Stocks for Birthdays

I recently had a birthday, and although my love language is definitely gifts, I’ve started to lose interest in “things”. I’m not by any means minimalist, but I can’t think of any must-haves right now. Instead, I think it’d be sweet if I could continue to build my stock portfolio. I use the app, Robinhood, and while you can’t gift/transfer stocks yet, I’d just put that money towards an investment rather than belongings. And ultimately, if I were to lose that $5-10 stock, it would’ve been free money for me, and the value gained is a lesson learned.

Falcon Heavy

First off, if you don’t follow Elon Musk on social media, what are you even doing using those platforms? He took his futurist company, SpaceX, to the next level with the launch of his Falcon Heavy rocket—the most powerful non-government rocket ever. And he launched his Tesla Roadster playing David Bowie’s “Spaceman” to Mars. Yes, literally hoping to end up in the orbit of the Red Planet. The man is a marketing genius.

It’s disappointing knowing you’ll never be able to leverage one of your company’s rocket launches to put another one of your company’s products into orbit and generate massive free advertising.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) February 7, 2018

You can also track where the Roadster is here.

The Planetary Society

Amazon has this cool thing where if you bookmark smile.amazon.com, they will personally donate to a charity of your choice! I set mine up to donate to The Planetary Society. Founded by Carl Sagan and currently run by Bill Nye, I’m excited to move the work forward in my own way!

P.S. I stumbled across Charity Navigator which helps you compare charities against one another to decide on how you’d like to donate. I’m following The Planetary Society, XPRIZE Foundation, and DonorsChoose.org.

HUM∀NS

If you’ve got Amazon Prime, then wait no longer—Humans is a fantastic show that has an I, Robot vibe with a Stranger Things-esque mystery to it. Shalene and I loved it! It pushes you to think of implications related to technology implementations in the future.

Boomerang for Gmail

A Gmail add-on I’ve been messing around with. Boomerang allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a later date/time or to “boomerang” them back to yourself at a later time as a reminder. For example, a friend sent me a Google Calendar invite for a meeting. I accepted the invite which put it on my calendar, then boomeranged the invite email to myself, which arrived 2 hours before our appointment. There’s also a slick feature that measures how “reply-able” your email is using metrics that evaluate your subject line, words in the body of the email, etc. and helps you rewrite your email to increase the chances of a response.

Featured Image: Markus Spiske