When planning a trip or vacation for my family, two variables are king: time and cost. Do I want to subject a bunch of airline passengers to my squirmy, loquacious children for a few hours, or do I want to subject myself to my squirmy, loquacious and now cranky children for many many hours? How much will it cost?

Luckily, there’s a handy site that will calculate trip time and cost for driving and flying to/from your destination. In the example above, it makes sense to drive to Las Vegas from Los Angeles, but it would definitely be cheaper to fly to, let’s say, Chicago from Los Angeles rather than drive. Handy!

via BeFrugal.com via Lifehacker

CamelCamelCamel (what a name!) is a free website that tracks the price history of any product on Amazon.com. Being a big Amazon.com customer, having this tool at my fingertips is invaluable. I can check to see if a product that I want is at its peak or valley and make judgement calls accordingly. You can even set alerts to notify you via email or Twitter.

This incredibly useful service is free! What are you waiting for?

via BoingBoing

You would think that monetary reward is the primary motivator for human beings to perform their best. You’d be right for simple tasks, but once you enter the realm of more complicated and more cognitive-intensive tasks, things turn upside-down.

The embedded video above is an excerpt from Dan Pink’s TED talk on motivation:

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

via RSA Animate via TED GlobalThanks for the scoop, Ken!

I started a project not long ago to convert my physical DVD library into a digital movie library. One of the things I used to obsess over is entering every bit of meta data for each video file. Now with two kids, I slowly fell off that bandwagon.

Until now.

Luckily there are both Windows and Mac OS X versions of the software.

via Kerstetter.net via Lifehacker

Whoa, Nelly! An entire month passed without a new post to MCOJ? My apologies!

What better excuse than a post on digital distractions.

via Information is Beautiful via Lifehacker

I’m already an Amazon fanboy, but now this Firefox extension takes my fanboy-ism to epically lazy proportions!

via Firefox Add-ons via Lifehacker

If you’re not afraid of getting your hands a little dirty, Lifehacker has a great little VB script that enables you to enter items into your Remember The Milk to-do list via Launchy.

A couple of caveats:

• This VB script assumes you have a gmail account.
• This requires putting your gmail username and password in the VB script.

For the security-minded (read: paranoid), this might be too much.  This works out nicely, though for quick task entry without losing momentum.

via Lifehacker