Many years ago, I remember watching the PBS cooking show The Frugal Gourmet as a child, and being enlightened by the host’s explanation of the term “frugal.” Sadly, most people don’t seem to understand the difference, and confuse being frugal with being cheap.

A frugal person seeks to buy things with the most utility for the least cost of ownership. A cheap person seeks to buy things with the least initial cost possible.

Jeff Smith, the host of The Frugal Gourmet, illustrated the difference using meat pounders. One choice was a nice, stainless-steel pounder with an elegant design and some nice artistic flourishes. This pounder was by no means cheap, but was it frugal? No, because it cost more than equivalent tools that would do the job just as well. On the other end of the spectrum was a short length of two-by-four pine stud. This could also be used to pound out a cutlet, and it was undoubtedly inexpensive. However, it was clumsy to use. It was inefficient at the task; it tended to give both the user and the meal splinters, and it was difficult to clean properly. In short, it was cheap. The frugal option was a wooden mallet, of the type you could buy in any hardware store. It was inexpensive, it did the job well, and its finish allowed for easy cleaning. It cost more than the two-by-four, but the cost of using it was lower.

There was a time where being “fiscally conservative”, in the American political sense, meant that one was frugal. A frugal person doesn’t want the cheapest thing; they want the best value for their money. They want something that will last a reasonable time, that doesn’t incur additional costs in its use, yet has no unnecessary bits that run up the price. A frugal person understands that “costs” are not just monetary; wasted time and wasted effort are costs, as well, and need to be factored in. I believe that the term “fiscally conservative” has increasingly shifted away from “frugal” and towards “cheap.” That’s regrettable, because a cheap person usually winds up paying more over time than a frugal one.

I can walk into the local mall and buy a dress shirt at Macy’s for about $30, provided I make sure that the shirt is on sale. (It’s rare that they aren’t.) I can go further out of my way and buy a dress shirt from Brooks Brothers for about $78—less if I buy from their factory outlet, and use the discount card provided through my company’s associate-discount program. A cheap person would consider me crazy for buying the Brooks Brothers shirt. A frugal person would ask: How well are they made, and how long do they last?

My experience with the shirts Macy’s sells is that they are poorly made. It’s rare to buy one that doesn’t have ragged stitching. There are often visible flaws in the stitching. On patterned shirts, the alignment of the panels is haphazard at best. The fabric is often coarse and unpleasant to wear. The collar stays are cheap material that curls or breaks quickly. Most of all, the shirts wear out within a year to 18 months.

Brooks Brothers shirts, on the other hand, are very well made. Rarely, if ever, do I find a stitching error—even on their “factory second” shirts from their factory outlet stores. The material is high-quality, and properly aligned. The collar stays are sturdy and resilient. With proper care, I can get three years out of a Brooks Brothers shirt.

One year for $30, or three years for $78. I come out ahead with the more expensive shirt… and I feel better and look better doing it. That’s the frugal choice. By spending a little bit more, I get a better value for my money. It may mean that I have to plan my purchases more carefully to afford the initial expense, but because I get a better bargain in the long run by doing it, it’s worth it.

The opposite end of the spectrum, the truly cheap option, would be to buy a shirt at Walmart. While the Macy’s shirt is not particularly good, Walmart is well-known for squeezing their vendors to provide the cheapest possible product. The president of Snapper, the lawnmower company, famously told how Walmart’s purchasing agents tried to convince him to make a flimsy, cheap mower for the store (and tarnish his brand in so doing) because the Walmart shopper wanted a “disposable” mower that was cheap enough to discard instead of maintaining. Sometimes you can buy a product that appears identical to one sold elsewhere, including the model number, but the Walmart version is cheaper because it’s missing features that you would have gotten if you’d purchased elsewhere. Cheap, but perhaps the exact opposite of frugal. Much of what Walmart sells, in my opinion, is similarly disposable.

On some level, people realize this; there’s at least one academic paper showing that people perceive goods sold at Walmart as inferior. Yet, rather than save to buy what they perceive to be a superior product… they’ll go to Walmart. Does it really help that you can “afford” the GE microwave at Walmart when it breaks quickly and cannot be repaired because Walmart required GE to use inferior parts that aren’t available as replacement components?

Americans have bought into the cheap lifestyle. Yes, there is a place for cheap: many “consumable goods” are a place to economize by buying based on cheapest upfront cost. These are things that are inherently used up as you use them, like toothpaste or food. Unfortunately, this attitude has spread to “durable goods” as well: furniture, computers, appliances, clothing, cars, homes. We call them “durable” goods because they should last. They may occasionally need repairs, but they should be minor, as these are things that can be made durable—resistant to wearing out, long-lasting.

How does your company requisition durable goods? Do you evaluate suppliers to find the most frugal option, the one that will have the most benefit on your workers’ productivity given the combined cost of purchase and maintenance over the projected life of the item? Or do you just find the cheapest quote for something that meets the minimum requirements on the day it’s purchased? In my experience, most medium-to-large American companies choose cheap, not frugal.

Learn the ways of frugality and apply them to your own life. Spend a little more where it will give you better value; go without or spend less in other areas where you will lose less value to compensate. Encourage frugal thinking, at home and at work. Write to your legislators, and ask them to use your taxes frugally, not cheaply; you want value for that money!

Frugal should be a core American value. Let’s make it one.

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs (1955–2011).

My first computer wasn’t an Apple. It was an Atari 800. As a young boy into videogames, the Atari was the natural step up from the Atari 2600 game console. It was videogames that got me fascinated in computers, and it was the Atari that helped me discover how much I liked making them run.

After a few years, though, I had outgrown the Atari. The system had limits, and the company was reaching its limits as well. As a loyal Atari owner, I disliked the Apple II, with its relatively crude graphics and very un-arcade-like analog joystick. In middle school, though, all the school computers were Apples, and I saw software that just wasn’t available for the Atari.

So, my Christmas wish one year was for an Apple //c. By then, Mom and Dad had learned the true meaning of the word “peripheral”—an education that started on the Christmas morning after I got the Atari when I didn’t want to shut it off lest I lose my programs, having no cassette drive or disk drive.  I had an Apple with all the trimmings. It was a well-travelled computer, making weekend trips to the family cottage in New Hampshire and the occasional trip in to school to supplement the small computer lab there.  I was an Apple owner, but I wasn’t truly an enthusiast yet.

That came in eighth grade. By then, I was the undisputed computer nerd of the town school system; the adults came to me for advice. That’s how it came that one day they asked me to come down to the computer room: I excelled in English, I lived and breathed computers… they wanted me to be an editor of the school newspaper, because they wanted to create it using a new thing they were testing: a Macintosh.

I had read about the Macintosh in Creative Computing and BYTE, and it had intrigued me… but that day in the computer lab, it was love at first sight. I took to MacWrite and MacPaint like a duck to water, and I started to learn the intricacies of ReadySetGo, one of the first of a heretofore-unknown type of software: desktop publishing.

Guess what was on the Christmas list the next year?

I had a Mac Plus back when they were still beige. I have oddly fond memories of the wub-wub-wub noise an Apple 800K disk drive made as it changed speeds, the ka-CHUNK a floppy made as you inserted it. I learned about INITs and CDEVS; I studied Inside Macintosh and learned Pascal. I took BASIC computer programming as a high-school freshman when the class was still being taught on Commodore PETs; being an old hand at BASIC, I breezed through the curriculum and started handing in programs written in Microsoft Macintosh BASIC, including GUIs.

I remember getting my first hard drive, a Jasmine 80MB SCSI disk that sat underneath the Mac, and thinking I’d never find enough things to fill it. I remember playing Epix’ Winter Games on the Mac, sliding the mouse back and forth rhythmically to simulate cross-country skiing. I recall driving from my parents’ home in North Granby, CT to the suburbs of Springfield, MA, not long after getting my drivers’ license, to get my hands on a freshly-minted copy of System 7, and lusting after the Macintosh Portable in all its portable-typewriter/boat-anchor glory while I was there. I remember the magic of the ThunderScan, a device that replaced the ribbon cassette in the ImageWriter II printer with an image sensor, allowing you to use the printer as a crude drum scanner. I spent hours going through my favorite VHS movies with the VCR hooked up to a MacRecorder, creating sound clips of favorite lines to use as beep sounds.

That lead to a particularly favorite prank. The school system’s computer expert was named Dave, and he wasn’t yet comfortable with Macs. One week, he made it known that he’d be taking the school’s Mac for the weekend to learn more about it. I played a little joke on him (with the knowledge of the teacher in charge of the computer club): Before he left, I added a program to the Mac’s startup disk that let you tie sounds to certain system events. Upon ejecting a disk, the Mac played a sound clip from the 1980s revival of Mission: Impossible: “This disk will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim!”  He later related that he panicked at first, before realizing that he’d been had.  (This was before computer viruses were on anyone’s radar.)

That Mac Plus was also well-travelled. The latter half of my high-school career was spent at a private school in Hartford; I was a fixture in the computer lab there, and an editor of the newspaper and the yearbook. When crunch time came for the yearbook, that Mac came to school with me daily in its big blue Cordura bag.

Somewhere in there was the summer I sent a resume to MacConnection hoping for a summer job, despite being a teen; they were headquartered in the next town over from our cottage. I managed an interview with the CEO, but I didn’t get a job.

I remember two treks from New Hampshire down to Boston for MacWorld Expo, back when it was a massive affair occupying two conference halls—and before the era of the Stevenote. I brought home bags of goodies, and a wonderful memory of spying Harry Anderson, star of Night Court, from afar as he negotiated a sizable purchase from one of the big Mac mail-order companies at the back of one of their booths. (Anderson was one of the most famous Mac enthusiasts of the era.)

Late in senior year, I hit Grandma up one more time, and made it count: I got the top-of-the-line Macintosh IIfx. (It’s often joked that the name expanded to “Macintosh Too F—ing Expensive”.) I got a stripped-down model and added my own hard drive, memory, and keyboard. I loved that thing.

Around that time, I was a beta-tester for a friend’s program, Wallpaper, which let you set color desktop patterns larger than the Apple-approved 8 square pixels. One of the background patterns I created featured in the advertisement for the program that appeared in MacUser magazine.

When I went to the University of Rochester, I remember setting it up in my dorm room on the Computer Interest Floor and having someone come in and exclaim “Woah! You’ve got a workstation!” (The E-Machines 16″ Trinitron monitor was physically imposing, and computer monitors bigger than 13″ were still uncommon then.)

That IIfx saw me through college, and through my first job and much of my second job. Then, I convinced my employer that I’d be more productive if I had a PowerBook, so I got a PowerBook 1400c. Sadly, when I left, they wanted it back… but I picked up a discarded Power Macintosh 7100/80AV to replace it. Meanwhile, the IIfx continued on as the girlfriend’s computer.

While at Global Crossing, I upgraded to my first personally purchased new Mac, a Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500MHz. For some time, that second processor sat idle, unused by virtually any software, until Mac OS X came out. I got that the day it came out, and lived with its shortcomings because it was cool, and it was UNIX. I also saved up for the original Cinema Display, the first of Apple’s awesomely huge displays. (That display was in nearly constant use until earlier this year, when the backlight started to flicker and I replaced it so Dad could keep using the G4.)

When I’d been at Bank of America for a while and replenished my funds, I bought a Power Macintosh G5 Dual 2.7GHz and a new Cinema Display. That served me well for years, and became another hand-me-down. It currently resides in my basement, awaiting rebirth as an Ubuntu system; the Cinema Display is my second monitor for my work laptop when I’m home.

The G5 gave way to a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz; that was my workhorse system until the girlfriend’s 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac flaked out and I found that 4GB of RAM wasn’t enough for a power user; I replaced it with a 27″ iMac Core i7 Quad, and gave the 24″ iMac to the girlfriend.

This spring, for graduation, my girlfriend’s daughter and her friend got MacBook Pros; I now have OS X Server and Remote Desktop to manage the household network.

I wasn’t the first person in line to get an iPod, but it didn’t take me too long to get one. I loved that first-generation device; I took many long walks with it. Sadly, it died after I handed it down to Mom and Dad, when they didn’t realize it wouldn’t take well to being left on the dashboard of their Jeep in the Florida sun.  By then, my girlfriend had given me a fifth-generation iPod.

I was waiting at the door in my Apple t-shirt for the UPS driver on the day the iPad was released. I’ve used it every day since. I am a voracious reader, and five years ago I would’ve said that I would never stop buying paper books. I love books, and I love bookshelves. I have visited a bookstore once in the last six months; I now buy almost all my books for the iPad, because it’s so much more convenient. I have my iPad with me in places I’d never lug around a book, so I get to read more.

Last Christmas, I got an Apple TV. The household has three Apple wireless access points.

Prick me, and I bleed five colors, modern monochrome logos notwithstanding.

Back in the late 1990s, when Apple was struggling and the faithful engaged in guerrilla marketing to help the company, I managed to read about Apple offering the first set of “Think Different” posters in time to order a set. Dad built some fames for them; they have places of honor in my office. (Well, except for Picasso, because I’m short on room, and frankly, he’s creepy.)

While the Atari got me into computing, Apple products shaped and fed my interest throughout my life. If it weren’t for Steve Jobs’ company, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I wouldn’t have gotten half the jobs I did—my first job out of college, working tech support for Xerox printers, came about in part because of my computer knowledge, and in part because of my long experience with desktop publishing.  I may never have met the man, but he had a profound impact on my life.

Last night, Kingston held its annual Fourth of July fireworks show… a week early, as usual. Due to budget cuts, the show wasn’t as good as it has been in past years.  On the other hand, because there was no budget for a weekend-long festival in the Rondout District this year, the crowds weren’t as obnoxious and there weren’t lines of brightly-lit, diesel-belching busses blocking the view, so that’s a plus.

I got some pretty good pics with my new Nikon ultracompact.  It’s nowhere near DSLR quality—I’m a bit disappointed in the image detail under normal use—but for a stick-it-in-your-pocket camera, it does pretty well.  It certainly did better than I expected with the fireworks show!  I’ve posted the pictures to Flickr.