• On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Politics, Money, and Some Music

    The original posting of this was horribly borked. I may be switching link-posting plugins. Warm and Fuzzy Budgeting – "You have things that matter to you. Hopes, and goals, and dreams. This is going to sound cheesy, but I think it’s true: Your budget is simply your hopes, and goals, and dreams … on paper." Maybe those tax incentives for creating new jobs should be for hiring a currently unemployed person | Prometheus 6 – What? How are you only going to hire people who already have jobs? "Members of Congress had urged the commission to explore the issue, after reading press reports of numerous instances in which employers and…

  • On Life and Love

    Financial Advisor: Not This One

    My first financial advisor discussions have ended with a quiet crash and burn. The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning warned me about commission-based folks. I listened to them and then called him on some junk. We met yesterday to catch up on some of the things we talked about the first time, such as pre-tax vs. post-tax investments, “real wealth” vs. “paper wealth”, etc. Showstopper: he was trying to sell me insurance. Lousy insurance at that. His ideas of safe, “real wealth”, tax-protected investments were whole life and variable universal life insurance. Which he’d get a commision on for selling me.

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    Cell Phones: Going Prepaid?

    So, I have this iWone 3G. Greg has one, too. It’s something of a boat anchor these days, now that the novelty has worn off (it’s been about a year and a half). I’m not an iPhone gamer. I don’t really use social networking stuff (Hootsuite) on it except on rare occasions. Email is only for reference rather than composition. It is my primary camera at the moment, sadly, since my real one won’t hold a charge on fresh batteries. So what do I use it for? Contacts, calendar, phone calls, static music, and Pandora. The first two come from our good friend Uncle Google. The last two are definitely…

  • 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.…

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    Stereo Reduction

    One of my latest home pet peeves is my stereo. I’ve got a nice, old-skool 5.1 setups (sans a subwoofer)… which means that my living room is chock full of cables. As I clear out things like the broken desk chair that’s been in our living room for a year and a half, more speaker cables are exposed. Fugly eye sore. I like my sound system–I’ve had it for over a decade now (mostly). The receiver is an old Harman Kardon AVR 110, and despite predating component inputs (much less HDMI), it sounds beautiful when I use optical/coax audio. In addition to the eye sore of the speaker cables, though,…