For the longest time, I didn’t really see the point of taking home movies. I would take some because I’d be encouraged to do so, but they always seemed to just wind up in boxes collecting dust somewhere.

Until last night.

I was digging through one of our closets and came up with a few tapes depicting the day our son was born, his first Christmas, and some other moments from early in his life. We watched them together and he really enjoyed them. He had tons and tons of questions about what was going on and we had to pause it several times to talk about things.

Home movies seem pretty useless when you take them, but they can sure create a magical evening a few years later.

The Science of Success Science is beginning to show beyond a doubt that genes have a huge effect on positive traits in people. Even more interesting, it benefits us to interact with people who are wired differently than us. (@ the atlantic)

11 Steps in Becoming Educated for Your Dream Job These steps can really be boiled down to one thing: push yourself in your education every chance you get. Choose the hard classes. Choose the hard school. A hard-earned C teaches you far more than an easy A. (@ productivity 501)

Slow and Steady Wins the Race The biggest challenge of personal finance is the battle with patience. Patience is hugely rewarded when it comes to personal money management, but many people simply don’t have it. (@ get rich slowly)

Some Counterintuitive Facts about Loneliness If you work in a job where you’re alone much of the time, these are some very important facts to keep in mind. (@ the happiness project)

The Cost of Money People often make some very unusual sacrifices in the name of a bit more money. (@ free money finance)

After turning in my book a week ago, some of my friends who had already published books wrote to me with an interesting point. “After your book is done,” they said, “you’ll find that you go through a bit of ‘writing burnout.’ You won’t want to write anything for a while.”

At first, I didn’t think this was true, as early last week, I got a lot of writing done. Now, though, I know what they mean. In some ways, it feels like the well is dry.

I’m not saying I have no ideas – I have plenty of those. It’s just that when I sit down with an idea right now, the words don’t flow as quickly as they once did. It’s almost as if I pumped too much water out of the well for a while and now I have to pump really hard to get even a slow flow of water.

So, I’ve been using the time to read, write down ideas, and follow up on other pursuits until the flow gets back to normal – which, according to some of my friends, it will in a few weeks.

For now, here are some interesting articles from other sites.

Do What Works For You I agree with this idea to an extent, but I can also see how it can be detrimental. If you always do it your way and ignore what others have done successfully with the same task, you might find that you’re doing it pretty poorly. Do what works for you – but never stop learning new things. (@ get rich slowly)

Saying farewell to a hobby, part two I’ve had to let go of hobbies several times in my own past and it’s always been difficult. Part of me has wanted to hold onto the items from that neglected hobby as some sort of nostalgia – but that’s a really bad idea unless you have acres of storage space. (@ unclutterer)

Act the Way You Want to Feel For a large part of my life, I thought this kind of thing was complete foolishness. Until I tried it. It works almost all of the time. If you consciously act happy over and over again, you begin to feel happier about your life. (@ happiness project)

How Do I Make My Resume Stick? This article describes the “keyword test” – figure out what words the person hiring is looking for and make sure those words get noticed on your resume. (@ fast company via behance)

Secrets of Telemarketing From an Industry Insider My sister-in-law was a telemarketer for a while. She was quite good at it, but she loathed the work. Perhaps I should convince her to write a bit of a “tell-all” about it. (@ wise bread)

How to Make Money as a Soccer Referee This is an excellent, detailed guide on how to turn a passion into a nice side income. I know some people who do such refereeing in different sports for a living and they love it. (@ free money finance)

Now that my book is finished, I’ve decided to embark on another big time-consuming project, but this one is a little different.

I’m a big fan of online banks. I think they’re an incredibly powerful tool for helping you with your personal savings. For a long time, I’ve wanted to talk about a slew of online banks, just to review all of the different options out there.

There’s been a problem with this, though. I don’t like to talk about products that I don’t actually use myself. I won’t review a book unless I’ve read it and thought about it. I won’t review a financial tool unless I’ve used it extensively myself. And I won’t talk about a bank unless I’ve used it myself.

I use ING Direct as my primary bank. I talk about it often. But I don’t mention other banks for the reason above, and I want that to change. There is a huge diversity in online banks, offering different features, different interest rates, different offerings, and different tools for managing your money.

Here’s my solution. Over the next several months, I’m going to open accounts at a bevy of online banks. I’m going to try them out, see in detail what services they offer, transfer some money in out, test their customer service, and close the accounts (if I don’t intend to replace an account I’m already using).

Then, once a week, I’m going to post a detailed review of that bank in an effort to outline clearly what distinguishes it from other banks. What do they do differently? Who is this bank most appropriate for?

So I’m going to open this up to you a little bit. What would you like to see in a review of an online bank? What features really matter to you and would cause you to make the move to switch to a new bank?

While you chew on that, here are some interesting personal finance articles that might interest you.

“Natural Inclinations…Are Hardly Ever Altered or Overcome.” Over the last few days, I’ve been enormously inspired by this little quote. (@ the happiness project)

Do you do your most important work first? I used to have a very organized morning routine, where I would do most of my “routine” tasks before starting the day. What I found is that I got my “routine” tasks done, but most of the real meat of my work – the creative tasks – didn’t go nearly as well. (@ unclutterer)

How to Change Your Motor Oil Changing one’s own motor oil is a tremendous way to save money – when you pay someone else to do it, you’re essentially paying someone $20 so you can sit in a waiting room while some guy unscrews a nut, collects some oil in a bucket, screws the nut back in place, then dumps some clean oil in the top. Why not do that at home where you can do something worthwhile while the oil drains and save yourself $20? (@ art of manliness)

What To Do With A Financial Windfall This is a great step-by-step guide to handling a windfall. If you don’t have a plan, windfalls can actually be a large negative disruption in your life, as we talked about a bit last week. (@ moolanomy)

Results of a Week Without Spending Can you go an entire week without spending any money? As an experiment, this family attempted to have a week without any spending and managed to get by only spending $3. Fairly insightful stuff. (@ pt money)

I’m pleased to announce that we’re expecting our third child. The baby is due in late April. And, of course, when the child is born, you can expect pictures.

This is the “news” I alluded to on Monday that was affecting my wife’s health – she’s had a big case of the first trimester “tiredness” which has made our home even more hectic lately.

Here are some personal finance articles of interest to keep you busy.

Even Good Debt Can Be Bad All debt can be bad. I don’t necessarily believe in the “good debt versus bad debt” dichotomy, which is basically the argument of this article. (@ moolanomy)

Be Your Own Part-Time Boss: The Pros & Cons This is one of the best guides I’ve read on starting your own small side business. My favorite point: start now and work out the kinks along the way. (@ man vs. debt)

Paradox Of Financial Choices: Maximizing vs. Satisficing Some people seek to maximize – to squeeze every nickel out of a situation that they can. Other people seek satisfaction – a level of completeness that balances their time and happiness. I think I’m more of the latter. (@ my money blog)

What is Simple Living and Why Should I Care? I think the real value of living simple is that it gives you the time to explore the things you’re interested in and passionate about. (@ wise bread)

Which Comes First: The House or the Nest Egg? The nest egg, in my opinion. Given that renting is often the better financial position as compared to home ownership, I think many people over-fetishize owning a home (myself included) and push themselves into a financially sub-optimal situation. (@ get rich slowly)

Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law Dunbar’s Number – 150 – is the number of meaningful friendships/relationships that a person can actually sustain. Although some argue that that number is growing due to internet technologies, I argue that it’s just allowing us to keep tabs on a larger group of people more easily, not to build meaningful relationships with them. (@ seth godin)

Separation This is a fascinating story of a divorce. It does seem like a better outcome than the typical “I’m calling a lawyer” breakdown in marriage, though. (@ steve pavlina)

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have much of a desire to collect books. I keep a small pile of reference books around for information and inspiration, and I have a handful of books I’m sure I’ll re-read in the future. Other than that, the only books I retain are unread books.

I have a bookshelf in my office and, aside from part of the top shelf, the only books on it are unread books – ones I’ve never read. I pick them up at yard sales, from PaperBackSwap, and so forth and just pop them on there.

Whenever I read a book, I usually put it in another box that I intend to give away in the near future. About every six months or so, I give away the contents of the box, usually on PaperBackSwap.

Why am I mentioning this? A few days ago, I spent a couple of hours reorganizing this bookshelf. Rather than feeling like I was just shuffling around stuff that I wouldn’t look at again, I was excited. It made me want to shout, “Clear my schedule! I’ve got some books to read!”

Those are the kinds of possessions I want in my life. That’s not clutter, that’s joy.

Remove a Limiting Belief in About 20 Minutes Beliefs are things that should be challenged. It either reinforces and strengthens a belief or it replaces that belief with something closer to the core of who you are. Either way, that’s a win. (@ steve pavlina)

How to Be Indispensable The best way to be indispensable is to create things useful to others and pack the ideas with intelligence, loyalty, kindness, respect, discipline, pride, passion, and compassion. (@ jonathan fields)

Pay Yourself First In other words, the first thing that should come out of your paycheck is some sort of savings for the future. This is a very powerful approach, as it ensures your long term future while also teaching you to live on less. (@ get rich slowly)

Overcompensating to Change Habits “When I was studying piano, I used to practice playing scales with each hand playing in a different key. This wasn’t something I was ever likely to do in real music, but it helped push the fingerings into my subconscious.” Brilliant. There’s no better way to reinforce a habit than to focus on mastering those little specifics. (@ productivity501)

How to Speed Read Like Theodore Roosevelt These are the techniques I use when I first read a document. Quite often, I’ll follow it up with more careful, slow reading when I’m trying to understand a specific point or topic. (@ art of manliness)

How to Defeat Burnout and Stay Motivated The best way I’ve found to defeat burnout is to use a lot of milestones. I find that big goals make it hard for me to stay on task – instead, I set goals for the next few days that are in line with the big goal. (@ zen habits)

Another Case from the Clueless Files I really don’t like the type of reporting highlighted in this article. Attempting to make me sympathetic for people who made stupid mistakes, realized they were stupid, then made them again is something of a turn-off. (@ free money finance)

Can a meal really get any easier than that? Cook up some rice, add some red beans, frozen okra, and cooked sausage (andouille, polska, whatever you like). Sprinkle in a lot of spices (sage, cayenne, garlic, thyme, paprika, even a bay leaf if you have one) as you’re cooking it all together. Yum – supper is prepared. Put a bottle of hot sauce on the table and you’re good to go. Make plenty and you can easily eat it for leftovers for a day or two.

Meals like this are common suppers at our house. Things that are easy to prepare and inexpensive yet quite tasty are always huge hits and wind up in our regular meal rotation. This meal is one of the common ones – we all like it.

The 5 Stages of Investing Enlightenment Investing is just like any other complex area that we study in life. We grow in our knowledge and understanding of it. Quite often, it seems, the more you know about something, the less it feels like you know about something because you’re aware of how deep the rabbit hole really goes. (@ free money finance)

Your Take: What Are Your Rules of Thumb? If I have a rule of thumb, it’s “there’s a better way of doing this.” I constantly try to figure out better and more cost-effective ways of doing the regular things in my life. (@ bargaineering)

Don’t Let the Children Dictate Your Finances! It’s very easy for people to allow children to dictate areas of your life. They’re demanding without understanding the ramifications and that often results in conflict – and sometimes, to avoid that conflict, parents try to find other ways to do things. That’s not a good idea when it comes to your money. (@ frugal dad)

No Costco Membership? Shopping At Costco Still Saves Money This is a calculation I’ve wanted to do for a long time: are warehouse clubs still cheaper even without the membership? Most warehouse clubs let you shop without a membership but you have to pay a 10% markup on what you buy. This article concludes that, for a lot of purchases, warehouse clubs are still cheaper per item. The question then becomes whether a membership is cost-effective. (@ the digerati life)

Apparent Risk and Actual Risk People’s perception of risk is often skewed and incorrect, but we generally behave according to the perceived risk, not the actual risk. It’s always beneficial to stop and figure out the actual risk of our situation. (@ seth godin)

Who Has the Time (or Money) for Deals? I agree – for the most part, sites that post tons of “deals” are usually a waste of time and money. My solution is simple – I filter them automatically using services like feedfilter.com. I just make up a list of the things I’m actually looking for, then use feedfilter.com to filter bargain sites for only those things. In the end, all I see are bargains for the specific items I care about. (@ wise bread)

Crush It! and The Best Books on Boosting Your Income Pretty good list, except for the Loral Langemeier book. I’ve read two books by her and they feel a lot like books by Robert Kiyosaki – cheerleading and anecdotes that lead to dangerous real-world conclusions. (@ get rich slowly)

Three little items of interest.

1. I will be attending the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX on March 12-16 (or some subset of those days). I hope to have copies of my upcoming book there to give to a few people. If you’re going to be there as well and want to meet up, let me know!

2. Starting next Friday (or possibly the Friday after that), I am going to be writing a series of weekly food posts on frugal meals and food preparation, ones that are kind of similar to the “How Low Can You Go” series from this summer. These will be heavy on the photography, but I do not want the typical over-the-top food photography – I want it to look like a realistic kitchen where real people prepare food and serve it to their families. Please, take extra effort in commenting on these posts, as these are “warm-ups” for an eventual blog that I hope to write dedicated to food and cooking.

3. Over the years, many readers have been kind enough to send me gifts of all kinds, and I really appreciate it. But after receiving some (very) awkward gifts in the mail, I’ve changed that policy. If you wish to send me a gift, please choose an item from my wishlist at Funagain Games. We play a lot of board games here as a family and with friends, and Funagain is a great game retailer with great prices and a very easy ordering system (you can even pay via PayPal). Alternately, please make a donation to Jump for Joel (my favorite charity) on my behalf. This change in attitude about such generosity was a difficult decision to come to and I puzzled over how to handle it (and write about it) for a long while.

Here are some interesting personal finance writings I found in the past week.

Little Known Secret to Buying Cookbooks at Insanely Cheap Prices Library book sales are a great way to find “timeless reference” books – like cookbooks. After all, recipes from the 1950s still work, don’t they? The cookbook section is the first place I hit during library sales, actually. (@ pay less for food)

5 Ways Self Storage Units Are More Sad Museums Than Savvy Solutions Before our financial meltdown, we had a self-storage unit to hold the stuff that wouldn’t fit in our apartment. It was an incredibly stupid mistake. Instead of throwing more money away storing stuff that we’re not using, we should have gotten rid of a lot of stuff. (@ wise bread)

Goals Are the Gateway to Financial Success This is the second in J.D.’s list of thirteen guiding principles. I’m a huge believer in personal goals for success, not only in finances, but in any area of life. (@ get rich slowly)

A Secret to Happiness? Don’t Get Organized. This seems counterintuitive at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense. If you have so much stuff that it’s difficult to keep it organized, you have too much stuff and should consider getting rid of some of it. A lack of organization is a sign of being overwhelmed – and that means it’s time to step back a little. (@ happiness project)

The Death of Multitasking and Rebirth of Unitasking If you do any sort of work that requires deep focus, multitasking won’t help you get it done. I find time and time again that I work better if I close off as many distractions as possible. (@ dumb little man)

The Neutral Fallacy: There is No Sideways in Life A thought-provoking article. I tend to agree, for the most part – everything you do in life is either a step forward or a step back. I don’t really think “sideways steps” exist – they’re usually steps back. (@ jonathan fields)

For her eighth birthday, I gave one of my nieces the book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. It’s one of those books that, in my mind, is a masterpiece of children’s literature, one that I wish every child everywhere would have a chance to read. I actually have a (fairly long) list of such books that I intend to read to my own children as they get older and I’ve managed to cross off a few of them already (like Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak).

What books do you consider to be essential children’s literature? Give me a few titles – they can be anything from picture books to young adult books. I’m curious to what books you’d consider absolutely mandatory for your children to read.

10 Things Warehouse Clubs Won’t Tell You I’m linking to this one because I’ve never seen such a blatant hatchet job. Among the reasons: it’s dangerous because twice in twenty years objects have fallen off shelves and hit customers, and it might take “several minutes” for them to inspect your receipt before you leave (I’ve never had this process take more than a minute, not even the weekend before Christmas). The author of this article has an axe to grind, to the point of undermining what might be a good point or two. This is, quite simply, an example of over-the-top borderline slander that anyone should be able to see through, and it discredits SmartMoney and Yahoo! Shopping for posting it. (@ yahoo via free money finance)

Ten Things I Will Teach My Children About Money This is the type of thinking that’s worthwhile for every parent to embark on. Even if the lessons that each parent considers important and worth teaching aren’t the same, the fact that a parent puts importance on such lessons is vital. Plus, sharing such thoughts gives other parents food for thought. (@ consumerism commentary)

Is the Key to Wealth Found in a Book? The answer is simple – knowledge is only one piece of the puzzle. Taking action on that knowledge is substantially harder. Most people have some semblance of an idea as to how to become a distance runner, yet most people aren’t distance runners. (@ millionaire mommy next door)

Why Good Writing Matters – And How You Can Improve Your writing ability is often the first thing people have to judge you on – and if you don’t bother to write well, that creates a negative first impression. (@ dumb little man)

Determining the Perfect Amount How much is too little? How much is too much? Getting a good sense of both helps you to regularly use the perfect amount, which can save you a lot of money and time. (@ unclutterer)

When Is It Okay to Finance Fun? I’m much more in favor of saving up for fun than financing fun. Financing fun means that, after the fun is over, you undo the joy you gained by having to face down the debt. By delaying gratification, you don’t have the downside of debt, just the upside of the fun. (@ get rich slowly)

If Craigslist Cost $1 If Craigslist cost $1, I would actually use it. As it is now, with free postings, it’s a cesspool of nonsense. This model really does work – see Ask Metafilter for proof. (@ seth godin)

Want to Hear More About the Business Side? Given the number of times I’ve been asked about how I earn money doing The Simple Dollar, I’ve considered writing a complete article along these lines to explain it. Is this of interest to you guys? (@ i will teach you to be rich)