Category Archives: senior lifestyle

Best Prices at the Best Restaurants

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I don’t mind spending a buck. In fact, Eliot and I tend to overspend for most things we buy. By overspend, I mean that we don’t go out of our way to squeeze the seller for the best possible price on every purchase we make.

The only time I get nuts about a price is when I fly or stay at a hotel. It feels so unsettling to learn that the person sitting next to me on the airplane paid a lot less because of some deal we missed. The same thing happens when friends stay at the same hotel as we do but manage to get it at a much lower rate. I really feel cheated and it ruins my good time.

That’s why I was so excited to learn about www.savored.com, which is owned by Groupon. The site offers deep discounts on high-end restaurants across the country if you book through them. Our friends Ron and Chuck told us about this restaurant site, The last two times we went out to dinner with them, they made the reservations through the Savored website. When the check came, the tally was 30-per-cent lower than it was listed on the menu.

I was so wowed. We go out five nights a week. We could use a little help with prices. High-end restaurants love Savored because the site fills tables that would otherwise go unseated.

Savored is currently available in 10 cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Denver.

Happy dining — much cheaper!

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Showtime’s Homeland Offers Extended Plot Lines on Audible

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Damian Lewis

Showtime’s Homeland is about to change TV watching forever. For the first time ever, an actor, Damian Lewis, who plays Nicholas Brody, will be recording complementary material related to major plot lines that will only be available on Audible.com.

That means directly after tonight’s episode (Sunday, October 13), fans can hear a free 30-minute extended story performed by Damian Lewis. There is a lot of speculation as to what he may talk about. My sources say most of the recording will give further insight into his mysterious character.

This development is unbelievable news for everyone who loves watching TV. So many times I feel a character has not been developed enough in an hour dedicated to complex story lines. Audiences can go away frustrated and confused.

I am hoping these supplemental audios really turn out to be a true value added rather than some commercial enterprise. 20th Century Fox has teamed up with Audible.com on this new venture. No one is saying who approached whom with this idea, but other Homeland characters are said to be preparing more audio segments.

Watch for other shows as well to copy this idea. In my book, that is good news both for audiences like me and for Audible. I have been telling you all to listen to books on Audible.com for over a year. More and more people will become familiar with Audible if they take advantage of this offer. That has to be a big sales generator for the audio book app, which is owned by Amazon.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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I can’t wait until October 15. The print, Kindle, and Audible editions of “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” will become available. I love biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. The book is going to tell all of us who don’t know much about Bezos just how he built a $75 billion empire.

The book was written by Brad Stone, a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. I know Brad from his days at The New York Times when he covered technology. He is extremely well respected and very precise, so this book is going to be as close to accurate as you can get.

Bezos was not interested in being interviewed, but he didn’t stop Stone from speaking to hundreds of his closest contacts. As I read an excerpt of the book, featured recently in Businessweek, I soon started to see some uncanny similarities between Bezos and Steve Jobs.

1) No level of tolerance and humiliate those who screw up.

2) Never met their real fathers.

3) Very peculiar. Amazon office desks are repurposed doors. Jobs lived in a house with no furniture.

Amazon will shortly be celebrating its 20th anniversary. Stone says “Amazon rivals Wal-Mart as a store, Apple as a device maker, and IBM as a data services company.”

“In the past few months, Amazon has launched a marketplace in India, opened a website to sell high-end art, introduced another Kindle reading device and three tablet computers, made plans to announce a set-top box for televisions, and funded the pilot episodes of more than a dozen TV shows. Amazon’s marketplace hosts the storefronts of countless smaller retailers; Amazon Web Services handles the computer infrastructure of thousands of technology companies, universities, and government agencies.”

Bezos, 49, surprised everyone last August when he personally bought The Washington Post. He believes he can turn the newspaper around. He also spends one day each week heading his own private rocket ship company, Blue Origin, which seeks to lower the cost of space travel.

Stone’s book is going to be a great read. I look forward to finding out more about Bezos and how he became one of the biggest successes in the digital marketplace.

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Apple’s Digital Playground

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Every time I hear that a child under 10 years of age is going to visit us, I spend hours thinking about entertaining things to do. Years ago, we went to a playground, the Children’s Museum, a musical for kids, or a sporting event. Those days are completely over for me since I visited a few Apple stores recently.

Apple is becoming the new digital playground for children. It has reconfigured the layout of its stores to accommodate children from three to pre-teen, depending on the size of the store. Apple has designated work tables for different age groups. I got a tremendous amount of pleasure watching these kids totally absorbed in the programs they were working on, which only proves that if you give someone something that he or she is interested in, that person can stayed focused for a very long time. This has nothing to do with a high IQ or better education.

While some grandparents feel technology is killing the social structure for the younger set, I believe the opposite. Bring two people together with a common denominator and a love fest will develop on its own. I have had bonding conversations with people 40 years younger than I am because we both liked the same app.

Most of you do not realize that Apple has free workshops for children comprising hardware and software instruction, youth programs, and one-on-one coaching. Did you know about The Apple Camp for kids ages 8 to 12? It teaches the ins and outs of iMovie and how to make your own films. The free three-day session, held at the Apple Store, leads up to an Apple Camp Film Festival where campers debut their masterpieces. I wish I were young again.

Apple also launched a Kids App Store. It’s not a separate mobile application. It’s a brand new section within the Apple App Store itself featuring a “Kids” category where apps are broken down by age range.

This section of the store separates apps into three age ranges: five and under, between six and eight, and between nine and eleven.

It’s wonderful being a youngster today. I hope they take advantage of everything being offered to them.

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Reboot Your Thinking

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Mike Rowe (wearing the cap) and Mary Sullivan with the Zedge team, Brian Payne and Jonathan Reich. I took the picture.

I finally had the luncheon meeting today that I have been waiting for since I saw Mike Rowe on “Real Time with Bill Maher” several months ago. Mike is the creator and executive producer of Discovery Channel’s Emmy-nominated series “Dirty Jobs With Mike Rowe.”

Mike was on Bill’s show to shed light on the three million perfectly good jobs in America that no one seems to want. Mike started a foundation called Profoundly Disconnected “to challenge the absurd belief that a four-year degree is the only path to success.”

Mike adds that we have a trillion dollars in student loans and record high unemployment. “Yet there are young folks who would rather live at home with their parents and watch TV all day than take a job they feel is beneath them. Boy, are they wrong.” Many of these jobs require skilled training and pay $75,000 the first year or two. After that you are looking at $150,000 or better.

The reason I was meeting with Mike, his business manager Mary Sullivan, and my clients Jonathan Reich (the boss) and Brian Payne of Zedge is that we have 75 million Zedge users who can help raise money to pay for technical school scholarships. Zedge is one of the most popular apps on mobile devices. It has the largest variety of ringtones, wallpaper, and video games.

Mike is the real deal. He has spent years traveling the country and working on more than 200 jobs that most people run away from: coal mining, roustabouting, maggot farming, and sheep castrating.

His foundation mikeroweWORKS says of Mike:

Without any formal training he began his career as a professional musician, faking his way into the Baltimore Opera, and earning his union card in the process.

Soon thereafter, he crashed an audition for the QVC Cable Shopping Channel, where he was immediately hired to sell dubious merchandise in the middle of the night. There, he impersonated a host for nearly three years, spending most of his tenure on double-secret probation, while learning the ins and outs of live television. After that, he worked when he felt like it, narrating, writing, acting, and hosting programs like “Worst Case Scenario” for TBS, “On-Air TV” for American Airlines, “The Most” for History (formerly The History Channel), “No Relation” for Fox, and “New York Expeditions” for PBS.

Hopefully, Zedge will become a “good cause” marketing partner of mikeroweWORKS. Zedge has a very active website, a million fans on Facebook and Twitter, and one of the most popular apps on the Google and Apple Stores. One major brand with one household name can make for some very productive times ahead. Stay tuned.

More On Mike
Birthdate: March 18, 1962

Hails From: Baltimore, MD

Marital Status: Single (but taken)

Current Residence: San Francisco, CA

Interests/Hobbies: Reading, writing, and a bit of running.

On Hosting “Dirty Jobs”: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Photo Plastic Surgery

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You can improve your looks with Facetune — or not!

Let’s face it, the DigiDame crowd is not getting younger. It’s getting more and more difficult to look in the mirror or have our picture taken. Who are those older people staring back at us? We don’t like what we see. The usual comments are: “My neck got so droopy.” “Look at the bags under my eyes.” “I used to be taller.”

At some point, we all need someone to doctor our photos just like magazines do for fashion models. The practicality of that happening is highly impractical. Don’t despair. There is a solution. An app called Facetune can help us look our very best, minimize the wrinkles and erase the blemishes, Facetune is similar to Photoshop but much easier for us to use. It’s also geared for mobile phone photos.

The app is available on the iPad and iPhone for $3.99 each. It features many of the options offered by Photoshop. You will have a great creative experience trying out all of the different tools. Touch the button for “Whiten” and rub your finger over your teeth, and voilà! The whitest smile you have ever seen. There are other buttons that let you remove blemishes, diminish dark circles, smooth skin and create many effects that normally were only reserved for Photoshop to master.

When you select any of the Facetune tools, you get simple instructions on how to use them. There are links to videos with step-by-step instructions as well.

Now go have your picture taken.

A Year After Sandy

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Today’s is a more personal story about Lorna and Jeff Spiro. Their resilience and strength in the face of adversity is not really a digital story, but it is one I’m proud to tell over the Internet.

A year ago, their home in Long Beach, LI was badly damaged and its contents wiped out by Hurricane Sandy. This is the home that Lorna grew up in and then took over as a married woman. This is the home that Lorna knows as her safe haven, no matter what else is going on in the world.

The house is nestled on a canal, blocks away from the ocean. That didn’t matter one bit when the water levels rose to where her cars and her lifetime belongings were washed away. Lorna and Jeff were home at the time and watched in disbelief as their shelter was collapsing one floor at a time.

Lorna is an artist, primarily a sculptor. Luckily, her masterpieces were saved by some fancy footwork. Many appear below in pictures that I took this past Sunday when my brother Steve and sister-law Susan took Eliot and me to visit these friends with whom they have been close for four decades.

We were honored to be invited along so we could marvel at their accomplishments after months of being homeless. Not only did they have the emotional and mental capacity to rebuild, but dealing with insurance companies and government agencies must have taken a super powerful inner strength that only a few can muster.

Lorna and Jeff Spiro are making everything perfect again.

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Tick, Tock, How Much Time Do We Have Left?

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“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” Steve Jobs

I have always wondered if I would have lived my life differently if I knew the exact date and time of my death. Even as a young kid, I used to wonder why we all weren’t told how long we had here on Earth. I believe life would have been so much easier.

I wouldn’t have been so hysterical every time I went to the doctor. All that unnecessary negative energy worrying all the time. Just this afternoon I panicked when I had my second MRI and the technician made me hold my breath about 110 times during a 40-minute period in the tube. I convinced myself that my body couldn’t handle that kind of breathing with dye running thorough it. If I knew I wasn’t going to die, it would have been so much easier.

Moments like this forced Fredrik Colting, a Swedish inventor, to create Tikker, a wrist watch that counts down your life, just so you can make every second count.

The slogan of the watch is “Make Every Second Count.” Tikker believes that if you wear their watch, you are making a statement that your biggest priority in life is living.

The Tikker Kickstarter page says, “Setting up and using TIKKER is incredibly easy. The wearer simply fills out a questionnaire, deducts his/her current age from the results, and TIKKER is ready to start the countdown. With your Tikker you will also receive the book About Time. This is your instruction manual to both Tikker and time itself. It not only gives you information on the concept of time – answering questions such as “What is time? When did time begin? Is time endless?” – but it also guides you through the process of calculating your own life span.

“Through various questions you will arrive at a figure; this is what you set your Tikker on. Although your life’s countdown began the day you were born, Tikker is now there to remind you to make the most of it, AND TO BE HAPPY!”

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Language Glasses

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We have all been to language classes. It’s a place we go to learn a new language. Now we have something called language glasses. It’s eyewear that will automatically translate foreign languages we read into the one we speak.

You are witnessing a new invention way before the general public. Japan’s biggest mobile carrier, NTT DoCoMo, has developed “Intelligent Glass” in preparation for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. The company wants to take full advantage of the tourism and publicity.

I have attached a YouTube video that explains the technology. It’s totally awesome. Picture this. You are in a foreign country. You can’t read street signs, menus, brochures, newspapers, and magazines. All you have to do is put on the DoCoMo glasses and the words will be translated right in front of your eyes.

Think about these language glasses when you see the new Sandra Bullock and George Clooney movie “Gravity.”

Rumors indicate that the DoCoMo technology could be licensed for other applications in the United States. If I hear of anything, I will let you know.

A New Twist on Twitter

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Twitter’s filing for an IPO last week has sent the real estate market in San Francisco soaring. San Francisco was already one of the most expensive cities in the country. Now it’s going to be untouchable. Twitter is located right in the heart of the city. All of a sudden, many of the 2,000 people who work for Twitter will have plenty of money to plunk down on fancy digs.

A real estate agent friend in SF told me that smart brokers have been romancing the upper echelon of Twitter to rep them in their pursuit of new, upgraded homes. More Twitter employees then would like to admit have been looking for residential real estate for the last six months. The better properties are going to go fast.

Mention the name Twitter to anyone in the Bay Area — the digital community, investors, writers, TV producers, celebrities, comedians, politicians, and Twitter users — and you’ll get a big smile. Twitter has changed our lives. It has been a public platform for everyone who wants to make a statement or vent and is one of the most important resources for up-to-date news and opinion.

Now word has it that everyone who is involved with Twitter’s IPO is very concerned that the content posted on Twitter stay relevant and personality driven. It has to remain a main attraction in the news arena in order for it to constantly be appealing to the investment community.

Twitter reportedly had an average of 218.3 million active users a month in the second quarter of this year, up 44 percent from the same quarter last year.

The New York Times recently reported that Twitter expects its growth rate of users to slow down in the United States as the service approaches market saturation. Twitter is hoping to get its future growth from markets like Argentina, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa.