• On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: A Microaggression, a Game, and Some Dancin’

    This week’s internet cruising: Microaggressions submission – I love microaggressions.com, and this one is actually cute. Learning from Fable III’s UX Mistakes | UX Booth – A nice look at the usability issues of Fable III. Email Management Made Fun | The Email Game – Okay, this is a cute and fun spin on the (in my mind) GTD principle of fast processing an inbox. I got 2375 points in my first game, and 2250 on the second. Make Love, Not Flamewars – bitquabit – I don’t care about mercurial vs. git (I use and enjoy both), but I like the approach of giving up the silly flamewars and debates…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage

    There’s a bit of everything in week’s internet cruising: The higher-education bubble (continued): Students are drowning in debt – How's this for ridiculous: student-loan debt now surpasses credit-card debt. Literary Agent – Traditional Versus Self-Publishing – Ted … – Amanda Hocking and Barry Eisler on their strategies of traditional- and self-publishing. 10 Tips on Growing Your Garden Without Growing Your Expenses – Given my gardening bug this year, this is a handy read. On Digital Identity, Technology Dependents, and Death – Much like the comprehensive backup solution I linked to so long ago, this is a great guide for getting started with digital identity management. 1Password is also great on…

  • On Life and Love

    Deployment Automation with Fabric: Bee’s Knees

    One immensely valuable thing I learned at Skookum was the value of automated deployments. I worked with a gent who took the time to work up Capistrano scripts for each staging and production environment of the whale of a project I worked with him on. I appreciated it during development, but I didn’t appreciate it until we were deploying single tweaks out to production on Amazon EC2 in rapid cycles. I haven’t worked with EC2 since then (second half of 2009), but let me tell you, deployments were for the birds. With his scripts though: run the script, enter your SSH or git password(s) a few times, and you have…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place

    There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here. The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)? "So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Web Work Everywhere!

    This week’s internet cruising: A reason to UI test, or “How to fill in the gaps” – "My stance: We unit test the ever-living raccoons out of the app now (thanks in no small part to Jukito). And we do have a UI testing process that was used for major features. While I agreed that we should have more, I was leery that it would make us any more productive. And I doubted it would help us discover any more issues than we already were…" Guide to CSS support in email clients – Articles & Tips … – A nice set of tables covering CSS support in various email clients.…