Products I Love XXVI

One tool I can't live without is a real lifesaver, and it serves a dual purpose. Keynamics makes a nifty little device that's super simple -- and super useful.

The Aviator Laptop Stand is intended to be used on planes, so you can rest your laptop on a seat tray and not have to hunch forward to work. But I've found it to be the best laptop stand for everyday desk use bar none.

It keeps your laptop off the surface of your desk, which increases airflow around the computer and aids in cooling. It also tilts the laptop forward gently for a more ergonomic approach to the keyboard.

And at $20, it's super inexpensive. Just three pieces of plastic you can snap together. I've used other laptop stands -- metal, padded, all much more expensive -- and this one's the best.

Moving Money

I know Where's George is sooo 1998, but 10 years later, it's captured my imagination like nobody's business.

The idea is simple: Each dollar bill has a unique identifier on it, and were you to enter them into a database, and track instances of a dollar bill's possession, you could monitor its travel throughout the world.

For the last few weeks, I've been religiously stamping my dollars -- $1 bills only; it's George for a reason, Media Dieticians -- with a stamp purchased from Holmes Stamp & Sign and releasing them back into the wild.

All my dollars have been virgins -- no previous entries, these -- but my sense of money and how money moves has been heightened.

Where does your money go? It's not that difficult to tell.

Reeds in My Saxophone Case

While in California recently, I bought a new box of alto saxophone reeds because I wanted new reeds to play my sax. So this afternoon, I cleaned out my saxophone case. I kept all of the reeds still in boxes but threw away used and loose reeds in order to make sure I wasn't reusing old reeds. It's been awhile since I've played my sax. Here are the reeds that were in my case:

• La Voz Med.
  
• La Voz M Hard
  
• La Voz M Soft
  
• Marca 3
  
• Marca 3 1/2
  
• Olivieri 3
  
• Rico Royal 3
  
• Rico Royal 5
  
• Roy J. Maier 3
  
• Vandoren 3
  

If you play a reed instrument, what kind of reeds do you use?

Products I Love XXV

At work, I just got a FreeAgent Go external hard drive from Seagate. It's the sexiest hard drive I've ever seen. Cost effective at $85 for 160GB -- it goes up to 250GB for $130 -- the drive is a sumptious chocolate brown and about as big as a wallet.

Memory is cheap. And it'll get cheaper.

Products I Love XXIII

I used to be a religious -- as in, frequent -- customer of Northern Sun, a progressive mail-order retailer based in Minnesota. I was especially fond of their "recycle this envelope" labels, which you could affix onto a business-reply envelope in order to address it and use it. For years, I just reused business-reply envelopes. Now, I'm not so picky, and the labels appear to be discontinued, so go figure.

But I recently dropped $20 their way in order to get some T-shirts I could work out in at the Greenpoint YMCA. We joined the Y in early February, and I've been hard pressed to single out T-shirts -- and I have too many -- that are worthy of sweating in... and then still wearing in other settings. So far, I've pegged a ratty Septophilia Records T-shirt as one that's not nice enough for everyday wear, but otherwise, it's Threadless and other shirts too nice to sully.

Northern Sun has this deal where you can get discontinued T-shirts for $5 a pop. You can't choose them, but you can buy them. I just got four -- and they're awesome.