew where to take them.   http://earth911.com/ does!  Not only does it give you cool tips and ideas about things you never thought about recycling before (blue jeans as insulation?), it serves us one better by allowing you to type in your location and what it is you are trying to recycle.  It will then show you a list of places that will accept your material.

http://earth911.com/

I have no affiliation with this website.

Now here’s a different kind of resume.

I fed my resume into Wordle.com and look what came out - Excellent!

Click on it to see the big version

To see it’s source

check out my resume page at http://www.MatthewRochte.com/resume

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real.

It is by the real that we exist;

it is by the ideal that we live.

~ Victor Hugo
found scrolled around top of the
Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City

In the past two days I have just been amazed by talent.   Two remarkable dance performances and one  Montreal street guitarist.

The first dance came from Pilobolus who I was first introduced to several months ago the same way many others did - on Conan O’Brien show or on YouTube - Summer In the City - The shadow play performance.   Shadows of full busloads of people, Statue of Liberty, and even a bust of Conan.

Well, yesterday I was surfing TED for interesting green ideas when I saw their name and had to investigate.  This performance was mesmerizing.   I like dance, but I’ve never seen synergy like this before.  And I love that they were part of the TED conference because of course art belongs in the same category as business and technology.  It is all about innovation and maximizing the human potential and delighting in the world of possibility.  Take a look

Today I was amazed by a Swan Lake performance presented by the Great Chinese State Circus.   The intro is charming as four frogs delightfully romp/leap around the stage.  The swan dance then seems like any other performance I’ve seen and then I take note that she is dancing on top of someone.  At one point she is piroetting on his right deltoid.   AMAZING strength and fluidity.

Lastly, for now at least, on the same website that brought us the Swan Lake performance an incredible guitar tapping musical performance by Erik Mongrain, a Montreal street performer with a critically aclaimed album.

Wow what incredible and beautiful paradigm shifts.  Take artistic standards and their expectations rotate them 90 degrees literally and figuratively and discover a new art-form, a new style, a new awareness, a new thinking.

Xerox Phaser 6130
This spring I bought myself a new toy (ahem) professional office support device - a Xerox Phaser 6130 color laser printer.  I LOVE IT!!!!  It duplexes, it makes booklets (2 pages per side), it is super fast, great pictures, and relatively low in cost to operate.   I was fed up with ink jet printers that never seemed to give me the value for the ink.  Xerox even goes so far as to calculate what your costs are per sheet depending on color content.

4Inkjets.com
Anyway, the one downside to the printer is toner - FOUR toner cartridges at MRP of about $85 each.  So I did some research and found “4InkJets.com” and found they had outstanding reviews and quite a following for ink and toner refills.  They sell a fully compatible cartridge (I think they are either the OEM or have direct connection to the factory as they truly are identical) for $39.99 - that’s a savings of $45 each right there.  And if you add your 10% off cashbaq coupon, it becomes $35.99.  If you order 2 you don’t have to pay for shipping (over $50) which would normally run about $8 anywhere.   They have been exceptional in service to me.   Only once was something backordered, but only for a couple of days.  These toners have a life cycle of 2500 for the black and 2000 for the color ones.   I don’t think my inkject printer came anywhere near that number of prints before they’d crap out on me.

Cashbaq.com
While researching toners I stumbled upon a cool little site that handles online rebates.   I’ve always been annoyed by rebates that you have snail mail in.  This is all handled electronically when you start your journey as cashbaq and use one of their many coupons for online stores.    I was a little skeptical at first, but it didn’t cost me anthing except my email addres which they don’t spam.     They have coupons for hundreds of online stores ranging from 5% off to free shipping to much larger.   That is cool in itself, but the real selling point is that this is a rebate center.  In the example of 4inkject they collect 20% rebate from each sale and offer 10% off coupons.   So in our toner situation.   The price is $39.99 which gets knocked down to $35.99 because of the cashbaq coupon.  Then in about 3 months you will receive a cashbaq check in your paypal account.  In this case 20% rebate.    So if I include the 20% rebate in my costing decision each cartridge costs me just $28.79.  So about the same if not cheaper than my office jet ever was.

It really works, and you totally forget about it until one day you get an email saying that they have deposited money in you paypal account.    They even start you off with a $5 credit to your account and focus.   So far I’ve received 2 rebate payments this year.

http://www.MatthewRecommends.com/cashbaq.htm