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Archive for July, 2013

Amazon Prime

July 13th, 2013 at 03:34 am

So, anybody else watch their TV sort of through online streaming, like Netflix?

Anyways, it turns out that Amazon has been competing in that space as well, and what's interesting about their offer (Amazon Prime) is that it not only offers a bunch of live streaming shows (with a bunch of kid shows if you have small kids), but it also offers unlimited free shipping for anything you order from Amazon, and you also get to rent one free e-book per month if you have Kindle.

Cost is $79 per year, or comes out to roughly $6.67 per month, which is cheaper than Netflix as well.

So yeah, I'm going to give the 30 day trial a spin, and if I don't like it, I'll just cancel it before the 30 days are up.

Updating my diet

July 7th, 2013 at 04:06 am

Sooo, it's not always easy to eat healthy and keep food costs down at the same time. This is especially true for us guys who want to maintain a certain minimum protein intake level.

After having my food budget free-wheeling out of control for a while, I finally sat down to reign it in, update my diet, and right now, it still comes out to be around $10 a day. Yes, I know it's still high, but I'll keep trying.

Actually, the hardest part will probably be staying on the diet. Hopefully that will work out as well. In the meantime, I will keep looking for cheaper, but quality diet alternatives.

Among other things, I finally bought a small pack of Stevia to try out. In case you didn't know, it's an all-natural sweetener that, because it's so sweet, does not require a whole lot to achieve a similar level of sweet taste as normal sugar. Thus, it contains next to no calories, and is cheaper than, say, buying soda all the time.

Unfortunately, I also learned the hard way that the main ingredient in most commercial Stevia products are either dextrose, or this more sinister thing called Erythritol. The latter is suppose to be some kind of "sugar alcohol" substitute that has been said to be partially indigestible, and in large doses, could cause like diarrhea or something.

Great, huh?

And yet that's usually the main ingredients in Stevia products, whereas the Stevia extract itself is typically second or third.

Nonetheless, it wasn't terribly expensive, and I'd be lying if I said that I can stop eating sweets for the rest of my life. As such, if this Stevia thing works, then this would help both my budget as well as my diet.

I decided to mix a packet with a glass of milk (which is realistically what I may use it for), and unfortunately, I really can't taste it all that well. I mean, I can taste it, but it's rather faint. Oh well, I still have 49 of those packets left to experiment with, so we'll see.

Life is a strange thing, isn't it? Time moves on, people move on, the world keeps on turning. And yet, life itself is a currency that is so finite and so precious. I hope you are all doing well in your life's travels.