In honor of O.A.R. playing the Gorge this weekend with the Dave Matthews Band, I bring you a review of their latest musical effort: All Sides.

I was introduced to O.A.R. my freshman year in college, and they are the quintessential college rock; just a little off-beat to be mainstream, but still cool enough for the (non-indie/elitist) college kids. They are a band that you know that you've heard them, but you don't know where. Lately, it's most likely been in a commercial, as their song 'Wonderful Day' has been playing on recent Ford commercials, and ABC featured them for a benefit concert on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Their previous album, Stories of a Stranger, and the tour following, have been the biggest of their career, including a sellout of Madison Square Garden and radio hits 'Love and Memories' and 'Heard the World', and a tour with Dave Matthews Band.

As a follow-up to Stories of a Stranger, All Sides builds upon the well-developed sound, but it doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from Stories. The sound hasn't progressed far enough to make it feel like the whole album, and if you played the two albums together with tracks shuffled, you'd be hard-pressed to separate them into two distinct albums.

A couple of tracks distinguish themselves, including the first single, 'Shattered' as well as 'This Town', but they are too far between to bring All Sides into the forefront as a wildly successful album. The sound across the album has less variance song-to-song than their previous efforts, which you could attribute to a refining of their sound or less creativity, depending on how you look at it.

As an introduction to O.A.R., this album works well, as it seems to have moved them more into the pop/rock genre than exclusively college rock, but previous fans may find the change unsettling.

January seems a year away. Here in the (Northern Hemisphere) summer, many of us forget our New Year's resolutions: lose weight, be nicer, spend more time with your kids, or watch less TV. Few of us can even remember what we set out to do. However, if you're looking to take control of your finances, resolution or not, mint.com can help you.

Mint.com has a great potential that requires a lot of trust. It gathers all your login credentials to your various financial institutions, and pulls in your transactions, balances, and debts. Fear not, however, all credentials are encrypted, and the site has been VeriSign verified and TRUSTe certified. The service also does not allow you to manipulate your accounts, and the logins are never stored on their servers, so even if someone logged into your mint.com account, they couldn't do much but see your transactions.

Mint.com is free, paid for by the offers it recommends to you by other banks.

Once you sign up for Mint, you can fill in your credentials for any financial institutions you are a part of, be it checking and savings, credit cards, loans or investments. The more you provide, the more it can accurately track your spending and budget.

As you fill in your credentials, the transactions supplied by your institutions (usually the last 30 days) are downloaded to your profile. It is then viewable in a variety of ways: as a pie chart of spending, bar graph of savings vs spending, or a simple history. Transactions can be edited to apply to different categories, such as groceries, utilities, automotive, and countless others. You can then set a budget for each category, and mint will pace you along each month, and even alert you via sms or email if you choose when you exceed your budget. This is a great tool for those who don't realize how much they spend each month on clothes or lunch, or if you just want to see how much our oil prices are really costing you.

Now for the downsides: Mint.com doesn't have every institution possible, of course, so if you bank with some lesser known institutions you may not be able to get a complete record of your transactions. When I personally signed up, it was telling me my account was closed, which seemed to be an issue for quite a few people across differing banks. And of course, there's a the question of security overall, even with verification and the promise that the information couldn't be used against you.

Overall, Mint.com is a greatly useful tool for nearly everyone; even if you currently track your finances now, there's no easier way to do it then with mint.com, provided you don't do a lot of cash transactions (checks usually show up in online transactions). A few kinks are left to be worked out, but look for Mint.com once it exits beta.