It’s not very often I break into my “personal world” here on BeDeviant.com, but this is too big to not share.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to my son. This is Finnegan William Wise, born 9/10/09 at 3:52 pm. He weighed in at a hefty 9lbs. 2 oz. Mom and baby are doing fine.

If you don’t hear from us for a few days, it’s because I’m busy loving this little guy to bits. Peace.

What would you do with an extra day added to your weekend?

Go fishing?
Sleep in?
Get some yard work done?

How about work out? According to a recent article in Time, that’s what most of the Utah state employees mandated to take a four-day work week would do.

• One year ago Utah mandated 4-day workweeks (closing on Fridays) for 17,000 state employees in an effort to reduce energy costs.

• Employees still worked 40 hours, just putting in longer days Monday-Thursday.

• There was a 13% reduction in energy use, and employees saved a total of $6 million in gas.

• A whopping 82% of workers say they are in favor of keeping the new schedule.

• “Fears that working 10-hour days would lead to burnout turned out to be unfounded…workers took fewer sick days and reported exercising more on Fridays. ‘This can really make a difference for work-life balance,’ says Jeff Herring, Utah’s executive director for human resources.”

I know of a few friends who have adopted this schedule and can attest that they are loving it. With the Millenial generation taking the ranks in the workforce in the next 5-15 years, could a five-day work week be a thing of the past?

What do you think? Would you want a perma-three-day weekend?

(HT: Jeremy Anderberg for the awesome research.)

When I first signed up for FriendFeed, I wasn’t quite sure how to utilize it. When I logged on, I felt like I was seeing all the same stuff from my other social networks.

Was FriendFeed worth it? Was it able to produce anything “new” in the social stratosphere? Or was it simply a regurgitation of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.?

I was ready to write FriendFeed off, but then I found the private groups feature. And then I was hooked.

One of the primary ways I utilize the FriendFeed private groups feature is to act as a depository for things I want to write about on this blog. I created a privated group called “blog fodder”:

I created it using the following steps:

1. Create the Group

First you need to go to the “Groups” section on FriendFeed and create a group. The button you want looks like this:

Click on “Create a group” and then give it a name, click “private group” (this way only the people you invite can view and post to the feed), and then click “create feed”.

2. Add Feeds

This is when things get really fun. This is where you get to add the feeds from around the interwebs that you want to be a part of your private group. For my giddy-up, I’ve got three feeds that I pull info from:

1. My Evernote public folder
2. The label “Blog Fodder” from my public Google Reader
3. My Delicious “blogfodder” tag

Whenever I dump something into one of those feeds, my private group pulls into into one central location, ready for me to read. Ready for me to post on!

The best part is, you can utilize multiple different feeds, email addresses, and social media services to make up your private group. If you can think it up, FriendFeed will give you a way to do it.

3. Utilize

Once you’ve done the hard work of setting up the group with your various feeds, FriendFeed allows you to aggregate all of that wondrous info in one of two ways: RSS Feed or Facebook feed.

You can pull the info for this group right into Facebook, say for a private group or a fan page. Or you can utilize the RSS feed of your private group (my preferred method) and feed it into Google Reader for fresh content.

This is one way to utilize the private group feature for FriendFeed. It is extremely:

• Useful
• Customizable
• Practical
• Helpful

If you’ve figured out a different way to use FriendFeed groups, private or otherwise, feel free to share in the comments below!

This is pretty gross. You can’t “un-see” this. Just warning you.

Dallas Willard just put words to something I’ve been trying to verbalize for years. Listen to these words from The Divine Conspiracy:

In the story of the good Samaritan, Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply he teaches us that we cannot identify who “has it,” who is “in” with God, who is “blessed,” by looking at exteriors of any sort. That is a matter of the heart. There alone the kingdom of the heavens and human kingdoms great and small are kit together. Draw any cultural or social line you wish, and God will find his way beyond it. “Human beings look at the outer appearance. but Jehovah looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16:7). And “what humanity highly regards can be sickening to God” (Luke 16:15).

To a Jew in Jesus’ time, “the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan.” Samaritans were the half-breeds that young Jewish children were taught to hate from birth.

If that’s the case, who is your “good Samaritan”? Is it the good Muslim? Good atheist? Good homosexual? Good Iraqi? Good Communist? Good liberal? Good conservative? Willard says that God will find a way to make it past your social judgment.

That was like a much-needed kick to the theological groin. Thanks Dallas!

I’ve enjoyed using Evernote immensely. It helps me stay connected to my “stuff” no matter where I am: Laptop, iPhone, other computer, wherever.

One of the main ways I use Evernote is to keep track of pesky receipts for work. I’ve set up a work flow involving my iPhone camera, JotNot and Evernote that has worked pretty well. Snap, scan, send, file in appropriate notebook in Evernote. Easy.

I recently discovered a new way to bypass the process when purchasing items online: The secret Evernote email address. If you have an Evernote account, you already have one of these email addresses and I’m going to show you how to use it to get receipts (or anything else, for that matter) sent straight to your Evernote account.

First, you need to go to your Evernote web account, log in, and click on settings:

Next, navigate down to the lower right hand corner of the page and look for something that looks like this:

That’s the email address you’ll want to use to get stuff sent to your Evernote. I’ve blocked out the “secret” part of my email address, yours obviously won’t have a giant, green bar across it. I tested this out with my most recent purchase from Apple (Snow Leopard!) and can assure you it works like a charm. Here’s the proof:

So find your secret email address and start using it:

• Email yourself receipts from web purchases.
• Email pictures to your Evernote account to mimmick a MobileMe account.
• Email notes to yourself or portions of emails that you get on your iPhone.

This is just another powerful tool in the arsenal of Evernote. Check it out and get started with your own, personal info cloud.

This video has been making the rounds as of late, but it’s important for you to know these stats. Watch this video and then tell everyone you know to start engaging in this new medium.

If you don’t know, now you know.

[HT: Collide Magazine]