Top 8 things to do before (and after) you stupidly lose your wallet

A few days ago, I lost my wallet.  Understandably, I was pretty bummed… but I was also grateful that I had taken some steps ahead of time to minimize the damage.  So, without further ado, let me share with you some suggestions so you, too, can suffer less when you stupidly lose your wallet.

1. Don’t keep more than what’s necessary in your wallet.
This is the easiest way to avoid headaches.  You may have 10 credit cards, gas cards, etc., but how many do you really need to use on a daily basis?  Putting less in your wallet not only means less hassle when it’s is lost, but also less heft that you have to sit on (if you’re a guy) or carry (if you’re a woman, or a guy who doesn’t like to put his wallet somewhere other than his back pants pocket).

2. If you do keep gift cards / stored value cards on your wallet, make sure they’re registered!
Addicted to Starbucks and got a Starbucks card, for instance?  Make sure it—and all your other stored value cards—are appropriately registered so that when they’re lost, you don’t lose the money on the cards.


3. Start a document or note that you can access electronically where you can put critical wallet-related info… ideally something that also syncs with your phone.
You should write down what’s in your wallet and be able to access it from nearly anywhere.  You could use Google Docs or Google Notebook or even a (very, very secure, password protected) file on your Web server or file server.  Here’s what I do:  I have an “In my wallet” Outlook note that I update regularly.  I use Plaxo to reliably sync my Outlook notes between home, work, and laptop computers, and then I use my Treo’s software to regularly place that same info on my phone.  I don’t put credit card numbers or similarly private info in this note, however, since it’s possible my phone could get stolen, and I haven’t gotten around to passwording it yet.  I store that more detailed info on a file on a network drive.


4. Actually update this document.
Yes, you actually have to remember to update this document (or these documents) regularly.  Given how often I’m putting things in and out of my wallet (particularly since I travel internationally), this is more important than you might think.


5. Keep an emergency stash of cash at home and at work.
It’s amazing what a nice buffer of $60 will offer when you just need some cash to tide you over for dinner, or get you into a club to meet friends, etc.


6. Separately store a passport (and a photocopy of your passport).  Put a scanned copy in a secure location online and tell your family/best friends how to access it.
This is particularly helpful if you find your wallet AND passport stolen sometime, especially if you’re overseas somewhere like, say, Estonia (trust me, I speak from experience on this one!)


7. Make sure the info in your wallet includes your full name and phone number.
That’s important for obvious reasons.  Sure, some folks’ll say “don’t include identifying info!” but frankly, I’m more eager to get my wallet back than I am to prevent identify theft (which, IMHO, is a lot more likely via other means and from folks other than your standard pickpocket jerk).


8. Do some checks but don’t panic.
Before you start canceling all your credit cards:
- Check and recheck (and potentially call) obvious and non-obvious locations where you may have dropped, left, or otherwise abandoned your poor wallet.
- Look online right away to see if there’ve been any suspicious charges.
- If you have a debit card, I actually WOULD cancel that right away, since—as I understand it—you don’t have the same sort of protections on that kind of card as you do on regular credit cards.
- On the rest of your stuff, unless it contains info or access-rights that’d be treacherous to your well-being or others’, I’d sleep on it overnight.  I think you have something like 24-72 hours to contact your credit card companies before you’re held liable for fraudulent charges.  Why stress yourself out with extra work unnecessarily if you don’t have to?

Especially when, in my case, you discover your wallet inexplicably cowering under your bed and not really “lost” at all ;-).

The fabulous jazzy score of Metropolis (and Napster vs. Rhapsody)

Have you heard of the movie Metropolis (the anime one)?  No?  How about film scorer Toshiyuki Honda?  No, again?  Well, you’re missing out!  It’s a delightfully quirky and surprisingly touching film, despite a somewhat slim plot and cursory characterizations.  And the Metropolis soundtrack is especially charming and catchy… in particular, it’s surprisingly jazzy, providing a sometimes-stark (and undoubtedly intended) counterpoint with the dark feel of the film.

Here are three different ways to listen to this great music, and I’d love to hear your feedback on which you find best overall:

1) Click on the “Metropolis soundtrack” link above to go to the Amazon.com page, and listen to clips there.

2) Listen to Metropolis on Rhapsody
NOTE: You’ll have to download a small plugin.  Non-subscribers (free users) get 25 free full-length track plays per month.  No registration required.

3) Listen to the title track below on Napster.
NOTE: Registration required (but it's pretty fast and painless). You can listen to an unlimited number of songs (from blogs and directly on Napster's site), but can listen to any particular track a maximum of three times total.
EDIT: Dang, for some odd reason, I'm not able to embed the Napster player in my blog, so you'll have to make do with a Napster popup player that plays Metropolis.

* * *

For more info on how I think these options fall far short of ideal (and a glimpse into what my ideal is), feel free to check out my post from yesterday if you haven't already ("Fair use, mashups, and profits" )

And of course, there's always the easier way... er, easier for users, pain in the ass for me.
Visit my entry on humorous a cappella ditty Aunt Sue's Aunt Soup to see what I mean.

Anyway, I look forward to your thoughts on embedded music and sharing music in general!

Fair use, mashups, and profits - why hasn't anyone figured this out yet?

Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us.  Music is a shared experience!

Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple widget that someone can cut and paste or even drag and drop into their blog?

Let me give an example of how painful it is to share (within, IMHO, fair use) a music snippet:
1) Identify song you want to share with others.  Determine that it’s DRM’d.  Ack!
2) Remove DRM (yes, I know this may technically be illegal, but frankly I don’t give a damn.  Call it civil disobedience)
3) Use software to grab a relevant thirty second snippet and save it as an mp3.  Make sure tags are still embedded.
4) Upload to server.
5) Before all of this, download and install a good flash player so others can listen to your snippet whether on a Mac or PC.
6) Embed the appropriate code into your blog entry.

Check out this entry on the emotional wallop of strings for an example of the result. 

I think it took me at least 20 minutes just to prepare, upload, and post this one clip.  Does that sound very conducive to sharing to you?!

So you know what massively puzzles me?  Why on earth hasn’t any major player (Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, Apple, etc.) made this process easier… not only facilitating the discovery and sharing of music by the increasingly powerful blogosphere, but increasing subscriptions and download sales?!  Let me explain how I envision this working…

What the blogger / music lover does:
1) Blogger goes to associates.amazon.com or embed.rhapsody.com or whatever and looks up an album or specific track.
2) They then selects an embed method (php include, javascript, iframe, etc.) and optionally set other customizable widget options.
3) If not already logged in, they enter in their subscription ID or affiliate ID so they can get credit from referred subscriptions and purchases.
4) They copy the specified HTML and paste it into their blog, along with (hopefully) personal comments.

What the person visiting the blog sees:
A simple mini-player widget that contains a play button and a short description of the clip (title, artist, album), along with links to:
- "Learn more about this artist, album, or song"
- "Purchase this song" (on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.)
- "Subscribe to service for unlimited listening to 3 million songs" (again, on Rhapsody, Napster, etc.)

* * *

Of course, even cooler would be all the online music folks coming together to make a common standard of some sort, so this widget could actually have a small pulldown menu enabling listeners to buy the tune on or subscribe to their preferred online music service.

So why hasn't any of this happened? Some guesses:
- Music services are shortsighted and want to more tightly (and obnoxiously) control the listening experiences.
- Music services are scared crapless of lawsuits; despite the fact that any sane person would envision 30 seconds being pretty much fair use, the RIAA would probably sue anyway.
- Fears over brand tarnishing (putting the names of artists and music services on splog sites featuring child porn, for instance)

I'm skeptical about the third issue, though. After all, Amazon seemingly lets pretty much anyone embed jpegs of book covers or album covers on raunchy or spammy sites.

* * *

So, what to do in the meantime?
If I wanted to be lazy AND give the finger to non-Windows-users, I could just link to Amazon.com clips, for instance, like this clip of "Where Does the Wayward Footwear Go?" from The Bobs. But that's pretty inelegant, and it also depends upon Amazon:
- having the song I want to show off
- including a decent snippet
- not changing the URL or blocking folks from accessing it off the Amazon.com domain

And, to be fair, it's not a very attractive option for Amazon.com. I mean, what do they get out of it? No potential sales, no branding (except from my arbitrary mention), etc. And unless I manually create a link to the album ("Songs For Tomorrow Morning" ), it's not even easy for the listener to learn more about the album or group, much less purchase the CD. In other words, it's a lousy experience for everyone.

Surely there's got to be a better way?!

-- -

Update at 12:58am the next day:
Hmm... well, there's Napsterlinks.

But...
- They require people to register with Napster before hearing any music (even a 30 second snippet)
- Each registered user can hear a track only three times total (which is reasonable, IMHO)
- The embedded widget doesn't allow one to fast-forward in a song, nor can it contain multiple tracks (much less an album). Just one track per widget :(.
- There seems to be a bug whereby any page with the widget on it never finishes loading. Weird.

So, unsurprisingly, napsterlinks are seemingly quite unpopular (I had never actually seen them in the wild, and doing a blogsearch yielded just a tiny handful in existence). Such a lost opportunity!

And Rhapsody? Sure, you can listen to free tracks with them, but...
- You're limited to 25 total plays per month (kinda stingy).
- You have to download and install their plugin (not too time consuming, though)
- The player window can't be embedded :-(.
- Any click to play a song opens BOTH the player window and a full-sized Rhapsody page. Boo!

Obviously NOT a decent experience for bloggers :(.

So, hey, music services... we're still waiting. Yahoo? Apple?...