Mint.com has a drill-down on how you can pull it off:

If you are looking to save money without sacrificing the movies and shows you enjoy, there is an option to fit every budget. Here are three ways to optimize your cost-per-channel ratio.

”My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”

- Clarence Budington Kelland

Before Benjamin was born, Jude and I decided we were going to travel as much as we could during the first year. There was no doubt about it: we were going to bring Ben to meet his Zimbabwean family. What we didn’t know was that my brother was going to marry the woman of his dreams in New York City just 90 days after Benjamin was born. We also weren’t sure that we’d find ourselves in the California desert, on the cobbled streets of Amsterdam, the beaches of Newport, or in our favorite city on the planet — Cape Town. What a year, indeed.

Thanks to this handy little website, I was able to quickly add up how far the three of us flew the past nine months. Since December 2009, Benjamin, Jude and I have traveled just over 33,000 miles. That’s 3 continents and a total of nearly 70 hours in the air. I can’t begin to guess how many more hours we spent in trains, buses, rental cars — pushing our stroller around carrying 50 pounds of gear. It’s easy to say we’d do it all over again if we had the chance, but it’s even easier saying that we’ve already done it and once is enough. We earned the memories and the photographs we made.

Here are a few tips if you plan on flying across the world with your baby.

1. Be patient and remember you’re having fun.
2. Break the flight up into 15 minute sections. It’s easier to digest 15 minutes at a time instead of thinking about how you’re going to survive the next 7 and a half hours. Also, avoid the Moving Map channel. That little plane and estimated arrival time will drive you insane.
3. If you can, try to book flights which depart around a usual nap. Wheels up = nap time.
4. Take more than you need. More everything. More food. More diapers. More wipes. More clothes. Yeah, it’s true: you’ll be the guy in the airport you always said you would never be, but weather and airline schedules don’t get along too well.
5. Find a dollar store and buy a handful of kitchen utensils, like spatulas and measuring cups, or a rubber ball and a slinky. It’s cheap entertainment and bringing out a new toy every hour makes the world turn.
6. Save yourself a lot of trouble and buy an umbrella stroller. We own the UPPA G-Luxe, and the thing is G. Check it plane side when you board, and pray it comes back with four wheels. Ours didn’t, so have a contingency plan when you arrive in Africa and the grounds crew says “I don’t think the other wheels are coming; you better go.”
7. If you have a nice flight crew, go stand in the galley after the meal is served and they’re not cleaning up. Have you ever seen how many knobs, buttons, lights, switches, cabinets, drawers, and sliding things there are in there? It’s a boy’s paradise. Just watch the coffee pot. That one is usually hot.
8. Do not let other people’s comments or dirty faces bother you. If needed, remind them they are ugly and they were a baby once, too.
9. If you’re crossing time zones, be prepared to be up all night when you arrive. Babies don’t like being on different time zones any more than adults do. And being up all night can be fun (if you can sleep all day).
10. Don’t read too much about flying with a baby before you actually do. You know, like this site that has 20 tips for how to survive a flight. Much like anything else, you just gotta do it.
11. Make lots of photographs. Memory cards are cheap.

36,000 feet

Cape Point, South Africa

Cape Point, South Africa

Table Mountain, Cape Town

At a White House press conference last [July], President Obama conceded that we may never achieve 100 percent health-insurance coverage without a single-payer system, “because there’s always going to be somebody out there who thinks they’re indestructible and doesn’t want to get health care … and then, unfortunately … they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room, and the rest of us have to pay for it.”

How did “getting hit by a bus” come to mean “unexpected tragedy”?. Juliet Lapidos explains.

• $240,000 Zimbabwean dollars
• $100 Rand
• £83 Pounds
• Owners manual for my Tilley
• A South Carolina detailed coastal expeditions map
• Well-worn street maps of San Francisco and Paris with hand-written notes
• A ferry schedule for the Aran Flyer in northwest Scotland
• Used ticket for Saimsa at the Claddagh in Galway

Fun stuff.

I’ve been listening to Joe on Red Sox radio my whole life, and with any luck, he’ll keep covering the games long into my unborn child’s life — similarly to how Johnny Most covered the Celtics until he practically couldn’t talk anymore. We’re still a month away from meeting Baby Healey, but I’m of the opinion you can never start preparing someone too early to become a member of Red Sox Nation.

A quick search for “1979″ turns up nearly 150,000 snapshots from the year I was brought into this world by the best parents any son could ask for. Thanks Mom and Dad. And happy birthday to me.

It’s not surprising because I never really understood Twitter from the beginning. I never learned what “RT” meant, why a “#” was prepended to certain words, and why Direct Messages only showed up in my email. For the 195 Tweets I posted, I can only think of a few instances when I had something to say in less than Twitter’s max 140 character limit. I followed acquaintances on Twitter — people I knew but don’t know — as well as real-life friends. I can’t knock it (I don’t think) because Twitter has millions of users who seem to Tweet all day and all night. But something’s wrong. Twitter’s two founders can’t figure out how they’re going to make money off their invention. Pogue can’t figure it out. And there are rules and snobs. It’s just too much.

In the end, I’m with Pogue: it’s just another time drain.

Dear Mark Healey,

Thank you for using GEICO’s online services and thank you for your feedback.

State insurance regulations sometimes prohibit the online transmission of certain policy documents.  However, we reviewed your policy and found you received this email in error.  We are working to correct the problem and we certainly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

I’m not sure who’s to blame: state insurance regulators for being so dumb, or Geico for not standing up against such ridiculous laws.

FedEx has my new MacBook Pro in an infinite loop somewhere in California

Obama with two campaign constants: his BlackBerry and his chief strategist, David Axelrod (via NYTimes.com)

Last week, I wondered what Obama used his Blackberry for. The man has dozens of aides and more than enough to think about. The NY Times printed an article this morning suggesting that Obama, as the 44th president, might have to turn over his Blackberry by law. G.W. Bush had to cease using his AOL.com email account 8 years ago because of those out to embarrass.

I’ve had this hammered home to me lately, that if I want to manifest peace in the world, I have to find peace in my mind.

They say a peaceful mind makes a peaceful man. A peaceful man makes a peaceful family. A peaceful family makes a peaceful village. A peaceful village makes a peaceful country. A peaceful country makes a peaceful world.

Peace. Kindness. Sustainability. It’s all the same to me.

My yearbook photos from '54 through '94.

Make your own at Yearbook Yourself. (via Kottke)

Gerard McDonnell, 37, an Irish engineer climbing with a Dutch team, wrote on his blog when the start date was set: “Let luck and good fortune prevail!!! Fingers crossed.”

But luck did not hold. On the way up the last 2,000 feet, a Serbian climber fell to his death, and a Pakistani porter died trying to recover his body. And on the way back, a chunk of glacier splintered and came crashing down, sweeping at least four climbers on ropes to their deaths and leaving a handful of others trapped in the death zone above 26,000 feet — desperately cold, starved for oxygen and without ropes.

Over the next few hours and days, some of those still left on K2 battled their way to safety, some fell to their deaths and others were simply lost forever in the cold wastes of the mountain.

via The Matador Pulse.

I’m still running WordPress — which is even better than ever now in version 2.6 — and have applied WP Super Cache for public-facing pages, plus Google Gears for local “turbo” mode. Overall, the pages are on this new site are startling fast. The Flickr photos in my footer are cached smartly, too, thanks to FlickrRSS.

The biggest switch of all is the move to a new domain: markhealey.org. I own the .com and the .net variations, but the .org suffix is most perfectly suited to this new site. It was fairly easy setting up .htaccess files to handle the heavy lifting for the many hundred of permanent redirects needed to get from markhealey.net to markhealey.org. One side affect of this switch, is that your RSS reader might show a few dozen “new” posts — sorry ’bout that. There shouldn’t be a single hiccup but be sure to let me know if you experience any issues. 

Drop me a line and let me know what you think of the new digs. The old site now lives at v4.markhealey.net.

Diabetes is treatable with the proper medication, but you cannot beat it nor can you erase the effects it has on your body.

Diabetes is anything but minor. It wreaks havoc on the entire body, affecting everything from hearing and vision to sexual function, mental health and sleep. It is the leading cause of blindness, amputations and kidney failure, and it can triple the risk for heart attack and stroke.

“It is a disease that does have the ability to eat you alive,� said Dr. John B. Buse, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine who is the diabetes association’s president for medicine and science. “It can be just awful — it’s almost unimaginable how bad it can be.�

More at well.blogs.nytimes.com.