• 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

    Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition

    At some point in the last 2 weeks, I had 0 unread items in Google Reader. It was a short-lived, joyous experience, but this is the result of my web branching: HCG Diet Dangers: Is Fast Weight Loss Worth the Risk? – MSN Health & Fitness – Healthy Living – "But the so-called hCG diet is either a weight-loss miracle or a dangerous fraud, depending on who's talking. The plan combines drops or injections of hCG, a pregnancy hormone, with just 500 calories a day." I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Healthcare, Midnight Deployments, and Markov Chaining

    I’ve been all over The Incidental Economist lately, and it’s really hard not to link to every one of their posts that I can make heads or tails of. They’re really prolific by my standards, though, which means it’s a struggle to keep their posts from falling off the 30-day cut-off in Google Reader. Simply put: Marginal cost/benefit – "You’ll consume as much health care as you think worth it for the transaction price (your copayment if you’re insured). The lower the price, the more you’ll consume. You’ll keep using health services until the marginal benefit falls below the price you pay." I'm not sure I agree that people will…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Stockholm Trolls

    Um… it’ll make sense as you read. Amanda Hocking’s Blog: Some Things That Need to Be Said – From a successful self-published author: "This is literally years of work you're seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn't writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me." The Very Rich Indie Writer – Novelr – Making People Read – Looking at the example of Amanda Hocking's financial success, will authors of web fiction start to close…

  • On Life and Love

    3:25 per Envelope

    I had one task last night: get sender and recipient addresses onto 35-ish non-standard envelopes. This turned into an exhausting, stressful 2-hour task. My initial thought was to hand write them for a personal touch, but then Greg (or I? Are we blurring?) reminded me that we should be able to print them. …And there went an hour and a half of my evening. The envelopes were an unusual size–about 4.125 inches by 8.125 inches–and my printer just couldn’t figure it out. I could set a custom size in Word and in the printer settings, but it didn’t seem to matter a fig. Gutters, margins, nothing was behaving right and…