When gas prices were sky high I was curious how much more my daily commute cost. I also wondered if it would make financial sense to get a more fuel-efficient car.

At the time I made a spreadsheet to do the calculations, but it was a pain to have to keep twiddling the numbers to run different scenarios. I’ve written a commute cost calculator in Javascript to see how rising gas prices affects your commute.

To use it, enter the distance of your commute (one way), your car’s average gas mileage, and how much gas costs in your area. You’ll see a graphs of your actual costs, along with how your costs would vary if you got better gas mileage, and if gas cost another $1 or $2 a gallon.

In the end, my commute costs weren’t high enough to justify making any drastic changes. Give it a try and see what your commute is costing you.

I’ve been searching for a Windows countdown timer that satisfied all my requirements for a long time. If you recall, I searched back in 2008 and posted my findings here. I’ve continued to search without success, so I decided to write my own. It’s called SnapTimer.

While writing it I reviewed all the Lifehacker timer posts and implemented any reasonable feature I could find. It’s flexible enough to be used with the 2-minute rule in GTD, the Pomodoro technique, the 30 minutes of uninterrupted work from the Now Habit, Steve Pavlina’s 15-minute method, Merlin Mann’s (10+2)*5 hack and any other productivity method requiring a timer.

I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and I’ve seen a significant increase in productivity. I hope you will too.

I’m fortunate to have kids who are young enough that I still have time to make an impact in their lives. I loved the advice in this Ask Metafilter thread about what it takes to be a Dad. It was a great reminder for me of what really matters and there was a ton of good advice.

Another bit of advice I appreciated is to be fully present.

The first step is knowing, the next is doing. I’m working on it.

There’s a reason the saying, “Time is money” has stood the test of time. It’s because the saying is true, more than you know. When salaried workers work extra hours, they’re getting a pay reduction. And if you change jobs and work more hours, a pay increase might not make up for the extra time. There are times when you need to work extra hours, but if it becomes a habit, make sure you realize the effect on your pay.

I was curious to see the numbers, so I wrote an hourly wage calculator and was stunned by the results.

If you make $50K and work 55 hours a week instead of 40, it reduces your hourly wage from $24.04 to $17.48, or $36K a year. From another perspective, if you make $50K working 40 hours a week and you’re considering a new job that requires 55 hours a week, you’d need to make $69K to earn the same per hour.

Think about this next time you’re putting in extra time at the office.

Here are two sobering charts generated by the calculator.

I’ve released version 1.0.2 of Snap MD5. It supports drag and drop (thanks to Giorgio, author of Peazip, for telling me how), SHA-1 hashes, a menu and an about page.

Enjoy! (and please let me know if you have any comments or questions)